Portrait 50, Spring 2015

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MAGAZINE OF AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL PORTRAITURE

JULIA GILLARD ON JOAN KIRNER MONASH AND MEMORY BARE REVEALED JULIAN OPIE ART AND AUSTRALIAN IDENTITY WAITING FOR GODOT

SPRING 2015

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Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award 2015

Untitled 2015 Isabelle de Kleine Macquarie Digital Portraiture Young Adult Award 2015 The annual Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award supports artists working with screen-based technology. With the generous support of Macquarie Group Foundation, the National Portrait Gallery offers a $10,000 award to the artist judged to have made the most outstanding screenbased digital portrait. The artist awarded the Macquarie Digital Portraiture Young Adult Award for 2015 is afforded the opportunity to undertake an artist residency at The Edge at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane.

28 August 2015 25 April 2016 Further information portrait.gov.au

03 Observation point Juan Ford 04 Getting Bare The freedom of privacy in Bare: Degrees of undress.

By Penny Grist.

12 Movement is my radar Michael Desmond charts the path of portraiture, arriving at Julian Opie’s digital realm.

16 Confessional conversations The portraiture of Kristin Headlam. By Fiona Gruber.

20 Joan alone Julia Gillard pays poignant tribute to her friend and mentor, Victoria’s first and only female premier, the late Joan Kirner.

22 Lauded legacy Karl James gives short shrift to doubts about the profile of General Sir John Monash.

28 Money for myth Australian character on the market. By Jane Raffan.

34 Fugue in yellow Roger Benjamin explores the intriguing union of Lina Bryans and Alex Jelinek.

37 Waiting for Godot Artist and actors, advancing spasmodically, find their rhythm together.

By Sarah Engledow.

51 Touchy touchy Tony Curran ponders whether our phones can change the course of painting.

Elle Macpherson 2000 Polly Borland type C photograph Purchased 2001 On display in the exhibition Bare: Degrees of undress until 15 November 2015.

56 Hidden in plain sight Grace Carroll on the gendered world of the Wentworths.

62 On show International and national portraiture exhibitions.

64 Hang time Rose Byrne 1

CONTRIBUTORS

PORTRAIT#50 SPRING 2015 Portrait is the magazine of the National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace Parkes Canberra ACT 2600 Australia 02 6102 7000 portrait.gov.au/magazine Editor-in-chief angus.trumble@npg.gov.au

michael desmond (“Movement is my radar” p. 12) is an independent writer and curator.

jane raffan (“Money for myth” p. 28) is a Sydney-based writer, art advisor and valuer.

Editors alistair.mcghie@npg.gov.au stephen.phillips@npg.gov.au

the hon. julia gillard (“Joan alone” p. 20) served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia from 2010-13.

Design brett@portrait.gov.au Rights and permissions trish.kevin@npg.gov.au Photography mark.mohell@npg.gov.au Print adamsprint.com.au

Circle of Friends The Circle of Friends plays an important role in the life and work of the National Portrait Gallery. Friends contribute to the acquisition of works of art, the mounting of visiting exhibitions, continual learning and the publication of new scholarship.

Friends enjoy many benefits through their association with the Gallery including an annual subscription to Portrait magazine and a 10% discount at Portrait Gallery Store Join the Circle of Friends Contact the Membership Coordinator on 02 6102 7022 or join online at portrait.gov.au/site/member_apply.php Sponsorship The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the continuing support of its sponsors to present exhibitions, programs and publications

Distribution publicationsolutions.com.au

penelope grist (“Getting Bare” p. 4) is Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.

dr karl james (“Lauded legacy” p. 22) is a Senior Historian at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra.

portraitgallerystore.com.au has an extensive stock of back issues of Portrait and National Portrait Gallery publications

fiona gruber (“Confessional conversations” p. 16) is a writer and broadcaster on the arts, based in Melbourne and London.

Twitter Join the twitter feed twitter.com/NPG_Canberra Flickr flickr.com/photos/ nationalportraitgallery/ Facebook facebook.com/pages/NationalPortrait-Gallery-Canberra/ Online portrait.gov.au/magazine

dr sarah engledow (“Waiting for Godot” p. 37) is Historian at the National Portrait Gallery.

tony curran (“Touchy touchy” p. 51), is a 2015 Archibald Prize finalist and recently completed his PhD on practices of contemporary portraiture.

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roger benjamin (“Fugue in yellow” p. 34) is an ARC professorial fellow in art history at the University of Sydney.

andrew turley (“Painted ladies” p.62) is an avid researcher/collector, with specific interest in the works of Sidney Nolan, James Gleeson and Euan Macleod.

illustrator alice carroll

grace carroll (“Hidden in plain sight” p. 56) is a PhD candidate at the ANU and Executive Assistant to the Director at the National Portrait Gallery.

ATSI readers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this magazine may contain the images of now deceased Indigenous people

Copyright The material in this publication is under copyright. Excluding fair dealing purposes, such as private study, criticism and review, research and education, no part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted without permission from the National Portrait Gallery. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional and corrections should be directed to trish.kevin@npg.gov.au © 2015 National Portrait Gallery issn 1446 3601

The cover Rose Byrne 2001 (detail) by Karin Catt type C photograph Purchased 2005

portrait 50 spring 2015

The Intermediary 2014 oil on linen Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery

OBSERVATION POINT JUAN FORD

A

portrait is rarely a painting done for the artist themselves. It involves a subject’s agency, and is thus a compromise between what the artist perceives and how the sitter perceives themselves to be.

One must soon ascertain whether the sitter is unselfconscious,

pretentious, vain, whatever. Then there’s the function of the portrait. Is it an official thing, meant to memorialise an occasion, or perhaps a deeply personal depiction of a loved one? The role of the sitter and their character are vital considerations.

I like to construct a ‘straight’ portrait so that it looks naturalistic and effortless, but making something look effortless is often extremely difficult. I usually construct the final painted image from a loose assortment of many impressions, drawings, and photographs, then work hard to integrate them seamlessly. It is important to me to create a portrait as one might experience the person over time, rather than in a photographic snapshot.

When painting a self portrait, some of these factors must be considered,

but ultimately you’re at war with how you perceive yourself to be, and how you perceive what is actually there.

The preconceptions and biases you carry around as defenses must be torn down. The first few self portraits are very confronting, especially when you realise just how you’ve been unconsciously lying to yourself. The benefit is that you can be so much harder on yourself than you can on any other subject, and thus it is far easier to be honest.

So you can imagine that after two decades of painting full time, I’ve developed all manner of complicated ways of thinking about what I do. Take this painting here, The Intermediary. In it, such considerations of portraiture are thrown into a messy amalgam with ruminations

on what it means to meet the medium.

In this case, it is oil paint.

Here the subject of the portrait is partly the self, but mostly it’s a portrait of the medium as an entity. Imagine the process of painting; the mind, body and medium interact to produce a result that cannot be predetermined if you allow chance to play a part. I think that art should aspire to be surprising, especially to its creator. In this work, the figure itself is the medium personified; an unknowable shape shifter, who throws up the unforeseen.

This is a painting about the conflicted role one’s agency plays in creation.

You are simultaneously in control, while being at the mercy of the medium’s whims.

Paintings are always a compromise, no less so than with oneself.

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Getting Bare the freedom of privacy in bare: degrees of undress. by penny grist.

Bareness is deliberate. ‘Bare’ is the word we use for the exposed parts of the body that are supposed to be naked – feet, hands and babies’ bottoms.

Bareness is a chosen degree of dress somewhere between the clothed public self and unclothed private self.

Modern portraiture is a public form, but reveals something of the sitter’s private life. In Bare: Degrees of undress, the National Portrait Gallery has brought together almost all of the portraits in its collection where sitters appear in degrees of undress. Within the exhibition, the portraits are arranged according to the role that bareness plays in enunciating something about the sitter’s humanity or identity.

This article examines seven portraits within Bare, and considers how they negotiate a sense of ‘public privacy’ – the revelation in a public portrait of those parts of the body and elements of life usually located in the private sphere. Sexuality, intimacy, personality, anxiety and imagination

AND the weaver said,

Speak to us of Clothes.

And he answered: Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful.

And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain. (from The Prophet

by Kahlil Gibran) 4

have traditionally dwelt in private life, and been embodied in nakedness.

In this sphere of the unconcealed body, emotion and hope, doubt and uncertainty appear on the surface of modern portraiture that seeks to reveal something of sitters’ inner lives.

The notion of privacy itself is popularly regarded as ‘under siege.’

In his introduction to the fifth volume of the landmark study, A History of Private Life (1991), Antoine Prost observed: ‘Private life is not something given in nature from the beginning of time. It is a historical reality …. The boundaries of private life are not laid down once and for all.’ Jose Antonio Vargas observed in his New Yorker profile of the founder of Facebook, ‘Zuckerberg’s business model depends on our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display.’

Zuckerberg himself frequently speaks of the new ‘social norm’ of sharing.

And in 2008, Clive James postulated that a ‘private life may be becoming impossible to lead.’

In portraiture, at least, sharing is a designed, controlled and constructed revelation. This may explain the fact that almost ninety per cent of the portraits in Bare represent sportspeople, dancers, actors and musicians – society’s performers.

It may also explain the complete absence of any sense of shame or embarrassment in the exhibition.

Bareness is not as refined a garment as the nudity historian Seymour Howard called ‘the most subtle and sophisticated form of clothing’.

Nor is bareness as spiritual or primal as the nakedness that is ‘under all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh … contextured in the Loom of Heaven’ as Thomas Carlyle’s fictional Herr Teufelsdröckh described it in Sartor Resartus. In portraiture, bareness is a costume for a public performance of privacy.

Untitled #21/09 (after Ricci, 1700; featuring Matthew Mitcham) 2009 Ross Watson oil on board Gift of the artist 2010 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Matthew Mitcham is cast in The Fall of Phaeton Ross Watson places the smooth, sculpted, athletic, nude body of Olympic diver Matthew Mitcham in the world of Sebastiano Ricci’s 18th century Fall of Phaeton. Art historian Michael Jacobs noted that artists from the Renaissance onwards often turned to ‘classical mythology as a fresh, humorous and erotic alternative to religious art’. In an ingenious appropriation of this tradition, Watson embraces the wild ambiguity of classical allusion. Mitcham appears with Phaeton, the son of Helios, who hurtles earthwards, out of control after insisting on driving his father’s sunchariot across the skies, the victim of youthful overreach. When the portrait was painted in 2009, the bravery of youth sustained the dramatic parallel.

Aged twenty, Mitcham was one of a handful of openly gay athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. ‘Being in an Olympic Village is like being in a utopian prison’ Mitcham told journalist Laurence Watts. ‘Everyone is happy, ripped, buzzed and beautiful.’

In the 10m platform diving event, Mitcham received the highest single-dive score in Olympic history.

It was his sun-chariot moment. His arm scarred from teenage self-harm, Mitcham has long struggled with clinical depression. In private, the following years saw his fall from the heights of Olympic stardom to a destructive drug-addiction, revealed in Mitcham’s 2012 autobiography, Twists and Turns, and his one-man cabaret show of the same name, touring in 2015. A portrait can become a public scene into which the rest of the private script can be read. It is the metaphor of personal resilience that is almost prescient: as young Phaeton falls to the earth to be buried by nymphs, Mitcham appears to soar upwards. portrait 50 spring 2015

Naomi Watts 2003 Peter Brew-Bevan type C photograph Gift of the artist 2004 Summer 1986 1986 Janet Dawson oil on canvas Purchased 2000 Part gift of Michael Boddy

Naomi Watts stars as a Victorian innocent In this portrait of actor Naomi Watts, photographer Peter Brew-Bevan plays on the nineteenth century genrepainting standard of the young lady posed dreamily in her boudoir. The Victorian obsession with innocence carried a hint of eroticism. Watts has been often cast in grim, intense thrillers and horror movies – ‘Yeah, grimerama’, Watts agreed with one journalist, also expressing the view that confronting one’s private fears on screen has some value. The Victorian era was the golden age of the ‘sensation novel,’ and the ghost story in which private lives harboured fearful secrets – these books were a guilty pleasure for Victorian ladies. Brew-Bevan recalled Watts’ instant engagement with the concept of the portrait shoot and was struck by ‘her innate beauty [and] her fragility …

She is very petite – almost childlike.’

While Watts, in a state of deshabille, is utterly immersed in the scene, she looks straight into the camera as a Victorian heroine never would.

Michael Boddy appears as the Venus of Urbino and Olympia Michael Boddy’s performance of a classic art historical pose in this deeply personal, affectionate portrait by his wife, Janet Dawson, reminds us that even the most intimate portrait is a scene of public privacy. In 1538, Titian painted the Venus of Urbino, an allegory of marriage with the goddess of love reclining, a dog at her feet symbolising fidelity. A courtesan held this same pose in Manet’s Olympia; the defiant reality of an individual woman sitting in place of an allegorical goddess provoked scandal in 1865.

These allusions are apt in the portrait, Summer 1986. Michael Boddy, director, playwright, actor and columnist was a unique and trailblazing figure in 1970s Australian new wave theatre. As a modern Australian allegory of marriage, this figure in spectacles, socks and slippers on a hot summer day could not be more perfect.

Dawson collaborated on Boddy’s productions as a designer, and in 1973 won the Archibald prize with his portrait, clothed. Boddy once said of his life with Dawson: ‘Our marriage is one long conversation.’

Boddy explained how Summer came about: ‘It was painted alla prima in one session on a very hot day. I was asleep on a sheet on the studio couch. Janet, my wife, came in to get a large stretched canvas to do a landscape. I said it was big enough to get all of me into it, plus the dog; a human landscape.’ Boddy’s ‘only stipulation’ is interesting: ‘I should be awake, conscious of the viewer, and not all welcoming’. He was the lead actor in this warm and honest private scene.

