Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

r Bonnard's wife as a love -goddess NOT a bad week for art in Sydney, and that's putting it midly. One great master of ail ,time, Bonnard. One major contemporary European artist, Vasarely. One of the two best Australian impressionists. Phillips Fox (the beet. is Rupert Bunny). One young Australian painter, John Peart, who now looks like an artist who will be noticed on an international level. Plus the news that David Aspden teas Jost won a gold medal at the Sao Paulo !Menai, an international exhibition of contemporary art held in Plus the lively groundswell pro- vided by two odd Melbourne pain- ters of abstract erotica: James Mel - drum at the Macquarie shows sleekly illusionistic bits of machin- ery intertwined In a Kama Sutra of sado-masochism; John Howley at Bonython shows his abstract -ex- pressionist "Phallic Totem Witness Series," which seems to be about warfare as pornography. Plus more groundswell, t h e healthy avant-gardism of the Con- temporary Art Society Gallery's exhibition of artists' photographs. Alan Oldfleld's pop landscape dis- coveries are just as good as his paintings Tony McGillick finds ob- Jeots with the same forms as his abstractions. Robert Williams' diffuse happen- ings gain by being framed in a photograph's limits. Ian Millis shows us a bit of his own life, plain: Terry English does the same, with more artiness. But Bonnard is best. 6 The exhibition of 40 paintings is at the Australian Museum, which during the Art Gallery of New South Wales' rebuilding, has step- ped outside its usual scientific role to provide exhibition space, and generously to share the exhibit ion's costs with the Art Gallery. The Auatrallan Museum is closed on Monday mornings. R has the usual weekend hours, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. 9 vsmn oll- on week -nights it will stay open till 7, specially for the Bonnard exhibition. There is an adinission charge of * cents. Great In May, when Bonnard's paint- ings were at the National Gallery in Melbourne I wrote about his art..I It is great because it finds great- est beauty in the most ordinary everyday experiences-domestic liv- ing, food, fresh air, bathroom, fam- ily and pets, and because nothing in Bonnard's art ever falls into habit, or convention, or formula. The only way to keep one's re- sponses fresh, to remain fully and intensely aware of everything is to grope-to remain uncertain, to try Out the unfamiliar, to be unafraid of awkwardness. Thus Bonnard's wife is one of the great heroines of all the world's art. She grew thick around the waist. She had strange silences. spent an inordinate amount of titne in the bathroom, grooming herself obsessively, as a cat does. And yet Bonnard accepts her totally, and loves her, and praises her, In painting after painting. One in this exhibition called "The Red Slippers" shows her standing by the bathtub, facing the spectator, her arms in a casual approximation of the pose used since antiquity for Greek, Roman and Renaissance statues of Venus, one hand covering (or pointing to the breasts, the other to the crutch. Venus is of course the Goddess of Love. And Bonnard's thickening wife Is a love -goddess, too, as far as he is concerned. sort (by daniel themes) Red is the color of love, so per- haps that is why she wears red slippers. More naturalistic, and full of accurate observation, is the general color of the painting; it is the pals blue iridescent pearliness of bathroom steam, and tiles and reflected light. Gift I discuss this painting at length because it is one of the few in the exhibition which are for sale, and of those few it is the one which the Trustees of the Art Gallery have agreed they would like to own. If it were given to the Art Gal- lery the price would be much less than for a private buyer; it would be fully tax-deductible; and it would be payable over three years. It would be the only major work by a great artist to be owned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For this, it's not expensive: About '17 OCT 1971 ;50,000 a year for three years. )inwrs FOX, at the Clune Gal- leries, painted some very nice pictures in Australia from the 1890s to World War I, in a fully Impress- ionist style that shows he fully understood what Monet was up to. This is more than can be said for Roberts, Conder or Streeton. But he doesn't really fill the pic- tures with a toweringly large vision, either of fantasy or reality, as his fellow Australian, Rupert Bunny, sometimes did, or the great French- men, like Monet or Bonnard. VASARELY, at the Bonython / Gallery, a senior contemporary, working in Paris, is thought of as the master of "Op Art." His style has developed from the geometric color -exercises of the Bauhaus in the '20s. Can one say that Op Art has anything more than decorative value? Yes, perhaps. I think the extreme physical exer- cise Gp Art paintings give to your eye muscles somehow makes these paintings into images of physical well being and radiant health. To look at a Vasarely is as re- freshing as a dip in the surf. TOHN PEART, at Watters Gal- lery, is briefly revisiting Sydney from England where he now lives. His paintings were always beauti- ful, though in a careful, quiet, aes- thetic way. Now they are large in size, bolder in color, more complex and rich in their illusion of space. He is now making what attempts to be major art, He is still in his 20s, his aohlevement is already considerable. It is an extreme pleasure to watch art flowering so brilliantly. "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W.