Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

' PUT IT ANYWHE R E ! ' : The Café Balzac mural Colin Lanceley, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall Richard Haese Facing page Colin Lanceley (right panel) Australia b.1938 Mike Brown (centre panel) Australia 1938-97 Ross Crothall (left panel) Australia b.1934 The Café Balzac mural 1962 Oil, synthetic polymer paint and mixed media collage; car duco, enamel paint, sand and plaster on plywood panels 195.3 X 487.4cm Purchased 1988 Queensland Art Gallery Above From left: Mike Brown, Ross Crothall and Colin Lanceley, 1962. The painting in the centre is Byzantium, a collaborative work by the three artists. Photograph courtesy News Ltd / % large work on three panels measuring almost two metres J L . high and five metres long, The Café Balzac mural (Queensland Art Gallery) was painted and collaged by three young Sydney artists, Colin Lanceley, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall, working together on site in March 1962 during the early hours of the morning, after the last customers had departed from the Melbourne restaurant that gives the work its name. Georges Mora, who commissioned the work, had established the Café Balzac some years earlier after arriving in Melbourne from France in 1951 with his wife, the artist Mirka Mora, and their young family. The Moras quickly found themselves close to the centre of Melbourne's radical modernist movement alongside their friends John and Sunday Reed and the artists of the Contemporary Art Society. Mora divided his energies between the newly established Museum of Modern Art (where he became vice-president of the Museum's Council) and the Balzac restaurant in East Melbourne, which in its earliest manifestation was an informal meeting point for the artists and their supporters. Charles Blackman, unable to survive on art sales, was recruited as a short order cook and several of John Perceval's ceramic 'Angels' were amongst the art on display. By 1962, however, the Balzac had entered upon grander days as one of Melbourne's first licensed restaurants serving fine French cuisine. The three artists had banded together in the previous year under the name Annandale Imitation Realists, and were in Melbourne for their first exhibition which opened at the Museum of Modem Art in February 1962. Comprising over two hundred works, the exhibition was unparalleled in Australian art in the originality of its presentation and the transgressive character of the art it launched.The Museum's director, John Reed, had first seen this extraordinary body of work — collaborative paintings, countless improvised drawings, together with works both large and small assembled from cast­ off junk, factory refuse, chain store trash, and every conceivable kind of object and memento that contemporary culture could generate — crammed into the space of the old terrace house in Sydney's Annandale where Ross Crothall and Mike Brown had been living and working in 1960-61. Mike Brown offered the following account of what it all might have meant: At different times the work has been called Fine Art, and Anti-Art, and irresponsible Nihilism, and Junk Culture, and mere Junk, and Modern Totemism, and modern reliquary, and satirical goonery, and inspired or uninspired doodling, and Sheer Corn, and Dada, and Neo-Dada and Lah-de-dah and what-you-will. It has also been said to comprise a newArt Movement. God Forbid.1 New art movement or not, the name the artists chose for themselves nevertheless represented an explicit statement of the radical nature of this art. 'Imitation'signified a wholesale rejection of the prevailing modemist cult of originality on the one hand, and of the principle of purity and truth to materials on the other. 'Realism' was equally provocative and, although not as outright hostile to abstraction as the Melbourne-based Antipodeans had been with their manifesto and exhibition in 1959, they, too, felt little attraction towards the current wave of Sydney abstract art then at its zenith. Roped together as an oxymoron, Imitation Realism embodied a deliberate paradox and was intended, Dada fashion, as a repudiation of normal logic and conventional expectation. Annandale itself, west of the city centre, compared to the favoured bohemian locations such as Kings Cross, Darlinghurst and Paddington, was at this time a decidedly unfashionable area for Sydney artists. Rising above the waterfront between Glebe and Leichhardt, its somewhat run-down Victorian architectural base was overlaid with the disorderliness of light industrial activity and the polyglot results of postwar immigration. Ross Crothall was the first to recognise the attractions of the hybridised character of Annandale, which Brown would later describe as a 'cultural stew'. Four years older than Brown and Lanceley, Ross Crothall had arrived in Sydney from Auckland in 1958 at the age of 24, possessed of an intimate knowledge of Polynesian Maori culture. Other influences on his 286 BROUGFIT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965