Australia at the RA

With 200 works by 146 artists, Australia is the most comprehensive survey of Australian art to have been mounted outside of Australia itself. The story told is one of cultural interaction between Australia’s indigenous peoples and its non-indigenous settlers. Sitting alongside this cultural story is the art historical story of the introduction and dominance of Modernism within Australian art.

The art of Australia’s indigenous peoples possesses an integrity and harmony with life and land which is initially absent from the figurative landscape-based art of the early white settlers. Aboriginal art is both made from the land and about the land. Shapes and symbols of the land are mapped on rocks, ground, bark, bodies and, in more recent years, canvas to enact and embody creation narratives and the balance which exists between the spiritual, natural and moral elements of the world.

While the indigenous peoples of Australia lived in the land and the land lived in them, the early white settlers brought with them an observational approach to landscape. Beginning with views of settlements and gradually expanding to depict the wilderness around them, the early settler artists established landscape as the dominant feature of Australian art. The variation and expanse of Australia’s land mass has provided endless opportunities to celebrate its terrain, vegetation, light and human settlements.

Within this has been a conflicted relationship with its indigenous peoples beginning with observational paintings of aboriginal settlements and rituals, through heroic dramatisations of settler activity which excluded on canvas, as in life, the indigenous peoples, and two-way influences (vis-à-vis Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira mastering European styles while Margaret Preston, a supporter of Namatjira, adopted the palette, flat planes and aspects of mark marking of indigenous art), to contemporary commentaries on race relations which are intentionally provocative.

Modern art began in Australia with the plein-air Impressionism of Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Condor, among others. The work they produced adapted Impressionism to the particular light and terrain of Australia and artists began to talk of a specifically Australian tradition. The early Modernists emphasised colour and composition in cityscapes, with the newly constructed Sydney Harbour Bridge a particular focus, but the greatest period of Australian art to date featured the Expressionism of Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. In their works, land, emotion and symbol coalesced by means of Modernism which, nevertheless, had parallels with Australia’s indigenous artists. In them, the land was speaking powerfully, albeit with strangeness and stress, once again.

Within both the cultural and art historical stories told within this exhibition are hints of another spirituality, the Christianity brought to Australia by the settlers. While the key catalyst for the recognition by the art world of Australia’s indigenous art is identified as being the work of Geoffrey Bardon, an art teacher at the local school in Papunya during the 1970s, Christian missions in Eastern Arnhem Land and Hermannsburg in the 1930s led to monumental panels of ancestors by Yolngu artists placed beside the altar of the local mission church together with the launch of the successful career of Albert Namatjira.
Roy de Maistre wrote that colour "constitutes … the spiritual speech of every living thing." Margaret Preston used The Expulsion to protest at the exclusion of Aborigines from their natural lands. Arthur Boyd set the casting out of the money changers from the Temple in Bendigo and Port Melbourne in his protest at materialism and greed. G.W. Bot’s Garden of Gethsemene, with its three slashes representing three crosses, was a response to the death of her daughter in 1999. These examples from the exhibition are symptomatic of a deeper, broader pool of Christian imagery and spirituality within Australian art which is not plumbed by this exhibition but includes work by Justin O’Brien, Leonard French, Eric Smith and Idris Murphy, among others, much of which has been stimulated by the Blake Prize for Religious Art. When explored alongside the spirituality of Aboriginal art, searching for meaning through this strand of Australian art and creativity can, as Sr. Rosemary Crumlin (author of Aboriginal Art and Spirituality and Images of Religion in Australian Art) has said, lead to the finding of deeper ways into our questions about life and meaning.

Similarly, as the RA’s own guide states, this exhibition "reflects the vastness of the land and the diversity of its people, exploring the implications of these realities - and mythologies - for national identity."

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Midnight Oil - One Country.

Struggles to contend with the Australian landscape

Australia is "the first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art. Two hundred works including painting, drawing, photography, watercolours and multimedia will shed light on a period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of colonisation on an indigenous people, to the pioneering nation building of the 19th century through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last 100 years."

Anthony Gormley comments: "When I think of Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams or Arthur Boyd, I think of harsh earth and fierce sunlight. Through its new occupiers, somehow Australia produced modernist vigour ... There is a directness in the Indigenous traditions, whether the dots of the Western Desert or the colour field paintings of the Great Sandy Desert, where pigment is used to carry mineral truth as well as lived feeling."

