Did Grace Cossington Smith read Virginia Woolf? It’s a question that has niggled me for years. The art history profession tends to talk of visual art as if it is an insular, self-absorbed activity with the only direct creative influences coming from other visual works. Paintings are shown to beget more paintings. But artists not only go to exhibitions. They listen to music, they watch movies and television, they attend various forms of theatre performance, and they read magazines and books, sometimes even novels touching on art. It was always this way. Arthur Streeton and Fred McCubbin pounced on Trilby…