Mirka Mora – ‘Double-Headed Creature’

Forty years ago, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz was touring the Guggenheim when he spied a Picasso leaning face-first against the wall, its verso exposed to the gallery. “I felt I shouldn’t be there,” he recalled, “As though I was in the presence of somebody I knew very well, and saw that person naked.” As a growing band of collectors, conservators and art historians know, the backs of art can reveal more than their fronts, containing clues about the artist’s process, personality, as well as the history of the object itself. 

Frank McKelvey – ‘On the River Lagan’

To take a rear view of a work of art is to become an art detective. Irish artist Frank McKelvey’s ‘On The River Lagan’ opened up when we discovered its full title on the back, transforming it from a serene landscape to a trace of the Troubles, its subject the river that runs past HM Prison Maze. When flipped over, Sidney Nolan’s ‘Elephants and Gazelles’ becomes an archive of provenance with vintage stickers from two galleries, an auction house and a framer.

Sidney Nolan – ‘Elephants and Gazelles'

Anne Marie Hall – ‘Untitled (Sides of the Same Soul)’

Works of art can also be two-faced or two for the price of one. Before he was a famed art critic, Robert Hughes painted ‘Self Portrait’ in 1959, a double sided work that features a portrait of the young artist on one side and an abstracted crucifix on the other. These dual images can be seen as a dichotomy of the man – precocious critic and serious avant-gardist. 

Robert Hughes – ‘Self Portrait’

Eric Thake – ‘Nuns on the Geelong Road…’

Dorothy Braund – ‘Dirty Dishes’

If rectos are what artists present to the world, versos can hold their inner thoughts. Within ‘Nuns on the Geelong Road…’, originally sent to Ursula Hoff as a Christmas card, Eric Thake proposes an alternative title: “...or Oil Sheiks to Bahrein? Ursula, the choice is yours”. Dorothy Brand’s ‘Dirty Dishes’ also conceals a flash of personality. On its back, she writes “To refute Ken Clark’s definition of the classical romantic”, a jive at the art historian’s serious theories of art. Nolan, a true lover of literature, scrawls stanzas from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Voyage to Cythera’ on the back of his work, ‘Baudelaire: Voyage to Cythera’, letting words guide his hand. 

Traces of personality, history, friendship and meaning, the backs of paintings are stories unto themselves. They are clues and soft underbellies, reminders that we all contain multitudes.

Sidney Nolan – ‘Baudelaire: Voyage to Cythera’

Mirka Mora – ‘Double-Headed Creature’