Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

dr , tr" 1.JUD bpya.11149RAPH, OCTOBER 27, 19611 53 GOOD BYE ... Marcel Duchamp DICK WATKINS' exhibition at Central Street is 41j peculiar, but it's not difficult to see what's going on. This Is the month when IDada'sand 1 moretiisv eseani . thogurgainicifiraginsdiet1 painteroand corr I rate Marcel Duchlat-: blessed be his memory - he has now come clean about his latent Dadaism. There were always the literary-witty titles, like a red square titled "Mos- cow," but since each ex- hibition was made u's from a group of Wallin' works we were inclined to forget that each sectop of works (each pretty good) was very different from the i.revlous group. Nov he rubs It In by making an exhibition where nearly every picture la different-realistic fauve landscapes, a pop art comic duck, a cursive Matisse, a Jasper Johns "Window Box," a heap of shredded paper grass, a spotted "Seurat's Shower Curtain," a cubist wood re- lief. Or as a change from wild variation in style, he makes the two charming little drawing- room sized Paris landscapes absolutely identical (except for a paste -on tourist view). Or keeping the same style and almost the same subject he enlarges another char- ming fauve French land- scape to 8ft. by 10ft., frus- tratingly beyond the usual tasteful drawing -room size for this sort of picture. What they all have in common may be a ready- made source In existing printed such as art books, comic stripe, films ("Blow-ups" is green- painted grass grossly en- larged under a grainy screen of dots and must come from Antonioni). Often little remains but the magnified dots from the printed page. He paints beautifully, but wants to paint import- ant subjects and doesn't know what subjects are important. When he wrote about Jasper Johns he was surely writing about him- self: "He's not sure what he's up to and admits it, and makes it the subject of his painting. He paints the flag as though It has importance, but yet with sceptical humor.The John Donne of contemporary painting; indulgent and constrained, breathing Joy and disgust." Ironically. a realistic landscape by Watkins is intellectually stimulating, while today the best geo- metric abstracts appeal more to the senses than the intellect. HINDER It was not always so with geometric abstraction, which was very high- minded in its old post - cubist phase, for example in Frank Hinder's art, formed in the 1930s. I A flat plane and a clear edge does not add up to "hard-edge" painting if It Is used In a relational, "compositional" way, small parts relating to larger. Though this is what many older painters re- fer to when they say "hard-edge" is nothing new, that they did it themselves when they were young, i.e. In the 1930s. RI I Even so, the new style "which 1% non relational, symmetrical, unitary, rep- etitious, does have enough in common With the port - cubism of Hinder, Batson etc. to make them mud more visible to present-dny taste than to the taste of ten years ago They are now beginning to be ad - ART with Daniel Thomas mired again by others be- side art historians, but it is still better to consider them "with their own gen- eration. (What about Weaver Hawkins?) A linninal kinetic by Frank Hinder is an ex- treme extension of cubist research Into space and structure. It has Intl,. to do with the terrors or the glamors or a technological age, Ilinder's very interesting show included paintings as well as kinetics. It is at Barry Stern's, the first ex- hibition there for a long time and for one week only. FLOWERS Stephen Earle's abstract painting (Walters Gallery) Is, like Michael Johnson's, another place where all those flowers have gone that used to be in repre- sentational, impressionist painting, But It's not all love -of -nature's sweetness and light. It's delicately ambiguous. The fresh dappled fields of color are imprisoned, trampled, sav- aged by hard, striped bord- ers and margins. FIELD Earle's present work qualifies him more for "The Feld" than Watkins', yet Watkins is in this sur- vey of a recent tendency in Australian art and Earle is not. Even so it's a big enough exhibition, and in- deed an exciting one. I've spent a very happy week with it already, test- ing relationships between the Var10118 works of art and the architectural WHAT'S ON Art Gallery of New South Wales: The Field (Wednesday); European master drawings. Newcastle City Art Gallery: NBN3 art prize, s David Jones: Charles Blackman, Alice in Wonderland, Farmers: Mixed show 7, for new gallery (closes a Wednesday). Macquarie: Keith Looby (Wednesday). Central Street: Dick Watkins. Walters: Stephen Earle. Stern: Mixed show. Gallery A: Michael Johnson. th Bonyon: Carl Plate, Geoffrey Dance. Barry Brickell (close Wednes- day). Komon: Leonard French (Wednesday). Galleries Pr limit If: West Irian art. Frances Jones: Yvonne Fro: cart. Artaznion: John Rowell. Von Bertouch: New- castle: Donald Friend. Helen McEwen Charles Mich (Wednesday). ow~~... spaces they are to inhabit user the next month. Although the Art Gallery of New South Wale has a dingy interior, eh the narrow doors, crooke . pas- sages and steep stairs are a danger to large works and to the men who must move them, yet It seems that the subdivision of Its spaces might give each art- ist better value than In the Melbourne showing. If one Imagines so It's because this most pleasant kind of museum work, directly in contact with works of art Is all too rare. What occupies most of one's time is answering public inquiries, not only from four million citizens of New South Wales, but curiously from Queensland and Tasmania whose State satisfy this need. fly do not ENCYCLOPEDIA, For years we've been waiting for Alan McCul- loch's "Encyclopedia of Australian Art." Now that it's in the bookshops urge you to buy it at once (and BenezIt's Dictionary if you want foreign artists covered). If it releases an art museum from its bur- den of Inquiries I'm o pse i upnrree- - spavedly. Pric e {17t0. In fact, it gives Informa- tion about a great many hitherto unrecorded, or in- adequately recorded artists. It also lists art museums, dealers' galleries, art prizes, art societies, art maga- zines, curators and critics, and some museum exhibi- tions. Movements like Im- pressionism, cubism, sur- realism, abstract-expres- sionism are not listed, nor are categories like port- raiture or landscape, nor media like etching, or sculpture; so perhaps it might have been better named a dictionary than an Encyclopedia. Its great strength Is, naturally, the coverage of Melbourne, where Mr. McCulloch lives, Brancusi's model, Margit Pogany, finds a place. A difficulty is the method of listing names. Full, legal names are pre- ferred to working names. There's no way of know- ing that Dawn Francis Westbrook normally exhi- bits as Dawn Sime. Rich- ard J. Watkins and Fran- cis Henry Crltchley Hin- der are unfamaliar forms. Stephen Earle la absent, though everybody in a museum catalogue is claimed and Earle appears in the Art Gallery of New South Wales' 1964 acqui- sitions. One cannot expect such books to be up to date, and from 1969 it tap- ers off. The Watters Gal- lery founded that year Is In (though misdated to 1968); Central Street Gal- lery, founded 1966, is not. Accuracy is only an Ideal, and on many pages there will be a mis-spelt name (Beatrice instead of Bernice Edwell, Duterreau instead of Duterrau) or a faulty date, which doesn't much matter. Unhappily errors about ownership are going to cause some wor- ries. Fur example, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is wrongly said to own work by David Gil- lison and Dermont Hellier, to own a Nolan "Escaped Convict" illustrated p.401; while its Leonard French, p.449, is given to Mel- bourne. Allthe same, as far as will be complete without I'm conceined no home it.