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Janine Burke, (born 2 March 1952), in Melbourne, Australia, is an award-winning author, art historian, biographer and novelist. She has also curated exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. Currently, Dr Burke holds a research fellowship at Monash University.

She graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons). In 1983, she completed a Master of Arts at LaTrobe University and a PhD from Deakin University in 2001. In 1973, Janine Burke began publishing art criticism and, the following year, co-curated "A Room of One's Own: Three Women Artists", one of Australia's first feminist art exhibitions. In 1975, she curated the landmark national touring exhibition "Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940" which became a bestselling book in 1980. In 1976, she was a founding member of the feminist art journal LIP. From 1977-1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts. She resigned to become a fulltime writer and independent scholar.

In 1983, after the publication of Joy Hester, she lived in Tuscany, approximately halfway between Pisa and Florence. The house, named Paretiao, belonged to Australian artist Arthur Boyd. At that time, it was administered by the Australia Council. There she completed her first novel, Speaking, and began her next novel, Second Sight which won the 1987 Victorian Premier's award for fiction. Second Sight pays homage to Paretiao and the Tuscan landscape. She then moved to Florence where she studied Italian at the British Institute. In 1984, she lived in Paris, returning to Australia later that year for the publication of Speaking. For a time, Burke lived in Sydney and rural St. Andrews in Victoria, before travelling in France, Italy and Greece.

In 1986, she settled in Robe Street, St Kilda, where Joy Hester and Albert Tucker had lived in the 1940s. She continued to write novels and short stories, as well as contributing art criticism and reviews to journals and newspapers.

Albert Tucker, helpful to Burke when she was writing Joy Hester, also lived in St Kilda and the two resumed their friendship. In 1995, Burke published Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Red,the correspondence between Hester and charismatic arts patron Sunday Reed. She was Hester's closest friend and adopted Hester's son, Sweeney. Sunday and John Reed's home at Heide and their art collection became the Heide Museum of Modern Art. When Burke was a lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, Sweeney, a former gallery director, was a mature age student in the printmaking department. Sweeney generously assisted Burke with her research on Hester. In 1977, Sweeney committed suicide.

In 1996, Burke was appointed a trustee of Heide MoMA. Burke's biography of Tucker, written with Tucker's approval, ran into strife prior to its publication in 2002. Tucker died in 1999 without reading the manuscript. Australian Gothic, A Life of Albert Tucker was Burke's doctoral dissertation and the first biography of Tucker. Tucker's widow, Barbara, objected to some of Burke's views about Tucker's oeuvre and refused to allow copyright permission to reproduce his paintings. The book was illustrated with Tucker's photographs which are not subject to copyright. In 1998, Burke had curated the first scholarly exhibition of Tucker's photographs, titled The Eye of the Beholder: Albert Tucker's Photographs which toured nationally.

In a controversial aspect of the book, Burke wrote it was unlikely that Sweeney was the son of Albert Tucker, but rather of well-known Melbourne drummer Billy Hyde (1918—1976). Burke based her comments on conversations with Tucker, Sweeney, Gray Smith (Hester's second husband)and Nadine Amadio, a close friend of Sunday Reed's.

In late 2001, when the row about the book hit the headlines, Ken Fletcher, chairman of the Heide board, asked Burke to resign. It was believed that the Tucker Gift to Heide MoMA, administered by Barbara, was in jeopardy. (1) The gift was worth several million dollars and comprised works by Tucker, Hester, Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Danila Vassilieff. Burke refused to resign from the board and the Tucker Gift went ahead.

In 2004, Burke published The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide where she wrote that Reed had assisted Nolan in painting the Ned Kelly series. Burke based her theory on the close collaborative relationship Reed and Nolan enjoyed, evidenced by archival research, and by Nolan's watercolour For the one who paints such beautiful squares (c.1946-1947,Heide MoMA)that is dedicated to Sunday.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Janine Burke", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0