Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

ANCIENT Greece, contemporary America, and two major shows by local Australians make it a remarkable season for Sydney exhibi- tions. Nu' :,ince the con- junction of Doolin, Martin Sharp, Tuckson and Whiteley a few months ago has there been this festival air. Of course, a one-man show that really gr is off the ground is always a move moving event than any mixed show, so David Aspden's paint- ings at Rudy Komon, and Robert Klippel's retrospective of draw hags at Bonython are more solid nourishment than the ancient Greeks or the contemporary Americans. But the Greeks and the Americans are such rare events in Sydney that every praise is needed for them too. A LOT FOR SAL E Three 'Thousand Years of Classical Art, at David Jones, includes quite a lot for sale from leading Swiss deal- ers and from David Jones, at prices from about $200 to $20,000. A lot has been bor- rowed from univer- sity Museums in Aust- ralia and New Zealand. Almost nothing comes from the Nicholson Museum at the Univer- sity of Sydney, which helped organise the exhibition, so we should take the David Jones show as a guilty re- minder of "When did you last visit the Nicholson"? - the best museum of antiquities in Australia. Today we most admire the more primitive Greek art. And there is a Cycladic idol of modernistic triangular forms, and of astonish- ingly large size for such things, which is the knockout item in the exhibition. The later classical, naturalistic, marble sculpture is not repres- ented by such outstand- ing examples. A FINE BRONZE But there is a small bronze of a nude man which contains all the amazed wonder in the natural beauty of the human figure, at that moment in the history of civilisation when this awareness surfaced for the very first time. God's greatest creation is mankind. Greek vases are more problematic for today's taste. The figure draw- ing which decorates them is supremely ele- gant and mannered. But, it doesn't always relate well to the vessel on which it is painted, and the vessels them- selves are sometirnes downright clumsy in forill; lii a way it is easier to admire the decorated fragments from broken vases. Exhibitions give Sydney a festival air There are also pottery statuettes, and from Rome, as distinct from Greece, one or two gravely realistic, sober, portrait heads. David Aspden revels in color, and in his titles indicates some hint of landscape experience, either at Christo's Little Bay. or at Norfolk Island) Per- haps these experiences are concerned with sea more than land-bound- less expansion into space, pervasive light, the infinite. Certainly they are very romantic paintings, and now seem to have found in their torn, flame shapea,. a perfect neutral vehicle to carry his feelings about vary- ing quantitiecs of color and light, Robert 'Clippers draw- ings, of 1947 to 1970, show him to be much more a surrealist than his recent sculptures do. They are full of sur- prises, startling changes and juxtapositions of direction, of form, of density. with Daniel Thomas They sometimes have the look of "exquisite corpses", which were collaboration drawings, each part done by a different surrealist art- ist. Here is the free play of an incredibly invent- ive imagination, done with an exploring hand which cannot help the roughest sketch look elegant. Since so many of the ideas are for Impossible mile - high sculptures, and an interesting group look like environments, elaborate interior archi- tecture, there is more of Klippel's art in these drawings than in his executed sculptures. Contemporary Ameri- can Art, bought for the Power Department at the University of Syd- ney, and exhibited at Wafters Gallery, means Latin America as well as the U.S.A. Who would have be- lieved Paraguay as an art centre? Leonor Cecotto's is a wild stuffed vinyl piece, where white legs trample black Limbs. The purchases ( to which are added many gifts of prints), divide fairly neatly between pure painting, a n d funky mixed- nied la. For the latter, besides Cecotto, there is a mar- vellous landscape sculp- ture, with lift-off cloud and water sections, by Sam Richardson, a n abstract - erotic plastic relief hy Craig Kaufman and an Ivan Serpa drawing. For pure painting there is Natvar Bhaysar, more lyrical if anything than those recently at Gallery A; Wolfgang Fangor providing op -art pulsations without mechanical aids; Leon Polk Smith; and for hard - core hard - edge : Larry Zox, and the. sculptor Robert Murray. It's harder to get the best in the mainstream when you've only got $18,000 to spend (you need $100,000 a year), and I think the less familiar oddities, like Sam Richardson, are the best things here. Zox makes one re-' member, very favorably, Robertson - Swann 's hard-edge exhibition. Among the prints is an outstanding white alphabet by Jasper Johns. I hope to say more about these exhibitions next week. Tony Coleing (Gallery A) shows six small models for large sculp- tures, each constructed of sections cut from pipes so that they look like heavy-duty coil springs. They are spra y - painted with graded colors, and these give the hot iridescence of metal in a furnace. Much less wayward than usual, they droop or rise in a single plane. David Rose (Bony- thon) shows excellent screenprints which play with perforated screens and the margins of recognisable figuration. $35 each. Erica McGlle hrist (Macquarie), a Mel- bourne painter, who once spent some years in Germany, would not have looked out of place in the last German ex- hibition sent to Austra- lia, with Laussen and Klaphek.. WORRYING PUZZLES She doesn't care for. flat radiance; her sur- faces are worrying puz- zles, their illusions of bending, folding, their solids and voids, all con- stantly switching to their opposites. Elaborately construc- ted architecture gives way to a bottomless pit. There is a dangerously attractive unease. The pictures are in two series "Enigmas" and "Enigmatic entran- ces," and there are painted wall hangings as well. Edward May (Holds - worth), a young painter with quite an individual imagination, speculates in large-scale canvases about the nature of reality. His realities: paint tubes, studio win- dows, beds. The.Royal Art Society of New South Wales. The 91st annual exhibi- tion (Education Depart- ment) was a chance to; see some decent conser-1 vatives who don't often: shoW In public, such as' Alfred Cook and Squsi;it; Morgan. (Is Law Balfour still alive?)/