Exhibitions 1
Nolan's Nolans: A Reputation Reassessed (Agnew's, 43 Old Bond St, W1 till 25 July) John Virtue (Jason and Rhodes, 4 New Burlington Place, W1 till 1 July)
A sense of isolation
Martin Gayford
The major centres of modern art are generally reckoned to be Paris, New York, Germany, to some extent Austria and Italy. But Australia scarcely figures in the ortho- dox version. Is that just and fair? 'One can very well imagine,' Robert Hughes once wrote, 'an "alternative history" of 20th-cen- tury art with some Australians in it.' The late Peter Fuller went a bit further and actually picked out an Antipodean school of the 'higher' romantic landscape, includ- ing Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, which played an important role in his view of contemporary art. But the current exhibition Nolan's Nolans: A Repu- tation Reassessed at Agnew's suggests that we should not allow our imaginations to get too overheated.
Nolan is often regarded as the major fig- ure among the mid-century Australian painters. But his reputation, to put it no more strongly, emerges from this reassess- ment looking in need of very firm editing. He was, in fact, a quintessential example of that common figure: the rather thin artist awaiting release from a badly overinflated oeuvre. He painted too much, far, far too much, 3,000-4,000 pictures according to Nicholas Usherwood's introduction to the catalogue to this show. And he retained a good portion of that massive output for himself. It is from that collection, Nolan's Nolans, that this exhibition of 88 pictures was selected.
Admittedly, the object of this exhibition is to edit Nolan's work, and thus 'do jus- tice', as Julian Agnew puts it, 'to the achievement and reputation of an artist who has not always been well served by a sometimes indiscriminate display of sec- ondary paintings'. To this one can only reply that even more drastic editing was required — perhaps down to 20 paintings rather than 90 odd — because some pretty dire specimens lurk even here among the creme de la creme.
From the time he left Australia for Europe in the early Fifties, Nolan's work became desperately uneven. Some of the very later pieces — the spray-painted `Snake' from 1989, and 'Chinese Land- scapes' from 1982 — are barely of amateur art-show standard. A good portion of the work from the mid-Fifties is of interest only as a melange of incompatible trends of the day — the unsuccessful attempts to meld spiky figurative drawing with abstrac- tion in 'Massive Head', 1956, and 'Bather in Lily Pond', the cardboard symbolism of `Pale Figure on a Horse'. A number of these pictures belong in a stylistic category — now well represented in junk shops that might be dubbed 'coffee-bar modern'.
But, throughout his career, Nolan was capable of being a good deal better than that, almost always when he returned psy- chologically and stylistically to his Aus- tralian roots. The core of his work, Australian roots: 'Hare in Trap', 1946, by Sidney Nolan however, lay in the mid- to late-Forties before he left those roots (that is to say, when Nolan himself, born in 1917, was around 30). At that stage he produced paintings that were at once personal, Aus- tralian and linked with international devel- opments. Some of them, perhaps a dozen or more from this show, remain vividly alive.
The international art he had most affini- ty with was English rather than American or Parisian. Nolan was interested in the turn-of-the-century naive master Douanier Rousseau but he had as much in common, at least in mood, with British contempo- raries such as Graham Sutherland — the so-called Neo-Romantics. Nolan's work is much more succulently painted — Suther- land and co. were essentially draughtsmen rather than painters — but the feeling, especially in the paintings of skeletal cattle inspired by the terrible drought of 1953, is often similar.
Neo-Romanticism resulted from a com- bination of the political wasteland of the mid-century with the melancholy of youth. In Nolan's case the desolation was also the emptiness of the Australian landscape, and his own sense of isolation became fused with the figure of the outlaw, Ned Kelly. And the angular armour and square, home- made helmet that Kelly wore became equivalents — more historically resonant equivalents — for the spiky, mutant figures of post-Hiroshima man who appeared a lit- tle later in the work of sculptors such as Lynn Chadwick, for whose work the phrase `geometry of fear' was devised. At best, all this added up to highly poetic paintings — `Glenrowan' from 1955, with its grey distances and crouching wounded Kelly figures, like a couple of toppled petrol pumps, is a later but beguiling example. Earlier, and equally memorable, is 'Dog and Duck' from 1948, in which the duck surreally stands, rather than flies, in the sky above a dusty, one-storey desert hotel. It is a perfect image for the weird inertia of liv- ing smack in the middle of nowhere. But Neo-Romanticism was a hard idiom to sustain. It was powered not by any stylis- tic motor — which is why it is an off-shoot from the main course of art — but by psy- chological tension. Sutherland and Piper went off, Minton went on the bottle. Nolan went off too, and how, but this show sug- gests that for a few years at least he pro- duced work for which one might — like Hughes — imagine a place in the history of 20th-century art. It's not a star part, though, more of a walk-on. Romanticism is a word which sometimes comes to mind when looking at the black and white world of John Virtue, the latest instalment of whose work is on show at Jason and Rhodes. But whether it is really the mot just is moot. Virtue has painted hundreds of paintings of just two places first, Green Haworth in Lancashire, and for the last decade South Tawton in Devon. His obsessive fixedness, however, seem to derive not from a poetic sense of place, but from a desire to avoid superficiality by going deeper and deeper into one motif.
His paintings tremble on the absolute border of abstraction; but if one reads them figuratively, these stark landscapes produced in the last couple of years of drought suggest that a massive tempest has burst. Heavy clouds hang above, drips, spatters and dribbles of paint cascade downwards. Romantic or not, the effect is highly dramatic.
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