Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

in Menton in 1898, the same year as Stéphane Mallarmé. Oscar Wilde, exiled in Paris, died in 1900. Toulouse-Lautrec was institutionalised during the time that Conder was working on the screen. Le Retour de Pierrot 1899 (Queensland Art Gallery) is a free-standing screen in the rococo-revival style that was popular at the end of the nineteenth century. One of the aims of the art nouveau movement was the concept of gesamtkunstwerk or a total artistic experience, where artists created works that could be used in everyday life, and not just placed on the walls. The screen fulfils this aim. In both style and content it shows the influence of the rococo artist AntoineWatteau (1684-1721), particularly with the light paint handling, delicate colours and subject matter of fêtes galantes (scenes of gallantry) in which elegantly attired court ladies and gentlemen are portrayed pursuing and enjoying their leisurely activities. Although eighteenth-century art was Conder's inspiration, he did not attempt to re-create it. The costumes belong to no distinct era and imply a generic 'past', capturing a sense of nostalgia for an invented Arcadia removed from the pressures of modem life. Likewise, Conder's use of narrative is not based on the viewer having a prior knowledge of history or legend; the viewer is not teased with symbolism that might reveal a particular meaning. Each story unfolds as a unique vignette to which we alone are privy. 'By his panels the eye is engaged, the intelligence is aroused, but only to a point; a story is told, a drama enacted in them which is never finished.'6 The figure of Pierrot is a nineteenth- century fusion of 'Gilles' (most famously painted byWatteau c.1718-19, now hanging in the Louvre in Paris) and the original 'Pierrot', both clown characters from the Italian commedia dell'arte. In the seventeenth century, the character of Gilles was a moron, and Pierrot a dunce, and both were a foil for the wittier Harlequin. In Watteau's time the characters were totally dissolute: reprehensible in their morals, obscene in language and gross in social behaviour — certainly not the shy, lonely and gentle creature of the nineteenth-century romantic poets' imaginations. By 1718 the two types had fused, but were not at this stage the figure of the sad clown that we have come to know, epitomised by the lovelorn mime character Bip (Baptiste) in Marcel Came's film Les Enfants du Paradis of the 1930s. Conder, through his interest in Watteau's art, would have known of the seventeenth- century interpretation of Pierrot as socially inept, and it is possible to see an element of self-criticism, or self-parody, here. In the screen's central panel a masked Pierrot is depicted mid-performance, yet his return appears to be relatively unnoticed. The aristocratic audience, to the right and left, ignore Pierrot and continue with their idle chatter. Two other participants in the performance have their backs turned and are focused on an inscription, 'M' DE VIN', appearing overhead. Only the monkey, agent of mischief and unbridled lasciviousness, and a plainly dressed man to the right recognise Pierrot as one of their own. What a social horror, to return to a scene and not be noticed by those whom one would wish to impress! All the other parties are engaged, chatting, watching a variety of liaisons, or entertaining one another in their hermetic environment, which is itself on full display. It would appear that for Pierrot there is no way into their world. Conder has painted the scene in delicate washes of blues and pinks, the pigment soaked into the silk appears as a diaphanous, coloured membrane. Within this delicate world the coarse public is excluded; it is a dreamlike, candle-lit and powdered domain of high society, whose characters appear to breathe a perfumed air from their theatre boxes or loges. Aswith his Heidelberg paintings of endless summers, or the strange costume drama in Figures on a beach c,1890s (QAG), in Le Retour de Pierrot Conder shows a comfortable world of perpetual youth and sensuous desire, a world where disease and poverty are absent; yet it is 82 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965