Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Keith Looby Crucifixion - Resurrection 1964 Oil on canvas 265x495.5cm James Fairfax Collection Keith Looby Daniel in the lion's den 1965 Oil on masonite 140x180 cm Private collection change is now difficult to conceive. Before the late 1960s, expatriates were resented most by those of the intelligentsia who could not join them. Joan Sutherland in 1951 had followed Nellie Melbas path to Europe. Playwright Ray Lawler stayed overseas after the British and United States seasons of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1956-57. Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker were resident abroad when Looby left Sydney in 1960 with little thought of return. Other associates from Sydney bohemia were streaming away: Barry Humphries to London in 1959 and Germaine Greer to do her doctorate at Oxford. Art critic Robert Hughes fled for fear of becoming the world expert on Tom Gleghom. Looby painted Incarnation towards the end of this phase. During the 1960s, Australians regarded the United Kingdom less and less as 'home'. This shift occurred because of jet travel but also through a switch in attention from the United Kingdom towards the United States of America. Permanent residence in Britain was still automatic for Australians who then travelled on British passports, whereas work prospects in the United States were limited to a few years. By the close of the 1960s, expatriation was ceasing to be the dilemma that confronted most creative Australians. Looby was old-fashioned enough to go to Italy, rather than Paris or NewYork, but not so old-fashioned as to hang around London before it started to swing. His places of residence overseas were determined by the presence of friends and relatives to help him eke out a living. Turin had mates and mentors from Sydneys Libertarian Push who had set up a school to teach English. After a year wandering across the Continent, Looby returned there because he remembered a great party on NewYear's Eve. He was not to be disappointed. Turin was working-class, a centre of communist militancy around the fiat works, more than a site for tourists. Looby arrived in Italy during preparations for the Vatican II Council which opened in 1962. The Church of his mother was opening towards the poor and the pacifists whose needs and hopes had drawn his father into the Communist Party. Christian-Marxist dialogues encouraged apostates such as Looby to hope that Rome would be converted to their radicalism. In this spirit, the poet, film- director and art scholar Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-75) dedicated his marxist film The Gospel According to Matthew to the memory of Pope John XXIII in 1964. Pasolini sought to sacrilise the humdrum and banal, despising deconsecration as a petit-bourgeois fear of myth and epic. Looby shared these attitudes, although he felt closer to films by Visconti. In 1964 Looby moved to Rome where his sister was married to an American film- producer with taste and money enough to provide Looby with a stipend. During that year he painted Adoration o f kings and cjueens (Art Gallery of Western Australia) and Crucifixion - Resurrection (James Lairfax Collection) in a studio beside the Vatican. Looby returned to London in 1965 where other Sydney friends such as Paddy McGuinness ensured that he would not starve. Although Looby still bought paint rather than food, he could never afford quality materials, which has led to darkening as well as some discolouration of Incarnation. Perhaps poverty contributed to the thinness of his paint compared with the impasto he later would lay down as if with a trowel. Back in Australia by late 1966, Looby took encouragement from the Blake and D'Arcy Morris Prizes for religious art to persist with the expression of his politics and ambitions, as well as his angsts and passions, through images reliant upon Christianity. The Last Supper 1967 was his first entry in the Blake Prize, using Pop Art colours on a Celtic Cross. Others were Those days we murdered Jesus 1969, which won the Morris Prize in 1969. He took that prize again in 1971 with Many Happy Returns to God and in 1972 with Knock! Knock! Is God home7. (National Gallery of Australia). Jokes became more blatant in his titles. After Your Motel Calvary still life with flowers (Griffith Artworks, Griffith University) won the 1973 Blake Prize, he stopped entering those religious races and adopted an overtly secular approach with his sequences of historical drawings and the canvases depicting his school days. Figuration In 1959 the Antipodeans in Melbourne, including Arthur Boyd, to whom Looby as a student had paid the highest form of flattery, were upholding figuration and realism against abstract art from Europe and NewYork. The 'Antipodean Manifesto' declared that 'in defending the image we are ... defending something which is vital to the life of art itself'. That inheritance was attacked by advocates of pure painterliness for whom the materials were the message. While in London Looby had made a lunge against one ideologue of abstract art, Daniel Thomas, curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Daniel in the lion's den 1965 (private collection), another work that depicted a contemporary concern through a biblical incident. 292 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965