by Clive James
Yes, me and the painters: you can imagine the group photograph. But what’s wrong with this picture? Me. I shouldn’t be there. I not only never shared their struggle over the long decades, but for most of that time I knew next to nothing about them. The whole upsurge happened without my knowledge. Though the painters eventually changed the way I saw them and have even changed the way I see life, they didn’t do it by appealing to my sensitivity. They did it by overcoming my lack of it. And although there were many writers who were less obtuse on the subject than I was, not many of them were in a position to change the general perception of Australian painting by what they wrote. The painters changed it by what they painted.
In retrospect, that was always the main guarantee of the strength of Australian painting: it didn’t really need writers to say how good it was. Though the painters cared a lot about what critics said, they cared mainly because critical opinion might affect the sale of their pictures to the public. The law of supply and demand was the measure that mattered. Since the pictures were bought by people who loved them – and that was especially true in the days when the prices were low, because it always takes a real appreciator to buy an artist’s pictures before there is an established market for them – the question of where those buyers lived becomes vitally interesting in relation to the larger story of how Australian post-colonial culture relates to the culture of the old imperial world from which it emerged.
But before we start discussing that subject on a large scale, it might be more fruitful to discuss it in the much more restricted terms dictated by my own knowledge of the visual arts in the late 1950s, when I was first a student at the University of Sydney. If only I had been a student of painting. Like students of music, students of painting had to learn something. From the life stories of the Australian painters up until very recent times, it emerges that they all had to submit to the hard disciplines of the craft that underlay the art: they can all prepare canvases, mix colours, apply a glaze. Above all, they can all draw. And those many hours in the life class they all share. If only writers had a shared experience with the same objective standards: they would know their own true ranking much better, and perhaps hate each other much less.
As a student of literature I had to submit to no disciplines at all, and spent an unforgivable amount of time fooling around. But it is, or should be, in the nature of a great university to provide an unwritten charter by which a no-hoper may fool around more constructively than he realises, largely by keeping company with fellow students who are working harder than he is. One of my fellow students was Robert Hughes. A bit older than I, a lot better looking, and much more gifted in every respect, Hughes in those days was doing as much of drawing and painting as he was of writing. Nominally he was an architecture student, but he spent most of his time drawing for the student newspaper honi soit, for all the other student publications, and, enviably soon, for the first examples of a new wave of serious periodicals that dealt with the whole of culture all at once. Hughes’s draughtsmanship was dazzling. He could draw anything and anyone in about ten seconds, like one of those autistic children who can draw whole cities in perspective without lifting the pencil point from the paper. But Hughes’s version of autism involved reciting large chunks of Four Quartets from memory, and his flying line had mentality and character in every inch. He painted with what seemed to me equal authority, although I was no judge. Hughes was, and the time soon came when he decided he was not original enough, and ought to quit.
He might have been premature in that judgment. Quite often, an original artist starts off looking like every artist he admires, and then his own uniqueness emerges after everyone else’s has been absorbed. The future critic might have criticised himself too much. Another reason he might have stopped was that I shot a hole in one of his pictures. At the family house in Rose Bay, he and I were diving around the garden with an air-pistol, making life difficult for the sparrows. When my turn came I tried a deflection shot on a passing spag and the pellet went past the target and on into the garage, where Hughes’s latest painting was leaning against a wall. It was a painting of a sad, rather Eliotesque broken king and when we held it up to the light it became evident that the disconsolate monarch now had a hole in one eye. My suggestion that the defeated central figure had thus acquired an interesting new connection with infinity did not go down well. Hughes was as put out as the eye was but he was a generous soul and soon forgave me.
I like to think it was a coincidence that he left for Europe shortly afterwards. Probably his real reason for heading out was a belief that the action in the art of painting, as in the arts generally, was elsewhere, in that distant place we called Overseas. I can remember taking that belief for gospel, even when it came to an art-form that I knew next to nothing about. The first art books with more of their reproductions in colour than in black and white were reaching Australia about then, and I thought I could see from my imported books about Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec that the so-called ‘Australian Impressionists’ in the Art Gallery of NSW were a secondary event by comparison. Much later on, Hughes the world-famous art critic talked about the effect on Australia’s would-be painters of what he called ‘the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece’. He took it for granted that for the painters to actually see Europe’s heritage of great paintings was crucial. But a loose interpretation of his principle – and a journalistic interpretation, the interpretation that sets the agenda, is almost always loose – tends to neglect the fact that Australia’s post-war wave of painters already knew quite a lot about the European heritage before they went abroad. And they all went. As Hughes himself would now be the first to point out, Margaret Olley, John Olsen and Jeffrey Smart had already made their first trips to Europe while we were still shooting sparrows. But Hughes might not have known that then, and as for me, I didn’t even know their names. I had heard of Russell Drysdale because some of his outback scenes had been reproduced in the Women’s Weekly. Sidney Nolan I knew to be associated in some way with Ned Kelley. But I didn’t meet an actual Australian painter until I got to London and found myself living in the same house as Brett Whiteley.