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Pat Painting No 1 1983 Richard Larter synthetic polymer paint on canvas Gift of Patrick Corrigan am 2008 © Richard Larter Licensed by Viscopy 2015

Pat Larter embraces the role of an artist’s nude model This collaborative production within the context of a personal relationship is Richard Larter’s portrait of his wife, performance artist Pat Larter, posed in front of another of Larter’s paintings.

Richard Larter painted thousands of nudes, using his wife as his model, over many decades. The work blurs the bounds between the contemporary art of the nude, performance art and portraiture. In an oral history, Larter recalled: ‘I started drawing nudes, using my wife as a model; I was virtually doing a private record of my wife – I enjoy drawing nudes, and then there’s the perverse side of it – I know that they upset people, they upset my mother, and she was the first person to be upset, and then as I started to exhibit and send pictures away, people started writing and saying things about the nudes, and then I think this made 8

me a little more daring, so instead of being discreet nudes they became very indiscreet nudes. I suppose I’m healthily sexual, as most people are, but unlike most people I don’t feel ashamed of it … ’ In 2005, writing in Politics and Culture, Joanna Mendelssohn observed that Pat’s performances within the works shocked because of their ‘unsentimental sexuality’. In a 1992 Art and Australia article, Mendelssohn quotes Larter: ‘Getting a likeness that can actually say something … You can only do that with somebody you know really, really well. You’ve got to have an interaction between the model and the painter, and the only person I could be assured of is Pat.’ Among Richard Larter’s favourite quotes, recorded on the back of an envelope for curator Christopher Chapman in 1995, is Pat’s question: ‘If we live in our heads, why is the voyeur looking out?’

Large Head 1993 Lucian Freud etching on paper Collection of Karen McLeod Adair and Anthony Adair © The Lucian Freud Archive / Bridgeman Images

Leigh Bowery performs Lucian Freud’s Large Head This portrait of a performance artist, on loan to the National Portrait Gallery, is an etching of Leigh Bowery by British artist Lucian Freud. Humans are ‘two-legged animals without feathers’ according to Diogenes Laërtius’ quotation, attributed to Plato in the third century AD. For Freud, bareness is an animal costume: ‘I’m really interested in them as animals. Part of liking to work from them naked is for that reason.

Because I can see more … One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings.’

Freud rarely titles his naked portraits with the name of the sitter – Bowery’s portrait is titled Large Head. At the same time, Freud’s portraits portray viscerally individual people, as he has said: ‘Human, tired, they are the thing which they themselves feel is essential to them.’ Martin Hammer observes that ‘Freud is driven not just to evoke the aura of the individual nude people, but also to attain a more fundamental idea of the naked truth.’

Androgynous pop star Boy George, for whom he designed costumes, called Bowery ‘modern art on legs.’ Bowery was a designer, musician, artist, performer and the face of the London Club ‘Taboo’.

Having grown up in Sunshine, Melbourne, Bowery became famous in the creative fringe of the 1980s London clubbing scene.

Transgressive, exuberant, shameless, Bowery was ‘creating a new being’, as William Lieberman put it. Freud met him in 1990 at Anthony d’Offay Gallery, following a performance piece where Bowery dressed and preened behind a oneway mirror. He sat frequently for Freud over the next four years, before Bowery died of an AIDS-related illness, aged only thirty-three. ‘I realised the fact that he was a performer meant that whatever he did, he was still in a sense performing,’ reflected Freud, ‘because of his physical awareness, which was extraordinary. And very articulated. And – huge as he was – very delicate.’ These quiet, strippedback portraits are deeply moving. In his survey of Freud’s work, Sebastian Smee highlighted Freud’s ‘understanding of other people’s privacy, their essential solitude.’ portrait 50 spring 2015

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David Walsh as the director of a controversial new museum and Germaine Greer plays the playful sixty-one year-old lady A quote from Friedrich Schiller is the inscription on Gustav Klimt’s 1899 allegorical painting, Nuda Veritas (‘naked truth’): ‘If you can’t please everybody with your deeds and your art, please only few. To please many is bad.’ It would be an equally apt inscription on both Polly Borland’s portrait of Germaine Greer and Andres Serrano’s portrait of David Walsh – two of the barest sitters in Bare. Their costumes of bareness match their deliberately cultivated personas – controversial, uncompromisingly unconventional and outspoken. As if to emphasise the artifice, Greer keeps her earrings on and Walsh his glasses.

Taken in New York in 2010, this portrait of David Walsh by Andres Serrano was the last image in the book Monanisms, published to coincide with the opening of his Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania. Mona is a public art museum displaying Walsh’s private art and antiquities collection, and Walsh courted outrage in interviews describing it as ‘a secular temple’ and ‘a subversive adult Disneyland’. According to some accounts, he was momentarily disappointed when it was embraced more than reviled. A naked portrait of its founder could not have been a better metaphor for this exercise in making the private public.

One of America’s most mythologised contemporary artists, Serrano has said: 10

‘Both my supporters and my critics seem to be disappointed when I am not especially provocative.’ His 1992 work The Morgue (Blood Transfusion Resulting in AIDS) is in the Mona collection. As is the case for Lucian Freud, Serrano’s subjects are both emphatically individuals and ‘a way of exploring ideas’: ‘All of my life, all of my career, I’ve used portraiture,’ Serrano told an interviewer, ‘as a way of looking at religion, politics, race, poverty.’

Richard Flanagan wrote in The New Yorker that Mona: ‘is a museum … of doubt and questioning, of despair and wonder … Certain only of its own uncertainty, it touches something of now.’

‘I’m not sure that art is so important for me,’ Walsh told Flanagan. ‘It is the relentless dissecting of myself to bring me closer to an understanding of why I do what I do that seems to be important to me.’ One reason Walsh, a mathematically brilliant master gambler, gives for using his winnings to found Mona, is ‘to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark.’ Since this portrait was taken, Walsh has become publicly more earnest about his achievement – an earnestness Serrano managed to capture in this portrait.

The 1970s feminist movement’s catch-cry, ‘the personal is political,’ sought to collapse a distinction that implied entrenched, gendered power relations. ‘Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice,’ declared Greer

in what was to become, world-wide, the best known work of second-wave feminism, The Female Eunuch, published in 1970. Bareness was Greer’s preferred costume for her photoshoot: ‘It was my idea to take my clothes off … because I did not fancy being portrayed on my bed like an old lady in a nursing home in me [sic] cardigan.’ Quoted in Polly Borland’s Australians exhibition catalogue, she continued: ‘I don’t usually have any clothes on in that room and I don’t have any clothes on for a good half of my life.

The photograph is really quite childlike.

I think there is a certain amount of playfulness in it. It might surprise people to discover that sixty-one year-old ladies can be playful.’

Greer has spent a lifetime engaged with private issues publically, accentuating discomfort to provoke debate. ‘Portrait photography reveals something about the nature of being alive,’ says Polly Borland. ‘The best portraiture is when you get beneath the skin of someone.’ Borland captures more than Greer’s cheeky expression and predictable bareness, touching on something more private. Greer told Andrew Denton in 2003: ‘principally, I think happiness comes from being un-self-conscious – just forgetting about yourself.’ Her portrait is more than a public performance; it hints at a personal and quite conventional belief about life.

David Walsh 2010 Andres Serrano typc C photograph Purchased 2014 Professor Germaine Greer 1999 Polly Borland type C photograph Purchased 2001

A public privacy The clear control over one’s own exposure is one of the most emphatic statements of self that can be made. The intersection of privacy and control resonates throughout Bare, and bareness becomes an assertion of freedom to wear this costume.

In A History of Private Life, Antoine Prost sees the modern sense of privacy as contingent upon control over the self: ‘self-realisation crucially involves the freedom to grant or to withhold access to oneself or the capacity to reveal or conceal aspects of one’s being as one chooses.’ He quotes philosopher Jeffrey Reiman’s assertion that ‘a precondition to personhood’ is ‘an exclusive moral right to “shape” your own destiny.’ As technology blurs or erodes the public-private divide, perhaps the metaphor of sitting for a portrait in the deliberate costume of the bare fortifies the inner sanctum of the self. portrait 50 spring 2015

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Movement is my radar michael desmond charts the path of portraiture, arriving at julian opie’s digital realm.

Kiera with pendant 2005 computer film on 40” LCD screen © Julian Opie

For centuries, portraiture has been associated with the hand rendered image, laboriously painted in coloured muds suspended in organic mediums, either plant oil or animal glue, or drawn with soft stone or burnt sticks; indeed, it has incorporated techniques and technologies as old as human culture. The invention of photography at the beginning of the nineteenth century changed that, with machinerecorded portraits providing greater objectivity and realism, and a faster and cheaper process. And now, after nearly two centuries of photography, there has been another revolution that is just as profound, yet still essentially unexplored, with the advent of digital technologies.

Julian with t-shirt 2005 computer film on 46” LCD screen © Julian Opie

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Alex, bassist 2000 Damon, singer 2000 Dave, drummer 2000 Graham, guitarist 2000 C-type prints National Portrait Gallery, London © Julian Opie

In today’s digital world, what might a portrait look like? Most, to be fair, continue the fine art traditions of yore, or extend the tropes of photography, but with the understanding that photography is no longer bound by objectivity and can be manipulated beyond reality as easily as painting.

While oil on canvas or cast bronze sculpture were the prized mediums of art in the past, the new mediums are no longer exclusive, but the ubiquitous tools of twenty-first century domestic and office culture – computers, screens and software. One of the masters of the new technologies and most celebrated exponent of digital portraiture is British artist Julian Opie.

Julian Opie had been a force in British art since the 80s with his funky hand-painted sculpture of common objects, but the cleanly designed portraits announced in the stunning

Warhol-inspired portrait of British band Blur, for the cover of their album Best of Blur, characteristically drawn using sharp black outline to separate areas of uninflected colour, became his signature style. Like his Pop Art predecessors, Opie’s work draws on popular culture, utilising the clean line and bold colours of signage, billboards and newspaper advertisements, as well as the arresting clarity of comics (Hergé, creator of Tintin, is much admired by Opie) and Japanese woodblock prints.

The example of Patrick Caulfield and Michael Craig-Martin (for whom Opie worked for a short time as a studio assistant) may also have been relevant to Opie’s development, as both of the older artists depicted simple objects in black outline.

Opie’s work simplifies his environment to graphic, outlined forms that are simultaneously schematic and individual. His portraits of the rockers in Blur, or musician Bryan Adams, Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve and others are far from realistic: eyes are mere dots, two smaller dots indicate nostrils, and the mouth is an equally perfunctory affair – simply a pair of lines. Despite the severe economy that excludes detail, these portraits are recognisable and exude personality, surmised, rather than dictated, from clothing, pose and gesture. Opie’s simplifications first began when he wanted a contemporary image of the figure: ‘I consciously looked around for a way in which I could draw [people] and it started by buying the aluminium symbols for male and female toilets, and I looked at them and thought I could combine, as I often do, the impersonal with the personal.’ The stripped back approach was eventually applied to portraits, making it easier to create the series of moving images, for example, Kiera with pendant 2005, shown at the National Portrait Gallery in the exhibition, Present Tense: An imagined grammar of portraiture in the digital age, in 2010.

Kiera with pendant is similar to a group of portraits made by Opie, all seemingly static line drawings which surprise with limited movement. In these screen-based portraits, eyes would blink, jewellery would glitter, a pendant might swing. One of the most compelling of this type is the self portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The movement of portrait 50 spring 2015

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the artist in this near life size image is very subtle, barely apparent in this gallery of painted portraits. He blinks occasionally, and his chest fractionally expands; the slight movements convey less the appearance of life in what is clearly a cartoon like drawing, and more of an impression of realism through detail. Opie has said that he got the idea for the limited movement when watching video games – the sprite for Lara Croft, protagonist for the popular Tomb Raider games, when left unattended, was programmed to perform a simple routine of idle movements that suggest a person at rest. In Opie’s digital portraits, the twitch of an eyebrow, the movement of an earring or the ghost of a smile maintain the attention of the eye of the viewer to the almost schematic 14

Sissi 2014 continuous computer animation on 70” LCD screen © Julian Opie Imogen 2013 continuous computer animation on 55” LCD screen © Julian Opie

face, and somehow convey something personal in an impersonal image.

The popular gauge of quality in a portrait was that ‘the eyes seem to follow you around the room’, parodied in B-grade horror films where living eyes lurk behind an inert canvas to look back at the viewer. Opie’s portraits don't belong on the walls of the Adams Family home or the halls of Hogwarts; there is no creepy sensation of the uncanny. ‘I have drawn a lot of portraits’, says Opie. The format has been passport style close-up. I wanted the bare essence of a face, a presence.

‘However, I am always looking for ways to expand on the logic of the works I have made in order to make new works.’

Opie’s logic maintains the essence, but adds the signs of life without losing the appearance of artifice. In her 1964 essay

‘Notes on “Camp”’ American writer Susan Sontag attempted to define the change in attitude regarding art and culture in Western society. According to Sontag, in our increasingly unnatural world, we ‘see everything in quotation marks’ and ‘convert the serious into the frivolous’. Opie’s work looks like art, not a person.

His adoption of the strategies and technologies of twenty-first century marketing and advertising give his work a post-Pop sensibility. In their art, Pop artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein echoed their own times, the 1960s, using images of commercial products and other objects in the contemporary environment, depicting them with the production means of the day, Ben Day dots and screen prints. portrait 50 spring 2015

Opie treats the environment around him as the product, packaged and commercialised, and in turn uses the digital media of his day – digital photography, computer drawing and animation, LED screens, even lenticular cells – for his works. Critic Dave Hickey has stated: ‘Painting isn’t dead except as a major art. From now on it will be a discourse of adepts, like jazz.’ Opie still paints (and he collects Old Master paintings) but his work over the last two decades has come from a love affair with the digital world.

