Australian Art History Research Articles

Lionel Lindsay’s Maghreb: Orientalism as Anti-Modernism

Lionel Lindsay still troubles Australian art history. An illustrator and etcher of undeniable skill, he voiced conservative aesthetics, including his anti-modernist and antisemitic polemic Addled Art of 1942. However, Lindsay was also philo-Arab, as he demonstrated in his 1929 visit to the Maghreb to meet Etienne Nasr’Eddine Dinet, the Islamophile Orientalist whose 1889 Snake Charmer was Lindsay’s favourite painting at the Art Gallery of NSW. During two months in Bou Saada and Kairouan, Lindsay made dozens of watercolours, drawings and meticulous etchings of ‘local character’, studied here as a group for the first time. Drawing on Lindsay’s unpublished diaries, letters and memoirs this article shows that this anti-modernist Anglo-Australian’s ‘Orientalism’ ignored the settlers and chose favourites among the peoples of the Maghreb.

The Myth of Heterosexuality: Queer Australian Artists, Art Historians and Gallerists in London, 1930–1961

ABSTRACT The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is when the idea of Australian art as “isolated” and “exotic” first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures. The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his book Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumption. What is overlooked in accounts of the show is that many of its artists were not “isolated”, frequently having spent extended periods in Britain living and studying. But, more than this, what is rarely, if ever, discussed is how many of the artists in the show were queer, as was its curator, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Bryan Robertson. In many ways, the social and professional connections between Australian and British artists were forged through their shared homosexuality. It is this that puts Australian artists in connection with the British art scene and, on occasion, explains their influence upon it. Queerness has often connected Australian artists to those around the world—it is also the case for the Australian women artists in Paris before and after World War I.

No Country for Old Men: Australian Art History’s Difficulty with Aboriginal Art

The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.

Australia in the World’s Art Colonies

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.

The Slav Avant-garde in Australian Art

Australian art history includes a peculiar short period during which the European avant-garde values were brought to Australia by a group of Slav artists who gathered in Adelaide in 1950. They were brothers Voitre (1919–1999) and Dušan Marek (1926–1993) from Bohemia, Władysław (1918–1999) and Ludwik Dutkiewicz (1921–2008) from Poland, and Stanislaus (Stanislav, Stan) Rapotec (1911–1997) from Yugoslavia, later joined by Joseph Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski (1922–1994) from Poland. Each of these artists went on to leave their individual mark on the overall Australian art practice. This brief moment of the artists’ working and exhibiting together also enriched their later individual work with the very idea of a common Slav cultural memory.

Australian Rock Art in the Expanded Field: History, Meaning, and Contemporary Context

Compared with the prehistoric parietal art of Europe, Australian Aboriginal rock art is little known in art historical contexts, despite that fact that many of these works are older, more dynamic, and more sophisticated. More than the laneways of inner-city streets, much of the Australian landscape is literally layered with art. There are thousands of rock art sites recorded in Australia and perhaps an equal number that have been forgotten or destroyed. New galleries and cathedrals of colour are regularly reported in the popular press. Yet the status of rock art in Australian art history, like much of the rest of Indigenous art production, is under-researched and poorly conceptualised within the discipline. To address this, we devised a panel session for the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand’s 2017 annual conference, at the University of Western Australia, upon which this special issue is based. The responses we received were curated into two parallel interdisciplinary sessions, each of which had an artist, an art historian and an archaeologist.

Nationalism, Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.

The art of the overseas exhibition

The history of Australian art has been punctuated with survey exhibitions in London from the late 19th century to the present, just as our artists were drawn to Europe both to study and for the possibilities of wider recognition. This review article focuses on the post-war years from 1950 to 1965, a high point of Australian cultural expatriatism focused on London – now viewed as a significant episode in the history of Australian art. The two most influential figures supporting key Australian artists were Kenneth Clark (promoting the work of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale) and Bryan Robertson, director of the avant-gardist Whitechapel Gallery. Robertson was responsible for organizing the most significant of these exhibitions of Australian art: Australian Painting Today in 1961, focusing on the work of a younger generation of artists that included Charles Blackman, John Olsen, Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley. Australian’s most significant art historian, Bernard Smith, who had also sought to bring about comparable exhibitions, but without success, challenged the orientation and the cultural framing by Robertson and the young Australian art critic Robert Hughes in the catalogue of this key exhibition.

The Colour Treatment: A Convergence of Art and Medicine at the Red Cross Russell Lea Nerve Home.