The house, in Melbury Road, Kensington, had once belonged to the pre-Raphaelite crowd-pleaser Holman Hunt. The bunch of recent arrivals that I was with all moved into the ground floor of the house and started being poor. Brett lived in the studio out in the back yard. Brett had obviously already left poverty behind. He had all the signs of success including a blindingly beautiful wife, Wendy. Forty years on, now that my elder daughter is an up and coming painter, I know enough about the harsh economics of the painter’s life to realise that Brett might not have been that well off after all. But he certainly got invited out.
It was a tough moment for the rest of us when Brett and Wendy emerged from the studio one spring evening on their way to dinner with Sir Kenneth Clark. Brett, whose tightly curled tea-cosy of a hairstyle was bright blond in those days, a kind of golden helmet, was almost as lovely as his wife. The two of them made us feel very downmarket. But Brett was no snob and seemed not to mind when I spent hours drinking his beer while explaining to him that technique in the arts was a side issue. Brett countered with the argument that one of the reasons Matisse could leave out so much was that he knew exactly how to put everything in. This was a perfectly true statement but I was years away from realising how true it was, because I had never had to sit down and keep reshaping a sentence while the light changed on the verb.
One of the things I most regret about my acquaintanceship with Brett Whiteley was that when he carried out his plan to visit the National Gallery before dawn – he had been given special permission after Sir Kenneth Clark had made the right phone call – I was too hung over to join him on his expedition to watch the sun come up on the Piero della Francescas. (Youth is the time of opportunities neglected: who would want to live through all that waste again?) One of the things I least regret is that I agreed he should do a triptych of nude lovers based on one of my poems. I thought I r
ecognised Wendy in the complicated and lascivious flourish of black ink on the white paper. Anyway the bits that I thought were her were a lot more interesting than my words. After the pictures were framed at Brett’s expense (Wendy looked at me very darkly about that, and she was right) he made me a present of them, and I lugged them around for years until I finally left them with a startled landlady in Cambridge as part compensation for being late with my rent. Unless she burned them, I suppose they will turn up one day and fetch a huge price, not because of my lines but because of Brett’s line: and that’s just how it should be.
British critics were already writing about how Brett had brought his blue sky with him from Australia. I had seen for myself that he got some of his blue sky from Piero della Francesca, but it didn’t occur to me that there was a potentially interesting aesthetic question here about memory, perception and inspiration. Nothing about painting occurred to me for some time. At Cambridge I made regular visits to the Fitzwilliam to admire the Rembrandt. The Rembrandt subsequently turned out to be a fake but by then I could tell it was a pretty good one. With my future wife I spent a lot of time in Florence and in the Low Countries, doing the grand tour of the Renaissance. What a busy bunch of guys the Renaissance had been, I joked to myself, but in truth I was duly overwhelmed. I didn’t see how anything could compete with that, or even add to it. I liked quite a lot of the new art that was then invading London from America but apart from a few unarguable stand-outs like Larry Rivers I didn’t see much that could convince me it was as hard to do as, say, painting the Portinari altarpiece.
Then something big happened, and, as so often happens when something big happens, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was; I just felt the thump. There was girl at Girton who wore pop-socks and had that strange, rare, Zuleika Dobson-like gift of being followed around by a troop of prattling young men wherever she went even though she never said anything. One night she invited us all to a party at her father’s flat in London. It was in St James’s, as I remember, possibly overlooking St James Street itself. I was more than slightly smashed when we all arrived out of the night, but after guessing from the scale of the place that Miss Pop-Socks’s father must be loaded, the first thing I specifically noticed was that the walls were covered with paintings which had to be Australian. I guessed this about the Arthur Boyd paintings, and I was certain of it about the Drysdales, which were so numerous that they sometimes hung one above the other.
Overcoming a rush of nostalgia about the Women’s Weekly, I proceeded to instruct the young company about the rise of Australian culture. Miss Pop-Socks seemed unimpressed, perhaps because she needed no instruction. Her father had backed his appreciation with his money. Or to put it in a less vulgar and ultimately much more useful way, he had backed it with his love. This is an aspect we should note. It wasn’t just a case of a pundit-cum-merchant like Sir Kenneth Clark investing in futures as he stocked up on the Nolans and the Whiteleys. It was a case of British art-lovers seeing something that delighted them, and wanting to live with it. That night I got no further than realising that Drysdale delighted me. Yes, that was what a red dirt road looked like, and a town with one pub. Taking it for granted that an Australian painting should have an Australian subject, I could have cried with homesickness.
Homesickness was unrelieved for another ten years at least, until finally the Observer sent me back to Sydney on assignment. Until then, I hadn’t been able to afford a ticket home. That was the reason, incidentally, why the first trips of the Australian painters to Europe tended to last for years rather than months: it was so expensive getting there that you would have been wasting the money if you didn’t stay. I wonder if, nowadays, easy travel really has brought the other side of the world any closer: if you arrive ready to leave again, how much do you learn? How much do you submit, which is the big secret of learning anything?
