Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

SI "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W There's never been such a rea- son for taking stock of Austra- lian art. g y The Hunr Horse last week, Farmer's com- ing up next week. This I week there was the W. ,D, dc H. G. Wills coin- , petitiun at David Jones' and the enornious ex- ' 'Attrition of work by younger artists. sent by the Common wealth Government to Japan early this year, arrived briefly at the Art Gal- lery of N.B.W. tlast day to its )owners. , before dispersal None of the exhIbi- dons define the extreme , avant-garde. The show ) at.Latchford's a couple of months ago did that. But they all include R. and the Japanese show must be the first offic- ial exhibition sent abroad which really looks onm iern I odn. 1923 II Those to Lond ti 1953, to Canada in 10541, did not play safe by balancing the nine- teenth century against the twentieth century, like the 1903 show in London. The Japanese ex- hibition was chosen for the Commonwealth by Hal Missingham, and it's limited to Australian artists under 40, or rather to those who were 40 or under when it was first planned two years ago (It normally takes two years to do a major international exhibi- tion). Molvig and Jo- mantas would be the oldest, Stephen Earle the youngest of the 40 artists included. The majority are painters, mostly with three works each; the sculptors have - Ilaldessin, Devlin, Jomantas, Len - ton Parr, Robert Parr, Redpath and Walker; printmakers and water- colorists have two - Thicken, Grieve, Daryl Hill, Balkauskas, Seidel and Senbergs. w PAINTING I PRETTY The surprising general impression is that Aus- tralian painting is very pretty just now. Hardly any starkness or mor- bidity here: Blackman's gicfysls saeengi Dickerson's good more wistfully appeal- ing as time goes by. (Dickerson's early Street Corner is a fine and unfamiliar work); Pugh might paint car-, misses, but they're done with such delicate tint- ing you'd hardly know. Molvig's women do show a welcome voraci- ousness, and Michael Taylor's big black nudes are fiercely turbulent. There la unease in Con- nor and (less) in Sib- ley' some morbidity in Raft. 'There is some hardness in Benbergs and Johnson; weight In Gleghorn and French. But mostly It's buoy- ant, or serene, or pretty, or colorful. Colorful is new in Australian painting. Pour or five years ago werything was black. Now Dawson and (S - ten and Lanceley show lip as genuine colorists to add to Molvig and Coburn 1whose one and only *black picture, from last year's Blake, looks very good here), While Daws and White -I ley, who aren't strictly( colorists, are at least i using pretty colors, and the same applies to French, plus his gold leaf, he time for a stocktakinu A certain fussiness,' an Inability to compress' the image into a clear' simple statement has' been a constant In Aus-. tralian art-perhaps it's. In the nature of things, for any provincial art. Oitl and macahkiev astrength f and unity by elabora- tion. (His splendid Entrance to the Siren City of the Rat Race not previously exhibited, but well-known in re- production. is here). Only WhIteley's Woman in R a t h, Salkauskas' slltscreens, and a conte drawing by Fred Williams really have a look of complete inevitability. You feel these works were really intended to look as they do; they are not one of several possible solu- hone. At any rate they're my favorites In the exhibition. Unfamiliar things to be noted: paintings by Stephen Earle and Brian McKay, pop art etchings by Barbara Hanra)an, WILLS PRIZE The Wills prize exhi- bition was judged, and its artists Invited, by a committee of which I was a member. We were asked to make as inter- esting an exhibition as possible from a cross section of Australian painters, limited to only 25 In number. So it's as extreme a cross section as we could make it. There are old- er painters who normal- ly aren't thought of like Prater and Cossington Smith, the latteti Interior in Yellow look- ing stronger than most. There is Charm School, likewise seldom seen in such shows; Strachan, and Donald Friend, who has made a rich and complex painting from multiple -view figure In motion of the kind we've only known in drawings. There are ex- patriates: Jean Bellette, Blackman. and Daws whose usual mixture of illustration and emblem for once utterly falls, simply because it's re- versed: the horseman Is on top, the emblems (quite a dictionary of them, small, in rows) are not suspended in the sky above, but made into a base below, There are well-known Melbourne artist s, Kemp, Dawson, Wil- liams, some lesser - known young artists, Michael Taylor and Dick Watkins; and two vir- tually unknown ones. What's on in art Art Gallery7 of N,S.W.: Special exhibitions Ian Fairweather re tive (LAST 7`01V - NIGHT): Young Aus- tralian Artists shown in Japan (LAST DAY). David Jones': W. F. As H. 0. Wills prize e chi - bitten. Hungry Horse: E ght Painters. Stern: Robert Owen, paintings; A d e !aide jewellers. Darlinghurst: George Lawrence, paintings. aune: The Boys of Granville High School. Macquarie: Desmond Digby, paintings, Aladdins: Polynesian native painter, Teuane Tibbo. Workshop Arts Cen- tre, Willoughby: Adult students. Von Sertouch, New- castle: Norma Allen, paintings. Canberra Gallery A: Septa 'Taft's Oceanic Sculpture. OPENING TUESDAY Little Gallery: Edith Birrell. paintinp. Domnion: Anniver- sary Mixed Show, OPENING Fanner's: Survey No. 1 newWEDN Sydney ESD painAY ting. Art Gallery of N.S.W4 Chinese Ceramic% through 4000 years,. Official opening Dr. Leonard Cox, 5.30 p.m. Wafters: Sheila Mc- Donald, paintings. Komon: Yugoslav prints. OPENING THURSDAY GRedaingon, paintings. c itrrir=terlr'4111"ng-, lish-trained, now in, Sydney, models the most ; delicious girls in a,' rather weird technique, of thin concentric tric- kles of enamel paint; Paul Panes, very young, with an underground reputation in Melbourne has a properly greedy eclecticism, Although I say It my- self, I think it's an ex- tremely good exhibition, The prize went to Ian Fairweather for a large major work Turtle and Temple Gong, with rectangular forms chim- ing and echoing through a golden architr cture. Most other pictures are much ac you'd expect. Some promising devel- opments are a tighter , and more precisely , articulated Dawson; a , white Michael Taylor with some angularity; a : Reddington with com- pletely new curvilinear,' form.