His portraits start as digital photographs, easily transformed and altered in computer applications.

‘I play with images and then I define them as objects, so the portraits exist [only as] digital files, and at that point I don’t deem them to be art works yet.’

George 2014 continuous computer animation on 70” LCD screen © Julian Opie Marina in purple shawl 2010 continous computer animation on 55” LCD screen © Julian Opie

By tracing the photographs, Opie reduces features to essential lines and broad colours, poster-like and ready for a variety of outputs including animation.

While the tiny actions are captivating, the acute stylisation of the portrait makes the subtle movements – the blink, the twinkle, the smile – something of a shock. Equally, however, the slight moves stylise the simple rhythms of life, announcing the fugitive and fragile aspects of the human machine in the digital age.

Has Opie, in his use of contemporary digital technologies, taken portraiture on a new road? We live in an imagesaturated, multi-media environment.

The digital world today seems a heaving sea of information technologies, from the agitating LEDs of Times Square, to Twitter feeds, Instagram and instant

messaging, email and a host of image, sound and text downloads used to create virtual environments and ondemand entertainment. It sometimes feels like the institutions of mass media, commerce and advertising are now occupying much of the terrain formerly held by traditional culture and fine art.

Opie works within this sphere, adapting his work to the culture of contemporary production.

Opie’s shy animated gestures seem contradictory, given the static and oddly impersonal faces that he makes, each portrait as bold and as confident as a marketing campaign. Yet Opie doesn’t sever ties with the past: art and the ideal are linked; art and society are equally linked. Julian Opie teases out the flicker of a smile within the electronic noise of today.

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Confessional conversations the portraiture of kristin headlam. by fiona gruber.

The domestic domain of artist Kristin Headlam is both very private and curiously accessible; anyone looking at images of her work, readily available on the internet, can peruse a side-on view of her sitting room, a corner of her studio, a full frontal of the walled backyard.

Her paintings contain other paintings, so an image such as About the House showing the artist at an easel and her partner, the poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe at the kitchen sink, also includes, on the back wall, a portrait of Headlam’s late father as an old man.

Another portrait of Wallace-Crabbe, recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, reveals her studio as stage set; she’s placed him against its interior north wall seated in an upholstered chair, a blue and white striped cup and metal coffee pot within easy reach, a book on his lap. The light streams in through a window, giving a view to lush foliage, a garden trellis and bluestone pavers. This garden is one she has painted many times; the subject’s 16

jumper, lettuce green, is a colour I discover crops up in several garments in both their wardrobes.

On my first visit to her house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, I therefore feel that I am entering familiar terrain. Only the dog in the painting is different; Pamphlet has died, and Basil, a red heeler cross, has taken his place on the sofa.

Headlam’s reputation as a portraitist rests on a mix of commissioned works, private explorations and prizes. The former includes a portrait of Dame Elizabeth Murdoch that hangs in the dining room of Trinity College at the University of Melbourne, and another of the distinguished research scientist Jacques Miller for the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, also at the University of Melbourne.

In 2000 she won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the country’s (and world’s) most lucrative portraiture award, for her painting Self Portrait in Bed with the Animals.

Animals crop up in several other group portraits; a study of her art dealer and friend Charles Nodrum with his

About the house 2007 Kristin Headlam oil on linen Artist’s collection Image courtesy of the artist and Robert Colvin

wife, daughters and four pets and The Burns Boys with their long haired collies reveal a gently humorous sensitivity to group dynamics, and the pre-eminence of pets as familiars and envoys.

We have coffee in recognisable cups at an identifiable table. Headlam has agreed to take part in a ten-part Radio National series, ‘Australian Portraits,’ that I am making with the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Angus Trumble, as co-host.

The project needs a first-hand sitter experience. Fortuitously, Headlam had already indicated that she was looking for subjects to, as she phrased it, get her eye back in, so I have put my hand up.

I’m not without trepidation. There’s something unnerving about being scrutinised; the old fashioned term, ‘to take a portrait’ taps into atavistic notions of souls captured, something lost. Another worry, even though I felt myself realistic as to my middle-aged charms, was that vanity might manifest itself in unexpected ways. I realised that although I was more concerned about looking intelligent than attractive (to be honest, I hoped for that too) on that first day I took extra care with my make-up (laughable in hindsight) and the colour of my jacket in relation to my skin tone (a much smarter consideration).

As she leads me to the garden studio, Headlam says that she isn’t interested in capturing anything metaphysical. portrait 50 spring 2015

‘I don’t think of the soul at all,’ she says, ‘only what the face is doing. The soul can take care of itself.’

She also paraphrases John Singer Sargent by adding, wryly, that a portrait is a painting where there’s something wrong with the mouth.

It’s a prescient comment; many artists prefer their sitters to be quiet; Headlam likes them to talk. It makes painting the mouth particularly difficult, she concedes, but the benefits outweigh the inconvenience.

The studio is a cool white space, with a metal plan chest, several easels and a storage area upstairs, crammed with canvases (I notice a full length study of the musician and Cat Empire co-founder Felix Riebl).

Downstairs, one wall is studded with pen and ink sketches, studies for a series of 40 prints to illustrate WallaceCrabbe’s verse novel The Universe Looks Down. Another features similar sized portraits to my own, life-sized heads against the white of the canvas. I recognise two poets: Melbourne based Lisa Gorton and the UK writer William Eaves. He wears a frown.

Whereas her larger portraits are usually full of artefacts and settings that reflect the sitter, these are stark. If you cover the whole canvas, you’re creating a complex illusion, she says, but with these studies there is no artifice; ‘this is a person made from paint,’ she adds.

There’s a much more conversational tone to her private projects and domestic commissions, she explains. With formal ones, she doesn’t allow herself the same liberties or playfulness. She would rather work from life than from photographs and insists on spending time with even the busiest sitters. Not always, though; she mentions a portrait of the former Tasmanian premier, Harry Holgate, commissioned by the Tasmanian Parliament and painted post mortem. ‘They were catching up,’ she comments dryly.

Headlam’s chalked crosses onto the floor to mark the legs of the chair I’m to sit on. I get a tick of approval for my muted greeny-blue jacket and scarf and am reminded of something I had read about William Dobell’s portraits of the cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubenstein, how she kept on appearing with complete changes of clothing and sackfuls of gaudy jewels. Throughout our several sittings, I keep to the same costume.

It’s time for business. Headlam uses small, flat brushes and squeezes oil paint on to a clean glass plate in tiny daubs and in a muted range of hues –‘too many colours make me nauseous.’ She confesses to a weakness for yellows and titanium grey. No, she doesn’t always mix every colour from scratch. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ she says laughing, but then adds, in a typical self-mocking way, ‘I feel by some measurements I’m not a real artist. But then self-doubt is a necessary part of most artists’ personality.’

A friend described having his portrait painted as akin to visiting the dentist. He had to sit still; having been

Chris Wallace-Crabbe 2012 Kristin Headlam oil on linen

invited to chat, I become a babbling stream of anecdote, and, as the sittings continue, alarmingly confessional.

Headlam also chats, about politics, people, art and her own life, all in a dry, witty and self-deprecating manner. She takes her work seriously, she reveals, but not necessarily herself.

Daily life is a settled routine centred around work, with a swim in the open air Brunswick pool each morning before heading for the studio at about ten. There’s a break for lunch when she catches up with Wallace-Crabbe, and a long afternoon walk with the dog.

Sometimes she plays piano duets with 17

Andrew and David Burns with Penny and Maggie 2007 Kristin Headlam oil on linen Private collection Image courtesy of the artist and Robert Colvin

Portrait of Jacques Miller 2011 Kristin Headlam oil on linen Walter and Eliza Hall Institute Image courtesy of the artist and Robert Colvin

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a friend. This is her schedule. If she is kept from her studio for too long, she says, she gets fractious.

Although portraiture is only part of her practice, she keeps returning to the face.

‘Painting is a way of pinning things down’ she says, and as she starts sketching my features onto the canvas, her main consideration is the way the muscles work on the face, how the shadows collect under the nose and chin, how the blues and greens work with the pinks of my face.

It’s hard to pinpoint which faces appeal and which don’t, she says.

Personality plays an important role, and also what she calls solidity, sculptural values.

Wallace-Crabbe has defined Headlam’s style as novelistic, in the sense of developing a character over time. In part, she says, she agreed with his summary; in the to and fro of conversation, there is plenty of time to probe the psyche.

She reveals her own psyche too; the four years she spent working for a pair of psychoanalysts and the years of analysis that she underwent were useful, she says, for hearing her own voice at a deeper level. It also helped her overcome a fear of painting that had its roots in a fear of failure.

‘I was a lousy student as I was frightened of working hard and discovering that I was only average,’ she confesses.

Headlam was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1953, the only child of an architectural draughtsman and his wife, a homemaker who had been given a place at the University of Melbourne to study architecture, but instead had married at nineteen and remained frustrated, says Headlam, for the rest of her life.

An uncle, Alan Mcintyre, was a painter and a great encourager, and her ambitions were given a fillip when, at the age of eleven, she won the Brisbane Courier Mail junior art prize on the theme of ‘Me Doing What I Like Best.’

Apparently this was swimming underwater – ‘I must have been lying in my teeth,’ adds Headlam.

Although she’s been painting portraits since student days – she followed up a degree in Fine Arts and English at the University of Melbourne with study in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts – Headlam says she is still exploring a language of portraiture, portrait 50 spring 2015

and it’s taken her many years to discover the kind of portrait she wants to create.

At the start, she says, she didn’t have a language, ‘a portrait voice.’

So who were her influences along the way?

She mentions Velasquez, Van Dyck, Degas, Manet, Hockney and ‘everyone goes through a Lucian Freud phase.’

‘I was obsessed by the way he used paint, its lustre and weight, the way his heads looked like lumps of flesh.’

The artist who comes up most in conversation is the American painter, Alice Neel, whose portraits of friends, fellow artists and the famous in New York over fifty years from the 1930s are full of psychological insights and wit. These are characters, comments Headlam, who leap off the canvas as total personalities.

‘You look at them and never question that it’s an accurate portrait, convincingly capturing all the neuroses and character traits.’

Later I see a portrait Headlam has painted of the writer and comedian Catherine Deveny, naked, laughing.

It’s very Neel.

Headlam says her portraits are part of a practice and body of work concerned with modern history painting –‘I’m the sort of artist who might have painted Napoleon on his horse’. This work is often based on media images and concerned with the interface between the private and the public, the public and the political.

She’s made works based on images of riots, raids and bombings, events that, once removed from the urgent glare of current news, assume an exaggerated distance from the present.

The Water Bearers 2003 showing lines of women in a ravaged African landscape, has a biblical quality; another series, based on photographs of brides, looks instantly dated even though the events recorded are relatively recent.

Handover 2008 was inspired by a newspaper photograph showing former prime minster John Howard and his wife Janette in a seemingly relaxed tête à tête with Kevin Rudd and his wife Therese Rein. The portrait pulses discomfort.

These strange tableaux, their staginess, and the insights they give into the theatre of power are the elements that interest her.

In the studio, the diffused light delays the sense of time passing.

A couple of hours have passed, the portrait is taking shape. It is time to stop for the day.

I come around the easel to have a look. I’m relieved to see the eyes look intelligent behind an excellent pair of spectacles. Headlam’s been straightforward about the messy hair

Artist and sitter with Portrait of Fiona Gruber 2015 Image: Robert Colvin Portrait of Fiona Gruber 2015 Kristin Headlam oil on linen Private collection Image courtesy of the artist and Robert Colvin

and chubby chin, and the mouth is in the process of becoming; I like what I see. It’s not there yet but it’s captured something of me, I feel. But who am I to judge?

Headlam is also tentatively satisfied, at least for now. She’s her harshest critic, she says, but also a quester after truth.

Sometimes she gets excited, ‘in a bit of a daze,’ and feels she’s pinning something down, but she says that every portrait involves feeling her way.

‘I want to find out how to do it, to be comfortable, but I never am,’ she says; ‘too much certainty can lead to repetition.’

Getting it right is important, but ‘a little bit wrong can also be good.’

‘If it speaks to you and you have expressed what that is, then you’ve achieved a form of communication.’

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Joan Kirner c. 1990

by Rennie Ellis Purchased 2006 Š Rennie Ellis Photographic Archive

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portrait 50 spring 2015

Joan alone julia gillard pays poignant tribute to her friend and mentor, victoria’s first and only female premier, the late joan kirner.

It is common for those who have served at the highest levels of politics, business, the law, the military, the trade union movement and civil society to spend their twilight years reminiscing.

Sometimes, a certain condescension creeps in, an occasional reflection that today’s generation is not as good as they were in their heyday.

Joan Kirner was the absolute stand out against this trend. Every day of her life post politics was enlivened by a spirit of generosity to those who walked, and sometimes stumbled, on the trail she blazed.

She did not want to be put on a pedestal and celebrated as the first woman to be Premier of Victoria.

Rather, Joan wanted to have her feet firmly planted on the ground and to be surrounded by the many, to see women in politics everywhere.

Not given to reminiscing, Joan did not want to tell stories of her own achievements. Rather, she wanted to support the women who came next so she could look on with awe at their many achievements.

This spirt of generosity was not simply an aura surrounding Joan.

Nothing so ephemeral would have satisfied this ever-practical woman.

Rather, she was determined to do everything in her power to multiply the number of women in politics and to amplify their achievements.

For Joan, her generosity of spirit manifested as a relentless driving force within her.

She both inspired and required others to share her passion for change for women. Joan cheerfully combined a loving grandmother’s warmth with a sergeant major’s ability to issue orders and expect results. You enjoyed being with her, even as she compiled a list of tasks you really had to do.

