Australian Art

In 1961 the Tasmanian Historical Research Association published Clifford Craig’s Engravers of Van Diemen’s Land, which proved to be the first of several books in which Craig attempted to document every nineteenth-century print with a Tasmanian subject produced in Tasmania, mainland Australia and overseas. Craig, in the next two decades, produced follow-up volumes expanding the area covered and including recently discovered prints. His work remains unique in Australia. Sadly no other collector, scholar, curator or librarian has taken up the challenge and attempted to document the printed images of another state.

Handsomely illustrated, beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Gavin Fry’s monograph on Albert Tucker aims to establish him as an important artist within the Australian twentieth-century canon. Fry begins his introduction with the statement that Tucker ‘was a man who inspired strong feelings and his work likewise required the viewer to make a stand. Many found his work difficult, some even repellent, but the artist and his art demanded attention. Equally gifted as a painter, and possibly more so as a draughtsman than his contemporaries Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, Tucker belongs with this élite who revolutionised Australian painting in Melbourne in the 1940s.’ But is this really so? Was Tucker really so much better than his contemporaries, or even as good as them?

A striking work by Adrian Feint and Hera Roberts appears on the cover of Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. It shows an aeroplane, a locomotive and an ocean liner travelling in opposite directions through a vivid landscape of radiating lines and concentric circles. On the circular forms, which are reminiscent of abstract paintings by the French artist Robert Delaunay, we read the legend ‘Paris, Rome, New York, Cairo’; on the diagonal lines, ‘Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane’. This 1928 work is typically modernist for its celebration of the exciting possibilities of modern technology, and in its use of bold colour areas and geometric shapes. It is also a declaration of a perceived, or wished-for, globalisation of culture, which Feint and Roberts, by adopting styles from international modernism, have realised in the work’s very design.

The publication of a third major book on Howard Arkley begs the question: does he deserve such attention while other Australian artists of his generation and significance remain invisible on bookshop and library shelves? Has Arkley’s untimely and sensationalised death in 1999 been the main driver behind his broad appeal, or is he an artist who warrants further critical investigation? John Gregory’s impressive book, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, proves unquestionably that the latter is the case, and tackles some of the myths that have been perpetuated, especially since the artist’s death.

It’s something of a shame, I suppose, but an enduring cliché emanating from Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed film Lost in Translation is the term itself – used currently to describe social encounters where language really is a barrier to communication, or abused in glib dismissals of ailing relationships or fraught encounters. But this is the term that sprang to mind when I was reading this book and considering the deft ways in which each of the writers has contextualised Yvonne Audette’s art, but has not lost in their translations of her practice the lyricism and understatement in her work, and the ultimately mysterious internal impulses that have driven Audette through five decades of creative enterprise. For some viewers, Audette’s is, or could be, an uneasy art. The pleasant surprise in this book is its balance of scholarship against its evocation of the poetics and introspection of an artist’s vision and visual life.

Things shimmer in the distance, as idiosyncrasies of air and light press in upon the eye, causing the terrain before one to wobble, smudge and dissolve. It was the singular achievement of Fred Williams to find an original pictorial syntax to poeticise such distance as it was experienced in the Australian landscape.

The landscape has been seen (and continues to be seen) as a potent ingredient (the most potent?) in the construction of a national myth, in the determination of an identity which we can call ‘Australian’. The question of identity is a difficult area in which to delve but it is one which has elicited much critical debate and as many views as there are voices. Lying About the Landscape is exemplary of this.

This is nothing less than a magisterial achievement. Joan Kerr and her collaborators (some 128 women and forty-eight men) have documented ‘500 works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955’ to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of International Women’s Year. Simultaneously with its publication exhibitions of Australian women’s art are being held at 127 venues throughout Australia. Both the book and the exhibitions are a monument to the energy, enthusiasm, and efficiency of Joan Kerr and her team of honorary fellow workers.

Craftsman House has contributed substantially to bringing our art map up-to-date with the simultaneous publication of a West Australian and a New South Wales art history. One on the work of Robert Juniper and the other on that of Salvatore Zofrea make interesting comparison. The first presents the style· of art one might expect to ensue from that great Western expanse of desert while the other challenges such expectations as stereotyped and clichéd. Juniper set out to depict the landscape and to heroicise it, as has been our tradition; Zofrea, according to Snell, incorporates Australia in the international tradition of art history.