About twenty or so years ago, a colleague, a graduate of Cambridge who lives and practises here, gave me a mild remonstrance, to use an English term, for describing an AO opera as ‘world class’. She said that sort of cringe had gone out with Gough, and that we were more than capable of standing on our own two feet without looking over our shoulder at what was happening in Europe or the U S.
She was dead right. We had shed the cringe – at least in that weasel world of ‘culture.’
And in some areas of art and literature, only Australians could serve our felt needs. Obvious examples are Arthur Boyd, Tim Winton, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and Patrick White. (The drama inherent in high level sport is on a different plane. Names like Bradman, Landy, Barassi, Peter Thompson and Freeman are in another world. And here, we like to show our colours.)
My ruthlessly cut-back library is full of art books – mostly on Australian art. They are there und used mainly for the artwork, and not the commentary. Talking about art, someone said, is like dancing about architecture. Ultimately you are faced with the premise that there is something that can be analysed logically. Why? Would it make sense to ask the creators of the Pieta or Eroica or Ode to a Nightingale what they meant? Would we not insult the artist or demean ourselves?
OK – I have got some help in following Turner, Janacek, Louis Armstrong, and Benjamin Britten from reading about them. I have also derived pleasure and insight from three or so contributors to the oceans of print on Shakespeare – which I have added to – but it is a long time between drinks.
One exception is the just published Nolan’s Africa by Andrew Turley. It is an outstanding account of Nolan’s work in Africa, and of his motivation and technique in general. The depth of scholarship and research is obvious and the photographic sources are in my view essential to the contemporary Australian home.
Nolan brushes up well in a suit. He looks like the young headmaster of a progressive school. He occupied a difficult position in Oz – like Patrick White with whom he fell out venomously – a supreme intellect and the capacity to hand it out in spades. Those people make Oz voters worried. They like their politicians to stay well within the mediocre – and they get what they want. Barry Humphries and our great cartoonists are rare exceptions.
And then we can get snaky with those who succeed overseas. Kenneth Clark, the prince of snobs, stirred up the green eyes of the also rans back home by referring to the ‘reckless innocence’ of a ‘genius.’
And the artists don’t come from the Murdoch side of politics. We get this from the author on the last page.
Today the themes of the African paintings resonate: genocide, dehumanisation of the poor, racial disenfranchisement, the decline of the West, nationalism, and a political shift to the Right, while nature, the environment and our own existence are threatened by escalating changes in climate and biodiversity.
Nearly forty years ago, Nolan said:
I am beginning to see how the imbalance in the spread of the earth’s resources causes famine and war and see the planet poised in a kind of mutually assured destruction. This madness must be so frightening to the young.
The great painter Sydney Nolan was, therefore, what we used to call a humanist. He was a man who could go from painting the evil of Auschwitz to the screaming agony of shot game at Serengeti.
About fifty years ago as a fledgling barrister, I acquired my first Nolan work on paper for what was then the huge price of $350 – Burke on a camel. Three days later, Robert Hughes on ABC TV, said that Nolan had become a ‘sausage grinder.’ That stung. Was Burke sitting a bit oddly on that bloody camel?
But I now know[GG1] that the journalistic barb was unwarranted then, and completely unfounded now. I say that not because I am fortunate in what I hold, but because for what it is worth, in my view, Nolan and Emily are the two greatest painters that this nation has produced – by the length of the bloody straight at Flemington.
In th result, I would change the remarks I made about Nolan in my Curated Library books.
The Introduction to this luxuriant tome by Edward Capon verges on hagiography, but the following makes sense to me.
‘Nolan is the best known, the most familiar, name in the history of modern Australian art….And yet he remains something of an enigma….Nolan introduced the human drama into the hitherto unpopulated but defining image of the Australian landscape. Much as he used the Australian landscape as the setting for his explorations and excursions into the human condition, it was not that natural landscape, but the human landscape that drove and sustained his curiosity and imagination….I always sensed with Sid and his restless pace and curiosity that fear of stillness and contemplation….He was a restless soul who tended to believe in the ultimate transience of all things which left, inevitably, the void of melancholy in its wake. It is a condition that is powerfully demonstrated in his work.’
That sounds about right. That is a little unnerving. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably said that, ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’
If you ask most Australians who was our greatest artist, the answer would probably be Nolan. But if you asked artists who was our greatest painter, the answer might well be one of two artists dealt with in this series – Williams or Boyd (the latter in this volume).
But let’s leave all that grandstanding to God and the successors to Mr Capon. Nolan exploded like a flare over a very bleak horizon, and he was one of those champions who helped us shake off that ghastly cringe of ours.
And as one relieved soldier in Hamlet said, ‘For this relief, much thanks.’
[GG1]
With Compliments 