Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"T ELEGRAP 1.4" Sydney, N.S.W. 1 c MIA7 14C? 94 SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, MAY 12, 1963 The Week in Art by Daniel Thomas THIS week was Olsen's week. He won a large art prize, in Melbourne on Wednesday; and a book about him by Virginia Spate reached the bookshops a few days earlier. By further coinci- dence a television programme fl Imed months ago was shown In Melbourne the very night his prize was announced. In it he followed Jeffrey Smart and Albert Tucker with comments on their paintings owned by the Na- tional Gallery of Vic- toria. Olsen spoke of his glut- tony for experience, and of his indentification with his specifically Australian environment. - All this has been obvi- ous enough in his recent paintings. What the book also shows in one or two examples is the excellence of his student work in an art school, Cezanne style. This excellence is not sur- prising, for nearly all good painters were good even in their student years; late developers are very rare and the book reminds us of his journey into apace -his completely abstract paintings done when he end Passmore and William Rose plus Eric Smith and the sculptor Robert Klip- pel formed a group and held an exhibition called "Direction I." Those paintings were more specifically concerned than his recent ones with the pure elements of pic- ture -making, with a beautiful arrangement, colors, shapes and spatial depths. They were more obviously well -made pic- tures, more obviously beautiful than his new tumbling cornucopias of men, women and beasts, of warmly vulgar urban flotsam, of lyrically tender rural jetsam, of his mem- ories and his expectations. But even "Dry Salvages," . the mast abstract seeming of the early pictures illus- trated in the book. Is in fact based on visual and physical experience, not on ,an abstract idea: it and 'others, it appears, were closely related to his ex- perience of Sydney's in- dustrial waterfront, the cranes, the masts, the morning light, the color of a great seaport. The title anyway comes from a poem by T. S. Eliot on the theme "The river is within us, the sea is all about us'; and it reminds us that Olsen's art, like most art since the inven- tion of photography, is free of the demands of in- formation. It does not need to be a guide book to, say, a landscape; it is a visual poem about it. In 1055, a year before the "Direction I" abstracts, Olsen seems first to have 4.111111 llllllllll 1111111/11111011111111 lllll I llllll WHAT'S ON TODAY: Art Gallery of N.S.W.: special exhibition Ac- quisitions for 7.1101. Final day. NEXT WEEK: Macquarie: Kenneth Hood. Clune: Back room show. Stern: Gareth Jones - Roberts, Komon: Contempor- ary British Printmakers. OPENING TUESDAY: Hungry Horse: Wil- liam Rose, OPENING WEDNES- DAY: Farmers: Will lam = SYDNEY PAINTER John Olsen with his winning entry, "The Tree of Life," in the George's Invitation Art Prize. discovered a personal form of expression, whose characteristics later re- turned to dominate his art. In that year "The Bicycle Boys Rejoice" clearly shows his special gift for line, for vital spon- taneous movement across a surface. And it already shows a gay inventiveness In visual metaphor where the figures and their machines fuse together into strange little centaurs on wheels. The book illustrates one or two experimental paint- ings from Olsen's three years 1r, Europe, and then the iaajority of them are trom 1880 to 1962, when the book was completed, Various artistic sources for Olsen's style are men- tioned in Virginia Spate's introduction (dense and meaty, but very clear), among them Klee, "taking a line for a walk," and Dubuffet. A meeting with Alan Davie in England is recorded, but the artist apparently forgot to tell the author about his con- tacts with the Cobra group (Appel, Jorn, Corneille, etc.). A journey from Parts to Spain on the back of Cornefile's motor -scooter Is recorded elsewhere by Robert Hughes. The Cobra group style would surely have encour- aged his return to the early direction indicated by the Bicycle Boys, As we now know well his Present elm is to dis- cover forms (not appear- ances) that are peculiar to Australian life and land- scape. Margaret Preston was one of the few paint- ers consciously to attempt this in a previous genera- tion. But even in the colonial period John Glover's acute observation had seen the characteristic, rubb I s h - like, open scatter that awn -trees make over tier- . lllll lllll lllllllllllllll toils landscapes, "Mills Plains." illustrated in the Bulletin some weeks ago, is an example. Olsen's rows of untidy dots In such pictures as "Digger Landscape" are based on precisely the same observation. His art then Is in the mainstream of Australian painting, for it has a strong interest in the landscape and general en- vironment of a country not yet rendered invisible behind centuries of paint- ers' interpretations. And in its difficult, but not impossible, search for forms rather than appear- ances (or stories), there is the possibility of contri- buting to an Australian style. The book costs 42, when the previous titles in this series of Australian Art Monographs were 35/. It is worth every penny of it because of the immensely improved color illustra- tions. There is as usual the biographical and criti- cal introduction, the bib- liography, a list of princi- pal exhibitions, and a list of known works. Virginia Spate in 'iese has main- tained (, id in the intro- duction sL.:nassedi the standards of .. series which is the only one in Austra- lia to tYse such things seriously. GEORGE'S ART PRIZE The publisher, Georgian House, however, has also provided the best Illustra- tions seen in a local art book for many years. The eight color plates (one of them a double page) are extremely faithful to the originals; the 27 half -tones are sharp and clear. All are large. One at _tile best onteraporary artists is ortunate to have received the best Australian art book yet published. In Melbourne, George's Art Prize went to Olsen's well-known "The Tree of Life," seen in Sydney at his exhibition In March. A second prize was awarded to the Melbourne painter Fred Williams for a landscape, at first sight abstract, but in fact very representational. It is a bird's-eye view, perhaps from some old mountain like the You Yangs, of exactly the same spotty, scatter of gum trees already mentioned in con- nection with Olsen. In tills particular asdase tane brown and red dabs on a honey - colored ground. They clus- ter more thickly along the fence lines. Such simple, familiar landscapes, apparently so ordinary, have been invest- ed with magic by Williams, Henceforth we will see them through his eyes. This Is because of the in- tense simplicity and clari- fication of the image, and because of its perfect, clas- sical order. Although it received sec- ond prize it is really im- possible to compare such pictures with Olsen's. They share something of their subject matter, but they stand for eternal tempera- mental opposites, the clas- sical and the romantic, the orderly and the diaorderly, the intense single experi- ence as opposed to the gluttonous appetite for totality of experience. One cannot say they are better or worse than each other, but only that they are different, and equally profound ways, of saying something about Australian nature. The prize was for figura- tive (Le. representational) art. But such categories are not advisable when the best art at present is, like these pictures, on the bor- derline betwern abstrac- ,t4o.n and figuratlou, tl