Arts

This year is proving a good one for Symbolism. An international conference entitled ‘Redefining European Symbolism’ was held at the Musée d’Orsay in April, followed shortly afterwards by four days on ‘The Symbolist Movement: Its Origins and Consequences’ at the University of Illinois, in Springfield. A third conference is planned for October at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh to coincide with the exhibition Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880–1910 (14 July–14 October); shown first at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as Dreams of  Nature: Symbolism from Van Gogh to Kandinsky and concluding at the Ateneum Museum, Helsinki. Meanwhile, Australian Symbolism: The Art of Dreams has recently finished at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

‘Rather like a consummate storyteller, Mozart knows how to keep us close to the edge of our seats,’ says Andrew Ford, composer, broadcaster, andauthor of this collection of illuminating essays on musical themes assembled from his talks, articles, and scripts for the radio series Music and Fashion. Like Mozart, two of Ford’s strengths are his compelling voice and his capacity to keep the reader enthralled. The down-to-earth title signposts something different, something digestible and fun to read.

Why, Alice Kessler-Harris’s friends kept asking her, are you writing a biography of Lillian Hellman – a good question of one of the world’s leading historians of women and work, who has just stepped down as president of the American Historical Association. If Hellman is remembered at all today, it is as a mediocre playwright, an ugly, foul-mouthed harridan whose luxurious comforts were provided by ill-treated employees, a blind supporter of an evil political system – and, above all, as a liar and thief who appropriated someone else’s life to make her own seem more heroic.

The British Museum’s connection with Australia goes right back to 29 April 1770, when Captain Cook landed at the place he called Botany Bay because of the large number of plant specimens gathered there by Joseph Banks, one of the Museum’s most influential early trustees. As a polyglot public institution dedicated by Act of Parliament (1753) to allowing any citizen to study and understand the whole world, past and present, the British Museum was a magnet for generations of Australian colonists visiting and revisiting the imperial capital, especially artists. This was as true for Arthur Streeton, Fred McCubbin, George Lambert, Bertram Mackennal, and Rupert Bunny as it was much later for Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley, and many other twentieth-century Australian artists. No doubt it will continue to be true of those members of future generations of Australians who visit London.

Napoleon came to power as First Consul in 1799 after a coup d’état, having recently returned from invading Egypt, his defeat there by the British spin-doctored into a victory back in Paris. Five years later he had himself made emperor, crowning himself in Notre Dame surrounded with panoply reminiscent of the ancien régime and inspired by fantasies of Roman Antiquity. Bonaparte’s armies occupied much of Western Europe, overthrowing governments, installing his brothers and brothers-in-law as kings, and imposing French laws and taxation. Napoleon’s wars killed three million soldiers, with the death rate on the Russian campaign – mostly of starvation, cold, and exhaustion – among the highest in modern military history. The emperor pillaged the art collections of conquered Europe to create his Musée Napoléon. In 1802 he reversed a decree of the revolutionary government in order to re-establish slavery in the French colonies. The famous Napoleonic Code of laws made women second-class citizens; a woman’s husband, for instance, had legal control of her property. The emperor unceremoniously dumped Joséphine to take a wife who could bear a child and, he dreamed, secure his dynasty. Napoleon’s opponents were imprisoned or driven into exile.

So many art books! And too many of them remainder-table compendiums of famous images thinly draped with text. It is refreshing, then, to rediscover an artist who has fallen into the slough that often follows a lifetime flush of reputation, and an art historian tenacious enough to resurrect that artist’s work and milieu.

The contemporary jewellery movement grew from a desire among postwar practitioners to explore both the expressive qualities in jewellery and the use of non-traditional materials. The move away from traditional gold and diamonds was partly economic – consider today’s price of gold – and partly ideological. Jewellery should be appreciated for what it is, on its own terms, not for its carats.

For a brief period, Australian art enjoyed unprecedented popularity in London, which became home to a large expatriate community of artists such as Sidney Nolan, Arthur and David Boyd, Charles Blackman, and Brett Whiteley. This ‘Antipodean Summer’ is vividly portrayed in Pierse’s critical account. He reveals that the success of these artists depended upon the support of a handful of art patrons, notably that of the art historian Kenneth Clark, the flamboyant young director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery Bryan Robertson, and the Australian expatriate art dealer Alannah Coleman. Nolan’s solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, Robertson’s ground-breaking Recent Australian Painting (1961), and Coleman’s Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today (1963) were also crucial to the success of Australian artists. These exhibitions provided a counterpoint to the much-critiqued Tate Gallery survey exhibition, AustralianPainting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary (1962–63).

Just because something is being done right now doesn’t make it contemporary. On the contrary, the predicate ‘contemporary’ in contemporary art is the name for a problem, not a clarified or self-evident state of affairs. As Boris Groys puts it, ‘This is because the contemporary is actually constituted by doubt, hesitation, uncertainty, indecision – by the need for prolonged reflection, for a delay.’ Such experiences, however, are not especially high priorities in the world of corporate rationalisation.