The power of her purpose changed the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the nation. It is simply impossible to imagine that the ALP would have reinvented itself as the party for women without Joan’s crusade for the Affirmative Action rule. Similarly, an organisation like EMILY’s List, women supporting pro-equity, pro-diversity and pro-choice Labor women, could not have been imagined or implemented without Joan’s dreams and knack for getting things done.

True believers and community members enjoy a more equal, equitable Australia because of the life she lived.

Indeed, Joan’s belief in equality for women and fairness for all Australians formed the golden thread that ran

Not given to reminiscing, Joan did not want to tell stories of her own achievements.

Rather, she wanted to support the women who came next so she could look on with awe at their many achievements. throughout her life and work. It brought together her advocacy for equity in education, as the leader of parents’ groups, with her change agenda as the Victorian Minister for Education.

Even in the hardest days of government,

she held fast to these values and made decisions shaped by them.

Joan’s life and leadership also embraced the beauty of nature as well as her belief in the essential goodness of human beings. From enjoying camping to making far-reaching political decisions to protect species at risk and care for our land, Joan brought change to our sense of place and how to live well.

Joan’s spirit and humour never failed her, but at far too young an age her body did. Frequently in pain, with her range of activities curtailed, Joan nevertheless wrung everything she could out of life.

Remembering her brings so many images into sharp focus.

I see her as Premier, walking through a building site and hitting her head sickeningly hard on a low beam.

Indomitable, she simply walks on.

Wearing leathers and belting out ‘I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll’, a woman quick to laugh and completely prepared to laugh at herself.

Dancing on the floor of ALP National Conference, infused with delight at the Affirmative Action rule being adopted.

Sitting at a meeting around her dining room table, the place where so many women came to be a part of Joan’s plots and plans to change our world.

The older Joan, sitting in her chair, sending earthy emails from her iPad. As Prime Minister, I was the recipient of many a blistering observation about those who were giving me trouble.

The younger Joan, before she was Premier, visiting her son Dave, with whom I shared a student household.

I see Joan who loved her family beyond measure, glowing with delight as new grandchildren joined her and Ron’s fold.

Love is infinite. Joan could always find space in her heart for another young woman to mentor, another middle aged woman to urge onwards, another older woman to share experiences with as the journey drew to an end.

But time is limited, short, precious.

Joan’s time passed too quickly and ended too soon. She wanted additional years so she could do more, love more, think more.

There will always be a frustration, even an anger, that she was denied that time.

But there will also always be a joy for the privilege it was to know her, the way she shaped so many lives, including mine, and her far-reaching, hugely positive impact on our nation.

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Lieut-General John Monash sitting for his portrait in the studio of the artist James Quinn, London 1919 Unknown photographer photograph State Library of Victoria

Lauded legacy karl james gives short shrift to doubts about the profile of general sir john monash.

On 8 October 1931, after months of failing health, General Sir John Monash died from coronary vascular disease in his home, ‘Iona’, in Toorak, Melbourne.

He was sixty-six. Three days later, an estimated 300,000 people assembled under a calm grey Melbourne sky to honour the late general in a state funeral.

Monash’s body had lain in state for two and a half days in Queen’s Hall in Victoria’s Parliament House before being escorted in a funeral procession past the Shrine of Remembrance, where a special ceremony was held, to Brighton Cemetery. Monash was buried with full military honours in a Jewish service on 11 October. Speaking on behalf of the Federal Government, General Sir Harry Chauvel described Monash as one of the country’s most eminent citizens and servants: ‘We mourn Sir John Monash as a great soldier and a great citizen.’

Already well known in Melbourne, Monash came to national prominence 22

after his successful command of Australian soldiers on the bloody battlefields of the Western Front during the Great War. But he was not a full-time regular soldier, nor was he some military martinet. He was an engineer; a citizen-soldier; a businessman; a scholar; and a patron of the arts. He was highly intelligent, with at times boundless energy and drive.

Monash could also be vain, abrasive, and self-promoting. Yet his many accomplishments could not be denied.

A century on, Monash’s reputation is still celebrated; he is probably the bestknown and most honoured Australian who served in the Great War. Yet some commentators continue to assert that Monash has been forgotten or insufficiently acknowledged.

Monash was born in Melbourne on 27 June 1865 to Prussian–Jewish parents. The family later moved to Jerilderie in New South Wales; Monash later boasted that as a boy he had had a brief encounter with Ned Kelly. He alleged that the bushranger gave him ‘much sound advice’, though

he never elaborated upon the details of their conversation. Returning to Melbourne, Monash excelled academically, attending Scotch College and studying engineering, arts, and law at the University of Melbourne.

He later worked as a civil engineer and businessman, and, after several passionate romances, married Hannah Victoria ‘Vic’ Moss in 1891. According to Monash’s biographer, Geoffrey Serle, the couple’s seemingly incompatible relationship was based on a ‘deep attraction’, with the two constantly fighting and making up. Bertha, their only child, was born in 1893.

Monash also soldiered part time as an army officer in the Militia, Australia’s small part-time army. He enlisted as a private in 1884 while studying at university. Subsequently commissioned as an officer, he had some 30 years military experience prior to the outbreak of the Great War. Monash’s service, though, was atypical, in that he commanded artillery, intelligence, and infantry units. As soldier-scholar Peter Pedersen has shown, this diverse

John Monash 1919 James Quinn oil on canvas Gift of John Colin Monash Bennett 2007

portrait 50 spring 2015

Portrait of John Monash as a boy Stewart & Co, Melbourne photograph National Library of Australia Brigadier General John Monash 1915 Unknown photographer photograph Australian War Memorial

experience gave Monash first-hand knowledge of weapons such as heavy artillery and machine-guns, complementing his civilian surveying and engineering expertise. He would later draw on this experience in advocating tactics that employed artillery and other arms to support the infantry. Monash considered that the infantry’s true role was to advance under the protection of ‘the maximum possible array of mechanical resources … guns, machine-guns, tanks, mortars and aeroplanes’ rather than fighting its own way forward.

In August 1914, within a month of the outbreak of war, Monash was appointed commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade in the all-volunteer Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

Landing at Anzac on 25 April 1915, Brigadier General Monash command his brigade no better or worse than any other commander during the Gallipoli campaign. Ultimately, Gallipoli ended in defeat and evacuation, and in 1916 most of the AIF moved to France to fight on the Western Front. Monash, however, was promoted to major general, and from July concentrated on training the recently raised 3rd Infantry Division. While the AIF’s other formations had learnt their trade in training camps in Egypt or in combat, the men of the 3rd Division were trained by Monash in superior facilities in England, and benefited from the latest battlefield information from the Somme.

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Monash’s 3rd Division began moving to France in late 1916, and fought its first major offensive in June 1917 in the capture of the Messines– Wytschaete Ridge in Flanders, Belgium.

Monash’s instructions for the attack were meticulous, complemented with detailed briefings for his officers and subordinates. ‘I want to leave nothing to chance,’ Monash said. The capture of Messines Ridge was highly successful.

Later in the year, the 3rd Division fought in the Third Battle of Ypres, helping to capture Broodseinde Ridge before suffering heavily in the failed attack on Passchendale.

In early 1918, Monash sat for a portrait by official Australian war artist Lieutenant James Quinn. The Londonbased Australian painter had been granted an honorary commission in the AIF for a three-month appointment in France in order to produce works

of several senior officers. Monash had been allocated as the subject for another artist, but when Quinn visited the 3rd Division’s headquarters at the end of February he seized the opportunity to paint the general.

This caused some concern for those managing the war artist scheme, as Quinn also delivered the portraits of the AIF’s most prominent leaders, including General Sir William Birdwood, Major General Sir Neville Howse vc, and Major General Sir Cyril Brudenell White (now in the collection of the Australian War Memorial); rather than splitting the AIF’s principal officers among the Australian portrait artists, Quinn took ‘all the plums’.

In March, the 3rd Division was back in France when the Germans launched their great Spring Offensive.

The German army initially broke through the British lines on the portrait 50 spring 2015

Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash 1918 James Quinn oil on canvas Australian War Memorial

Somme, and threatened to capture the important railhead at Amiens. Monash quickly deployed his division to plug a gap in the British lines. The German offensive was blunted before Monash’s defensive deployment could be tested, but Monash was nonetheless praised for his quick and cool planning.

In mid-1918, Monash was promoted to lieutenant-general and replaced Birdwood as the commander of the

Australian Corps. Now leading the five veteran AIF divisions, he commanded some 166,000 men. He inherited a formation at the peak of its efficiency; the AIF was battle hardened, well trained, well equipped, and led by experienced officers and soldiers.

Monash’s elevation met resentment in some quarters. Australian-officialwar-correspondent-cum-officialhistorian Charles Bean and the

influential war correspondent Keith Murdoch tried to undermine the appointment, lobbying Prime Minister Billy Hughes to replace Monash with Brudenell White.

Although Monash was senior in rank to White, the opinion amongst the war correspondents was that Monash’s appointment to corps’ command was a ‘tragic mistake’ as they believed him to be an administrator rather 25

than a frontline soldier. Bean greatly admired White and rejected Monash’s ‘showmanship’ and self-promotion. An element of anti-Semitism may also have been at work.

Monash silenced any doubters on 4 July with the Australian Corps’ capture of Hamel. There, Monash’s meticulous planning – going well beyond the point of micromanaging – coordinated infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft to produce a stunning victory. With little modesty, Monash himself wrote: ‘ A perfect modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for an orchestral composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phrases.’

artist’ had been at corps headquarters working on ‘the replica picture which is destined for you’. Monash thought this second portrait was ‘very much better’ than Quinn’s earlier work. (The earlier portrait is in the Australian War Memorial’s collection. The latter ‘replica picture’ remained in the Monash Bennett family until 2007, when it was donated to the National Portrait Gallery.)

At the time, Monash was also sitting for another official war artist, Lieutenant John Longstaff. Like Quinn, Longstaff was working on multiple portraits of Monash. ‘It is very trying work indeed sitting for these artists,’ Monash commented. ‘I can only give them from ten minutes to half an hour at a time, and it is an extremely tiring process.’

Monash: two portraits are kept in the Australian War Memorial’s collection, one portrait is held by Monash University, and one at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Monash also sat for two hours for the Polish painter Leopold Pilichowski.

The war ended on 11 November with Germany’s defeat. Monash was appointed Director General of Repatriation and Demobilisation to oversee the return to Australia of some 180,000 soldiers from France and Britain. Monash enjoyed celebrity status in London; he had more portrait sittings with Longstaff and Quinn, as well as with Australian portrait painter Isaac Cohen (currently in the collection of the National Gallery of

Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces on the Western Front, thought highly of Monash, describing him as ‘a most thorough and capable Commander who thinks out every detail and leaves nothing to chance’.

A month later, on 8 August, the Australian Corps spearheaded the British offensive in the battle of Amiens, capturing 7,900 German prisoners and more than 170 guns for the loss of 2,000 Australians. Writing home three weeks later, Monash proudly told his wife how his corps captured some 10,000 prisoners from 75 different German units. The Australians had been ‘fighting every day, gaining ground every day, and capturing prisoners and booty every day’. In the same letter, Monash mentioned that ‘Quinn the

With the German army’s defences cracking, Monash relentlessly drove the Australian Corps onwards – almost to the point of breaking – in a series of operations until October, when the AIF was finally relieved from duty. On 6 October, Monash went to London and spent the best part of a week in sittings with Longstaff for what was ‘a very tiring and boring business’.

Monash confessed: ‘Longstaff has gone to a very great deal of trouble and had a photographer along to take me in about thirty different poses. He [Longstaff ] would not pose me himself but insisted that I should adopt quite a number of different natural, habitual poses; he merely corrected quite minor details as to the position of the hands and feet, etc’.

Between 1918 and 1919 Sir John Longstaff painted four portraits for

Victoria), sculptor Dora Ohlfsen, and British artist Solomon J. Solomon. He attended numerous social engagements and the theatre. His regular companion was Melbourne expatriate Elizabeth Bentwitch. Known as ‘Lizzie’ or ‘Lizzette’, she was a friend of Vic Monash and had been the general’s lover since late 1917. Their affair cooled, however, with the arrival in London of Vic and Bertha Monash in April 1919. Thereafter John Monash saw his mistress only when she was in the company of his wife.

The Monashes returned to Australia in late December; soon afterwards, in February 1920, Vic Monash died from cervical cancer. Bentwitch arrived in Melbourne the following September, and remained Monash’s close companion. They regularly attended

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8th August, 1918 1918-19 Will Longstaff oil on canvas Australian War Memorial

portrait 50 spring 2015

the opera, and Bentwitch encouraged Monash’s collection of work by Australian artists such as Longstaff, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, and Norman Lindsay. In addition to this collection of etchings, paintings, and war memorabilia, Monash’s home contained a library of several thousand books.

Monash remained a prominent public figure for the rest of his life, heading the State Electricity Commission of Victoria and taking up the vice-chancellorship of the University of Melbourne in 1923.

He was promoted to full general in 1929.

Monash was an extraordinarily successful commander. His wartime memoirs, The Australian victories in France in 1918 (first published 1920), and the publication of private letters home, first in the press and then as the edited volume War letters of General Monash (first published 1936), helped make his reputation. Some historians and commentators have lauded him as the greatest allied general of the war, the man who single-handedly defeated Germany.

Charles Bean held a more nuanced assessment. He and Monash had clashed during the war, and the two maintained a cordial post-war relationship.

Privately, Bean thought Monash ‘was neither a hero, nor a mighty strategic genius, but an extraordinarily careful and versatile organiser – which was precisely what the interests of his … men … demanded, at a very difficult and critical time.’ Peter Pedersen believes Monash’s skill lay in his technical mastery of all arms and tactics; he was a successful trainer of men who created and maintained an esprit de corps among those he commanded. However, as Pedersen rightly notes, Monash is all too often discussed in isolation of his contemporaries. There were other divisional and corps commanders in 1917–18, such as the Canadian General Sir Arthur Currie, who were as capable.

