The Australian Newspaper has been going for 50 years now and they have posted some great articles highlighting the arts and politics during that time.
I have posted some of them - see links below.
Now, you may or many not agree with Mr Allen's assessments, and it is a shame that he has confined himself to the past 50 years although I understand this is due to The Australian's 50th anniversary.
If the time frame weren't of significance I would add Sir Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Albert Namatjira, and Norman Lindsay as some favourites of mine and there are many, many others.
Interestingly, I went to school with the daughters of John Brack and John Percival, and it was quite clear the girls inherited a lot of talent from their fathers.
Noel Counihan's wife taught me French during my last year at the school.
Sir William Dargie, the great portrait painter, lived just around the corner from my old school.
Seems I was 'surrounded' by great Australian artists including my best friend Lizzie!
A PERENNIAL problem with art lists is to distinguish between the historically significant and the good. The difference is not hard to grasp when we think of important individuals in history, but for some reason, perhaps because of the tenacious fallacy of progress, we tend to assume that whatever is notable or especially influential in the history of art must also possess superior aesthetic quality.
So the list to accompany this article is far from definitive. In the end, however, I considered which artists active in the past 50 years stood out as particularly memorable, suggestive and poetic. I left out Nolan,(clip above) Drysdale, Dobell and Boyd, whose acme belongs to the two decades after the war. Those on the final list may have their limitations, but they are all highly individual and are neither simply idiosyncratic nor purveyors of commercial product, nor representatives of some current style or fashion.
Countless artists fall into these latter categories, especially during a period that has been characterised by an unprecedented inflation in the production of art. Dealers’ galleries proliferated in Australia from the 1960s, and solo commercial shows replaced the group exhibitions of artists’ societies. There was more money, more glamour, and a new star system; dealers’ galleries, once they had established their own credibility, could make and market the reputations of new artists, justifying their substantial cut of the sales proceeds.
From the late 60s and into the 70s, this burgeoning art scene was complicated by alternative avant-gardes, sometimes overtly political, at other times more conceptually oriented, but in either case usually rejecting the galloping commodification of art — even when some of the individuals concerned managed to make their way back to dealers’ galleries and financial returns in the long run.
The explosion of new practices in the 70s also brought an end to the modernist assumption that there was a single main line of evolution in avant-garde art — the supposedly progressive unfolding that had led to the flat painting celebrated in The Field exhibition of 1968. If colour field was the end of painting in the teleological sense, it was also followed almost immediately by the announcement, premature as it turned out, of the death of painting as an art.
What followed was not only a bewildering variety of art forms but, even more significantly if less obviously, a scattering of styles that could no longer be understood as stages in a dialectical series with a meaningful outcome. In hindsight it was the beginning of the amorphous world of what we now simply know as contemporary art.
The Biennale of Sydney was first held in 1973 and, like other international exhibitions of the kind, it also encouraged an amorphous idea of art. We have now had such exhibitions for so long that we take them for granted, but in fact their relevance to the practice of art is very questionable. For really a biennale is just an international trade fair.
In art, however, biennali do not purport to demonstrate superior oil painting formulas, better procedures for bronze casting or new tools for welding steel sculptures. Nor is art progressive in the way that refrigerator design is, where it is clear that one represents an advance on another. Nor, finally, does art benefit from being connected to what is going on all around the world.
Occasional outside influences can be stimulating, but art really develops out of an intimate engagement with its own community and its beliefs and values. All the great art we admire in past ages and in other cultures was produced primarily in communion with its own world, sometimes stimulated by sporadic outside influences, sometimes in almost total isolation.
In Australia the establishment of the Australia Council, also in 1973, helped to support a further expansion of art of all kinds, including funding artist-run spaces, which helped to foster artists who were either not yet ready for the commercial dealers’ galleries or committed to the kind of work that did not lend itself to the exhibition and sale model of these galleries.
The Australia Council also funded state galleries, touring exhibitions and publications. There were benefits in these funding programs, of course, but there was also the danger that the same artists would end up being funded directly and indirectly through inclusion in exhibitions, publication in subsidised magazines, and so forth. Groupthink tended to spread through the new subculture called the art world, in which interests converged and formerly experimental practitioners ended up in the big companies or even at the funding bodies.
Meanwhile public art galleries and museums were established or more often grew. The Art Gallery of NSW underwent a series of extensions (1972, 1988). The National Gallery of Victoria opened its new building on St Kilda Road in 1968, and then more recently (2002) another site at Federation Square.
The Australia Council also funded state galleries, touring exhibitions and publications. There were benefits in these funding programs, of course, but there was also the danger that the same artists would end up being funded directly and indirectly through inclusion in exhibitions, publication in subsidised magazines, and so forth. Groupthink tended to spread through the new subculture called the art world, in which interests converged and formerly experimental practitioners ended up in the big companies or even at the funding bodies.
Meanwhile public art galleries and museums were established or more often grew. The Art Gallery of NSW underwent a series of extensions (1972, 1988). The National Gallery of Victoria opened its new building on St Kilda Road in 1968, and then more recently (2002) another site at Federation Square.
The new National Gallery in Canberra was established in 1967 but did not open in its new building until 1982, incidentally setting an example of the conspicuous but inefficient design that would become, with rare exceptions such as the new National Portrait Gallery (2008), a signature of art spaces. In 1991 the Museum of Contemporary Art was established, out of the old Power collection at the University of Sydney, also a symbolic event as the contemporary in its turn was absorbed into museum culture.
Art schools expanded and proliferated, producing, like the universities of the same years, an ever-greater number of poorly trained graduates, some of whom would become the cannon fodder of the art market, while others would end up in ancillary roles in the art world or teaching in schools. Here, too, the curriculum came to reflect the increasing disorientation of contemporary art, with a collapse in the teaching of practical art skills and art history, replaced by an unappealing mixture of ideology and craven submission to fashion. The new national curriculum for art will be, in this respect, no better than the ones it replaces.
So often, if you want to deconstruct such ideological products as school curriculums, you need look no further than the socioeconomic realities from which they emerge. The most striking development in art in this country in the past half-century has been its enormous expansion, but an increase in quantity is never equivalent to an increase in quality. It has become big business, so governments have become interested; museums and galleries have grown more populist to please the politicians.
The expanding market, at first a boon for the dealers’ galleries, has now turned against them, for collectors have been replaced by investors. Art, as several prominent dealers have told me recently, used to be bought by people who loved it; now it is acquired by the new rich who see it as an asset, and who are guided not by people who know about art but by people who know, or think they know, about money. And this has meant that while there is an overheated market for highly priced, “investment-grade” art — including the ever-popular Aboriginal dot painting — there is little support for less expensive work by younger, less well-known or less conformist artists.
The international contemporary, meanwhile, has become a fashion accessory of the corporate world. So where does that leave us? Our society sometimes feels like a kind of post-cultural wasteland of shopping malls, amnesia and narcissistic self-satisfaction based on scraps of superficial sophistication: familiarity with brands or the nomenclature of coffee, wine or food. But it is not quite as bad as that. There are thoughtful people, too, and there is even good art, here and there, and it can appear in unexpected places. Even in a biennale.
Picture: John Brack. Pictured is part of his painting Collins St, 1956, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
With thanks to The Australian
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