Visual Arts

Humphrey McQueen’s new book claims to give an adequate account of the emergence if not the development of modernist paining in Australia up to 1944. In particular he claims to do two things the previous writers in this area have not done or have done inadequately.

‘To paint’, Ian Fairweather once observed, ‘one must be alone.’ True enough, you think, though hardly deserving of quotation. Down the years all kinds of artists have made the same observation, yet not many of them have been as consistently forthright when essaying the value and aesthetic nature of their lonely activity. Fairweather was an exception. ‘I paint for myself,’ he went on to add, ‘nor do I feel any compulsion to communicate, though naturally I am pleased when it seems I have done so.’