Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin and Cézanne. These influences were adopted so enthusiastically that the art critic for the Sydney Sun wrote of the students splashing 'merrily with spots of crimson and green and vermilion and yellow'.6 Innovations in Australian art had been partly motivated by the reproduction of European avant-garde painting in local and imported magazines and books. These were seized on by the culturally deprived young artists and were frequently discussed. For example, the English modernist magazine Colour reproduced the work of the English vorticists, while contributors to the locally produced magazine The Salon demonstrated an acquaintance with Italian Futurism.7 At about the same time Wakelin read Willard Huntington Wrights Modern Painting, Its Tendency and Meaning (1915), which contained a chapter on the American artists Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright who had formed a group in Paris known as the synchromists. Synchromism drew its name from a complex theory of colour and music, in which timbre or 'tone' was equal to hue, and pitch equal to luminosity. Utilising a complicated mathematical calculation, which related sensation and emotion to the twelve 'notes' of the chromatic scale (the 'chromatic colours' in which, for example, C represented red and A blue- violet), the aim was to develop a form of painting that could emotionally move people in the same way music did.8 In October 1913, at the first synchromist exhibition in Paris, Morgan Russell had exhibited a large canvas entitled Synchromy in deep blue-violet which he regarded as a key painting in his development. It was a 'synchromie to light', he wrote, a means of depicting depth, projection and movement.9Although the Paris debut was only moderately successful, Russell and Macdonald-Wright were persuaded to mount an exhibition of works the following year at the Carroll Galleries in New York. This provoked a puzzled response from the American public and critics, in much the same way that Wakelin's and de Maistre's paintings would a few years later in Australia.10 De Maistre, who had been experimenting with colour therapy for shellshock victims, probably borrowed from all available sources to arrive at his own system of colour theory which related seven notes and seven colours. Though based on similar principles to Synchromism, there were some notable changes, Middle C corresponding with yellow instead of red, for example, and higher octaves representing lighter tones, lower ones darker colours.1 The first exhibition of de Maistre's and Wakelin's work relating colour to music was held in 1919 at Gayfield Shaw's Art Salon in Sydney, with titles such as Synchromy in Orange Major 1919 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) and "The Bridge” — An arrangement in yellow major resolving into red minor paying direct homage to the synchromists.12The exhibition caused a sensation in the Sydney art world with over seven hundred people attending the opening night. Opinion was divided, however, as to the merits of the works, and supporters and critics lined up in fierce opposition to each other: Howard Ashton savaged the paintings, while the Daily Telegraph's critic thought them vivid and beautiful.13Colour key boards, discs and scales were offered for sale along with several interior designs based on colour-music theory. Much of what de Maistre wrote and said at this time about colour-music verged on Spiritualism. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, he claimed that colour brings to many people: the conscious realisation of the deepest underlying principles of nature, and in it they find deep and lasting happiness — for these people it constitutes the very song of life and is, as it were, the spiritual speech of every living thing .14 This attempt to transcend the confines of traditional art forms, to establish a new concept of art based on the principles of the prism, was alarming for many members of the art establishment and their negative response produced a conservative backlash in Wakelin's art. Later described by him as Left Grace Cossington Smith Australia 1892-1984 Before the arches met C.1930 Crayon and coloured pencils over pencil on cream wove paper 37.8X43.4cm Purchased 1976. Godfrey Rivers Trust Queensland Art Gallery a period of uncertainty, Wakelin drifted back to an academic style and for the next two years produced paintings influenced by the Melbourne artist and teacher, Max Meldrum — paintings with broad loose brushstrokes in tonal, muted colours.15 This proved a more popular aesthetic, a view confirmed by an invitation from the Anthony Hordern Gallery to hold his first solo exhibition in February 1922. Wakelin successfully exhibited forty-five paintings and sailed later that month on the Largs Bay to England with his friend John Young and their two families. Wakelin's first trip to Europe proved a revelation to him, allowing him to observe at first-hand the techniques of Post- Impressionism. Though disappointed with the few modern works they were able to see in Paris, they were compensated by the extensive van Gogh exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, London, and, before leaving to return home, the Gauguin exhibition. Viewing Wakelin's English work, however, one recognises, rather than the French artists, the influence of the new generation of English moderns, the Camden Town Group and the 'New Movement' of Cézanne s admirers who clustered around Roger Fry and Clive Bell. The similarities exist not only in Wakelin's choice of a restricted palette and tonal brushstrokes but also in his compositional strategies of lonely streets and empty landscapes, these as much as anything else making the works identifiable as 'modern' art.16 These paintings byWakelin were shown shortly after his return to Sydney in 1925 as the inaugural exhibition at John Young's newly established Macquarie Galleries. Opened by Margaret Preston, this exhibition heralded a new association for Wakelin, one that was strengthened by the formation of the Contemporary Group, an alliance of artists who considered themselves to be at the cutting edge of art.17 Most of the viewing public, however, continued to be bewildered by an art that was clearly not about imitation of the natural world. As Ethel Anderson pointed out, at that time no public gallery in Australia owned a work by a modern master — 'no Cézanne, no Gauguin, no Van Gogh, no [Stanley] Spencer, PAINTING A SYMPHONY 135