Queensland Art Gallery Presscuttings Book 8 : Pressclippings, 1977-1981

4 · Time Off June 6·19, 19l ,1111111111111111111111111,¥isual Arts,111111111,111111•111•111•111111111111111111111111111• EAU IN AUSTRALIA y, MIM Bldg till June 22. and I It'• the eme motif on at lrollo would 11ony• k, all Then Item, Iden– You • con• eady i! the copy hlch mber– t you who Info eel to works lurk, ii per e. by hind In lls Ned oukl ttlng piece of merchandising are to be not only financial, but not fussy either. Art by the sq. metre, or Money for gawd's sake. And do you really wanl to litter your coffee table with statements like: 'There Is (sic) virtually no pure Art Nouveau buildings In Australia'? Tough luck. becuase due lo the devious commercialism of The Organization, If you wanna play, you pay. Having got all that off my chest, I am now calm enough to make yet another of the uni– que special offers which re• main exclusive to this column. Yes readers and artlovers, by simply cutting around the dot· ted line surrounding this deathless prose, you get your very own absolutely free alter· native guide to the Arl Nouueau In Auslrallo ex– hlblton. Not merely a catalogue, an entire crttlquel And as this, like all my offers, Is a strictly limited edlHon (we're talking Art, not money) I strongly advise you to place yourcopy under the glass on top of the coffee table.... geddll 11? Gumnut Nouveau And now, a few words about the works In question. While dealing speclflcaly with the Australian version of Art Nouveau, which Barry Hum• phrles forever dubbed Gumnut Nouveau, the exhlblHon raises some Interesting problems for students of 'Australian' art about where the local variant of a particular style comes from, how It differs from the mainstream (If there Is one), and what makes II different. ~Thll Is a contentious point, as one school of thought argues that any purely national focus obscures the wider global and historical characteristics of a movement or development. But to give Humphries' wlt– llcllm Its serious due, anyone looking at the work on show would have to concede that It Is not only self-consciously Australian, It makes a positive fetish of It. Gumnut Is spot•on. Never will you see so many furling eucalypt leaves, coiling ~!Y.m~!l unmlstnkably an• sak.e launched lut December to aulst the 1&11er, trustees maintain, Im• prove and develop tl\1 1tate collection. The collection Will be heuled In the new •19.1 mlWon art gallery, du for completion tn th~ middle nf 1981. It la po of the $72 mllllon cuJtur• al centre belnp: built OP– poslte North Quay. The foundation hu llt a tarset of '3 million for runda to help the pllery ~ at,nlflcant woru. T he president, l!ltr Oeorp P11her, aid the preparatory work for ui, appeal wu complete and brochure& and appeal_ letters, dl.N!Cted to bull· neue, throu1hout state, wo •Id t,,, • nat we tlpodean nymphs and satyrs. Those of us. and that's everyone I know. who got swept up In the 1960s Art Nouveau revival and plastered our walls wllh Mucha posters and Klimt cutouts; would find themselves hardput to recog– nize the generic characteristics of the style which united these artists beneath the positive welter of nationalistic signposts that distinguish the Australian work. This Is parllcularly Intriguing In view of the fact that 'Art Nouveau' as a single unified movement never existed - the term Itself Is of fairly recent origin. a convenient retrospec– tive umbrella label which actu– ally refers to several different developments In several dif– ferent parts of the world. Thus exponents of 'the' style them– selves - ranging as historically and geographically far afield as WIiiiam Morris In early Vic– torian England, Serusler and Toulouse•Lautrec In turn-of– the-century France, and Henry Van de Velde In Post•Great– War Holland, would not recognize themselves as belonging to the single school Implied by the term Art Nouveau. The national emergence of what we, In retrospect, have defined as an International style, was known variously as Jugendsttl In Germany, Modemlsmo In Spain, Stile Liberti In Italy and In France as either Moderne, Metro, Noullle or Yachtingl What enables us, wllh the benefit of hindsight, to identify as the unifying themes and charactertsttcs which Iden– tify a broad movement Is the common reaction against pre– vailing values and concepts about 'Art', and the common alternative values and concepts which the dissenting artists proposed. art for everyday What, fundamentally , was the lnlttal reaction against? Now when talking about ar– tists, II Is rather silly and a little unrealistic to try to separate the Idea from Its visual embodi– ment - after all that's what art Is about - the 0owertng of '{ Not Entirely Abandoned /1899) by D.H. Souter. 