Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

thinking about art included the work of his New Zealand mentor, the painter Colin McCahon, as well as such figures as Paul Klee, Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tàpies. Crothall soon met the two younger artists who were then studying at the National Art School in Darlinghurst, although later that year Brown abandoned his formal studies at the school. After spending several months in New Zealand following in Crothall's footsteps, Brown joined the Commonwealth Film Unit as a trainee production assistant. In this capacity he accompanied the unit to NewGuinea and New Britain in I960 where he discovered Melanesian art of the Sepik and other regions. He had also viewed a major exhibition of bark paintings from Arnhem Land and Tiwi grave posts from Melville Island that had been commissioned by Tony Tuckson for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These works had gone on show at the gallery in 1960-61 in the first major exhibition of Aboriginal art in Australia's public art museums. For Brown it had been a revelation, and his experience of Oceanic art between 1959 and 1960 transformed his sense of the possibilities of art. In 1960 he left the Film Unit to work alongside Crothall in Annandale. In the following year Colin Lanceley joined them and their other friends in the Imitation Realist enterprise, although he remained living in Darlinghurst. The sources of Imitation Realismwere both European and non-European, modernist and primitivist — and as the Balzac mural reveals, also reflected directly the personal and highly individualist natures of the groups central participants. At the core of the movement — and these were to be its most radical features — were the dual principles of collage and collaboration. Neither had any real precedent inAustralian art in spite of the fact that from Cubism onwards the creative practice of collage and assemblage had been an axis for avant- gardist and transgressive art. Collaboration, too, has a long history, although in the visual arts at least it has been less openly acknowledged either as a working practice or as a creative ethic in so far as it has tended to oppose and subvert modernist notions of unique artistic 'genius'. Collaboration had been central to the Imitation Realist experiments of Crothall and Brown from the outset, and later included Lanceley as well, especially in such games as 'aesthetic chess' in which everyday articles and objects were arranged and rearranged on the tabletops of Darlinghurst coffee shops in a series of 'moves' by the various players. However scrupulously crafted the works of the Imitation Realists were (and this was a point of special pride on their part), the formal niceties and aesthetic conventions of the high modemist art characteristic of Sydney art at this time were invariably cast aside in obedience to the group's alternative and anti-formalist credo: 'put it anywhere!'. The Café Balzac mural, completed after their exhibition at the Museum of Modem Art, provided the three artists with the opportunity to make a final major statement of these principles in Melbourne. Yet, although collage is a central ingredient of the mural — and in spite of the fact that all three had collaborated on one of their most recent and most successful works, Byzantium 1961 (National Gallery of Australia) — it was decided not to make this a collaborative work in a direct sense. Rather, each artist would work exclusively on a separate section of the mural with the idea of asserting a further and related proposition: that it was possible to paint three discrete and individual pictures which, when assembled, would go together because, in Brown's words, 'we told them to go together'.2Indeed, to add to the disparity, the three plywood panels that form the triptych are not of uniform size. Moreover, and thiswas also unusual for the group, there was, pointedly, no discussion of themes or of any shared approach to the project. What there was, was the same confident and high-spirited comradeship that had characterised the just completed exhibition. What must strike the viewer immediately is the disparate character of the three sections that comprise the mural. They are clearly the product of three distinct hands and minds — Ross Crothall's panel (left) is comparatively spare and austere, at least when compared with Mike Brown's compacted and teeming mêlée of figures alternating with dense patternations (centre panel), or Colin Lanceley's more seductive and painterly surfaces (right panel). These were differences of both temperament and artistic practice which the art critic Elwyn Lynn had already shrewdly characterised in his introduction to the Museum of Modern Art catalogue: 'Lanceley is often more ambiguous and subtle, Brown involved and complex (when in doubt, add!) and Crothall simplicity sanctified (when in doubt, subtract!)'.3 Crothall's mood was less than ebullient by the time he came to work on the mural. He had held great hopes for the impact that their work might have on the Melbourne scene. Writing to a friend in Sydney, Magda Kohn (who was also a member of the group), Crothall described how in his view Melbourne's artists and critics had failed to respond on a significant level to the exhibition. Melbourne had not been conquered. It seems that we have struck the bedrock ofwhat we can do in Melbourne. The show... sets a tone of out-of-this-world cultural entertainment and is received as such ... The point is we have neither offended the conservatives ... nor upset the aggressive equilibrium of the place, hence the entertainment which we have offered their staid and respectable city .4 Sales in fact had been few and the only real financial and moral support had been commissions from John Reed and Georges Mora. Did Crothall's general mood of disappointment flow over into his work on this commission? While something of its comparative restraint and sobriety when compared to the other contributions might suggest this to be so, these stylistic qualities had also been present from the beginning in his pared-back approach to painting and assemblage. His panel is dominated by an enormous blue head with its red contour line sweeping down from the top right-hand corner. This head with its dislocated cubist features is, in fact, the only image to reoccur in the other two panels, replicated by Brown and Lanceley on a much reduced scale. If this head is imitation Picasso, then much of the other content around it also appears as a homage to early twentieth-century Modernism. The painted 'Journal' with its 288 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965