Sarah Thomas

Australian expatriate artist Bessie Davidson was a woman who ripened with age. After decades of living in Paris and dressing somewhat dowdily ‘à l’anglaise’, she gained confidence with the liberation of France towards the end of World War II. In her sixties, she adopted a long black cape, a wide-brimmed fedora and a slender black cigarette-holder. Penelope Little’s A Studio in Montparnasse: Bessie Davidson: An Australian Artist in Paris similarly improves as it goes along, becoming increasingly engaging as the artist is brought to life and found to be in the midst not only of two world wars but also of bohemian interwar Paris.

Eva Gandel and Marc Besen Married in Melbourne in 1950 and soon began collecting current art. After the closure of John Reed’s privately established but short-lived ‘Museum of Modern Art & Design of Australia’, they bought a few of its de-accessioned possessions, paintings by John Perceval and Sidney Nolan. In the 1970s they added works by recentlydeceased Sydney artists William Dobell, Ralph Balson, and Tony Tuckson. These were perceived ‘gaps’ in a collection of recent Australian art. Perhaps the systematic history of Australian art then profusely displayed in the private collection formed by their relative Joseph Brown, and first published in 1974 as Outlines of Australian Art, had inspired the Besens to be more systematic. Hitherto, they had mostly encountered local work by living artists.

The publication of a third major book on Howard Arkley begs the question: does he deserve such attention while other Australian artists of his generation and significance remain invisible on bookshop and library shelves? Has Arkley’s untimely and sensationalised death in 1999 been the main driver behind his broad appeal, or is he an artist who warrants further critical investigation? John Gregory’s impressive book, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, proves unquestionably that the latter is the case, and tackles some of the myths that have been perpetuated, especially since the artist’s death.

In the 1930s the notorious art critic and gallery director J.S. MacDonald felt it was his patriotic duty to protect Australia from the morally suspect culture of Europe, where, he exclaimed, ‘the pictorial symptoms of the degeneracy of France [is] enfeebled by the rule of functionaries, and … Mittel Europe [is] crushed and torn between Nazi, Bolshevist and Fascist megalomaniacs’. Not a man to mince words, MacDonald also expressed his horror of what was arguably Australia’s first blockbuster exhibition, the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, suggesting that it was the work of ‘degenerates and perverts’. As the then Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, MacDonald was a man of influence, and his outspoken views were transmitted widely.

The Heart Garden was the subject of considerable controversy even before its launch, ruffling art world feathers and propelling the Heide set once again onto the front page of an Australian newspaper. Janine Burke has a knack for provocation, which must delight her publishers, and this new biography of Sunday Reed makes bold claims that challenge some of the orthodoxies of Australian art. No doubt the book’s sensual and charismatic subject, Sunday Reed, and her famous artist friends Sidney Nolan (her lover for some nine years), Albert Tucker Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Charles Blackman among others, can also claim credit for the continued public interest. After all, their libertine proclivities make contemporary Australian society seem dull by comparison.

Lina Bryans’s painting The Babe is Wise captures the ‘insouciant chic’ of the New Woman in 1940: independent and self-assured, the subject stares at the viewer from beneath a sharply angled hat. A portrait of the artist’s close friend, author Jean Campbell (whose novel inspired the painting’s title), The Babe is Wise became Bryans’s most famous painting, and its subject captures the artist’s own attitude to life.

Gillian Forwood’s handsome new book, Lina Bryans: Rare Modern 1909–2000, recalls the life and work of a brave, unconventional and generous woman who single-mindedly pursued a career as an artist from the late 1930s until her death three years ago. This lavish Miegunyah Press publication serves both author and artist well, reproducing numerous images in colour, many for the first time.