Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Lrde just as trivial School. It is to become a defining a ter all Gothic, re only dirty al. cs not include lately admired t: Art Gallery c'd exhibited; artist" in the re his famous s much more hough he did Contemporary tions. e Contempor- d his work that people d to find any Hall was the as they are cley. Besides in techniques of drawing glazed and as he. But lose personal - them all in ). (except for Friend's is satirical - ale interprets national life; artificial life ate bohemia. so much a alien themes his style is terms with spent in a in 1953, ild lightness harming and aden-footed. was typical Australian from them, spontaneity. tylists to the Ilan genera - history and oussin and ' recognised. ,ature until at than the lonist sub like their, exposure 4 their own emotions like their succes- ors. At their worst when they neglect to style things up, when they let it go flabby, the spectator is left to do all the work, that is to inject all his own pleasant memories or daydreams into the passive emblem of something vaguely agreeable, say the head of a pretty girl or boy. They have been called neo- romantics because their subject matter is usually removed from everyday reality and usually pleasant but their self con- trol and their concern for a well - structured painting are really neo- classical. They could be called the School of Paris in Sydney. For it was the slightly reactionary neo - classical aspects of modern French painting that they seem to have liked best - Derain, Kisling and so on, not surrealism or geometric abstraction which were the big things when they were young in the 1930s. (There was geometric abstraction in Sydney in their day, by Grace Crowley and Ralph Belson, but it was almost completely neglected. There was sur- realism, too, notably by James Gleeson, but they drew little from this movement which in various ways has nourished Drysdale and Nolan and many other Melbourne painters.) Naturally, the Australian painters whom they respected were the post- impressionists, W a k e I i n, Cossington Smith, late -period Bunny, Ian Fair- weather; and George Bell, the Mel- bourne teacher under whom several had studied. Where did they exhibit? They stayed with the Contemporary Art Society for a while, but most of them exhibited with the middle-of-the-road Society of Artists. Then they formed The Sydney Group, a small elite which held an annual exhibi- tion for ten years from 1945. A second generation appeared there in the early 'fifties with Kmit and Eric Smith; God- frey Miller made his debut there; the young John Olsen exhibited there to- wards the end. For their one-man shows there were only the Macquarie Galleries, and, later, David Jones. There were no other dealers except the conservative Grosvenor Galleries. Taste -makers WHEN did success come? Quite soon, perhaps 1943, but it seems to have been the admiration of outsiders which put them on the map. Neil McEacharn, who was immensely rich, and his wife. who was extrernely beautiful, were oblig- ed to leave Italy and chose to pass the war in Sydney. They happened to like these artists, and to buy their paintings. Fashionable society, and statesmanlike (or fence - sitting?) taste - makers like Sydney Ure Smith, followed their lead. Another visitor with the immense wealth necessary for influencing people was the American Edgar Kaufmann, then a serviceman on leave in Sydney. And the test of a successful opening was whether "The Hats" had come. Hats, it seems, were large and wonder- ful then, and the best of all were Mrs McEacharn's, Mrs McClure Smith's, Mrs Ivan Lewis's and Mrs Gregory Blaxland's. There were other tastemakers besides the rich foreigners, "The Hats", the Macquarie Galleries, and Sydney Ure Smith (who was the publisher of those Australian Present Day Art picture books, and was also president of the Society of Artists). Mrs Alleyne Zander who had brought modern exhibitions to Australia in the 'thirties could always put in a good word, and an effective one, for a young artist. And there was Paul Haefliger. A painter himself, and the husband of Jean Bellette, he was the moving spirit behind Peter Bellew, editor of the magazine "Art in Australia" in its two final years. Then from 1942 he was art critic of the "Sydney Morning Herald" for 15 years. Although he would scourge and condemn fiercely enough, his criticism was always made within the Charm School's own set of values: cosmopolitan painting was better than regional Aus- traliana; French art was better than German (American didn't yet exist on the international level); surrealism was too literary; abstraction was an arid, dead end with no future (I); the Euro- pean old masters were the proper tradition to follow, not the degraded im- pressionism more usual in Australia. He was in a sense their own critic. And since he was much the best critic in Sydney at that time he had much in- fluence. A quieter tastemaker was Warwick Fairfax, partly by virtue of having ap- pointed Haefliger to his newspaper, partly because of a genuine fondness for the work of Francis Lymburner, and partly because he was one of the links between painting and theatre. There seemed to be ballet -dancers eveywhere in those days. They were in Lymburner's paintings, Loudon Sainthill was always drawing costumes for them, they appear with Society and the arts in "Alec Murray's Album", a book of portrait photographs which preserves with embarrassing accuracy some of the more pretentious aspects of the period - girls posing in matador pants on broken obelisks, bare -bosomed men draped with fish -nets and skulls, elegant portraits of the backs of people's heads. The Album fixes their Merioola period. After the war many of them lived together in thi- down -at -heels mansion (now demolished) at Edgecliff. It had its resident ballerina too. In 1947 there was a Merioola Group exhibition, shott at David Jones and at Myers in Mel- bourne with Friend, Sainthill, Edgar Ritchard (who was another theatre !Le - signer), Peter Kaiser who has gone abstract and other birds of passage now settled in Europe, and Justin 013{isn who came on the scene after the war. (Others lived in Kings Cross where Elaine Haxton's parties are well -remem- bered; earlier some had lived near Circular Quay in a building called Bug- gery Barn.) Theatre and painting TODAY Cedric Flower and Elaine Haxton still do theatre work; Lymburner still has a genuine feeling for backstage life in his paintings. But if you decide to become interested in the arts today it's not like the 'forties when theatre and painting seemed to go hand in hand, now you must keep them separate. Of course, there is a distinction between the witty entertainers and the more solemn ones like Strachan and Bellette whose work belongs most strictly to my definition of School of Paris neo- classicism. It's among the entertainers that you get the Australiana - - to deprive us of these pleasures they feel would be too puritan. There was Donald Friend's Ned Kelly ballet design in 1941, his mock -history today. Nearly all Cedric Flower's work is private family legends from Tilba Tilba on the south coast of New South Wales. "A Bit of an Acci- dent" is about his Edwardian aunts, Molly and Poppy Flower. One wonders whether this kind of light-hearted approach to Australian history had anything to do with Nolan's Kelly. There was a lot of it around in Sydney and slightly earlier. And among the less Parisian are two who do give away something of them- selves. Lymburner is a genuine romantic - he really feels those tender love scenes, he's not calculating a guaranteed sentimental response. And Donald Friend, recently called King of the Charm School, reveals an equally genuine sensuality in his neo - Old Masterly drawings of girls and boys. The Charm School doesn't really break much new ground. Although it was the avatar garde of its day the rear guard (gumtree art) was incredibly re- actionary, and the Charm School is the guardian of traditional painting values and skills. As such it has a higher level of professional craftsmanship than most Australian art, and for this reason one can predict a modest future, but cer- tainly a lasting one, for their best paint- ings. El