Sandra McGrath

Sandra Burt McGrath is an American-born Australian art writer and historian, an art collector of the avant-garde, and a prominent art critic.

A well-traveled and wealthy socialite, McGrath, (née Burt) showed talent in writing and developed professional interests in the art market in her late teens, and after marrying her Australian husband in 1959 and while raising their five children in Sydney, she became an enthusiastic patron.

A friend of the younger generation of artists in her adopted country including John Olsen, Colin Lanceley, George Baldessin, Richard Larter, John Peart and Jeffrey Smart, she was an early biographer of Brett Whiteley in the influential first monograph on him. McGrath had begun art writing on art in her late twenties and was art critic for ''The Australian'' from 1972, ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' from 1987 into the 2000s, and from 1966, wrote for ''Art and Australia.''

An active supporter of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, she donated significant works to its collection, and she built connections with commercial galleries, such as the Purves' family's Australian Galleries, that advanced the careers of emerging and establishing artists.

In the 1980s she collaborated on surveying themes of the desert and Sydney Harbour in art books with John Olsen and then Arthur Boyd, the latter leading to her and her husband's involvement in the creation of Bundanon.

After the publication of her last book, on Patrick Hockey (1994), and the death of her husband in 2000, McGrath returned to the United States, where two of her children, Eugenia and Julia, established an art gallery. One of her sons is artist James McGrath. Provided by Wikipedia