When the Red Cross opened its new convalescent home at Russell Lea in Sydney in 1919, it contained a coloured room designed for treating ‘nerve cases’. This room was painted by Roy de Maistre, a young artist, and was modelled on the Kemp Prossor colour scheme trialled at the McCaul Convalescent Hospital in London for the treatment of shell shock. Dubbed the ‘colour cure’ by the popular press, this unconventional treatment was ignored by the Australian medical profession. The story of de Maistre's colour experiment is not widely known outside the specialist field of Australian art history. Focusing on the colour room as a point of convergence between art and medicine in the context of the First World War, this article investigates Red Cross activities and the care of soldiers suffering from nervous conditions.

The presence of absence: Tommy McRae and Judy Watson in Australia, the imaginary grandstand at the Royal Academy in London

Detail of Tommy McRae, Corroboree or William Buckley and Dancers from the Wathaurong People, c. 1890, ink on paper. University of Melbourne Archives.Nineteenth-century Indigenous art is remarkably absent from Australian contributions to World Art history. This close reading of Tommy McRae's drawings of a Victorian ‘Corroboree after Seeing Ships for the First Time’ argues that the presences and absences in Australian art history are epitomized in these nineteenth-century Indigenous works. The influence of photography and popular press imagery on McRae's representations of ceremony is analysed. How renderings of figure and ground bring colour and race into the very material support of his drawings is explored. The reverse assimilation of the ‘wild white man’ William Buckley is assessed in regard to the proto-national apparel in the colonial space that McRae illustrates. The reassessment of this early Aboriginal artist is framed by the exhibition of his work in London at the Royal Academy in 2013. Comparisons with Eugene von Guérard and William Barak are made in the visual analysis. The significance of the reception of the Australia exhibition as imaginary grandstand for the nation is further highlighted through Judy Watson's fire and water sculpture.

Against provincialism: Australian-American connections 1900–2000

This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smith's well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smith's argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a whole new history of Australian art come into view but we can see that the “provincialism problem” never existed.

The Case of the Vanishing Mediator: Seventies Art in Australia

Australian art history is the subject of constant revision. For the last couple of decades, Australian art historians have increasingly revisited standard accounts of the country's artistic development, rereading Australian art according to current precepts. Largely, these researchers are motivated by a desire to engage with issues that, ignored or marginalised by traditional approaches, are now deemed important. Like most traditional accounts of Australian art history, Bernard Smith's foundational Australian Painting 1788-1960 is based on the sense of a chronological continuum that stretches from Australia's annexation by Europeans to the present day. However, as the revised editions of Australian Painting show, such a history becomes divided around the seventies.

Here in Byzantium: Ross Crothall's Trans-Tasman Career

The New Zealand-born artist Ross Crothall (1934-68?) is one of the enigmas of Australian art history. He was a member of the Annandale Imitation Realists, a short-lived collective credited by Robert Hughes as 'one of the few significant statements made in Australian in art in the early sixties'. He came to public attention in February 1962, along with the group's two other young artists, Mike Brown (1938-97) and Colin Lanceley (1938-), when they first exhibited at Melbourne's Museum of Modern Art of Australia. Three months later they exhibited as the Subterranean Imitation Realists at Sydney's Rudy Komon Gallery, and, soon after, disbanded. The Imitation Realist exhibitions were different to anything their audiences had seen before. They featured over 200 works, including paintings, drawings, collages, and assemblages constructed from anything the artists could lay their hands on: household detritus, plastic toys, newspapers, scraps from a nearby furniture factory, and house paint. Many works were collaborations between two or more of the artists and their friends. The exhibitions were immersive environments, with works displayed on the walls, floors, and ceilings, accompanied by loud pop music. While this trio of young, unknown artists received an unparalleled response, the nature of Crothall's contribution to art in Australia and New Zealand has not yet been fully appreciated.

French, Floral and Female: A History of UnAustralian Art 1900–1930

In this essay, which is another instalment in the authors' ongoing project of writing a history of 'UnAustralian' art in the 20th century, the period 1900 to 1930 is characterised in terms of three adjectives: 'French', 'floral' and 'female'. 'French' because so much of Australian art history took place in France, or in relation to France, during the period. 'Floral' because so much of this history can be understood in terms of flower painting, often included in still lifes and interiors, as opposed to the prevailing 'gum tree' nationalism enshrined after the War. 'Female' because, extending the existing accounts by women art historians, the entire period can be understood as feminine in character. This 'UnAustralian' account breaks with the importance attributed both to Norah Simpson bringing back books on Cubism in 1913 and to Grace Cossington-Smith's The Sock Knitter (1915) as the first signs of modernism in Australia, and to the War as an event that dramatically changed the course of Australian art history, either by sending Australian artists for the first time overseas or by explaining the prominence of women in Australian art after the War. To think Australian art 1900-1930 as 'French, floral and female' is to imagine a different account from the usual nationalist one, to reconceive a history that has remained fundamentally unaltered since William Moore's The Story of Australian Art (1934).

