Art History

Bernard Smith gave us Australian art. Before him, the subject was not part of our cultural discourse. We knew and could place the work of Michelangelo and Monet but not that of Eugene von Guérard, Tom Roberts or Grace Cossington Smith.

This book, a tale of Stephen Scheding’s search for the artist of ‘a small unsigned painting’ he was unable to resist buying at an art auction, has already been warmly reviewed by others as an excellent read, a sleuth story that captures the frustrations and joys of research while holding its reader in a state of suspense worthy of the best whodunnit. I heartily agree and warmly recommend the book to anyone, amateur or art professional, looking to while away a pleasurable and interesting few hours.

The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

Edward Colless is the ‘don’ of the art world – in fact, he is Juan, Quixote, and Giovanni all woven together. The Error of My Ways is his ‘mille e tre’ of theoretical affairs – essays and articles that have infected an otherwise sterile art scene with a flame of desire.

This is nothing less than a magisterial achievement. Joan Kerr and her collaborators (some 128 women and forty-eight men) have documented ‘500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955’ to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of International Women’s Year. Simultaneously with its publication exhibitions of Australian women’s art are being held at 127 venues throughout Australia. Both the book and the exhibitions are a monument to the energy, enthusiasm, and efficiency of Joan Kerr and her team of honorary fellow workers.

At the conclusion of the fascinating essay ‘Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Cook’s Second Voyage’ in his recently published book Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages, Bernard Smith writes:

The most carefully planned and the most scientifically and efficiently conducted expedition ever made up to its time in the realm of reality provided the poet with a world of wonder and a nucleus of recollections from whence emerged in its own good time the most romantic voyage ever undertaken in the realm of the imagination.

Craftsman House has contributed substantially to bringing our art map up-to-date with the simultaneous publication of a West Australian and a New South Wales art history. One on the work of Robert Juniper and the other on that of Salvatore Zofrea make interesting comparison. The first presents the style· of art one might expect to ensue from that great Western expanse of desert while the other challenges such expectations as stereotyped and clichéd. Juniper set out to depict the landscape and to heroicise it, as has been our tradition; Zofrea, according to Snell, incorporates Australia in the international tradition of art history.

In the late nineteenth century, the Sydney barrister and critic, William Bede Dalley is reported to have said: ‘I enjoy literature in all its manifestations. But if there is one class of books I prefer to another, I think it must be’ – with a flash of his teeth – ‘why, New Books!’

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart.