Arts

A sarcastic little slogan on a wall in Australia’s arts funding organisation in the mid-1990s read ‘Il y a trop d’art’. All right, it was meant in jest, but it seemed to hint broadly at shared bureaucratic resentment of importunate artists, even though they were the Council’s clients and the reason, indeed, for its very existence. Remember the national health hospital in Yes Minister that ran perfectly until it had to take patients?

Ever since Plato famously proposed to banish poets and their ‘embellished tales’ from his ideal Republic, the relationship between art and politics has been strained. On the negative end of the spectrum hovers the warning example of a failed Austrian landscape painter who proceeded to push the world into total war. What makes things even worse is that the remarkable appeal of Hitler’s ghastly vision in 1930s Germany owed much to the efforts of sympathetic artists such as Leni Riefenstahl or Gottfried Benn. But even more inspiring figures on the positive end of the spectrum – Václav Havel and Melina Mercouri come to mind here – usually fall from popular grace once they accept political office.

Last year marked the centenary of Robert Helpmann’s birth. Apart from a tribute at the Helpmann Awards ceremony – the ‘Bobbies’ – in July 2009, no Australian performing arts company celebrated the anniversary of this polymorphous artist and early advocate for a national artistic life created by Australians, not by northern-hemisphere exporters. Two new books and a vibrant touring exhibition went part of the way towards providing a fitting tribute.

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.

Yet another book on Wagner. Given the title, you might expect it to be an investigation of Wagner’s complex relationship with Nietzsche or, failing that, a study which, like Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886), attempts to push the examination of a given subject beyond the limits to which it hitherto has been confined. The blurb on the dust jacket appears to suggest the latter: ‘Deathridge engages the debates that have raged about him [Wagner] and moves beyond them, towards a fresh and engaging assessment of what Wagner ultimately achieved.’ Well, yes and no.

Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn (a future artistic director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre) first met at NIDA in the 1960s, and Sharman returned there as a tutor in the 1970s. He was then a ‘radical populist’, while Cramphorn was scholarly, mad about Racine and Corneille. But they agreed that theatre was a vocation, and shared a ‘crypto-mystical’ interest in the slippery relationship between reality and illusion. They would set up a short-lived theatre company at the Paris Theatre (later demolished), and mount two premières of Australian plays, Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross (1978) and Louis Nowra’s Visions (1979).

First impressions are unfavourable. The cover is ugly, and too cute: human-headed sheep, male and female, wait motionless for a drought to end while wearing prime ministerial bush-visit hats. We have read Frank Campbell’s rebuke in the Australian: the author Jeanette Hoorn did not know a fox’s tail from a dingo’s. Inside, however, there is a cheering profusion of illustrations, placed in unusually reader-friendly closeness to the relevant discussion, and they include a feast of the best Australian paintings. There are some interesting sources in English eighteenth-century art and, much less familiar, some parallels in German fascist art.

If Australian art has sometimes been perceived as wanting in style and opulence, recent art museum exhibitions and monographs examining the art and artists of the Edwardian era tell another story and reveal that there is abundant glamour in Australian art. The Edwardians (2004) and George W. Lambert Retrospective (2007) – both from the National Gallery of Australia – and Bertram Mackennal (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007) have succeeded in presenting Australian art in the grand manner from this most extravagant period.