It should also be remembered that Monash commanded a corps in action on the Western Front for the final six months of the Great War. Monash received numerous British Imperial and foreign honours and awards for his war service. There have also been many posthumous memorials and tributes to his memory, including the establishments of Monash University and the Monash Highway

in Melbourne. His name was taken for the small South Australian Riverland town of Monash, as well as a Canberra suburb, and his likeness currently graces the Australian $100 note.

It is erroneous to claim that Monash has in some way been forgotten; his reputation and legacy is enduring.

General Sir John Monash was, by any measure, an outstanding Australian.

General Monash 1918 John Longstaff oil on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1919

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Money for myth australian character on the market. by jane raffan.

Amid the cacophony of celebration, national anniversaries give rise to reflections on nationhood and national character. In 1988, two hundred years after the First Fleet’s arrival, and again in 2001, the centenary of Federation, large scale and ambitious exhibitions of Australian art framed and toured a picture of Australian life, culture and character across the nation.

Creating Australia, 200 Years of Art 1788-1988 (curated by then Snr Curator Australian Art at the NGA, Daniel Thomas) and Federation – Australian 28

Art and Society 1901–2001 (curated by former NGA Head of Australian Art and long-time art critic, John MacDonald) were filled with hero pictures and more modest works championing overlooked or underrepresented aspects of our society and culture. Both exhibitions cast wide nets, in particular the latter; each had inevitable gaps and the odd minnow in the mix.

More recently, the Gallipoli centenary offered sombre contemplation on an episode indelibly inked into our history books. Despite the terrible defeat, the campaign is enshrined in our collective consciousness – with significant mythologising by early war historians,

First-Class Marksman 1946 Sidney Nolan Art Gallery of New South Wales Image courtesy Menzies Art Brands © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust

the media and film/television industries – as marking the birth of the ‘digger’, who possesses a ‘bush born’ Australian identity and character distinct from British antecedents.

Academia offers a contradiction: in a new exhibit about colonial artist ST Gill, Professor Sasha Grishin claims Gill invented the character of the digger with illustrations of gold prospectors in the 1860s exhibiting ‘resilience, antiauthority attitude and dry humour.’

Meanwhile, contemporary mythologising continues, with the media repeatedly describing all injured/killed soldiers as diggers; one wonders how they’ll reference the first female soldier to fall.

Bushranger and murderer Ned Kelly espouses the digger’s characteristics and is venerated as a cultural symbol.

Sanctioned with a postage stamp in 1980 commemorating his death, his status was proclaimed to the world in the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, portrait 50 spring 2015

Rocky McCormack 1962-63 Russell Drysdale Private collection Image courtesy Sotheby's Australia © Russell Drysdale Estate Settler’s Camp 1888 Arthur Streeton Private collection Image courtesy Deutscher and Hackett

where Kelly figures based on Sydney Nolan’s iconic depiction ran around the stadium ground with guns blazing fireworks.

Kelly’s cultural status is also enshrined in the Australian secondary market. Nolan’s First-class Marksman, 1946 (collection AGNSW), is the most expensive painting on record, realising $5.4 million (2010). This eclipses the best price paid for an image of a soldier: Russell Drysdale’s Soldier, ’42 (collection AWM), a portrayal of isolation and angst en route to a new posting (sold 2004 for $519,000).

National institutions celebrate and collect depictions of esteemed reallife people as well as types. Portrait galleries have been called ‘institutions of collective memory’, and in this context art galleries can be considered repositories of myth and imagination.

The secondary market shows clear preferences for the latter, but at least

one artist straddles the divide, with Drysdale’s images of outback types or ‘European bush battlers’ – which were present in both the 1988 and 2001 exhibitions along with versions of Nolan’s Kelly – having blue-chip status.

Drawn from real life encounters, these works – such as Rocky McCormack, 1962-63, which sold for $1.89 million (2008) – were acclaimed by Sotheby’s at the time to be ‘distillations of deep personal and social truths’, and a ‘compassionate record of a people and an epoch in a limbo that is partly reality, part legend’.

In commentary published in Art and Australia to accompany a Drysdale exhibition in 1967, however, the idea of bush battlers as ‘sentimental-nationalist fictions’ was dismissed, and the works were lauded for depicting images of people who, as ‘inhabitants of the Lucky Country’, showed it had ‘been built upon their very bones.’

In contemporary times, where the term ‘battler’ is regularly paraded by politicians in aspirational outer-urban marginal seats to court votes, the impact of the foundational image of the bush battler has somewhat faded from collective memory – but not on the secondary market, where portrayals of ‘The Old Boss Drover’, ‘Warrego Jim’ and the like, regularly achieve sums well over $1 million.

Australia’s foundational narratives are inextricably tied to the landscape. There are no great history paintings of convict life. Instead, our public art institutions are filled with pictorial visions of sun-bleached pastorals and wooded idylls, where pioneers toil or itinerant workers pause to contemplate life ‘on the wallaby track’ (collection AGNSW), a euphemism that offered the prospect of independence from master/overlord, tied to the promise of bounty from the land.

Coincidently, or perhaps not, Australia’s first recorded million dollar sale on the secondary market occurred in 1988, the bicentenary of the first convict arrivals. What better way of saying ‘we’ve made it!’ The aspirational buyer was Alan Bond.

The secondary market has long supported an idealised view of our early history, with several works by Frederick McCubbin amongst the top twenty recorded sales.

McCubbin’s paintings carry intensely poetic titles that serve to disguise their subjects’ toil, such as Bush Idyll, 1893 (sold 1998 for just over $2.3 million), and Whispering in the Wattle Boughs, 1896 (sold 2012 for $1.2 million). Like the French artist Millet’s depictions of peasants gleaning under a glorious sunset, this genre served to keep the privileged classes comfortable in the 29

knowledge that the working poor were (and are) content, and won McCubbin significant praise and patronage.

The approach of McCubbin’s Heidleberg group compatriot, Arthur Streeton, was somewhat more direct and robust, if not factual. Settler’s Camp, executed in the centenary of British colonisation, set a record price for the artist and is currently the seventh highest price for an Australian work at auction (sold 2012 for just over $2.5 million). The real-life subjects of most of Streeton’s settler pictures depicting heroic masculine labour were, in fact, tenant farmers.

In 1938, the sesquicentenary of colonial settlement, Australia hosted the Empire Games (now Commonwealth) 30

for the first time, and Charles Meere, who designed the posters, commenced Australian Beach Pattern, 1940 (collection AGNSW). Painted a year after Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, this work has become an iconic representation of nationhood for its depiction of ordinary Australians as ‘heroic symbols’ exhibiting health and vitality – an extension of the ideals credited to Tom Roberts’ young woman in Australian Native, 1888 (collection NGA), painted in the centenary of colonial settlement.

Meere’s classical idealism has led one commentator, Linda Slutzkin, to describe his painting as ‘Spartans in Speedos’.

It privileges the Australian white male (albeit heavily tanned), who is depicted at the centre of this national story, as

Australian Beach Scene 1938-40 Freda Robertshaw oil on canvas Private collection © Estate of Freda Robertshaw

in most others. There have been three near-identical versions of this work sold at auction, with the best price being $427,000 (2013).

In 1989, photographer Anne Zahalka produced The Bathers (collection AGSNW), a work that replaced the bronzed Aussie mono-racial figures in Meere’s work with a representation of multi-cultural Australia. In 2013, she updated the work with The New Bathers, which depicts an even greater racial mix and centres on a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.

Painted by Meere’s student/assistant, Freda Robertshaw, Australian Beach Scene, 1940, is a markedly different version of Meere’s narrative. Its compositional devices place the focus on portrait 50 spring 2015

women; men are all but absent. It sold for $475,500 (1998), more than five times the top price for the artist, and was acquired by a private collection by curator John Cruthers who has long championed women painters. Robertshaw’s work – where carefree play is disrupted by a central warning sign – can be read as a comment on loss. In the artist’s case, it is maternal loss, fore-grounded with a mother and baby evoking The Pietà and, in a broader cultural context, as an observation on the absence/loss of men due to war.

One of the most popular narratives on the secondary market is exploration, or more accurately, the explorer.

Modernists Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, in particular, repeatedly turned to this theme in their oeuvres. Stoicism, resilience, blind ignorance and masculine heroism fill canvases. And the landscapes are terra nullius.

Nolan did tackle a couple of stories of women and the landscape, both with Indigenous connections – Daisy Bates and Eliza Fraser – but these ‘imaginary portraits’ were exceptional, utilised chiefly for expressing alienation rather than pioneering spirit or resilience.

Nolan fixed on Burke and Wills (268 sales; top price $552,000 in 2009), whose follies were exploited for poetic drama, while Tucker developed a type, or ‘refracting prism for the human condition’ – a huge skeletal male head that usually dominated the landscape.

Variously titled Antipodean Head, Pioneer Head and Explorer, the latter performs best, despite clearly utilising the same head. The depicted work, Explorer, which made nearly $219,000 (2002), was originally sold in 1974 as Antipodean Head.

Brett Whiteley, too, ventured into this territory with his 1985 sinuous homage to Ernest Giles who ‘discovered’ and named Kata Tjuta ‘The Olgas’, currently the third top selling work at auction, at close to $3.5 million (2007).

Contemporary Indigenous artist, Gordon Bennett, has repeatedly addressed the explorer/colonist trope in his work, challenging this heroic masculine canon in Australia’s narratives by reinstating Indigenous presence and adding political comment.

In Zones of the Marvellous: In Search of the Antipodes (2009), author Martin Edmund described Bennett’s depiction of Burke in Haptic Painting Explorer (The Inland Sea), 1993, as

Explorer 1968 Albert Tucker Private collection Image courtesy Sotheby’s Australia © Barbara Tucker

Haptic Painting Explorer (The Inland Sea) 1993 Gordon Bennett Corporate collection, Sydney Image courtesy Bonham’s © Estate of Gordon Bennett

‘burning as he drowns in a sea of his own territorialising imagination.’ Bennett has the heroic explorer sinking beneath a dotted sea, referencing central desert art, amongst the flotsam and jetsam of previous colonial naval explorers (sold 2012 for $108,000).

In search of portrait depictions of national character on the secondary market – as opposed to our national institutions, where they abound – there are few compared with types. Where portraits have sold well, they tend to be unnamed sitters, a ploy to draw attention to the work’s aesthetics. Named sitters are typically society people, or from the

artist’s circle. Ex-pat Jeffrey Smart’s portraits, rare in the oeuvre, focussed on Australian intellectual and artistic pioneers (David Malouf, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Margaret Olley).

Despite this, in most cases they are still ‘chess pieces’ in his chief aim of highlighting the banal, sometimes sinister and alienating effects of our urban environment.

Smart’s works are a far cry from masculine heroic narratives of pioneers and pastoralists, explorers and bush battlers, diggers and drovers. He and satirist John Brack, in particular, share the secondary market limelight

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The Bar 1954 John Brack National Gallery of Victoria Image courtesy Sotheby’s Australia © Helen Brack Self Portrait at Papini’s 1984–85 Jeffrey Smart oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas Private collection Image courtesy Deutscher and Hackett © Estate of Jeffrey Smart

for insightful engagement with this particular counter-narrative.

Brack’s famous depictions of rushing workers, ballroom dancers, jockeys, shopfronts, domesticity and the car, ground contemporary Australian experience in the suburban, where the charade of heroic character gives way to the mundane, in which his subjects nevertheless still express the ‘resilience, anti-authority and dry humour’ assigned to characterisations of Australianness.

Works by both artists factor in the top prices paid at auction each year, with Brack currently claiming three places in the historical top-ten, totalling nearly $7.65 million. The Bar 1954 ($3.2 million, sold 2006; collection NGV) is a parody of Manet’s famous Un bar aux Folies Bergère and a comment on the infamous ‘six o’clock swill’. Curiously, the profiles of the patrons exhibit strong similarities to Tucker’s Antipodean heads developed a decade later.

For Smart – who, along with Brack, Nolan and Drysdale are four of the market’s most traded artists – it is a self portrait that currently ranks top in the artist’s oeuvre: Self Portrait at Papini’s 1984-85 (sold 2014 for $1.26 million). Smart depicts himself smiling ambiguously out at us. Here we have the mature artist confidently front and centre of his own story. This work comes closest to the examples of notable people lauded by our public institutions for their personal achievements as Australians, but they are few and far between on the secondary market, where espousals of national mythologies and masculine types still fill the front of catalogues and bring the biggest bucks.

Auction results courtesy of the Australian Art Sales Digest (AASD) 33

Yellow Portrait (Portrait of Alex Jelinek) 1955 Lina Bryans oil on plywood Gift of Paul and James Bryans, 2015 Alex Jelinek sketching at a party at 39 Erin Street Richmond, late 1950s; photographer unknown.

Alex Jelinek Archive, Sydney

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Fugue in yellow roger benjamin explores the intriguing union of lina bryans and alex jelinek.

Despite its matter-of-fact subject of a professional at the drawing board, Lina Bryans’s portrait of Alex Jelinek inscribes a grand passion: it was painted at the outset of an affair that lasted the rest of their lives.

The two unconventional ‘creatives’ started a relationship that was unorthodox: the thirty year old Jelinek had been introduced to Lina – at forty-six half his age again – by her son, the journalist Edward Bryans. Lina, the glamorous bohemian divorcée with old Hallenstein money, had been a central figure in Melbourne culture from the days of her postwar salon at the ‘Pink House’ in Darebin.

Lina was Ian Fairweather’s key protector and patron; she supported many young artists, and she connected people across the cultural scene.

