Australian Art

Influence spotting is one of the major preoccupations of traditional art history. Important and necessary though the practice may be, I sometimes suspect that it is employed to keep art history the preserve of the specialist and to deny access to the general reader. How refreshing, then, to be confronted with a scholarly Australian art history book that explores the artists’ subject matter and its local context rather than the derivation of the artists’ styles.

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.

The World of Norman Lindsay is compiled by Lin Bloomfield, proprietor of the Bloomfield Galleries in Paddington, NSW, and an authority on Lindsay’s work. It was first published more expensively in 1979. This elegant paperback will make it widely accessible, which is a matter for satisfaction. It contains comprehensive, short, expert articles about Lindsay’s life and achievements as an artist and the reminiscences of Lindsay’s children, grandchildren, models, friends, and colleagues. Good illustrations, some in colour, cover every era of his works in all their variety, and the book also includes photographs of people and places.

We all have our favourite examples of language in the landscape, and can feel disappointment not to find them in collections. The pleasure they give can only be enhanced by finding more. This Richard Tipping has done, his choice of graffiti, random association, incongruity, and vandalised property documents man-made absurdity in what he terms ‘this visual and verbal traffic jam ... our every day mental habitat’. The resulting ‘photo-poems’ exploit the ambiguity between intent and effect, text and context to provide fields of symbols from which the reader (viewer?) construct his own meaning.

Macmillan’s Albert Tucker is a pioneering venture. It is not just another well-arranged, well-printed collection of paintings by a notable painter, it is an endeavour to present the whole conspectus of a painter’s work and mind.

Gary Catalano’s book, which I admire greatly, is a readjustment. His standpoint, so far as I can tell, is an ideal he has of what might be the suitable creative situation for artists, and he reviews the 1960s with this in mind.

This book must win the prize for the most lavish and the most amateurish book on an Australian artist. Not one of the 200 odd colour plates is dated; not even in the portentously titled Opus Index (a list of plates without page numbers!) do we get a single date or indication of present ownership. Where dates are given in the text, they are often vague and careless ‘... in the 1950s...’etc.

Janine Burke’s Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940 is a memento of the exhibition of women’s art initiated by the Ewing Gallery for 1975, International Women’s Year. An extraordinarily rich exhibition, it convinced me and many others who saw it on its tour of the eastern states, that Australian women painters, for at least the first 30 years of this century, must share the laurels equally with men.

Patrick McCaughey’s Fred Williams is a rare event in Australian publishing, a substantial and scholarly monograph on a living Australian artist. Fred Williams, born in 1927, belongs to the so-called ‘heroic years’ of modern Australian painting (1940-65), yet his reputation as ‘Australia’s leading painter’ was made during the decade that followed. Unlike his contemporaries – among them Charles Blackman – who made their reputations before going overseas, Williams spent most of his formative years (1951-56) in England. The works from this period are mainly figurative and shaped by his experience of London life music hall and other genre subjects.

Humphrey McQueen’s new book claims to give an adequate account of the emergence if not the development of modernist paining in Australia up to 1944. In particular he claims to do two things the previous writers in this area have not done or have done inadequately.