Australian Art

In August 1999 the Melbourne art collective DAMP staged an argument that turned into a glass-smashing fight at an exhibition opening of its work at 200 Gertrude Street. Peter Timms, writing in The Age, described this event, which in former times might have been called a ‘Happening’ and today would be recognised as a ‘Pop-up project’:

Bernard Smith, who died in September 2011, was responsible for creating the first orthodoxy in Australian art history. His version of the story of Australian art has been persuasive and enduring. It held sway for half a century; in many ways we are still living with it. Smith’s classic account of the development of Australian art was Australian Painting, first published in 1962 and reprinted with updates in 1971, 1991, and 2001.

The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from  traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

The settler art history of Australia is not a long one – not much more than two hundred years – so it is all the more surprising that the literature of its first century should remain so riddled with holes. It is a sad reflection on the priorities of the academic and curatorial professions that (certainly as far as concerns that conventional, fundamental professional resource, the monographic study) some very significant artists have been neglected or completely ignored. To give just a few examples, it is years since there was anything new or substantial on Augustus Earle, S.T. Gill, Nicholas Chevalier or Louis Buvelot, while there have never been focused, extended studies of first-generation early colonial artists such as the surveyor-explorer G.W. Evans and the natural history painter John Lewin, of Benjamin Duterrau, artist of The Conciliation (1840), Australia’s first history painting, or of the 1860s and 1870s landscapists J.H. Carse, Thomas Clark and Henry Gritten.

The opening chapter of Robert Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know (2006), may have persuaded readers that Australians are a mercenary, uncouth and ungrateful lot who love nothing more than a glistening athlete on a podium. Hughes had reason to be sensitive at this time, having eluded the ‘feather-foot’ on that desolate Western Australian highway in May 1999 and endured the trials that followed. He names two writers, Peter Craven and Catharine Lumby, who have stood by him, whereas others, he says, have sought to further their careers by denouncing him. To the former small but faithful posse can be added Patricia Anderson, who defies that great Australian tradition of ‘cutting down the tall poppy’ to celebrate Hughes’s achievements in this biography of his ‘Australian years’: from Hughes’s birth in 1938 until 1970, when Time magazine afforded him the opportunity at last to leave our shores.

In under a decade Bill Henson has managed, by careful and strategic marketing, to become probably Australia’s leading art photographer. This status is based on the precise circulation of three or four exhibitions of work, Untitled Sequence 1979, the Untitled 1980–82 series, the Untitled 1983–84 series, and the Untitled 1985–86 series. The titles indicate a continuity of practice rather than anything else, a statement that the photographer has been engaged throughout this time in producing work. By an economic placement of the work in different commercial and public galleries around the country and in contemporary survey shows, such as the 1981 Perspecta and more significantly, the Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, Henson has managed to maximize the exposure and impact of his work. The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta provides a useful means of circulating the work internationally (the exhibition has been shown in Germany), although Henson, like most of us, does not really need the bicentennial; it simply provides a free trip into the international market in which Henson’s work is already placed by virtue of its content and formal qualities.

Curated by Tracey Lock-Weir, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 at the Art Gallery of South Australia presented a re-evaluation of Max Meldrum (1875–1955) and the influential Australian tonalist phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. This recent exhibition was accompanied by an elegant publication in which Lock-Weir’s substantial essay (divided into readily digestible chapters) makes the claim that Meldrum and his tonalist doctrine had a more far-reaching impact than has previously been recognised. Accordingly, paintings by Meldrum and his followers – including Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan, A.D. Colquhoun, John Farmer, Polly Hurry, Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason, A.E. Newbury and Hayward Veal – were augmented by the work of artists more fleetingly influenced by his ideas, such as Roy de Maistre, Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin. Although William Frater and Arnold Shore produced a number of tonalist paintings, Lock-Weir observes that by 1926 they had ‘broken away into colour and line’, later becoming the leading proponents of modernism in Melbourne.

Marry an artist? Never! So I always thought, and reading these autobiographies does nothing to change my prejudice. Married to artists, both Judith Pugh and Irena Sibley spend a good deal of their time cooking and, even more, socialising. Not that they mind. Judith declares that ‘cooking was my deep pleasure’, essential to the story of her life with Clifton (‘Clif’) Pugh. Irena concedes facetiously, ‘it’s too hard painting pictures. It is easier to bake cakes.’ The importance of food is apparent in the chapter titles. Eleven of Sibley’s chapters refer to food, while all of Pugh’s have subheadings that, typically, jumble up evocative ingredients.