Jelinek, who arrived in Australia a penniless ‘architectural refugee’ (as he put it) from Communist Czechoslovakia, had few friends or connections. When the two met in 1954, he was spending much of his time working as a builder on the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Bryans had already emerged as perhaps Melbourne’s leading progressive portraitist, undertaking a long series of oil paintings from the end of WWII. Her subjects included the writers Alan Marshall and Jean Campbell, the painters Harald Vike and Guelda Pike, the

academics Nina Christesen and Nettie Palmer, the curators Laurie Thomas and Robert Haines, and ‘the Phillip Adams of his day’, Adrian Lawlor (see Gillian Forwood, The Babe is Wise: the Portraits of Lina Bryans, 1995).

Although she had little formal training, Bryans is admired for her intuitive gift for portraiture and the experimental landscapes of her later career. A well-travelled admirer of the School of Paris (she had met Picasso in person), her style stood somewhere between the colourism of Paul Cézanne and the Fauve brushwork of Henri Matisse or Albert Marquet. Each of Lina’s portraits tries a different gambit in attempting, like Chaim Soutine or Oskar Kokoschka, to seize the spirit as well as the appearance of the sitter.

Yellow Portrait is true to form. One of the largest portraits she attempted, the work is like a Chinese brush painting, where much is suggested, but little described. Bryans often experimented with the aesthetics of the incomplete, following the example of Cézanne (another well-to-do experimenter with no need to sell his paintings). If the marks on the canvas were sufficient to capture the sitter in the desired aspect, the painting could be considered a complete work of art. In Yellow Portrait Bryans shows Alex in the creative act, focused intently on an unseen design on his drawing board. The vivid yellow ground envelopes the designer at work in

an atmosphere of focus and optimism.

As Forwood writes, ‘The bold drafting, with no spare brushstrokes, reflects the “all or nothing” character of the subject’. Mundane details of Alex’s desk are no more than hinted at by a brush drawing in brown paint, heightened at the shirt collar with white; one sees with a shock that the sitter’s right arm is absent. Bryans emphasises Alex’s trademark spectacles, self-designed and made up for him by a Hungarian optician in downtown Melbourne. When Lina chose to exhibit the work as Saturnid at the Independent Group of Artists Exhibition in October 1955, prominent critic Alan McCulloch in The Herald welcomed it (along with Lina’s portrait of Allan Marshall) as ‘productions of a vigorous and inquiring intellect’.

We cannot suppose the picture, by far the sparest of Lina’s usually richly-painted portraits, stalled due to mischance. The artist’s grandsons Paul and James Bryans point out the yellow portrait of Alex was on view for decades in successive Bryans-Jelinek homes. First amid the timber renovations Alex designed for Lina’s modest terrace on Hotham Street, East Melbourne, then from 1957 in the front foyer of the grand Victorian home at 39 Erin Street Richmond (for which Jelinek designed an outstanding rear extension c. 1964, and finally at the entrance to Bowen Street in Kew, where the couple lived into old age. Yellow Portrait always held the place of honour.

From a family of Czech master-builders in the regional capital of Hradec Králové, Jelinek had qualified as a builder before doing postgraduate study in architecture at the élite Special School of Architecture at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. His professor was the leading Czech modernist, Jaroslav Fragner.

Born in 1925, Jelinek had grown up during the flourishing of the Czech Functionalist and international modern architectural movements, where the buildings of Josef Gočár, Adolph Loos, Mies van de Rohe, Ladislav Zak and Fragner were part of the modern urban landscape. His training in Prague, however, was truncated by the 1948 Communist takeover, which abolished private architectural practice. Jelinek fled with an engineer friend by hijacking a light plane in the factory town of Most and forcing the pilot to fly, seemingly at gunpoint, to Weiden in NATO-occupied West Germany. In 1950, as a registered Displaced Person who signed a two-year labour contract with the Victorian Government, he arrived in Melbourne.

The few known facts of Jelinek’s first Australian years were that he worked as a labourer laying track at the Newport Power Station, and then as a draftsman for an architect, designing neo-Georgian mansions 35

Diorama showing proposal for Adaminaby Church; landscape backdrop in oil

by Lina Bryans (location unknown), architectural model in painted wood, metal and plastics by Jelinek, c. 1956.

Alex Jelinek Archive, Sydney

in Toorak. Like hundreds of other skilled post-war émigrés, he found work in the bush on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. In awe of the engineering marvels he helped build, he was promoted to Leading Hand, and drew architectural fantasies in his spare time. He related that he was 60 metres up a scaffold at the Guthega Dam when Lina and the writer Alan Marshall drove up to tell him of his first architectural commission.

The year was 1956, and his first client was Bruce Benjamin, a Melbourne and Oxfordtrained philosopher and Lina’s second cousin, who had been teaching at ANU in Canberra.

The house that Jelinek designed for the Benjamin family still stands (if somewhat altered) at 10 Gawler Crescent Deakin, and is protected by ACT Heritage. The judges who named it House of the Year for 1958 remarked of the building: ‘while representing a clean break with traditional construction and design methods, for its site, [it] had the appearance of belonging and in a way expressed the openhearted character of this country’. The house was widely published at the time in twelve black and white photographs commissioned from the Berlin-trained Wolfgang Sievers (National Library of Australia collection), who in 2002 still considered it ‘the most beautiful private house ever built in Australia’.

Although Jelinek built very little, he drew and designed a great deal at home, and seems to have been the ideal partner for Bryans. In the 1960s he drove her, in their trusty Land Rover, on many painting trips.

These ranged from Mallacoota in Gippsland 36

to KataJuta in the Western Desert. Around 1973, for medical reasons, she was advised to move to central Australia for the dry climate.

The couple lived in Alice Springs for two years, and after returning to live at Bowen Street in Kew continued to drive out to the desert when her failing health allowed. Alex used the Kew house as a workshop, where he made several large sculptures cut from heavy sheets of aluminum, displaying them in the garden (Quill, 1974 is in the National Gallery of Victoria). As an inventor, he built an experimental device for generating power by harnessing wave motion, and a unique all-aluminium bicycle that the hardy Jelinek rode from Melbourne to Coopers’ Creek, South Australia. He received several architectural commissions after 1960, but only one was built: the Peregian Roadhouse, a steel, glass and concrete pavilion for the Victorian real estate firm T M Burke, used as a land sales office and café just south of Noosa. (see R Benjamin, ‘Prague on the Sunshine Coast’, Fabrications, March 2012). Several other private villas and one public building (for the Mornington Art Gallery) remained unbuilt because Jelinek clashed badly with his clients. The title Bryans had first used for her portrait, Saturnid, was perhaps prophetic: Jelinek had a saturnine temperament, and could be an irascible perfectionist. In a more positive sense, the word ‘saturnid’ also refers to a species of large and splendid moth, often yellow in color like the canvas. From the rugged cocoon hatches a thing of beauty: certainly a fair prediction for the young designer in 1955.

Benjamin House, 10 Gawler Crescent Deakin, summer 1957-58 scanned from an Ektachrome slide Alex Jelinek Archive, Sydney

A delightful collaboration between the painter and the architect can be published here for the first time. Based on his bold charcoal drawing dated 1953–55, Jelinek made a threedimensional model of his futuristic design for a new Anglican church at Adaminaby. This was the town that was famously relocated to higher ground (beginning in 1956) to make way for the vast Eucumbene Dam, centerpiece of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme.

Jelinek’s drawing features concave shells of reinforced concrete and a white spire towering over forty metres high. The meticulous model reveals the interior as a single vaulted space with diaphanous screen walls, and a great ceramic mural sketched in blue, red and yellow in due Fifties abstract style. The model and Lina’s landscape painting were placed together to make a simple diorama, with fresh foliage cut from the garden providing a foreground. Lina, who painted a number of exceptional landscapes of the High Country (see G Forwood, Lina Bryans, Rare Modern, Melbourne 2003) painted the Adaminaby hills in this canvas. Alex engaged his friend Bruce Benjamin to present the project to the popular left-leaning Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, Ernest Burgmann. Although far-sighted, neither Bishop Burgmann’s vision nor his church’s resources stretched as far as funding such a grand modern church for a remote tourist village.

Although Jelinek’s model survives in his estate, the limpid Bryans landscape has yet to be rediscovered. Happily, however, Yellow Portrait, the couple’s first collaboration as sitter and as painter, is now at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, a fitting tribute to a distinctive moment in Australia’s cultural history, and to two very private lives. portrait 50 spring 2015

Waiting for Godot From the Godot sketchbooks

artist and actors, advancing spasmodically, find their rhythm together. by sarah engledow.

In the middle of 2013, Nicholas Harding was in Paris on an Australia Council Cité des Arts Internationale residency. It was spring, and he set about painting the city’s commuters, dogs, ducks and flowers. But one day, a flimsy replica of the Globe Theatre popped up outside his apartment on the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville. Watching the actors dressed in costume, waiting for their entrance cues, moving around outside his windows, pacing, practising their lines and dragging on cigarettes, Harding filled a small sketchbook with his observations of them.

In Sydney, Harding’s friend Hugo Weaving saw some of his drawings of actors on Instagram. Scheduled to play Vladimir in the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Waiting for Godot in late 2013, he invited Harding (an habitué of the theatre) to come and watch some rehearsals. Harding began drawing from the moment the actors were up on their feet in rehearsal, and he sketched in a fever through five public performances of the play, three of them from the wings. When his sight line was obscured, he drew from photographs, but he made himself maintain a lively pace and dextrous rhythm.

Now, as he looks at the work he made over his months with the company, Harding traces his accommodation to what he observed: ‘Initial awkward tentativeness as the concepts and motivations were grappled with, eureka! moments followed by consolidation and more inquiry; faith in process as insights into the text and its characters began to bring the play’s reality into being. I began to trust my presence in this theatrical parallel universe, where “play” comprised rigorous attendance to imagination, talent, sheer hard work and Beckett’s stage directions. And then all turned back into “play” again. And this wasn’t a steady, ascending gradient of understanding. Some days brought setbacks and doubt.

Once rehearsals were done and the time came for performing on stage and drawing from the wings, the actors were in command of the text and their stage craft, and I was more adept at the observational drawing that the pace of the action required.’

Harding had not only to become familiar with the routines of rehearsal, and the actors’ adoption of character, but to learn to control the speed of his drawing to achieve acuity with line; to judge how much to draw while looking at the action or at the page; to cope with working on a rough and ‘thirsty’ paper with an Indian ink-filled cartridge chisel-nose felt-tipped pen.

‘I was unaccustomed to the coarser paper and it became a metaphor for the actors’ dealing with the play’s resistance to a conventional understanding of narrative,’ he recalls.

In the cotton-fibre sketchbooks there are scores of drawings of hats. Boots. Suitcases. Collapsible tables and chairs. Coats too big. Trousers too short. One drawing reveals a lot about the rest: it’s of Richard Roxburgh in profile, with his arms folded.

Though he’s in costume – in Gogo’s hat at least – his attitude tells us that he’s not in character. He’s watching his colleagues; he may well be waiting for something, but he’s definitely not waiting for Godot. When Harding’s drawing the actors in character, you can tell from a wildness or a vacancy about the eyes; there’s an excessive uprightness here, a touch too much slack in the body there. There’s Weaving as Didi sitting on the floor, angled like a bookend, beard raised, fingers scrabbling at his pants, boots pointing skyward, while Quast as Pozzo bends forward on a minute stool, knees splayed, the lines of his hat concentric, those of his shoulders and arms undulating like striations on an oyster shell. There’s a much sparer rendering of Mullins as a classic Christ-figure, long face downcast and shadowed. There’s a spread where Harding and Roxburgh are lightly rendered figures on the periphery – Weaving, hands on hips, inquisitive, Roxburgh identifiable only by his stance, his hands soft claws – while in the ditch of the paper, Quast, a black colossus, drags at the stricken figure of Mullins, arms outflung, thin legs trailing.

As his project ripened, Harding turned to other mediums: gouache, and, eventually, oils. By the end of 2013, the faces of his actor friends were extracted and developed from the sketchbooks to loom in colour from his studio walls. I saw Weaving looking kinaesthetically alert to something that you could tell wasn’t there; Mullins twisting to look over the back of a chair with an expression of moronic malevolence. Roxburgh’s gaze roved over all and nothing at once; his piggybacking grasp on Mullins was desperately vicious. Quast, though barely more than a pile of clothes, was still a man, crouching in a rictus of agon. In two alarming and pathetic gouaches, Roxburgh and Weaving were dancing, clumping around. It was all frantic and enervated at once; but the gouaches themselves were elegant: spare and refined.

Harding was introduced to Beckett’s work as a schoolboy; but it wasn’t until he was middle-aged, concentrating intently and working in an ambitious, demanding new way that he could encompass Godot’s brilliant balance of violence, humour, despair and grace. The drawings attest to Harding’s hunger to 37

From the Godot sketchbooks

learn: at the broadest level, across centuries, about the great expressions of Western drama and art; and at the narrowest, about himself, his own corpus and history, the buried and accreted influences on his work. He writes: ‘Beckett’s contemplation of our existential folly acknowledges both the cruelty and tenderness in our relationships with each other.

He recognizes both our frustration and stoicism as we endure the absurd conundrum of our very being. Pozzo cries in Act 2: “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”’

Although he draws instinctually, wherever he goes – on the street, on the train, at the table – the artist also relishes intellectual and imaginative exchange with disparate art forms and artists, living and dead. The artist’s ‘dialogue’ with others might materialise as allusion; or remain subconscious, at least for a time. Harding’s project was all his own; but it was veined through by images, influences and techniques of a line of artists from Goya to Daumier, to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, through Sickert’s Camden Town Group to Bacon and the figurative painters of the so-called School of London, especially Leon Kossoff. In retrospect, Harding acknowledges the influence of Toulouse-Lautrec’s theatre and cabaret drawings and paintings on his Godot series.

Then again, for years, he’s been fascinated by the themes and techniques of Goya – especially the Caprichos series.

