John Olsen’s Sydney Sun, 1965, on display in the “Australia” show © DACS 2013
Australian art used to be well known and widely collected in Britain. As long ago as 1898 the Grafton Galleries could put on a show of Australian painting without apology or explanation. In 1923 the painter Elioth Gruner curated an exhibition of Australian art at Burlington House. In 1961 the Whitechapel Gallery hosted an exhibition called “Recent Australian Painting” with works by Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Brack, Russell Drysdale, Ian Fairweather, ST Gill, John Olsen, Jeffrey Smart, Arthur Streeton, Albert Tucker and Brett Whiteley. The Tate bought Whiteley’s Red Painting from that show and mounted its own exhibition of Australian painting two years later. In the 1960s and 70s Boyd, Nolan, Whiteley, Colin Lanceley, Charles Blackman and Barbara Hanrahan were familiar figures on the London art scene and so successful that the most prestigious galleries were happy to represent them. Collectors understood what was different about the Australians, which was only possible because they could also see what they shared with the European tradition. The artists, too, learned how to represent Australia by positioning it against the dim green country around them. Nolan’s vision of Australia roared into incandescent life against the rolling hills of Herefordshire.
At the same time Aboriginal painting was being invented. The most befuddled of the British critics confronted with the “Australia” exhibition, which opened at the Royal Academy on 21st September, stated confidently that Aboriginal painting represents “a tradition stretching back tens of thousands of years before the first Europeans even glimpsed the Australian mainland at the start of the 17th century.” Another critic, Adrian Searle of the Guardian, begged someone to explain whether we should see Aboriginal paintings “as a kind of art, a means of communication, maps, cosmologies, ceremonial artefacts, stories or abstract paintings to hang on a wall.”
Aboriginal paintings as we know them are trade objects; they have no place in ceremonies. The best of them are painted flat on the ground and you might as well hang them on a wall as do anything else with them, though they have no upside down or sideways. Emily Kngwarreye is represented in the Royal Academy’s exhibition by a single work painted when someone brought to her camp a stretched canvas nine feet long, already painted black, gave her a single brush and the white acrylic paint she was to load it with and set her to work. Emily would have drawn wobbly lines on the flat canvas, working all the way around it until the space could be considered filled and the same people who brought it took it away. Brian Sewell informed readers of the Evening Standard that contemporary Aboriginal work was the “stale rejiggings of a half-remembered heritage wrecked by the European alcohol, religion and servitude [!] that have rendered purposeless all relics of their ancient and mysterious past.” Sewell thought that Jackson Pollock was to blame for the emptiness of the Emily, as if Emily had ever seen Blue Poles. Such misprision is the fault of the curators of the “Australia” show; if they had hung the right Emily, even Sewell would have been awed into silence.
The exhibition, slated to run until 8th December, has been touted as the “most significant survey of Australian art ever mounted in the UK” and guaranteed to “uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art.” The implication, that 200 years of art in Australia could be adequately represented in a single show, is condescending and ridiculous, but the Australian organisers of the exhibition seem blissfully unaware of the implicit disparagement. So much of what they have chosen to show is small-scale and trivial, that the impartial observer might suspect that their real intention was to belittle Australian achievement. Why else include silver objets de vertu that were ridiculous in conception and incompetent in execution unless it was to make a witty connection with Fiona Hall’s Paradisus terrestris consisting of 23 sardine cans opened to show reliefs of human genitalia in various states of arousal? A similar elephantine playfulness is to be suspected in the choice of a huge fake fur piece by Kathy Temin as the sole large-scale sculpture. By such pointless ironising the Australians succeeded in misrepresenting themselves, only to be further misunderstood by British commentators who have no inkling of the depth of their own ignorance.
While Aboriginal people were adapting whitefella art for their own purposes, the Australian presence was receding from the European scene, as the Australian art market swelled and prospered. By the 1990s Australian artists were getting far higher prices in Australia than in London or New York so, even if they lived in Europe or America, they showed in Australia. The career of the late Jeffrey Smart provides a case in point. Smart’s work was shown at the Whitechapel in 1961 and at the Tate exhibition of Australian art in 1963. In 1965 he moved to Italy and lived there until his death this year. In Australia he is regarded as an important artist whose work fetches high prices. He is represented in public collections in every state, while in England he is virtually unknown. On 26th September a sale of Australian art at Christie’s saw a 1978 Smart called North Sydney sell for £170,000; five will get you ten the buyer was Australian.
In that sale of 75 lots, 31 remained unsold, including Frederick McCubbin’s Bush Idyll, which had been confidently predicted to earn between two and three million dollars. The last time this large and awful painting, of figures posed and painted in the studio and subsequently surrounded by fake bushland, was sold, at Christie’s in Sydney in 1998, it broke the record for an Australian painting with a hammer price of A$2.3m (£1.3m). It is to be hoped that its failure to sell at a significantly lower reserve price in 2013 signifies an improvement in Australian taste. However it seems that what has actually happened is that the cynically overheated Australian art market is undergoing a much-needed correction.
