Art

An appreciation of Goya, contends Robert Hughes, has become essential for Europeans wishing to make themselves literate in their own culture. Goya’s significance is heightened because his works are arguments for humanity, to be balanced against the horrors he depicted. Goya (1746–1828) indeed remains our contemporary. His life, his imagery and his dilemmas resonate at a time when countries are being invaded for their own good, as Europe was by Napoleon, provoking the first guerillas.

Robert Hughes, bemoaning the contents of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1959, cast an eye over its sandstone façade decorated in bronze letters with such august names as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and quipped: ‘Never has so large a nut housed so inadequate a kernel.’ The National Gallery of Australia was in every respect the opposite story: its collection was a fat kernel in search of a shell. Until 1968 this collection, thought to comprise some 3000 works, was strung around Canberra offices and Australian embassies like so much washing on a line. The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, which would soon be dismantled, had been buying energetically, if conservatively, for years. However, there was no catalogue, no conservator to care for them and no established policy for the collection.

One of Australia’s most significant Modernist artists, Margaret Preston (1875–1963) is often remembered for her relentless self-promotion and her forthright opinions: in particular, for her call to develop an art for Australia, untainted by past and irrelevant foreign art. Although frequently quoted (the wonderfully titled autobiographical article ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’ being one of her best-known pieces), her writings have not previously been gathered together. Selected and introduced by Elizabeth Butel, who has written before on Preston, this book presents twenty-nine articles and one extract. These appeared in a number of publications – art journals, women’s magazines, exhibition catalogues and the like – between 1923 and 1949.

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.

A thirty-ish Peter O’Toole becoming an aged schoolmaster with powdered apple cheeks. I was a child when I saw the remake of Goodbye Mr Chips in 1970, but even then I could see that wrinkly make-up will never wash. More fascinating than the film was watching it in Walter Burley Griffin’s Capitol Theatre in Melbourne. The ceiling’s cunningly layered pleats of multi-faceted fittings were a million triangles softened in an illuminated cloud of pink and rose and yellow hues. It was my first knockout encounter with the style known as Art Deco.

Art is divided into three parts – at least for amateur painters who ask, when they begin acquaintance, ‘Do you do abstract, impressionist or surrealist art?’ Of these, surrealism has the strongest interest for a mass audience, and the deepest penetration into popular culture. When it was new, surrealism was quickly appropriated into commercial and advertising art. Today, commercial cinema is awash with some of surrealism’s youthful political idealism, but more with its fantasies of shock-horror and sex.

Surrealist literature never came to much. The artists took over. If Picasso was the greatest twentieth-century artist, his surrealist paintings from the 1920s onwards might be his own best work. Remember how the best exhibition ever produced in Australia, Surrealism: Revolution by Night (National Gallery of Australia 1993, by Michael Lloyd, Ted Gott and Christopher Chapman), showcased Picasso ahead of Miró, Dalí, Magritte and Ernst. And the star of the Australian component of the exhibition was James Gleeson.

Imants Tiller is one of the most distinguished of Australia’s postmodern generation of artists. Just about every trendsetting exhibition within Australia throughout the 1980s had a Tillers piece on centrestage, and his inclusion in internationally touring shows then and in the 1990s has been a matter of course. His commercial success has matched his fame and his prodigious output. But Tillers’s high profile and fashionable appeal are contradictory phenomena. For an artist whose work is declaratively derivative – brashly quoting, awkwardly imitating or strategically appropriating other artists’ imagery – Tillers has nonetheless managed to develop a signature effect in his working method which is inimitable.