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There’s a drawing of Goya’s in a book he has that shows a man tumbling downstairs; and he was reminded of it as he watched Luke Mullins practising falling, rolling over Lucky’s suitcases again and again. Moreover, in the sketchbooks there are two drawings of Mullins, writhing lumpily, that are redolent of figures by Francis Bacon. In fact, though the Beckett Estate demands strict adherence to Beckett’s production notes, and Andrew Upton worked within the playwright’s prescription, he was inspired, too, not only by the partnership of Laurel and Hardy and the clowning of Buster Keaton, but the painted figures of Bacon. To help inform Luke Mullins’s interpretation of Lucky’s ‘dance’, Upton placed images of Bacon’s contorted figurative forms on the floor; starting from there, Mullins retained the spirit of these fleshy figurations as his dance took on a life of its own. Harding comments that it was a fitting reference, ‘as Bacon’s warping bestial forms were a response to post-war Europe as much as Waiting for Godot was Beckett’s rumination on the European wasteland of the mid-twentieth century.’

Slaking the thirst of his paper in the theatre, Harding finished on a high note: ‘It usually took about two rehearsals and two sessions from the wings to fill a sketchbook. But having become familiar with the performance’s tempo by the time of the last “from the wing” sessions, I worked very quickly and completed a sketchbook during one night’s performance. It seemed a fitting adieu! for my experience with the production’.

It would be thrilling to see Beckett leaf through that sketchbook; to see him pace catlike around a gallery of Godot gouaches. I imagine him nodding, slowly, his bright eyes narrowed and the corners of his thin lips upturned. portrait 50 spring 2015

Rehearsing Godot (Mullins as Lucky) 4.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Gogo and Didi) 6.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Didi being a tree) 30.10.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Pozzo, Lucky and Gogo) 6.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Gogo dances) 30.10.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Weaving as Didi) 20.10.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Gogo) 30.10.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Lucky falls) 4.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Quast as blind Pozzo) 4.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Pozzo and Lucky) 20.10.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Lucky) 12.11.2013

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Rehearsing Godot (Pozzo and Lucky tumble) 4.11.2013

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Touchy touchy tony curran ponders whether our phones can change the course of painting.

A very common question people had was whether I thought the iPad was the future for portraiture and art.

Two years ago I embarked on a project called As long as you’re here.

I sat in the National Portrait Gallery near the information desk for thirty-three days straight, drawing anyone who sat down opposite me, using an iPad. At the end of the sitting I emailed the subject their digital portrait. I was curious about how people would participate in my project, whether they would be interested in it, and, if they were, how long they would be willing to sit. What surprised me was that the sitters and visitors to the Gallery who watched me drawing were fascinated with the technology.

How I came to use the iPad In 2009, fresh out of art school, I got an iPhone. Money was tight and it was a huge investment; I downloaded as many free apps as I could find, determined to get the most that I could out of it. One of the first things I downloaded was the drawing app, SketchBookX. Whenever I needed to kill some time, I grabbed my phone from my pocket and started drawing. I drew the backs of strangers’ heads on the train to work, drew sketches of friends from memory, and my girlfriend while she read the weekend paper. Whenever I ran

out of money for painting supplies, I painted with pixels. Meanwhile, I continued to paint and exhibit with traditional materials whenever I had supplies; I didn’t take the phone paintings all that seriously.

Initially, drawing with my phone was awkward. It took time to orient myself to the colour swatches, the controls for changing virtual brush types and sizes, and to figure out the different functions within the app. Even though an iPhone screen is small, most drawing apps allow the user to zoom to see and work with individual pixels. For example, in the app, Brushes, the zoom capacity is 6400%, meaning that no matter what the screen size is, the details can be continuously refined. I grew better at working

As Long As You’re Here #129 2013 Tony Curran digital paintings Courtesy the artist

with the miniature scale and started pushing it further. I started to take notice of other artists who appeared to be using the device both for its portability and capacity to easily distribute luminously colourful images to audiences.

I began to ponder whether iPad drawing could be considered an artistic medium in its own right, the same as oil paint, watercolour or charcoal, or whether it is more a simulation, with nothing new to call its own.

A number of established artists have already blazed a trail with 51

What I saw as a new, revolutionary technology was, in fact, a slight twist on technology that has been available and used by artists for at least half a century. this digital medium. A prominent example is David Hockney, who has been using his iPhone and iPad since 2008 to draw landscapes and everyday objects that reflect his daily life, emailing them to his friends as gifts. Hockney’s ‘art star’ status attracted a tsunami of media coverage when he launched his first exhibition of iPhone and iPad art, Fleurs Fraîches, in Paris in October 2010. Another is Jorge Colombo, who published his first drawing in The New Yorker in 1994; his iPhone sketch featured on the cover of the 22 May 2009 issue. Colombo’s sketches are of life in New York City, drawn outdoors – ‘en plein air’. Hockney and Colombo both use Brushes, a simple app that cost about three dollars at the time, and is now free. A feature of Brushes is that it records the drawing process as a video; Hockney has exhibited his 52

videos, and Colombo’s are available on his website.

Their work encouraged me to switch to Brushes, and I started to see iPhone drawing as a time-based moving image art form, as much as a device to make a still picture. The images I created could be instantly and widely distributed through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and (now) Instagram, or by emailing them to friends. What I saw as a new, revolutionary technology was, in fact, a slight twist on technology that has been available and used by artists for at least half a century. What distinguishes art that’s created on an iPhone or iPad from previous forms of digital painting is the directness of the touchscreen and the portability.

‘Not so new’ media While touchscreens can be

considered recent technology, Sketchpad was the first digital drawing program. It was developed in 1963, and, with the aid of a tablet and electronic stylus, allowed the user to physically draw lines rather than rely on the written commands that previous graphics programs required. Computer programs like SuperPaint (1973) developed digital painting further, until MacPaint (1984) was released to the mass market. The release of Macintosh and Personal Computers resulted in a huge industry in digital art and illustration, with digital painting subsequently dominating the graphic design and publishing industries.

American figurative painter Philip Pearlstein used one of these early drawing tablets to make digital paintings in the 1980s. In Pearlstein’s time, anything digital was considered

rare and specialised, because the equipment required was expensive and prototypical. In the documentary, Philip Draws the Artist’s Model (1985), his digital painting process is replayed, showing the painting unfold over time. It’s unclear which computer program Pearlstein used; it is likely to have been SuperPaint, which was the first painting program capable of recording the painting process as a video. This recording/playback feature was also to appear later in the iPhone and iPad app Brushes.

Recording the process of artistic production has been of interest to artists since at least the end of the second-world war, with videos of action painters and abstract expressionists, most famously Jackson Pollock, and others, being filmed since 1950.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film, portrait 50 spring 2015

visible pixelation. The clear signs of digitisation produce a tension with the careful and awkward lines of an artist’s hand drawing from observation. With the PDA’s internet connectivity, Faithfull could distribute his drawings electronically, both via email and directly onto web forums. In 2008, four years after Faithfull’s PDA drawings, the iPhone and iPod Touch were released, making full colour digital painting portable and accessible in a way that it had never been before.

facing page: Sonya 2009 Tony Curran digital painting Empire Diner 2009 Jorge Colombo magazine cover, March 22, 2010

Abdoulaye 2015 PylonWith2 2003 digital drawings Simon Faithfull Courtesy the artist and Galerie Polaris, Paris

The Mystery of Picasso (1956), shows Picasso painting with an ink that ran through onto the back of the canvas. By filming the back of the canvas, Clouzot captured each brushstroke as it happened, without the artist’s hand and body occluding it.

The development of the digital, however, has meant that the elaborate studio set up of cameras, spotlights, film supplies and crew has been replaced by the mechanics of the computer software which automatically records the process.

The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets has thus led to a ‘democratisation’ of sorts, with the time-based element of drawing easily captured by anyone, allowing greater potential for drawing to emerge.

In the years leading up to the iPhone’s release, other portable technologies such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and Palm Pilots gave artists the opportunity to draw on-site and immediately distribute images electronically.

Simon Faithfull’s PDA drawings are linear and monochromatic landscapes that draw strength from their limited colour and

A digital aesthetic So, with the advent of such ground-breaking technology, what have the artists chosen to paint?

Thus far they’ve chosen to paint the same things that artists were painting before the touchscreen, and before the digital. And they make digital paintings the same way they always have, layering transparent colours to produce images resembling their material oeuvre. The subject of Philip Pearlstein’s digital drawings is the same as the subject matter in his oil paintings. The way he builds his paint layers remains the same, with naked portraits drawn and painted from life. From line drawing to under-painting and layers of glazing, his ‘pixel play’ reveals a seductive tension between new technology and the academic traditions of grisaille.

Digital artists have also followed the path of the Photorealists from the 1960s. The YouTube video of Kyle Lambert’s 2013 photorealistic iPad painting of actor Morgan Freeman went ‘viral’, attracting over 14 million views (at time of writing). The video shows the drawing process of Lambert, as he meticulously repaints a digital photograph of the actor, Morgan Freeman. His resulting image is identical to the original photograph, attracting praise from some viewers, while others are more critical, citing the pointlessness of the task of spending (apparently) 200 hours to make a digital file identical to another digital file, which could simply have been copied and pasted in an instant.

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While there appears to be nothing new about what painters are depicting with this new technology, the video record is certainly an advantage of the medium that’s being utilised by artists in this emerging field.

Pearlstein says of his digital drawings that he prefers to show them as videos rather than as prints or finished images; David 54

Hockney exhibits his digital paintings as both prints and videos; Lambert’s labour-intensive recreation of a photograph is a ‘pointless’ still image, but as a video, it’s an online sensation.

It’s unclear what the future of this art form might be; it may be that iPad art is unlikely to emerge as a standalone medium, but more a tool to be used at the sketching

stage to produce bigger, better and more tangible things. The video playback has allowed my own art practice to do exactly that. As a sketchbook that automatically records every brushstroke, it allows me to return to any stage of an image that I produce. For example, knowing that every brushstroke is recorded, I don’t have to work toward a finished

image when painting a digital portrait; instead I can allow the sitter to move around, knowing that the end result will show the subject’s movements throughout the sitting, as opposed to their physical appearance alone. It also means there is less risk in experimenting throughout the sitting. I can compare stages in the portrait, assessing which frame is portrait 50 spring 2015

As Long As You’re Here 2013 Tony Curran digital paintings Courtesy the artist

more visually interesting – if one frame has more detail, perhaps a previous or subsequent frame has a more dynamic or interesting composition.

I found the video playback function of Brushes added significantly to my 2013 project at the National Portrait Gallery. While I produced 194 portraits over the 33 days, I also ended up with a 4-hour

video time-lapse of the drawing process, showing sitters’ changing positions, and emphasising the amount of time they sat for me.

More importantly, the video adds to the project aesthetically, as it constantly changes, building towards an image of someone who is erased as soon as they are formed, while the next person might never ‘fully’ form.

In an interview in 2011 David Hockney said that touchscreen devices would encourage artists to draw again. While it’s impossible to tell if Hockney’s prophecy will come true, one thing we can say for certain is that, in an age where touchscreens are everywhere, there are fewer barriers to drawing and painting than ever before.

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portrait 50 spring 2015

William Charles Wentworth 1872 James Anderson oil on canvas State Library of New South Wales

William Charles Wentworth – The Australian Patriot c. 1870 Unknown artist lithograph on paper Purchased 2010

Hidden in plain sight grace carroll on the gendered world of the wentworths.

Portraiture, it could be argued, is as much about concealing as revealing. During Antiquity, the portrait profile and bust were considered dignified ways to preserve one’s image for posterity.

This ethos informed portraiture during Australia’s colonial Australia. Portraits of colonial statesman William Charles Wentworth (1790-1872) and his wife Sarah Wentworth née Cox (1805-1880) each employ Classical conventions to create portraits that suggest wealth and power.

But neither captures the couple’s controversial past.

The Wentworths, who lived at Sydney’s famous Gothic Revival style Vaucluse House, were the subject of both scandal and praise in colonial Sydney.

Long before their family home became Australia’s first house museum in 1911, Wentworth rose to prominence for his expedition across the Blue Mountains, his political pursuits and pride in his country. His wife, however, was shunned from society. While it was customary for women to be precluded from social

gatherings, her ancestry and the fact she lived at a distance from the city reinforced her isolation.

This dichotomy reveals colonial attitudes towards marriage, ancestry and gender. Both were the children of convicts, but having two children out of wedlock, it was Sarah Wentworth who bore the brunt of the disrepute in conservative colonial Sydney.

Interestingly, it was her husband, not Sarah, who was born out of wedlock. William Charles was conceived on the convict vessel Neptune in 1790. His mother, Catherine Crowley, was travelling to Australia following her 1788 conviction for stealing ladies’ apparel. Her soon-to-be lover, Dr D’Arcy Wentworth – an Englishman of aristocratic descent – was also on board, serving as the ship’s doctor. Despite his noble ancestry, the elder Wentworth was not exempt from the criminal stain; he had a reputation for highway robbery and petty theft to make up for his financial shortfalls. In 1790, Crowley and Wentworth, unmarried, settled at Norfolk Island, remaining there until Crowley’s death a decade later.

Notwithstanding the stain of convict associations and

illegitimate birth, Wentworth enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle.

After his mother’s death, Wentworth was sent to England where he received first-class tuition before returning to Sydney in 1810. He capitalised on social connections when, in 1813, together with William Lawson and Gregory Blaxland, he led the first European party to cross the Blue Mountains.

Receiving public acclaim and having Wentworth Falls named after him, the expedition propelled Wentworth into the limelight at the age of twentythree. However, success as an explorer was just the beginning; the future statesman had his sights set on further fields of endeavour.

Wentworth’s future wife, Sarah Cox, did not share his public profile.

The Australian-born daughter of convicts, her parents had completed their sentences at the time of her birth in Sydney in 1885.