In 1997 the Australian government cancelled the post of cultural attaché in London, then held by gallerista Rebecca Hossack, who nevertheless continued to do her best to headline Australian artists in her own galleries. Despite her efforts, none of the major art collections in the UK thought fit to invest energy or resources in building up an Australian collection. The Royal Academy has a single work by an Australian in its permanent collection, Self-Portrait in Youth, Nolan’s diploma piece, accepted in 1992 (the year of his death) and never exhibited. The Tate has 10 works of Arthur Boyd, only one of them a painting, not on display. It has nothing by Smart or Perceval or McCubbin or Streeton. It has 19 works by Charles Conder, all of them of European subjects. Nothing exemplifies the misunderstanding of the relations between British and Australian art more vividly than the treatment of Conder. There he is in the “Australia” exhibition as a fully paid-up Australian painter with five paintings of Australian subjects, though he was born in England, came to Australia at the age of 15 and returned to Europe at the age of 21, never to return. He was trained in the ateliers of Paris, as were many Australian-born painters.
Tom Roberts, A Break Away! 1891
Least appreciated was the section of the exhibition that dealt with the “colonial encounter.” If the object was to showcase Australian art, there was no point in jamming into an already crowded exhibition a horde of 19th-century topographical paintings, prints and drawings, of the kind that appear in London salerooms every year. These may be fascinating objects of study but they made little headway against the clamour of the paintings. Chief amongst them were works by John Glover, who emigrated to Tasmania at the age of 64 and died there 18 years later. Interestingly enough, it was a work by Glover that took the highest price at the Christie’s sale of Australian art, but, even so, it did not make the estimate.
The “Australia” exhibition may have grown out of the “Out of Australia” exhibition of 20 works by Aboriginal artists and 106 works by white Australians mounted in 2011 by the British Museum, where the prints and drawings department has accumulated the most important collection of Australian art anywhere outside Australia. The collection was given a kick-start in 2002 in the form of a gift from Lyn Williams of 70 etchings and nine drawings by Fred Williams. Barbara Tucker gave 24 drawings and monotypes by Albert Tucker; Barbara Blackman gave six drawings and a print series by Charles Blackman; Helen Brack gave 11 etchings by John Brack; Mary Nolan contributed 15 works by Sid, and Margaret Tuckson 17 works by Tony. The volunteer cultural attaché who involved all these people (and a great many more) in the project was James Mollison, who contributed 50 works from his own collection. The British Museum collection now numbers about a thousand Australian artworks that can be seen on application by appointment.
Because they must be stored away from light, works on paper, however distinguished, do not a major collection make. Though British galleries hold important works by artists from all over the world, many have little or nothing by Australians. The National Gallery has no painting by an Australian. The Tate has 135 works by Nolan, but of these all but 11 are works on paper. Only one of the paintings is on permanent display, and it is one of a series of wonderful evocations of inland Australia very like another of the same series that was included in the “Australia” exhibition. Of the eight pictures by Nolan that Lord McAlpine presented to the Tate, none is at present on display. All 25 of the Tate’s Colin Lanceleys are works on paper; 16 of their 18 Brett Whiteleys are works on paper, the other two are not on display. In 2006 the gallery received five important works from Fred Williams’s estate; so far, none of them has been shown.
Too many paintings have been hung in the Royal Academy’s “Australia” exhibition and too many of them are bad. Why hang a great Rover Thomas in sight of an execrable Paddy Bedford? Why lose a stupendous work by the late Doreen Reid Nakamarra by positioning it horizontally at the height of a coffee table? It could have filled the whole room all by itself.
The “Australia” exhibition will do little to clarify British notions of Australian art. The tastes of the curators are so different and so uncertain, and the blizzard of words in the gigantic catalogue so difficult to read, that the only outcome is bewilderment. The omissions are almost as bizarre as the inclusions. Why only two Drysdales but four Grace Cossington Smiths, including a large folding screen of no artistic merit whatsoever? There is no mention of the most conspicuous art event in Australia, namely the annual awarding of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, no sign of Norman Lindsay or William Dobell or Pro Hart. Their absence might have been a relief but, if “Australia” was to be a genuine survey, they should have been there.
Key figures in Australian art:
Arthur Streeton (1867-1943) Influenced by Turner and French impressionism, Streeton painted from nature with a gold and blue palette, which he called “nature’s scheme of colour in Australia.”
Emily Kngwarreye (1910-1996) An Aboriginal artist from the Utopia community in the Northern Territory, Kngwarreye went on to become part of mainstream art culture.
Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) Australia’s most internationally acclaimed artist, Nolan worked prolifically across a range of media, often with autobiographical themes. He returned repeatedly to the story of the Australian outlaw, Ned Kelly.
Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) Born into a family of artists, Boyd, who spent two decades in Britain, drew on mythical themes which he worked into his paintings of the Australian landscape.
Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013) Trained by Fernand Léger, Smart, who spent much of his life in Italy, painted visions of the urban landscape.
Charles Blackman (b. 1928) Blackman was one of several artists who wrote the Antipodean Manifesto, a reaction to the rise of abstract expressionism in Australian art.
Colin Lanceley (b. 1938) Lanceley made his name in the 1960s as part of a Sydney-based group, the “Imitation Realists,” which crafted assemblages out of street junk.
Brett Whiteley (1939-1992) Whiteley, who moved to London in 1961, started off in a near-abstract style, turning increasingly towards figuration. He later produced a series of provocative paintings, with sexual and political themes, which incorporate collage.
Barbara Hanrahan (1939-1991) Hanrahan grew up in an all-female household and moved back and forth between Australia and Britain. She frequently explores female relationships in her prints and collages.
Australia is on at The Royal Academy until December 8, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J OBD