'theory In paint, clay, wood or any other medium. But like all good marriages this union does not completely obscure the character of ellher partner and we can still observe quite clear– ly that the 'Idea' behind Art Nouveau was for an art no longer 'pure' or sacrosanct and beyond the reach of mere mor– tals, but beautiful because func– tional - art for everyday, I.e. applied art. This philosophy Is what ultlmately made Art Nouveau, both here and elswehre so ubi– quitous that It became almost Invisible as an 'art form' and changed Instead Into the reflec– tion of a whole era. Everything from painting lo book-binding, from embroidery to architec– ture came to reflect the same sinuous line, celebration of organic and especlally floral form, so that a teapot became as much a focus for artistic at– tention to detail as a cathedral. All of which would have glad– dened the heart of the In– novative William Morrts who had some pretty Liberal Ideas about social and artistic equal!• ty, and who combined theory and practice by Immortalizing wallpaper , among other things. This deliberate populariza– tion of the style In reaction against the high-priced enclave of 'Salon Art', particularly In Its lithographic form. of course helps to explain lls very wide revival a century or so later, In !he 1960s rage for the poster. Toorop , Mucha , van de Velde, Toulouse-Lautrec, the Bergerstaff Brothers, de Feure had all designed specifically for poster medium; they had all, to varying extents. celebrated the same escapist, idealized themes - Woman, Nature , Myth - with a one-dimensional obsession for line, colour and surface detail that made them newly-relevant In the Psyche• delic Era. Not only the posters, but the similarly exotic (both Japanese and Celtic linear traditions made a vllal contribution to Art Nouveau's forms) ceramics, fabrtc, carving and architecture of the style offered both a sym– bolic expression of and visual focus for the Intense Inner vi– sions of the Drug Culture. It's Interesting to remember that back In Its formative years In the mid-nineteenth century the Style had enjoyed a passing but formative relationship with drugs and the Occult - this was In the era of Laudanum, the Salon de la Rose-Croix and the enigmatic Madame Blavatsky....perhaps a case of plus ea change? patriotism Looking now at the work which was being produced at roughly the same time In Australia, although we must allow for the lags of time and geography which meant that everything started a little later here and went on a little longer than at source, It Is Interesting ART NOUVEAU IN AUSTRALIA - to speculate on how and why the developments differed so much. Was II, perhaps, some• thing to do with the freshness of a new Federal self-Image, pride at having shed the old colonlal taint and acquired the status of Nationhood? Perhaps patriotism was fired as well by the prospect of another, even greater war? Whatever the answer, there Is no doubt that the reiteration of the 0ora-and•fauna 'Austra• Ilana' theme was a refinement quite unique to these shores. Gumnut Is not too strong a description. The refinement goes further, however. Whereas the Brlttsh and European forms of Art Nouveau reflect, on the whole, an urban, cosmopolitan and sophisticated society, at Its up– per levels concerned with chlvalrlc nostalgia and at Its lower level wllh the life of the clubs and the cabaret , Australian Art Nouveau seems almost naively rustic. It Is slm• pie, by adopting social development as the delermln· Ing factor, to point out that even up to the Second World War Australia remained fairly devoid of the continental al• tributes, and was busily dlvesllng herself of the old con• tlnental mythology that fed the appetite and Imagination of Art Nouveau elsewhere. Such a solutiorr Is perhaps too simple. After all, we got SOME of the myths, but the selection Itself Is significant and Interesting. Conder, Streeton, Moffitt, Long, Lindsay, all the Australian exponents of the Art Nouveau graphic style chose the rustic chapters of mythology. Their nymphs and satyrs, their ubiquitous Pans are forever gambollng across rural landscapes, eternal babes In the wood, or rather Bush. Because fundamentally, II Is the Australian BUlh which we• are being asked to notice, not the figures In the landscape but the landscape ltseH. It Is Ibis landscape, In all Its delightful minutia, which Is the real sub– ject of the Art Nouueau In Australia exhibition, Just as It was the real subject of the ai• tlsts whose work you will selr there.