Anyway, I had been away a long time: long enough for the Opera House to be finished. When I left, it was just a set of foundations. When I got back, it was Sydney’s most famous thing since the Harbour Bridge. Before the war, Grace Cossington Smith had painted daringly pointilliste pictures of the Bridge when it was being built, but that was as close as art got to engineering. Now the Opera House was there, and it had its own art inside it, including John Olsen’s huge painting Five Bells inspired by Kenneth Slessor’s poem about Sydney Harbour, out onto which the painting looked through the glass: a virtual image observing its reality. The painting knocked me sideways. For a while I thought it was an abstract, until I began to notice that it was composed of natural details. But the natural details were dotted through coloured space, in roughly the proportion of space to object that obtains in a Japanese screen, and with the same touch of quietly ecstatic wit that I had learned to look for in Paul Klee. You will notice that my range of reference had expanded.
Some of these guesses about the kind of art that Olsen has been looking at I was able later to check up on, because with Olsen, as with the other major Australian painters, a useful tradition began of publishing sumptuous monographs in which the reproductions not only got better and better, the text got more and more learned. To the row of Olsen books there has recently been added one called John Olsen: Teeming with Life, His Complete Graphics 1957–2005. This book is an education: an education about the artist’s education.
In Olsen’s prints you get down to the basics of where his big, seemingly boundless paintings such as Five Bells and The You-Beaut Country got their centripetal strength: detailed drawing. In all the prints of the 1980s that carried images of the now-famous Olsen frog, you can see how he caught the wildlife in motion through letting his line run as fast as it would flow: the frog dives from a branch like a blob of spit. You can also see that all this lyrical freedom must have been the product of a discipline. And so it was. In the early 1950s Olsen worked long hours in the drawing classes of three art schools in Sydney. Two of them were in sight of the Harbour and the third was the fabled East Sydney Tech, where Margaret Olley had already put in what Australians call the hard yakka.
But the extra thing to grasp is that Olsen knew quite a lot about Klee and Kandinsky before he left on the Orion in 1956 for his first three years away. He might not have seen many originals, but he saw all the reproductions there were. And the visiting exhibition ‘French Painting Today’ had taught him a lot, as it taught all the painters a lot, when it toured the Australian cities in 1953. It could teach them so much because they were looking with instructed eyes. And indeed common sense tells us that the Australian painters had never been cut off from the old world, but had been in a constant state of interchange with it, and all the more so because the actual pictures they had seen were so few, and thus so precious. Waiting for a long time under the balcony is not necessarily the worst start to a love affair. But the big difference between Romeo wooing Juliet and an Australian painter saving up for his first European trip was that the Australian painter already had a good idea of what he was going to get.
He, or, of course, she. Before the war, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith had always had the European heritage on their minds, if not before their eyes. After the war, Margaret Olley might have preferred to have it on her mind for longer. She has always said that she was exposed to the European impact too early in her career. Meg Stewart’s excellent biography Margaret Olley: Far From a Still Life is a lot better than its title. The book gives us a richly nuanced account of how the girl from Banyan Creek grew up in artless houses but had already seen her first Medici prints while she was at school in Brisbane in the late thirties. We should pause here to remind ourselves, and to inform the incredulous young, of what a Medici print was: it was a very good colour reproduction. What the Australian painters couldn’t see of the European masterpieces was the texture. They could see the colour, which meant that they could see almost all of the form. And they saw more of the European modern painters than you might think because there were well-off and cultivated Australians who collected modern art and brought it
home, and the same spirit that made the collectors want to own foreign paintings made them want to know young Australian painters. It’s the story that’s so often left out: the story of the appreciators.
Margaret Olley’s real life as a painter began in Sydney towards the end of the war. At East Sydney Tech the young Margaret was soon famous among the artists for her talent and Renoir-pure pulchritude. Drysdale, Donald Friend and William Dobell all painted her, and in 1949 Dobell’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait of her, in her white dress of unrationed parachute silk, made her famous throughout Australia: Women’s Weekly famous, famous in a way that a shy girl didn’t really want to be. The journalists, in both senses of the phrase, chased her onto the ship. In Europe, she was overwhelmed by the galleries. We might tend to think that it was because she had no idea. A better interpretation is that she had a very good idea, but when she saw the reality it was too much of what she wanted all at once.
In Paris, all the Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings that are now coldly housed in the Muse´e d’Orsay were still splendidly concentrated in the natural warmth of the Jeu de Paume, where, dare one say it, they belong. We can safely deduce that she was thrown for a loop, because a large part of her subsequent career has been devoted to searching through that concentration for its essence. She came back to Australia in 1957 and for twenty years didn’t sail again. Nowadays she travels all the time – she doesn’t miss a major exhibition anywhere in the world – but for those two decades her journeys were in the mind: for any kind of artist, the journeys that matter most. And just as, when in Europe, she had maintained a presence in Australia – she sent a whole exhibition back to Brisbane from the south of France – she never, when she came back to Australia, ceased to live in Europe. That indeed, was what her journey in the mind was about.