Leading Australian contemporary landscape painter Idris Murphy has said:

"I’m not interested in negotiating my way around Indigenous painting. I think it is going to be a problem – can the Western tradition sustain a view of the world? I mean, Peter Fuller used to talk about this when he came to Australia very briefly; he saw in Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan the potential for the ‘last great hurrah’ of the Northern Romantic tradition and I think there’s a lot of truth in what he said. I think it’s going to be a problem – it’s not a problem for me – I’m just lapping it up! Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting."

It will be interesting to see if this show gives any sense of this new sort of language base that Murphy sees in contemporary Australian art. By contrast Adrian Searle has suggested that the show is strong on Aboriginal art and full of classics – but loses its way in modern times:

"The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions.

 

I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way."

 

The Guardian does have a helpful timeline of Australian art, however: A history of Australian art – interactive timeline.

 

Back at the RA, author Tim Winton will explore his belief that ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.’

In today's Guardian, Winton selects Fred Williams's Yellow Landscape, 1968-9 as his favourite artwork from his homeland:

"he renders the scale and mystery of the physical world by tiny marks. The forms and figures are like scars in the hide of a beast too big to properly conceive of, let alone see entire. All these wens and divots are without pattern and yet they bring to mind calligraphy. These are the marks, the messy, chaotic texture that even the practised eye struggles to contend with in the Australian landscape. Whether you're seeing it from the air or at ground level, this is what your senses struggle with in the open country, such flat planes worked over with hieroglyphics born of fire, erosion, meteor showers, drought and epochal passages of time. Here humans might seem incidental."

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Midnight Oil - Dreamworld.

Mexico and Australia: Revolution and Land

I'm looking forward to two exhibitions at the Royal Academy in the Autumn. The first is Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910 – 1940, (The Sackler Wing of Galleries, 6 July – 29 September 2013) which "will examine the intense thirty year period of artistic creativity that took place in Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. The turmoil of the revolution between 1910 and 1920 ushered in a period of profound political change in which the arts were placed centre stage. Often referred to as a cultural renaissance, artists were employed by the Ministry of Public Education on ambitious public arts projects designed to promote the principles of the revolution.

The exhibition will explore this period both in terms of national and international artists. Work by
significant Mexican artists, such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros,
will be placed alongside that of individuals who were affected by their experiences in Mexico. These
include Josef Albers, Edward Burra, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-
Bresson, Henrietta Shore, Leon Underwood, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. Mexico: A Revolution
in Art, 1910 – 1940 will reveal a dynamic and often turbulent cultural environment that included some
seminal figures of the twentieth century reflecting on their interaction with each other and their
differing responses to the same subject: Mexico."

The San Bernadino County Museum describes the Mexican Mural Movement as follows: "The Mexican Mural Movement began about 1913 when Mexican President Victoriano Huerta appointed Alfredo Martinez as director of the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas. Gerardo Murillo (who called himself Dr. Alt) of Guadalajara painted the first modern mural in Mexico, and pioneered the idea that Mexican art should reflect Mexican life. After the revolution, the new government commissioned works of public art that supported and affirmed the values of the revolution and the Mexican identity: a broader knowledge of revolutionary history and the Mexican people’s pre-Columbian past.

Three muralists—“los tres grandes,” José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—became the internationally-known leaders of the mural movement. All believed that art, the highest form of human expression, was a key force in social revolution. Together, they created the Labor Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors and devoted themselves to large-scale murals illustrating the history of Mexico, its people, its society, and the revolution. Their work was not always received positively. All spent some time in the United States creating works of art."

Rivera "did not represent religious images unless they were useful as social observations ... The most that he came close to portray religious messages was at the murals in Chapingo, where his images functioned as a catechism exhorting a new generation of Mexican farm workers and agricultural planners to uphold a modern nationally, constructive, self-respecting way of life, based on the credo "exploitation of the land, not of man."" Nevertheless, it has been noted that his Detroit Industry Murals "are rife with Christian themes and utopian symbolism."

Orozco "painted the theme, Cristo destruye su cruz, three times in his life, twice as murals — one of which still survives at Dartmouth College — and once on a 4’ x 3’ canvas." The image has been understood both as saying “It is finished!” to the violence that destroys and oppresses and as a denial of "the sacrificial destiny meant for him."

