Art
Foundational myths
NGV paves the way for future breakaways A. Frances Johnson
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have frequented too often the gift shops of Australian Impressionism. Back in 1985, I mooned over David Davies’ Templestowe twilight scene before purchasing the corresponding tea towel (for my mum), Fire’s On placemats with matching coasters (for my dad), and lost child mugs (for my siblings, only one of whom took offence).We lived equidistant from Eaglemont and Warrandyte, sacred artist sites both. In our loungeroom, a print of Tom Roberts’s herculean Shearing the Rams hung above the recliners, a russet-toned paean to heroic masculine rural labour, divested of grime and abjection. None of us had ever come close to sheep or shearer, though we vaguely understood the sheep’s back as a metaphor of economic prosperity. My mother eventually removed the print to the hard rubbish, after decades of blasting western sun faded it to a fleecy moonrise. In a house with few books, weighty Impressionist catalogues became the fifth leg of the coffee table, largely unread but too good to use as doorstops. Looking at a tower of older catalogues before me today, I can shallowly report that the box-office smash that was Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond ( Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, National Gallery of Victoria, 1985) had a catalogue of modest heft compared to Terence Lane’s whopping Australian Impressionism (Australian National Gallery, 2007) and Anne Gray’s sizeable, magisterial Tom Roberts (NGA, 2018). What sticks in my mind is Victoria Hammond and Juliet Peers’s 1992–93 touring exhibition Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era (Heide Art Gallery and other venues). I remember standing gobsmacked before monumental Sargeantish interiors by Violet Teague (Dian Dreams [Una Falkiner] [1909]) and Alice Bale (Leisure Moments [1902] and Interior [Morning Papers] [c.1913]), feeling that until that point I’d been cheated of something important. The 1980s and 1990s were a watershed time for scholars, curators, and artists to rethink the mythic cultural baggage that had accreted around the so-called Heidelberg School and Australian painting generally. Ann Galbally, Leigh Astbury, Janine Burke, Frances Lindsay, Hammond and Peers, David Hansen, and artists such as Julie Brown-Rrap, Joan Ross, Stephen Bush, Gordon Bennett, and Anne Zahalka variously added significant feminist, postcolonial, and biographical freight to twentieth-century hagiographies of landscape privileging masculine enchantments with rural labour and sentimentalised scenes of settler struggle. Astbury wrote in City Bushmen (1985) that popular interpretations of the Heidelberg era – whereby a group of rebels (rejecting academic tradition embodied by Eugene von Guérard, Nicholas Chevalier and others) became the ‘discoverers’ of a new Australian painting reflecting a golden age of national idealism – were given impetus by the upsurge of nationalistic feeling during and after World War I. This, he argues, has coloured nearly all accounts of the period. In the catalogue of the famed Golden Summers exhibition, Galbally bravely struck at the heart of local cultural myth, point-
ing out that academically trained artists in Brittany, Cornwall, Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere were variously producing luminous, anti-urban naturalist painting. She notes that following World War I, ‘writers were tempted to … see the decades of the 1880s and 1890s as a golden age – a time of pure unsullied Australian nationalism’. Lionel Lindsay and Arthur Streeton, keen to look back from post-Federation vantage points, idealised the complications they’d lived through. The resultant typecasting, Galbally concludes, dominated ‘all aesthetic and historical discussion of the period until the 1970s’. But those queueing for Golden Summers wanted to be welcomed to the gift shop – to take pleasure in pure paint but also to buy into foundational myths of Australian painting. Not for nothing did cartoonist Michael Leunig create his parodic Ramming the Shears (1985), attempting to awaken modern settlers from a golden-summered stupor. Bicentennial ‘celebrations’ loomed; artists began reconsidering landscapes bereft of women and Indigenous protagonists. The above critiques contribute significant bedrock to the NGV’s beautifully researched new exhibition, She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, curated by Anne Gray, former head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, and an NGV team led by Dr Angela Hessen, Curator of Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Named for a sensuous lozenge of a landscape by Tom Roberts (1889), the show elegantly situates the variegated local and European, social and artistic, influences that impacted the evolution of so-called Australian Impressionism, foregrounding urban subject matters and portrait genres alongside landscape. Whisperings of bohemian queerness and nascent suffragism, popular colonial illustration and high colonial landscape art, imported Whistlerian aestheticism, photography, and Barbizon school naturalism are shown as part of a mosaic of influence across boom and depression years, and shifting sands in relation to the enfranchisement of women and Indigenous peoples. To wit, wall texts particularise the First Nations country where settler work was made, a respectful strategy that invites viewers to contest the dispossessing and proleptic assumptions underpinning settler landscape and portrait practices. The catalogue chronology also movingly situates Indigenous and suffragist political gains and losses alongside key biographical information. Roberts and Artur Loureiro painted portraits of Indigenous men, though only Loureiro’s King Barak last of the Yarra Tribe (1900) appears here, with limited contextualisation. As Hannah Presley, NGV curator of Indigenous Art, writes with Sophie Gerhard: ‘the general invisibility of Aboriginal people helped to erase the less appealing aspects of colonial expansion from Australia’s burgeoning national narrative’. The informative texts also recalibrate Australian landscape’s central cultural imaginaries as they pertain to the Heidelberg School.1 The ‘Heidelberg School’ nametag, for starters, is rescinded. As Gray asserts, there was no school. McCubbin never painted in Heidelberg or Eaglemont, though he socialised there; and in the 1880s and, particularly, the 1890s, Roberts, Streeton, and Charles Conder worked extensively in Sydney. Certain women painters daytripped to Melbourne’s artist camps as propriety decreed. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021
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