CONTEMPORARY ARTS
ART
Australian Painting.
THE painting of young countries often shows certain similarities. It is always romantic, never classic. It is naïve, untutored, journeyman stuff at the outset, recording usually some incident of exploration or colonisation. As the country reaches its era of self-discovery and nationalist aspirations, its painters become intensely and emotionally aware of whatever is peculiar to the local scene, to the expanding horizons of a land freshly opened up. To some degree they mirror the spirit of revolt, record oppression directly or by allegory, react against the elegance of a remote aristocracy by an interest in genre. Such painting is based less upon visual analysis than upon literary ideas and illustration, upon a symbolic and conceptual rendering of its chosen subject matter. In manner it is realistic—how otherwise in an unsophisticated society could it tell its story ?—but it is the realism of the thing known rather than the thing observed. In this middle period it is unswervingly insistent upon local colour, darkened with black to produce shadows ; it produces generalisations of form which are bulbously over-emphasised to the point of caricature • it tends to an enamel-like surface, or else one that is rough and dry, lacking in either case a painterly sense of matiere. Later, with the rise of a new aristocracy, the culture aspires to elegance and inter- national standards ; artists attempt to assimilate idioms from overseas and to reconcile them with the nationalistic tradition, until finally any residue of national characteristics is almost entirely unconscious. This cycle, and especially the striking family resemblances of the middle period, may be noted in the painting of countries as far apart as Mexico, the United States and Australia. They are evident in the exhibition of Australian painting brought to the New Burlington Galleries by the Arts Council.
This is the first such official exhibition to be seen here, although, individually, half the artists are fairly well-known to us already (it has an official flavour not only because of its auspices but because nearly all the pictures come from national galleries). It was wise, and the catalogue is needlessly defensive about this, to limit the number of painters so that a greater number of works by each could be shown. Of the twelve represented, four were born during the last century ; the youngest in 1920. With the exception of three abstractionists (oddly enough among the older artists), the exhibition has remarkable homogeneity. This is in part the result of the frequency with which it dwells upon the dry, rocky and desolate landscape of the outback (the only animals to be seen are carcases dried to husks by drought) ; partly a common palette. Almost throughout, in the work of Dobell, Drysdale, Nolan, Friend, Bellette and Constance Stokes, the same hot tones of red and ochreous brown predominate. There is likewise a common density of pigment, an insistence on following the form with the brush-stroke (expressionist-wise), so that there are strong stylistic resemblances between heads by Drysdale and by Dobell. The other Australian artists whom we know, but who are not showing here, like Sail Herman, fit into the same pattern.
William Dobell is the nation's most controversial portraitist (Once the centre of a famous court case that brought into question the principles of" modem "art). Dobell's robust over-emphasis blows up the forms of his sitters like balloons, generalises and subordinates them to a concept of character much as does Signeiros in Mexico on a grander scale. Russell Drysdale is the senior romantic landscapist. Here is all the twentieth-century nostalgia for the deserted shanty town at night, the street lights, the telegraph poles, the iron-columned colonnades, the golden light of the setting sun—that same nostalgia that Brienin and so many American painters have found in the Middle West and the Deep South. Here too the metamorphic tree- bole of Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Sydney Nolan is shown in three distinct manners. The earliest, a pseudo-naïve style, he used for the curious set of pictures dealing with the exploits of famous Ned Kelly the bushranger ; secondly a delicate and feathery touch with which he gave a magic realism to the vistas of red cliffs and peaks of the Durrack Range ; finally a careful simplification applied to the sun-dried corpses of cattle. More academic but transparently honest and by no means without charm are the three landscapes by Lloyd Rees (a little reminiscent of Caryl Weight) ; more tricksy, but yet conveying an Australian effect of space, is the Victoriana-up-to- date of Arthur Boyd. Justin O'Brien's decorative figure composi- tions, with their elongated forms and soft brilliance of colour, are very pretty and well—perhaps too well—within the artist's power of control. Donald Friend has also to fight a certain facility. None of the abstractionists will cause much excitement here.
M. H. MIDDLETON.
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