A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
art movement in Australia, and the one that marks the end of the colonial period and the transition to Federation and the twentieth century. If the earlier colonial phases of art in this country were explorations of a new and unfamiliar environment, the Heidelberg movement for the first time asserts a confident sense of inhabiting this land as a permanent home. Georgina Cole’s chapter introduces us to the most important figures of this movement, such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, as well as the themes of an art that looks forward to a new Australian nation.
III – Dwelling in the World
Hardly had the art of Australia begun to define this sense of belonging, when a new and perhaps surprising phase of expatriation began at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. As we see in Barry Pearce’s essay on the period, this was partly motivated by particular commissions that required or even expressly stipulated travel to England, such as Roberts’ commission for a vast painting commemorating the opening of Australia’s first Parliament, and partly by a desire to make a mark in London, the great metropolis at the heart of the Empire. Anna Gray’s chapter on the Edwardian period completes the picture of this period before the Great War, including those artists who remained in Australia.
With Denise Mimmochi’s chapter we enter the period between the two World Wars, when modernism first appeared in Australia, though often on a rather modest scale and in a decorative manner; the new art was closely aligned to fashion, advertising, interior decoration and the smart lives of a new urban middle class. By the end of the 1930s, throughout the war and in its immediate aftermath, as we see in Jacqui Strecker’s chapter, the tone grew far more intense and even urgent with the artists collectively referred to as the Angry Penguins, from the title of an avant-garde magazine associated with the movement.
In contrast to the polemical tone of culture during the war, the postwar period was initially less antagonistic, and a number of modernist artists rose above controversy to be broadly recognized in Australia and to a lesser extent in Britain: Sasha Grishin introduces this period when Drysdale, Nolan and Boyd were widely accepted as contemporary cultural stars. Mary Eagle offers an introduction to the cultural and aesthetic debates of this time and their place in an international context, while Christopher Heathcote chronicles the rise of the modern art market and the emergence of the dealer galleries that managed the careers of the principal figures of the time.
Richard Haese, finally, deals with the rise of a new avant-garde from the 1960s and 1970s, which brought with it renewed and sometime bitter polemics, both about style and the aesthetic direction of art and about its role in social and political life.
IV – Artforms and Themes
This final section covers a further three important subjects that require separate discussion. The first of these is the history of Australian sculpture. Michael Hill introduces this complex subject, which weaves in and out of the story of art in Australia in the course of the last two centuries, but is hard to account for in narratives that are mainly focused on painting. Early sculpture is principally concerned with monuments and portraits, and both the choice of individuals or events who are thus commemorated and the manner of commemoration within a newly-founded community are clearly of great significance. In the modernist period, on the other hand, the meaning and place of public monuments become increasingly vague and disconnected from a sense of social purpose.
Photography too has a long history in Australia – almost as long as anywhere else, since by the mid nineteenth century the arrival of new technology in Australia was almost simultaneous with its invention in Britain, Europe or America. Indeed photography had a particular connection with the far-flung regions of Empire, both because it allowed images of new and exotic worlds to be reproduced for the benefit of audiences in the metropolises of the old world, and also because portrait photography was particularly important to families separated indefinitely by distant expatriation. Isobel Crombie offers an expert introduction to a field that extends from early daguerreotypes to contemporary artists of international stature such as Bill Henson.
Philip Jones, finally, deals with a subject which, though not the central focus of this book, is of the greatest importance: Aboriginal art in the modern world, and more specifically the way that traditional Aboriginal art has adapted and changed over the last half-century or so. Different materials have been adopted, the traditional roles of men and women in the making of art have been disrupted, and most importantly both the social occasion and the intended audience of art have been radically transformed in a new environment dominated by the demands of the domestic and international art markets.
Conclusion
After much reflection and discussion with a number of professional colleagues, it was decided not to attempt a formal historical coverage of the contemporary period. As I noted in my 1997 book – and as is clear from the final chapters of Bernard Smith’s two histories of Australian art – it is impossible to deal with one’s contemporary period with anything like scholarly objectivity. One reason for this is sentimental, for significant personalities are still living but often elderly or frail; others are institutional and economic, for museums and funding bodies are determined to uphold the reputations of the artists and movements they have chosen to promote, and the art market is anxious to maintain prices and the value of their customers’ investments.
In the end I decided to discuss what seemed to me salient issues in the state of contemporary art myself, in the guise of a conclusion. Such a discussion makes no claim to historical comprehensiveness, but is simply an attempt to raise some of the questions that are deliberately ignored in the promotion of the contemporary art business. It will be up to a later historian to attempt a balanced assessment of the art of recent decades once the dust has settled and the publicists and spruikers have fallen silent.
2 Historiography of Australian Art
Molly Duggins
Origins of Art Historical Writing in Australia
With the increase in immigration and economic development following the discovery of gold in 1851, art was institutionalized in Australia. Colonial governments promoted art education through the establishment of technical schools and public galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, while a number of professionally-trained European artists found employment as teachers through which they imparted knowledge of overseas trends. A sustained form of local art criticism in Australian newspapers and periodicals developed in the 1870s, playing a significant role in supporting Australia’s nascent artistic culture which looked to the European movements of romanticism and naturalism. In a review in the Melbourne Argus of the Viennese-born artist Eugene von Guérard’s View in the Grampians from the Top of the Sierra Range (1870), critic James Smith acknowledges the artist’s absolute fidelity to nature, a key attribute of colonial topographical painting and natural history illustration, yet criticizes what he perceives as von Guérard’s lack of an aesthetic reading of the landscape necessary to elevate it from a scientific treatise to a legitimate work of art (Smith 1975, 162–163). In contrast, Russian-born Nicholas Chevalier’s The Buffalo Ranges (1864) is praised for marrying “the grandest reminiscences of the old world”, evident in its sublime mountainous grandeur, while realizing “the effect of the sylvan sunlight peculiar to our clime”(Argus 1864, 6). Commending the introduction of plein-airism to Australia, Smith also lauds Swiss artist Abram Louis Buvelot’s Summer Afternoon, Templestowe (1866), a Barbizon School-inspired pastoral landscape, for its “general freedom of handling to which we are unaccustomed in the work of colonial painters” (Argus 1866, 5).
Literary romanticism presented an additional model for analysis, epitomized in novelist and journalist Marcus Clarke’s poetic interpretation of the “weird melancholy” of such Australian landscape painting, germinating from a sense of isolationism in a strange country. This aesthetic of alienation is captured in Clarke’s description of Buvelot’s Waterpool near Coleraine (1869):
In Australia