Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. 2 0 SEP 1964 SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, SEPTEMBER 20, 1964 59 The week i by Daniel Thomas art New art blooms WINTER has always been the season for old masters, for full-dress art occasions like the Dobell exhibition. Spring Is for the big mixed show where new art tests itself. And this week was the springiest of the year. There was the Helena Rub ! nstein Scholarship, Australia's largest art award and, more import- ant, the only competition artists themselves seem really to care desperately about. It was won by Cohn Lanceley, age 28. Three other painters in their twenties have held first one-man shows-two pop artists, Michael Shaw (Dominion) and Ken Rein- hard (Macquarie), and one, Robert Rooney (Clune), who squeezes slack, late 1950s Nolan figures into horizontal or diagonal striped fields. Freshest of all is Sidney Nolan himself in the springtime of his life, for he was 29 and 30 when he painted the Ned Kelly series 17 years ago. These 25 famous pic- tures are at Qantas House until Saturday and are on no account to be missed since for all their fame very few people in Sydney will have actually seen them in the original. There was only a brief showing in 1958. in poor light and rather grubby. Newt/ cleaned and framed, well -lit in a deep carpeted shrine off the Qantas booking hall. they are now an enchantment. Who could know from the Wustrations (or from his more familiar recent work) what delicacy of touch, of subtlety of color. Nolan commanded then (sometimes recently the touch has been mechanical: the color has stopped short at tonal structure in mono- chrome). Might he end up like Millais, weeping at the lost beauty of his early work? Or is it only that the recent work is not Aus- tralian, while the Kelly bictures, in their landscape ackgrounds, offer so poetic a vision of the Aus- tralian scrub that we here in Australia just can't help falling for them. It is the landscape pass- ages that dazzled me, not so much Kelly In his hel- met. John Reed however, who has known the pictures in- timately for their 17 years, indulgently declared that evt,yone goes through that stage. Besides their beauty these landscapes teach an- other fundamental lesson: good art does not grow in isolation, it always grows on the good things that came before-in Nolan's in the Spring case the "Heidelberg for his venture Into the School" of Australian big world of European and pressioniste: Roberts and American art, and into his Streeton. Or subtract the own future. rider and the peacock from For it has been a general "The Alarm" and you And rule in Australian art - a veritable Walter Withers maybe it's so in any provin- of say 1897. cial community-that art - The torch has been pass- ists get worse as they grow ed on too it seems: Fred older. They can go corn - Williams, our current bush mercial like Streeton or poet must have looked dull like Roberts even hard at these Kelly paint- though they do miracus Inge when he cleaned them. Sous things when young. There is nothing so close In the Rubinstein the to some of Williams' re- oldest competitor is Elwyn cent gouaches as bits of Lynn, who is exceptional "The Burning Tree." In improving with age, but Not that an interior with on the whole the over 30s flgures like "The Defence get no better. Milgate age of Aaron Sherritt," isn't 30, might have been an brilliant in Its dashingly alternative choice Peascod flung together design, its has improved, Matthews wallpaper bursting into has promise, Kwiatowski flower and its policemen should not have been in- emerging from beneath the vited ao soon. bed with Picasso grins One notes that the first very handsome room full contains all the New South Welsh artists: the second and less attractive room has the other States, leas interesting than one would wish, Let's hope this is be- cause the invitation list was poorly Informed, not because there's nobody else. * * * Cohn Lonceley (Picasso of course being another art -parent any artist should be glad to claim). I repeat, don't miss the Kellys, especially for the landscape backgrounds. * * * LANCELEY has chosen his art - parents - Olsen and Klippel - as wisely as the young Nolan did, and has made some- thing as personal and as magical of his own art. His assemblages of junk have the same disarming unexpectedness in their transformations. But he shows already a much greater formal vigor than Nolan. "Kindly Shoot the Piano Player," and in "The Great Aviator" are ex- amples, except that the latter, a thick - legged standing conatructton of wooden cogs and wheels very firmly grounded, has the most heartrendingly fragile wings growing from its head. A nice symbol, now that he's won the scholarship, WHAT'S ON AA Si: D 1111X1' E An (WWI et Id.g.Wit A I Nmeibilioni WIelti Ssoa Itubironen Trawl. lint An Scholarship. Nnnaille eery An Gallery: Contemporary Auslrellan painting Iron a private Collection; American malls. ALL NEXT WEEK tttt Noose: Sideey Nola., Ned Kg, p&nlinoll. Dentledenr &Laurel Shor, pnitnoe. aaaaa He: Ken Ra'mme'd, palnirse Terry Chang: Robert Rooney, pa nr.noe, Hungry Nene: Five Melbourne tru'F'ors Ildirealun Deg... neat: Royal An Sotr, Annual Ish.billedr. Grano, Well co.Meldmotc, droveot Geonntenyreatth lank, Ag.deatrItt mom OPINING TUESDAY Aral , Artarmen: Ronald Steuart, pa rst OPINING WEDNESDAY 5'4 2,7r.:t 1, Sir Whiten Rudy Itrnent Fred Williams. wNtrceinu., drawings end in,. gamy Stem Doreen Gadaby, Daord Guy Dunn, jewellery. OPINING FRIDAY David Jones% AnCoue end modern Wt. I rent the Goldunillre Cern. Val gleriegelt, Neweecti. W.1.1anr paintings. POP art hit Sydney in a big way this week with Michael Shaw and Ken Rein- hard, We can see now that Lancely's work is not pop. hilt a sort of surrealism, What is pop then? At a symposium last week four pop artists didn't really tell us, I suggest that its not anti-art, nor la it sat- ire. It can be an emotion- ally neutral raid into the visual material provided by commercial art and popu- lar culture, in search of new formal elements: or as Michael Shaw himself put it, to enlarge his pictorial vocabulary. Neither art nor life can be grounded on hate, nor even satire. Reinhard seems to be the latter kind of pop artist. He loves underclothes and breasty pin-ups and low - class newspapers. He draws or pastes them on to a white ground, and adds red and orange. Tinted il- lustrations in fact, inter- esting comment, fascinat- ingly readaole but not yet pushed into any strong formal mould. Shaw on the other hand is a picture-maker Brat, not a commentator. In- stead of embroidering he refines the pin-up or what- ever image triggers hinx off. Design, shape, rotor, and space, the traditional resources of painting, are his concern as much as the meaning. He uses these traditional resources with skill, and the result art - not illustration, which INTERESTING PEOPLE I .ritir,"1 B.r:r4E's Is Reinhard's danger; nor advertising, which is what , . . Rooney's repetition of one brand image amounts to. Michael Shaw's is the most interesting new name this year. For the record he La recently arrived from England, where pop art began, and his message, is so much the nearer to be- ing first hand. But although Shaw is my top artist it's good to see subversion being spread so energetically by every:. one this week. In spring you turn the soil to let the plants pop through.