A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities (Clarke 1975, 134).
By the following decade, substantial land-clearing and rapid urbanization transformed the colonial environment from a strange wilderness to an area ripe for productive labor, inspiring a shift in the aesthetic reading of the Australian landscape from Clarke’s “weird melancholy” to an emphasis on pastoral wealth and the notion of progress through work.
Inspired by Buvelot’s plein-air technique, a number of artists including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Charles Conder, and Jane Sutherland, began painting the landscape around Heidelberg on the outskirts of Melbourne in the 1880s, depicting intimate, optimistic views of the bush, epitomized in Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889). Following the developments of French artist Julien Bastien-Lepage’s representation of French peasants and the British Newlyn School of artists’ portrayal of Cornish fisherfolk, these artists of the Heidelberg School also sought to capture the life of the bush settler. This interest intensified in the years surrounding the centenary of the British settlement of Australia in 1888, wherein nostalgia for a lost pioneering past replaced by urban and industrial development was combined with a progressive nationalist idealism channeled through a vision of rural landscape and labor (Galbally 2011). Such nostalgic nationalism was promoted by the writers of the Bulletin magazine, “The Bushman’s Bible”, who championed the unique Australian virtues of mateship and egalitarianism. A similar approach was advocated by the American critic Sidney Dickinson who, in the article, “What Should Australian Artists Paint?”, encourages the embrace of familiar subjects expressive of Australian life and culture: “It should be the ambition of our artists to present on canvas the earnestness, rigor, pathos and heroism of the life that is about them” (Dickinson 1975, 250). While Dickinson proposes the “characteristic life of the station and the bush” as appropriate material for Australian artists, he also suggests that the “mixed life of the city” would “furnish countless subjects”. This appealed to the urban bohemianism of the Heidelberg School group who were entrenched in cosmopolitan Melbourne society and were interested in contemporary developments in international Impressionism and the Aesthetic Movement, culminating in their 9 × 5 Impression Exhibition in 1889 (Dickinson 1975, 249–250).
In the wake of Federation and Australia’s participation in the First World War, the Australian digger came to be seen as the natural descendent of the nineteenth-century bushman. The painters associated with the Heidelberg School, especially Arthur Streeton, were canonized as the founders of a distinctively Australian art that directly engaged with the local landscape, while earlier colonial artists were criticized for what was perceived as their reliance on imported artistic formulae. For Frederick McCubbin, one of the central members of the Heidelberg School, the connection between landscape painting and national identity was critical in creating a nationalist iconography. In “Some Remarks on the History of Australian Art” (1916), he highlights the inability of colonial artists to “understand the Gum”, citing Louis Buvelot as the link between such “Pioneer Artists” and the Heidelberg School for his “genius to catch and understand the salient living features of this country” (McCubbin 1975, 269–270). Critical of cosmopolitan culture and emerging modernist trends as well as the increasing number of artists traveling overseas to Paris and London, McCubbin concludes by asserting that “the Australian artist can best fulfill his highest destiny, by remaining in his own country, and studying that which lies about him…” (McCubbin 1975, 276).
Modern Engagements
“It was about the year 1913 when the first glimmerings of what is now called “modern art” came to Sydney,” according to Roland Wakelin (Wakelin 2006, 75). Along with Roy de Maistre, Wakelin introduced a French-inspired modernism that explored the relationships between painting, color and music, culminating in the exhibition Color in Art (1919). John D. Moore, a Sydney-trained architect, attempted to codify these emerging modernist tendencies in the article, “Thoughts in Reference to Modern Art” (1927), identifying what he perceived as its two principal strains: the embrace of the avant-garde and the engagement with contemporary culture and society. For Moore, the functional form of “the aeroplane, the steam ship, the motor car, the skyscraper of America, the wheat silos of Canada and Australia” all embodied the “essence” of modernism (Moore 2006, 69–70).
Modernism’s engagement with the present was championed especially by Sydney Ure Smith, the publisher of the nationally distributed Art in Australia (1916–1942), which had a significant impact on the scattered regional networks of artists in Australia after World War I. Ure Smith supported artists such as Wakelin, de Maistre, and Moore as well as Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, and Grace Cossington Smith, while advocating a holistic view of modernism that endorsed design, architecture, and the applied and commercial arts. In his editorial for the September 1929 edition of Art in Australia, Ure Smith draws attention to the paradoxical acceptance of commercial modern design yet rejection of modernist painting: “to quite a number of people, anything ‘modern’ can be appreciated in anything except pictures” (Ure Smith 2006, 89).
From the outset, the development of modernism in Australia was questioned and challenged by a range of dissenting voices, a number of which featured in Art in Australia. Appearing in the first edition of the magazine, the artist and engraver Norman Lindsay’s essay, “A Modern Malady” (1916), aligns modernism with a deracination of art resulting from a lack of foundational principles and from the adulterating influence of other cultures. The pastoral tradition he favored was fervently defended by Norman’s artist brother, Lionel Lindsay, and the critic J.S. MacDonald and institutionalized in the 1920s and 1930s in the face of an encroaching modernism that was seen as the expression of a European culture in decline (Dixon and Smith 1984, 27). In its most extreme form, Australian pastoralism developed into anti-modernist, proto-fascist and even anti-Semitic discourse.1
The pastoral tradition was also central to the first monographic survey of art in Australia, William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934), which credits Streeton with the consolidation of a landscape school within the evolution of a local art industry that climaxed in the 1920s (Moore 1934, xx). Establishing a model for later surveys through his emphasis on late nineteenth-century landscape painting as the key movement in national art, Moore also set a precedent for the positioning of Aboriginal art and visual culture within a broader art historical framework. He presents rock art as a starting point for the history of Australian art, beginning with George Grey’s account of his discovery of rock painting in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia. Moore’s interest in Aboriginal art was inspired by Australian Aboriginal Art (National Museum of Victoria, 1929), the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to take place in a public gallery, which featured a range of rock carvings, bark paintings, ceremonial objects, weapons, utensils, as well as models, dioramas, and displays and was accompanied by a number of public lectures and an illustrated catalogue.
From the 1920s Aboriginal art intersected with the public sphere on a broader level both through the impact of such exhibitions and the accessibility of public collections, and also through emergent desert tourism in Central Australia. Margaret Preston was the leading advocate of Aboriginality during this era. She contributed a number of articles to The Home and Art in Australia, beginning with “Why I became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923), in which she explains her desire to create a form of modern art “a purely Australian product” (Preston 2006a, 68). The adaptation of the earth-toned color palette and flat, asymmetrical motifs of Aboriginal art provided a vehicle through which to articulate these goals, with Preston asserting in 1925, “It is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring” (Preston 2006b, 156).
Preston supported the display, Australian Aboriginal Art and its Application, at the David Jones Art Gallery in 1941, which coincided with the North American touring exhibition, Art of Australia 1788–1941, co-curated by Ure Smith and Theodore Sizer, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. The accompanying catalogue begins with an essay by Preston that declares the “limitless