"Siqueiros painted some fifteen portraits of Christ ... on August 2, 1963, he inscribed the following quote from the most devout of Italian painters, Fra Angelico, in the back of his painting Cristo del Pueblo: "May only he who believes in Christ paint Christ." And in another occasion, during his imprisonment, he declared: "Was Jesus Christ not, like me, a victim of social dissolution, a persecuted man?" On August 9, 1963, from his cell at a crime prevention facility, Siqueiros inscribed the following words regarding the Via Crucis on the back of his painting, Mutilated Christ: "First, his enemies crucified him 2000 years ago. Then, they mutilated him from the Middle Ages on, and today, their new and true friends restore him under the political pressure of communism post-Ecumenical Council. This small work is dedicated to the latter."

The second exhibition is Australia (Main Galleries, 21 September – 8 December 2013), "the first survey of Australian art in the UK in over 50 years. The exhibition will reveal the development of Australian art through over 180 paintings, prints and drawings, watercolours, photographs and multimedia works, incorporating
settlers’ images of the land from the beginning of the nineteenth century to today, together with art by
Aboriginal Australians. The exhibition will consider the tensions both real and imagined between the
landscape as a source of production, enjoyment, relaxation and inspiration, and conversely as a
place loaded with mystery and danger.

The exhibition will include works by Aboriginal artists such as Albert Namatjira, Rover Thomas, Emily
Kame Kngwarreye and Fiona Foley. Nineteenth century European immigrants such as John Glover
and Eugene von Guerard will also feature, as well as the Australian Impressionists whose paintings
relied heavily on the mythology of the Australian bush: Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts (a student of
the Royal Academy Schools), Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin. Early Modernists such as
Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and Roy de Maistre will hang alongside the leading
twentieth century painters: Arthur Boyd, Rosalie Gascoigne, Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley and
Sidney Nolan RA, with the exhibition ending in the twenty-first century with internationally recognised
artists such as Shaun Gladwell, Bill Henson and Tracey Moffatt."

Margaret M. Manion has written that "for a surprisingly large number of gifted Australian artists, the relationship between art and religion has continued to provide a creative challenge." Robert Hughes suggested in The Art of Australia that Justin O'Brien "was the first Australian painter to concentrate on religious imagery" but that religious painting in Australia was "quickened" by Eric Smith and Leonard French. Rosemary Crumlin writes in Images of Religion in Australian Art that with "the founding of the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1950, many artists turned to the Scriptures for subject matter in their paintings, some of them for the first time":

"Roy de Maistre, reconverted to Catholicism in London, worked often from the Bible and became associated with the Sacred Art Renewal Movement in England. In Melbourne, Russian immigrant Danila Vassilieff used religious subjects, often ironically, sometimes humourously and with zest. In Melbourne also, the Boyd family, always deeply religious, provided its younger generation, including Arthur Boyd and his brother-in-law John Perceval, with an easy familiarity with the Scriptures as texts of faith and guidance for living."

In The Blake Book: Art, religion and spirituality in Australia, Crumlin continues the story providing "a fascinating visual social history of Australia and an astute, well-documented history of The Blake Prize from 1951 - 2011. The book traces many significant changes in art and art movements, both within and beyond Australia. Through their work and words, the artists have room to speak of what has influenced them and found expression in their Blake entries. The influences they name range widely. Choices often surprise.
Among the winning artists presented in the book are Donald Friend, John Coburn, Stanislaus Rapotec, Roger Kemp, Ken Whisson, Maryanne Coutts, George Gittoes and Euan Macleod. Space is given to indigenous art and the many exhibited artists other than the winners."

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Midnight Oil - My Country.

Rituals of Life

More than 300 aboriginal artefacts – collected by missionaries for an exhibition commissioned by Pope Pius XI in 1925 – have been properly curated for the first time and can be seen in the Vatican Museums, an event project leader Professor Margo Neale described enthusiastically as “a miracle”.

These treasures are now on public display, thanks in part to Missionary Ethnological Museum curator Father Nicola Mapelli. Last summer, Mapelli flew to Australia and visited Aboriginal communities to request permission to display the collection. His objective was to "reconnect with a living culture, not to create a museum of dead objects." His goal is accomplished in the exhibition, Rituals of Life which is focused on northern and Western Australian art from the turn of the 20th century.

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Midnight Oil - Earth And Sun And Moon.