Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. J1 1 t )63 The Week in Art by Daniel Thomas THIS week was Olsen's week. He won a large art prize in Melbourne on Wednes- day; and a book about him by Virginia Spate reached the bookshops a few days earlier. By further coinci- dence a television programme fi lmed months ago was shown in Melbourne the very night his prize Was announced. In it tional Gallery of Vic- toria. he followed Jeffrey Smart and Alber t Tucker with comments on their paintings owned by the Na- Olsen spoke of his gin.- 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 space --his completely abstract paintings done when he and Passmore and William Rose plus Eric Smith and the sculptor Robert Kilo- 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 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 crones, 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 1955, a year before the "Direction I" abstracts, Olsen seems first to have 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 ........... 11111111111111 ..... 111111 .............. early direction indicated by the Bicycle Boys. As we now know well, his tiresent aim 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 1 s h - like. open scatter that gum-trees make over cer- tain landscapes. "Mills Plains" illustrated in the Bulletin some weeks ago, Is an example. Olsen's rows of untidy dote in such pictures as "Digger Landscape" are ased 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 apnear- Races (or stories), there is' the possibility of contri- buting to an Australian style. SYDNEY PAINTER John Olsen with his win- ning entry, "The Tree of Life," in the George's Invitation Art Prize. or two experimental paint- . togs from Olsen's three GEORGE'S ART years in Europe, and then the majority of them are PRIZE from 1960 to 1062, when the book was completed. In Melbourne, George's Various artistic sources Art Prize went to Olsen's for Olsen's style are men- well-known "The Tree of Honed in Virginia Spate's Life," seen In Sydney at introduction (dense ands his exhibition in March, meaty, but very clear). A second prize was among them Klee. "taking E awarded to the Melbourne a line for a walk." and painter Fred Williams for Dubuffet. A meeting with a landscape, at first sight Alan Davie In England is abstract, but in fact very recorded, but the artist representational. apparently forgot to tell It is a bird's-eye view, tacta with the Cobra'group mountain like the You the author about his con- perhaps from some old (Appel, Jorn, Corneille. s Yan a of exactly the same etc.). A Journey from Parisespotty, scatter of gun) trees I to Spain on the back of I alepodk theollOW -ra Corneille's motor -scooter is recorded elsewhere by nection with Olsen. In this Robert Hughes. particular case the trees The Cobra group style are seen as distant brown would surely have encour- and red dabs on a honey- aged his return to the colored ground. They clus- ter mon) thickly along the fence lines. Such simple, familiar landscapes, apparently so ordhary, 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.