How to Write Art History from an Antipodean Perspective

Abstract Classic histories of Australian art begin their narrative with the art of first contact, such as Bernard Smith's European Vision and the South Pacific (1969), or his history of Australian Painting 1788–1960, first published in 1960, till the standard text today. European Vision and the South Pacific remains an extraordinary thesis, in which the art and nature of the new world is shown to have been represented, according to the norms of Europeans. It is almost certainly the first great statement of crossing cultures in art history. Smith's Australian Painting, by contrast, although unsurpassed, has come under increasing criticism for presenting such a partial view of painting, omitting sculpture or anything three dimensional, or anything indigenous, or anything ancient. It is a cliche that Australians have the longest living tradition of art anywhere in the world, and yet no history of Australian art exists that accepts this statement as a premise. Hitherto ignored in all accounts of Australian ar...

Cosmopolitanism and Modernism

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is very complex, especially from the point of view of Australian art history. National accounts form only a part of a whole, and hence, such a way of writing Australian art history would disperse with accounts of modernism and in terms of its passive reception or as a local manifestation.

Wolfgang Sievers and the Revisionism of Australian Migrant Art

This paper contends that in looking to Australian migrant art, such as that of the German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, we can better understand the significance and politics of revisionist discourse in this country and begin a much needed enquiry: to rethink the historiography of modernism in Australia. Drawing on the experience of migrant identity situated between the past and the present (and potential future) – the present now represented by the new Australian locality – the concept of the ‘inbetween’ and identity renegotiation that is implicit here are seen to condition and structure the local settler culture more so than the concept of provincialism. It is the dynamic of the ‘in-between’ (both cultural and psychological) with its postcolonial implications, with which Australian art historical revisionism is ultimately concerned, and it is through modernist migrant art that this condition can best be understood and articulated. 1 Over the past twenty years, Australian art historians have struggled to reassess the contribution of the post-Second World War migrant artists to Australian art history. Establishing an effectual framework for this project has been met with little to no success. The work of German–Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers, for example, has been institutionalised under the safe banner of modernism, yet the problems posed by such definition and institutionalisation in terms of art production and reception in Australia have not been taken into account. Nor has the already viable revisionist framework, instrumental in re-modelling Australian art history over the past two decades, been considered in accounts of migrant art. An enquiry into how and to what degree emigre artists have responded to the presumably inherent provincial condition of Australian culture and society, and how their local artistic efforts can be considered in terms of revisionism, reveals crucial elements in the structure of the revisionist framework. The work of Wolfgang Sievers serves as the catalyst for this analysis, largely because his work illuminates the condition of ‘settler art’, the condition which embodies the dynamic that revisionism identifies as the driving force of Australian art practice. This article starts with the premise that the very name ‘Australia’ denotes a country defined by the settler–colonialists, either before or after settlement. In referring to the ‘settler’ culture, I am referring explicitly to the non-Indigenous element of Australian society, regardless of whether someone would consider her or himself a settler. The term relates less to a particular period in history, the nature of occupation or nationality than it does to a mentality: it is thus psychological and political, as the revisionist writing reveals. The terms ‘settler’ and ‘migrant’ are in the present context interchangeable.

Bernard Smith, Cold Warrior

Bernard Smith’s canonical book, Australian Painting, 1788-1960, was shaped by the Cold War. This forced the emerging discipline of Australian art history onto a trajectory that would not be shaken for another two decades. More than art history determined Smith’s innovations. This article proceeds from that obvious but easily overlooked point, that Smith and his book were deeply conditioned by the intellectual climate of Cold War Australia. The appearance of Smith’s book and, henceforth, Australian art history’s concerns with postcoloniality and anxiety about nationality derive from this. Smith’s particular Cold War has shaped Australian art history ever since.

Bernard Smith’s Early Marxist Art History

In a systematic investigation of national art histories, Bernard Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788, first published in 1945, would likely emerge as an Ur-text of the genre. The book’s rewriting of Australian art history within a Marxist tradition of ‘culturalist’ criticism was a major advance on the available models. Its success stems in no small part from its judicious and balanced account of how social forces intersect. The book privileges economic production as a primary force, as does any Marxian text deserving of the name, but no more than it privileges cultural production and reception as primary forces.

Mapping Histories of Art Education In New South Wales

This article examines the historical discourse relating to the field of art education in New South Wales from the nineteenth through to the late twentieth century. While discussing antecedent historiography relating to the history of art education in Australia, it argues that the tasks associated with that history are incomplete. By focusing on the system of art education in New South Wales, the paper refers to the differences between specific state-based systems of art education in Australia. It indicates the advantages of recognizing the effect of sexual, ideological, psychological, and other social and educational practices when writing historical material about art education. It introduces evidence that some of the most common perceptions of the history of Australian art education require more detailed scrutiny.