Homage to much-loved Breuer

Breuer's daughter Nicky McWilliam described how Slow Burn, which features 93 female artists, was developed over meetings every second Thursday at her mother's gallery in Woollahra.

Surveying the walls of the S.H. Ervin Gallery, filled with works amassed by Kim Harding and Irene Miller on the advice of her mother, Mrs McWilliam told guests how "mum had loved all of this so much".

The artists so beloved by Breuer include well-known names such as Portia Geach, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Judy Cassab and Margaret Olley.

But the exhibition also drew attention to many "forgotten gems", said NSW Governor Marie Bashir, who opened Slow Burn.

Professor Bashir said the work of female artists was often forgotten or under-appreciated until much later in life or posthumously.

Harking back to her childhood, Professor Bashir also recalled her "artistic mother's description of her passionate love of art and unquenchable desire to paint".

She said her mother would wait for her older brother to return home from a night of drinking, extracting money for art lessons in return for keeping his carousing secret from their father.

She described Breuer as

"an elegant women of great sensitivity" who gave "pragmatic and fearless advice".

"We loved your mother dearly," Professor Bashir told Mrs McWilliam.

Animal magnetism

AN AUCTION of art featuring the animals of Taronga Zoo attracted Sydney's social wildlife last Monday.

Shari-Lea Hitchcock, Terry Schwamberg-Kaljo and Fairfax Media board member John B. Fairfax were among guests grazing on canapes and wine

while Sotheby's auctioneer

Tom Goodman took bids on works by 20 artists, including Elizabeth Cummings, Euan Macleod, Chris O'Doherty (Reg Mombassa), Tamara

Dean and Rodney Pople.

The auction raised $148,000 for the Taronga Foundation, with O'Doherty's Giraffe Eating a Carrot attracting the highest bid of the night, selling for $9000.

Now in its second year, the artist-in-residence program invites the artists to tour the zoo and meet the keepers and their animals, as well as giving them the opportunity to work inside the zoo over three months.

Curator Leo Robba said it continued a tradition began more than a century before, when Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton set up an artists' camp at Curlew Cove, next to Taronga Zoo.

Sombre state

THE Melbourne Art Fair might be the country's premier visual arts event (organisers of the Biennale of Sydney may have a different opinion) but its opening-night party, Vernissage, left a few guests underwhelmed. Not even the presence of photographer Bill Henson - let alone Magda Szubanski and Santo Cilauro - could liven things up.

Culture's spies described the event as "very sedate", suggesting Melbourne's freezing weather contributed to the sombre atmosphere last Wednesday.

"It's Melbourne, for Christ's sake," said artist Andrew Taylor (he's the one married to actress Rachel Griffiths). "It's a tough town. Melburnians are so damn restrained. Sydney would have a hell of a party."

At least the art inside the Royal Exhibition Building provided some inspiration.

Taylor said the fair did not rely on a historical works by the likes of Picasso but had a more contemporary feel, ranging from octogenarian John Olsen to art made by people with disabilities.

"It's wild, mate," Taylor said.

He nominated Jon Campbell's public commission as the best in field alongside guerrilla show Notfair, held in a Richmond warehouse. "It's the alternative to the Art Fair - young and funky, and the alternative you need in a complicated city."

Taylor, whose artwork was showing at Tim Olsen Gallery's stand, said he had heard a few people whingeing about the art being "too safe". But, he said, "it's a commercial art fair, not Biennale. It's the marketplace, not a curatorial study."

$100,000 awarded to Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont for their four-minute video Gymnasium, which won the Basil Sellers prize for sport-themed art.