Sandra was art critic for
The Australian from 1972,
The Sydney Morning Herald from 1987 into the 2000s, and from 1966, wrote regularly for
Art and Australia, and was a broker of relationships between artists, patrons, galleries and their public; in one instance in 1977 she visited
Jeffery Smart in
Tuscany to persuade him to join the 'stable' of Ann and Stuart Purves' Australian Galleries. Of Smart, in 1969 she wrote:...despite the twentieth-century trend to abstract art and Abstract Expressionism, a few painters continued to wrestle with the real world, to struggle with the forms and structures and problems of the twentieth century. One such notable painter is Jeffrey Smart. In 1973 McGrath was appointed Australian representative on the International Council of the New York
Museum of Modern Art with her friend Penny Seidler, and Anne Lewis, joining
James Fairfax. McGrath became closely associated with
Brett Whiteley, whom she 'met in the early sixties, when he returned to Australia to mount his first large exhibition which included the
Christie paintings and the London Zoo Series.' She records that 'it was Whiteley who inspired the second magazine article I published...which appeared in June 1967 issue of
Art and Australia. She considered the 1970s: a golden age of Australian art in Sydney and Melbourne. Everything was exploding culturally and politically. The era of
Menzies and
Dobell and
Drysdale was finally over. Sydney was shedding its old colonial-backwater shell, as the
Opera House was revealing new ones. was the first major text on the artist.
John Tranter welcomed the biography in which 'Ms. McGrath dips her pen into the purple ink,' but noted 'its faults: no index, some misspellings, a catalogue (of 129 black-and-white reproductions) that appears incomplete, but we are not told by how much, nor why; colour plates that are occasionally faulty or out of register, and in many details from paintings, badly blurred; and incomprehensibly - no list of illustrations. But it's a vivid and exciting book to read, and at the price it's good value for money.' Joanna Mendelssohn advised that; 'As long as this book is accepted as being nothing more nor less than an interpretation of Whiteley by a friend, it can be seen as a valuable historical document. For it is a most successful evocation of Whiteley’s mannered hedonism, his sensuous pleasure in landscape and the human body and his eager exploration of the dark side of human experience.' In 1992 Annette Van den Bosch, who elsewhere calls McGrath a 'kingmaker', observed that 'The major Sydney reputation forged in the late 1970s market was that of Brett Whiteley. After he won the Archibald Prize in 1977 for
Double self portrait, Whiteley won a succession of prizes and had a string of sell-out exhibitions. Sandra McGrath’s practices as a critic quite explicitly linked concepts of masculine creativity, genius and international reputation in relation to Whiteley’s work. From the perspective of 1995 and against Barry Pierce's new book catalogue,
SMH reviewer Elizabeth Cross winced at 'unrestrained excesses' in McGrath's writing. Published in 1982,
The Artist and the Desert, co-written by McGrath with artist John Olsen, on whose work she first wrote in 1976, In European landscapes, man is always there, has been there, in the foreground, in the middle distance or in the background. By contrast, in the Australian desert there seems to be no place for man at all; there seems no past, no present and no future; only an overwhelming withering of will and a numbing sense of despair.From experience of husband Tony's career Sandra was to write in 1983 a four-part series on merchant banking for
The Australian newspaper, and the couple capitalised on canny real estate purchases; their three-bedroom cottage in Ebor Road,
Palm Beach was bought by
Carla Zampatti in 1972 for $51,500; the Collins Avenue, Rose Bay house they owned in the 1970s sold in 1989 for $4.15 million; and their
Dover Heights clifftop residence, excluding its massive Michael Snape sculpture, was sold in 1993 for $1,775,000, the then-highest auction price for the suburb. In summer 1971-2,
Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne visited the McGraths at their property
Bundanon on the south coast of
New South Wales, which they owned with art dealer Frank McDonald. The Boyds purchased nearby
Riversdale on the banks of the
Shoalhaven River in 1974 and then bought Bundanon from McDonald and the McGraths in 1979. Sandra's son
James McGrath began his art career as studio assistant to Boyd. Over 1982-83, David Chalker, federal ministerial adviser to
Tom Uren and manager of the Nolan Gallery at
Lanyon in Canberra, with his wife Margaret assisted McGrath with research for her publication
The Artist and the River, praised by
Bernard Smith as 'a most valuable account of Arthur Boyd's work since his return to Australia after a period of almost 20 years abroad...[and] his preoccupation with the Shoalhaven River,' and as a 'particularly personal book in that it is, as the author tells us, her expression of gratitude to the artist for his work, in that it made her—an American—aware, for the first time, of the beauty of the Australian bush. "Where others see harmony, I have seen disorder, where others see beauty, I have seen ugliness; where others see grandeur, I have seen pettiness; where others see bright colors, I have seen dull greens and greys". Smith raises McGrath's reaction as an instance of the problem of 'to what extent is it possible to see scenery except through the eyes of other artists?' McGrath continued prominently as a member of the Sydney social set through the 1980s, protesting the encroachment of properties on Sydney Harbour, itself the subject of her 1979
Sydney harbour paintings from 1794 a compilation of works by 38 painters, and joining fundraising committees for charities. She was on the special committee to select works of art for the
Darling Harbour redevelopment chaired by
Neville Wran with the State Gallery director
Edmund Capon, journalist Lenore Nicklin, stockbroker and art collector
Rene Rivkin, and Bob Pentecost, general manager of the Darling Harbour Authority. Through her reviews, McGrath promoted the work of a number of then lesser-known Australian artists including
Tony Coleing,
Vivienne Pengilley, Peter Taylor, the 'reticent'
Tony Tuckson, and
Peter Tully. In 1982 on what
The Bulletin slated as a 'bear' market for art, she scolded:I don’t see any young artists that anyone is excited about. Buyers are rediscovering expatriate artists such as Colin Lanceley and
William Delafield Cook but there are no young ones around who excite the public the way Brett Whiteley and
Tim Storrier did. There are some good photo-realists around but while...admired, it is not bought. No one is buying adventurously and even in good times the people who do are rare birds. Dealers [are] increasingly being knocked by the sale of art at auction. Another problem for the dealer was that the number of serious collectors had not increased...[and] very few obsessive collectors who will get something from every show that an artist has. == Whiteley dispute ==