A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
his constructed vision of Australia as an antipodean arcadia that merged Claudean convention with the empiricism of natural history to cater to contemporary taste. The theme of the immigrant artist looking simultaneously back to Europe and forward to Australia also informed the 2011 NGV exhibition, Eugene von Guérard: Nature Revealed. Focusing on von Guérard’s ambition to present the wondrous environment of Australia to the public, while maintaining an absolute fidelity to nature, this retrospective explored the influence of contemporary theories of natural science, particularly Alexander von Humboldt’s directive to artists to depict plants contextually in their local ecosystems, on von Guérard’s Australian landscapes.10
Lewin: Wild Art (State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW], 2012) and its accompanying catalogue Mr. J.W. Lewin, Painter and Naturalist by Mitchell Librarian Richard Neville similarly explores the impact of the natural sciences on the career of Australia’s first professional artist, John William Lewin. Neville reveals how Lewin, schooled in generic natural history illustration “unexpectedly discovered his own visual language” not only through precise observations of Australian vegetation but through his emotional and physical investment in his new home (Neville 2012, 9). Most recently in Australian Sketchbook: Colonial Life and the Art of S.T. Gill (State Library of Victoria [SLVIC], 2015) curator Sasha Grishin, presents S.T. Gill, famed for his 1850s lithographs of the Victorian goldfields and his frank portrayals of prospectors, larrikins, and swagmen, as “Australia’s first painter of modern life” through his interrogation of Australian society and its values. Gill, according to Grishin, was also the first to invent the Australian character of the digger: “tough, resilient, resourceful, possessing a dry humour, one who was true to his mates, but intolerant of all forms of authority, humbug and institutionalized religion” (Grishin conversation 2015). This quintessential type, he contends, was subsequently built upon by the artists of The Bulletin and appropriated by the myth-making nationalist campaign to commemorate Australia’s soldiers in the Great War.
The rediscovery of the wealth and diversity of colonial visual culture challenged the orthodox view that a distinctive Australian art only began with the Heidelberg School in the 1880s, a myth that arose against the backdrop of nationalism and federalism in the late nineteenth century and was perpetuated by twentieth-century art world politics (Sayers 2001, 80). One of the major catalysts for the reassessment of the Heidelberg School was the exhibition, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (NGV, 1985), which included key works such as Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), which had not been seen in public since 1924. It dispelled the illusion that the artists of the Heidelberg School only painted “pastoral Australia under a midday sun with a bright ‘Impressionist’ palette”, presenting instead a diversity of responses to Impressionism by Australian artists including urban imagery and portraiture (Galbally 1985, 9). In the accompanying catalogue, Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw demonstrate that the impact of French Impressionism on the Heidelberg School was quite minimal and that plein-air French artists of the 1860s and 70s, including Jean Francois Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage, and their subsequent English interpreters, were more significant inspirations (Galbally 1985, 9–10).
Golden Summers’ emphasis on the group’s “urban-based sensitivity to and nostalgia for Australia’s pioneering history” was concomitantly explored by Leigh Astbury in City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (1985) (Galbally 1985, 10). Astbury demonstrates that the artists of the Heidelberg School were ultimately “city bushmen” whose embrace of the bush as a form of nationalist sentiment was matched by their bohemian lifestyles that revolved around city studios, art teaching, and portrait commissions. His views built upon Ian Burn’s “‘Beating about the Bush’: The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School” (1980), which points out that the bush, a place of hard work for real selectors, farm laborers and pastoralists, was instead experienced as a pleasurable respite from the city by artists who belonged to an “educated urban capitalist class”. (Burn 1980, 20–21, 35). In reality, this idyllic arcadia was well-trafficked suburban bushland easily accessible by the extension of Melbourne’s railway system in the 1880s, as demonstrated by Helen Topliss in The Artists’ Camps: Plein Air Painting in Melbourne 1885–1898 (1984).
These revelations renewed the interrogation of the relationship between what was perceived as the distinctive “Australian” style of the Heidelberg School and the international Impressionist movement. In the essay, “The Sunny South: Australian Impressionism” (1990), Virginia Spate suggests that the radical departure from tonal plein-airism in works such as Roberts’ Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west (c. 1885–1886, reworked 1890) and Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) constituted a distinct modification from French Impressionism (Spate 1990, 120). Spate contends that Australian Impressionism was marked by a fundamental duality, in which artists sought to be true to their perception of effects of light while at the same time investing this light, especially its sunny, golden nature, with symbolic resonance associated with the optimistic vision of Australia as a new land of health and abundance (Spate 1990, 117).11 In Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (2003) and the subsequent AGNSW retrospective of this artist, the least nationalist member of the Heidelberg School, Ann Galbally provides an extended focus on his fin-de-siecle silk paintings and British and European oeuvre. In contrast to previous readings of such work as decorative and marginal, Galbally portrays Conder as a cosmopolitan aesthete more in tune with his international contemporaries than Roberts, McCubbin, or Streeton (Peers 2005, 193).
Other reevaluations of the Heidelberg School focused on the contribution of women artists who made excursions to the artists’ camps in Box Hill and Eaglemont, including Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern. In the 1992 exhibition, Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era, Victoria Hammond and Juliette Peers acknowledged the critical role of women in shaping the history of the period which witnessed the rise and decline of the first wave of the women’s movement, and presented women’s interpretation of the landscape.12 Women, “identified with the home, family, morality and conventionality,” played a marginal role in the myths created by the urban male artists and radical nationalists of the 1890s, representing, as Peers observes in the catalogue, “the constraining values from which the bohemian fancied himself liberated” (Peers 1992, 28).
A rebranding of the Heidelberg School was attempted in the Australian Impressionism exhibition (NGV, 2007), which focused on the work of Jane Sutherland in addition to the four major artists associated with the school, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Conder in an effort to destabilize this artistic pantheon.13 The exhibition also attempted to replace the term “Heidelberg School”, coined by critic Sidney Dickinson in 1891 and used in the twentieth-century writings of William Moore and Bernard Smith as a general identifier of the nationalist phase of landscape art in Melbourne and Sydney in the late nineteenth century, with “Australian Impressionism.” In his catalogue essay, Gerard Vaughan claims that the term “Impressionism” “came to be readily associated with the new international style of plein-airism which developed in the 1870s and 1880s around artists like Jules Bastien-Lepage” (Vaughan 2007, 16). David Hansen qualifies this association in his essay, “National Naturalism”, in which he argues that in the bush settings of their national pictures, Roberts, McCubbin, and Streeton were following the rising artistic mode of naturalism, which combined academic drawing and modeling with a plein air atmosphere and the contemporary subject matter of Impressionism and Aestheticism, in Europe and Britain.
More recently, Ann Galbally has argued that the drive to rename members of the Heidelberg School “Australian Impressionists” is unsustainable due to the emphasis they placed on developing new landscape paradigms and a genre of national imagery culled from popular black-and-white illustrations over their technical experimentation with color (Galbally 2011, 73). Following Hansen, she suggests that the Heidelberg School artists engaged in a high-keyed naturalism that contributed to a vision of “aesthetic nationalism” that combined landscape with an interest in heroicizing the life of the bush settler spurred by nostalgia (Galbally 2011, 75, 79). The duality of this aesthetic nationalism is demonstrated through Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890), a “powerful fusion of mythic subject matter with a Realist aesthetic” which celebrates