Her father, Francis Cox, worked as a blacksmith and the family lived at Sydney Cove. As he had a wife and family in England, he never married Sarah’s mother Frances ‘Fanny’ Morton, who assumed the name Mrs Cox for the sake of propriety.

The descendant of convicts, Sarah Cox was labelled a ‘currency lass’, a derogatory term European settlers used for Australian-born children.

It was combating this scorn by showing pride in his country that her future husband, a ‘currency lad’ himself, championed.

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Wentworth’s patriotism emerged during his campaigns for New South Wales to become selfgoverning. This conviction became action when, in 1819, he penned a legal tract, A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land, With a Particular Enumeration of the Advantages Which These Colonies Offer for Emigration and Their Superiority in Many Respects Over Those Possessed by the United States of America. In his 2009 biography of the colonial statesman, Andrew Tink notes that the issuance of the influential tract made Wentworth the first Australian-born individual to be published. By the mid-1820s, on the heels of this publication and after several years studying at Cambridge University, he was one of the leading barristers in the colony.

It was Wentworth’s prominence as a barrister that brought the nineteen year-old Sarah Cox into his life. Sharing her future husband’s determined nature, Cox employed Wentworth as her lawyer in her 1825 ‘breach of promise’ lawsuit against a Captain John Payne, who had retracted his proposal of marriage. Her court case against Payne was the first of its kind in the colony, and became the subject of scandal, particularly when awarded in her favour. The drama did not, however, end with the trial. Wentworth’s name was soon dragged into the controversy as his romance with his client became apparent.

Public opinion of her as a fallen woman was confirmed when Cox testified in the witness stand that she was already carrying Wentworth’s child. Acknowledging the child as his own – as his father had done – Wentworth and Cox commenced a de-facto relationship. A few years later, they moved into Vaucluse House, a home that would become as famous as Wentworth’s political ideas. In what was then a one-room cottage that had been established by the Irish knight-cum-convict Sir Henry Browne Hayes in 1804, Cox lived a comfortable yet secluded

life. Over time, the house was extended; Gothic Revival style outbuildings were erected, and the estate expanded to over 500 acres.

The couple defied the critics and had another child together, before finally marrying in 1829, when the newly minted Sarah Wentworth was eight months pregnant with the third of their ten children.

The contrast between the isolated domestic sphere of Sarah Wentworth and the high profile of her husband continued throughout their time at Vaucluse House. As William Charles Wentworth gained fame as ‘the father of Australian democracy’ for his part in drafting the New South Wales constitution of 1853 – considered by historians as the model for Australia’s 1901 constitution – and as one of the founders of the University of Sydney, his wife remained an absent figure at public events.

However, Sarah Wentworth’s biographer Carol Liston has observed that her role in managing the family home, overseeing the kitchen garden, and supporting

Bust (Sarah Wentworth) 1885 Achille Simonetti marble portrait bust Vaucluse House, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales Gift of Miss Dorothy Wentworth The Three Graces [Edith, Eliza and Laura, daughters of Sarah and William Charles Wentworth] 1868 Hans Julius Gruder oil on canvas Vaucluse House collection Sydney Living Museums William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872) c.1862 Photographer unknown sepia photograph (carte-de-visite) Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection Sydney Living Museums

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Wentworth was fundamental to his professional success, and that of their children.

These included their daughters Edith, Eliza and Laura, who have been immortalised in a portrait

by Hans Julius Gruder, The Three Graces [Edith, Eliza and Laura, daughters of Sarah and William Charles Wentworth] 1868, which hangs in the hall at Vaucluse House. The painting portrays the Wentworth daughters as sophisticated and privileged young women; there is no hint of the scandals that coloured their mother’s life.

The sophisticated portraits of William Charles and Sarah Wentworth provide insight into their self-image. These include a medallion by eminent English artist Thomas Woolner ra produced in 1854, a copy of which is in the National Portrait Gallery collection, and a marble bust of Sarah Wentworth by Achille Simonetti (1885), that was on loan from Vaucluse House to the Gallery from 2008 until earlier this year.

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The portraits are examples of those the Wentworths and their progeny commissioned of their family for display in Vaucluse House, which had been transformed into an ‘elegant château’ during the 1830s and 1840s.

The Wentworths amassed a collection of furnishings and artworks from Grand Tours of Europe to decorate Vaucluse House. The mosaic floor of the dining room was thought, for many years, to be made up of tiles from the ancient city of Pompeii (the tiles were made in Italy in the nineteenth century).

It is no coincidence that William Charles Wentworth, a devotee of Classical art and literature, is presented by Woolner in a format that pays homage to Classical art.

Indeed, the cultivated image depicted in Woolner’s medallion matches that of both Wentworth’s domestic environment and his

public image. As art historian Deborah Edwards has observed, Woolner referenced Classical coins in his commissioned portrait medallions, combining this with the Pre-Raphaelite philosophy of ‘truth to nature’. In the

medallion, Wentworth’s strong features suggest the gravitas of the man, and reflect the interest in physiognomy at the time. Indeed, his social prominence is reflected in the title of the lithographic portrait by an unknown artist in the Portrait Gallery’s collection, William Charles Wentworth: The Australian Patriot c. 1870. Simonetti’s posthumous bust of Sarah Wentworth matches the portraits of her husband.

The image of Sarah is that of a powerful and sophisticated woman, not the convict mistress she was often dismissed as. Art historian Deborah Edwards described Simonetti as ‘the most fashionable Sydney portrait sculptor of the 1880s,’ which might explain why the Wentworths selected him to sculpt their portraits. In this portrait, as with the one of her husband produced as its pair, Sarah Wentworth is shown wearing Classical attire. Her head is held high and turned at an angle, and portrait 50 spring 2015

Vaucluse House c.1841 Conrad Martens watercolour on card Vaucluse House collection Sydney Living Museums William Charles Wentworth 1854 Thomas Woolner cast bronze relief medallion Gift of the Simpson family in memory of Caroline Simpson oam 2008

Sarah Wentworth née Cox c. 1852 William Nicholas Watercolour pencil Vaucluse House collection Sydney Living Museums Acquired with funds provided by the Members of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales

she bears a confident expression.

These portraits are thought to have been commissioned by their son, Fitzwilliam Wentworth, and were displayed in the Wentworth mausoleum until their transferral to Vaucluse House in 1928.

Liston notes that portrait busts of women were seldom produced in colonial Australia, as the Gallery’s collection attests. The existence of this portrait, therefore, provides some insight into the image of Sarah known to those around her.

Indeed, at least two other portrait busts of Sarah were produced in plaster; one by Charles Abraham (c. 1844), which is on display at Vaucluse House, and another by an unknown artist that is featured in records associated with the House.

It is a small watercolour portrait

by William Nicholas that reveals the most about Sarah Wentworth.

Depicted seated, presumably at her beloved home, she sits upright in an expensive pink silk dress, her hands resting on her lap. Her head is tilted down, and she gazes directly out to the viewer. Compositionally, Wentworth’s body occupies the picture plane, promoting her image as the ‘Mistress of Vaucluse’.

Nicholas portrays her as a strong yet refined woman.

The Wentworth legacy as an Australian dynasty has endured since William Charles and Sarah Wentworth’s deaths in 1872 and 1880 respectively. The recipient of the first state funeral in New South Wales, William Charles Wentworth was mourned by 70,000 citizens when laid to rest on 6 May 1873.

In the twentieth century, he was championed as ‘Australia’s Greatest Native Son’ by patriotic historian

Manning Clark. By contrast, Sarah Wentworth’s death in England eight years later passed with little notice in Australia and her scandalous past was soon forgotten.

Although William Charles Wentworth continues to be heralded as a significant figure in Australian history, Sarah Wentworth’s story has not been

forgotten. Liston’s 1988 biography, Sarah Wentworth: Mistress of Vaucluse, made a significant contribution to revealing her prominent position in her family and home, suggesting that she may well have been the strong and refined woman represented in Simonetti’s bust. As a result, visitors to Vaucluse House today learn of the woman who played a

vital role in establishing the House and the Wentworth family legacy.

Her story brings to life the lot of a colonial woman whose experiences were both extraordinary, yet representative of that of many ‘currency lasses.’ William Charles and Sarah Wentworth’s portraits exemplify how even the most refined works can act to both reveal and conceal their subjects.

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ON SHOW

international J. Eleana Antonaki © Eleana Antonaki; Untitled (Patrice de Mac-Mahon, Duc de Magenta) 2013 Jonathan Owen Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art © Jonathan Owen; Audrey Hepburn dressed in Givenchy with sunglasses by Oliver Goldsmith 1966 Douglas Kirkland © Iconic Images/Douglas Kirkland; Abraham Lincoln 1865 Alexander Gardner National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

BP Portrait Prize 2015 National Portrait Gallery, London until 20 September 2015 Selected from a record-breaking 2,748 entries by artists from 92 countries around the world, the BP Portrait Award 2015 represents the very best in contemporary portrait painting. New York based artist Eleana Antonaki, 25, is the winner of the BP Young Artist Award for a portrait of her friend and emerging artist Julie Laenkhom whose practice is installation-based and deals with the idea of the object as a living thing. She was fascinated by the connection Julie develops with her sculptural objects and the almost ritualistic and obsessive way she treats objects of ‘low value’ like plastic bags and balls of clay. npg.org.uk

Head to head: Portrait sculpture Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh until 10 January 2016 Head to Head brings together around fifty sculpted works in a variety of styles and media, dating from antiquity to the present day. Head to Head explores the many ways in which sculptors have treated and re-imagined that most engaging and most primal subject, the human head. nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs 1859-1872 National Portrait Gallery, Washington 18 September 2015 – 13 March 2016 Alexander Gardner, the man who shot the Civil War, created dramatic photographs of battlefields. Included in Dark Fields of the Republic is his best-known work, the ‘cracked plate’ photograph of Lincoln. Gardner also documented American expansion as settlers moved westward.

His landscapes give a sense of almost limitless horizons and his portraits of Indian chiefs have a specificity and gravity that is haunting. npg.si.edu

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Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an icon National Portrait Gallery, London until 18 October 2015 Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon is the first UK exhibition to be organised with support from the Audrey Hepburn Estate and her sons, Luca Dotti and Sean Hepburn Ferrer. A remarkable selection of rarely seen photographs from their personal collection. npg.org.uk

portrait 50 spring 2015

Sherbet 1972 Lewis Morley Gift of Lewis Morley 2002; Barry & Alkirra – The House in Carrington 2014 Katherine Williams; Visitors to the Angourie house c. 1974 John Witzig; The Wandering Jew 2015 Ilya Milstein

national portrait gallery

National Photographic Portrait Prize 2015 Cairns Regional Gallery 11 September – 18 October 2015 The National Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition is selected from a national field of entries that reflect the distinctive vision of Australia’s aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects.

The National Portrait Gallery offers a prize of $25,000 for the most outstanding photographic portrait. portrait.gov.au

Bare: Degrees of undress National Portrait Gallery, Canberra until 15 November 2015 Bare: Degrees of undress is a National Portrait Gallery collection remix celebrating the candid, contrived, natural, sexy, ironic, beautiful, and fascinating Australian portraiture that shows a bit of skin. Fun and forthright, the exhibition includes portraits of Sherbet, Billy Slater, Matthew Mitcham, David Gulpilil and Megan Gale. portrait.gov.au Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award 2015 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra until 25 April 2016 The annual Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award encourages the development of moving image portraiture by supporting artists who work with screen-based technology. The six finalist artworks were selected from 100 entries for their compelling expressions of identity. portrait.gov.au

Arcadia: Sound of the sea Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre 2 October – 15 November 2015 Arcadia is an exhibition of lyrical, richlytextured photographs by John Witzig, co-founder of Tracks magazine and founder of SeaNotes, with huge ink drawings by Nicholas Harding and psychedelic film footage by Albert Falzon. Imbued with a Romantic conception of the awesome and spiritually restorative force of the sea, it expresses the free-spirited character of a group of young and perfectly-formed Australian surfers in the early 1970s. artgallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au

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HANG

TIME

Rose Byrne 2001 Karin Catt type C photograph Purchased 2005

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n the eighteen months following its establishment in 1998, the National Portrait Gallery acquired just over 120 portraits depicting some 110 different sitters.

Roughly a third of these were women. The current Women in Focus display highlights the energy the Gallery has applied to the development of a collection documenting the strength and diversity of the achievements of contemporary Australian women and presents a selection of these early acquisitions alongside a sample of the 2600 works subsequently added to the collection through purchase, gift and commission.

Rose Byrne (b. 1979) was raised in the Sydney suburbs of Balmain and Newtown, and joined the Australian Theatre for Young People at the age of eight. Her breakthrough came playing opposite Heath Ledger in Two Hands (1999). In 2000 her performance in The Goddess of 1967 won her a best actress award at the Venice Film Festival. In 2004 she was in the thriller Wicker Park and the epic Troy. Beginning in 2007, she acted over five seasons in the television series Damages, gaining two Golden Globe nominations. She has since appeared in the brash and ribald comedies Get Him to the Greek (2010), Bridesmaids (2011) and Bad Neighbours (2014).

portrait 50 spring 2015

Circle of Friends Acquisition Fund 2015

The National Portrait Gallery invites Circle of Friends and supporters of the Gallery to contribute to the purchase of this significant new portrait of Australia poet, essayist and academic, Chris Wallace-Crabbe am.

The portrait, painted by his partner, artist Kristin Headlam, features on the cover of Travelling Without Gods – A Chris WallaceCrabbe Companion (2014), an anthology of essays and artistic responses to the poet and his work.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe 2012 Kristin Headlam oil on linen

The winner of the Conrad Jupiters Acquisitive Art Prize (1991) and the Doug Moran Portrait Prize (2000), Kristin Headlam’s works are included in major state and national collections and several regional galleries.

For information about how to support the acquisition of this portrait, please telephone (02) 6102 7022 or email jody.barnett@npg.gov.au

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