Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL FOUR years ago I helped launch Ralph Balson. irony is that he was already dead. What happened was that after his death, aged 71, two of his ar- tist friends, Grace Crowley and Robert Klippel, asked me to try to memorialise him somehow -to remind Australia this quiet, retiring man was one of our very best painters, So I looked through all the pictures in two studios, one hi George Street near Circular Quay, one in Mitts - gong. A few pictures had been bought by his fellow pioneers of ab- stract painting, a few by the art musetras, but scarcely any by pri- vate colectors. A for unsold pictures had been painted over. But there was a com- plete range of his life's work-cubist figure sub- jects in the 1930s, geo- thetric abstractions for 15 years (in 1941 he held Australia's first one-man show of en- tirely abstract paint- ings), then painterly abstractions from the late 19508 till his death. It was very moving, and very exciting to see it all, unlooked at for years. Somehow the pic- tures drank up the un- accustomed light, they resisted the gathering dusk on the roof top terrace, They glowed, pleaded to be loved. Museum exhibition So, I es.ablished the basic :acts of his life. wrote a long article for Art and Australia; ar- ranged fora museum exhibition. It was a four -man show of Bat- son and his colleagues, Grace Crowley, Rah Melte and Frank Hin- der, and it was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1966. Balson's family de- cided that Gallery A should handle the dis- posal of the paintings. And now the third and last exhibition of major works from the estate is on there. Cleaned, gold -framed, high- priced, and selling like hot cakes. Why couldn't it have happened in his life time? It's depress- ing, though the paint- ings are not. The first exhibition at Gallery A was his painterly, shim- mering. light-filled work of the late 1950s which I had felt to be his best. The second was the earlier geometric ab- stractions which had been so advanced for their time. The Ameri- can critic Clement Greenberg, who isn't too sympathetic to ac- tion painting, much pre- ferred these, and said what a pity there had ,teen no-one around tq tell Belson what a good kind of picture lie was making. This third exhibition Ls of Balson's last work, of 1960 to 1964. They are different from the previous paintings in their use of semi - automatic technique of pouring paint, not brushing it. IL began in 1960 which ART with Daniel Thomas he spent in Paris and England on his first overseas visit, and he called them "matter paintings." He had been im- pressed in Paris by Burri, Tapies and Du - buffet, and felt they wen, reacting against American action paint - Mg. "The matter or sub- stance used - iron, sacking, wood or cloth in the work of Burl, a thick putty in the work of Tapies, plaster and sand in others is allow- ed to remain as the work itself, "The ironness of iron, the stickiness of sack- ing the cracking and shrinking of putty as it dries, etc, The aesthetic quality is in the sen- sibility of the artist using It, "In my painting the matter, that is the paint, was allowed to now together to produce its own rhythm, its own structure - a natural paint structure. "A rose is a rose be- cause it's a rose. We don't try to make it a daffodil or a cabbage." But as well as his de- termination to make 'natural paint struc- tures" - and they were poured and layered till they sometimes seemed to weigh a ton-he saw his art as expressing in his own time, certain scientific discoveries. "Ours is a world of relativity, a world of ceaseless movement where reality is noth- ingness and nothingness reality. Instead of the determinate, the prin- ciple of indeterminacy." Several years ago I felt that the poured and caked "matter paint- ings" were less success- ful than the spotty, brushed veils that pre- ceded them. I felt that The unpleasant a part of more control- led relationships and a delight in oolor seemed more natural to him. I still feel something of this and perhaps he did, too. After all, Just before he died, he was experimenting with two different recapituhdory manners. his "spotty" manner in beaded ver- ticals, and his "hard- edge" manner, But moat of the pour- ed pictures limit their color drastically, often only to black and whoa, and then he does keep - full control. The few poured pic- tures with more positive color are the only showy ones this modest man ever made, their outer -space theatrically comes from extreme tonal contrasts linked with color less subtle than usual. Black is beautiful. Black is dignified, arrogant. All through Balson's early years he used a certain soft pink that his friends named Batson Pink, But Balson's final black paintings must be the grandest, most mus- eum -worthy, most aris- tocratic pictures ever made in Australia, Belson Black is bet- ter than Batson Pink. DALLIMORE Arthur George Dalli- more Matters Gallery) is a Rip van Winkle. Apparently not young, his first show is 80 fig- ure subjects In a cur- vilinear cubist style, that might have been very modern in the late 1930s, The colors are attractive and pas- tel. The multiplication of outlines seems less a visual investigation of multiple viewpoints than an expressive de- vice to indicate magical auras vibrating out of the figures. Good of their kind, large, and by no means expensive at $120 to $200. NEW GUINEA At Farmers is a col- lecticn of New Guinea art, collected last Year on the Sepik, in the Trobriands and else- where. There are fam- iliar types of house' board and canoe prow, not many masks. A lot of pottery indicates a recent change in col- lecting interest. -_-_WHATS ON Art Gallery of N.S.W.: Permanent collection. Clone: Suzanne Ar- cher. Cascade: Mixed. Farmers: New Guin- ea art. David Jones: Orien- tal ceramics (Tuesday). Macquarie: James Meldrum (Wednesday). Central Street: Dic'e %Atkins, Tony McGil- lick (Wednesday). Potters: Shigeo Shiga. Waters: A. G. Danl. more. Stern: Mixed. Gallery A: Ralph Belson. licien McEwen: Gun- nar Isaacson. Bonython: Stockdale, Lendon, Louis James, Fred Olsen. Kamen: Julian Quir- ante. Villiers: John Per- ceval. Howell: Original prints. Australian Sculpture Gallery, Canberra: New Zealand Printmakers. Newcastle City Art Gallery: Deelderlus Orban. Von Sertoueb, New- rastle: Hermia Boyd (Friday). "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W.