by Clive James
It was conspicuously a journey away from the specifically Australian subject. In her early days, off in the bush at Hill End with Donald Friend, she had painted what was in front of her. Recently there was a rich little exhibition at the National Trust’s Samuel Henry Ervin gallery on Sydney’s Observatory Hill to prove that Olley and Friend got results a long way beyond the merely decorative. Robert Hughes said that they were two members of the ‘Charm School’ but the term is dismissive only if you underestimate just how charming charm can be. But now that she was back where she started, Olley painted as if she was still in the Jeu de Paume and the doors had been nailed closed, leaving her there unaccompanied except perhaps by Morandi and Ivon Hitchens. By the time I got to know about her she had been in there for almost forty years.
As I started flying back and forth to Australia more and more often, the question of the duty of the arts to the Australian Identity was taking more and more space in the media. One look at a roomful of Margaret Olley’s pictures was enough to prove that the question was a mare’s nest. This wasn’t Australia being painted, nor was it French pictures being echoed: this was the deep, layered memory of colour and balance being analysed for its coherent force. Mainly the objects in the pictures were items from the flea market that Olley is still running in the Hat Factory, the old name for the annexe of her Paddington house: a flea market where none of the brocante is for sale. (The lucky lunch guests, who amount to a long-running tertulia of everyone prominent in the Australian arts world, have to get used to being surrounded by knick-knacks recognisable from pictures they have seen and might even own.) But it’s doubtful if we should talk about objects at all. Imploding nebulae of colour, her pictures, Australian only in the sense that it’s an Australian who paints them, continue to raise the question of whether she is a figurative painter leaving the people out or an abstract painter putting objects in. I tend to the latter view. I think that with her, as with Olsen, there is constant and deliberate adventure into the territory where the subject yields its full material glory by ceasing to matter. But the question, with both those painters, will always remain moot.
With Jeffrey Smart it was settled from the start. There has to be representation, because form is his mainspring. The literature on him is already rich but Barry Pearce’s recent Jeffrey Smart is the best thing yet, a truly beautiful book. As we have come to expect from the Beagle Press, which is by now setting world standards and not just matching them, the colour reproductions are sumptuous, and because Smart works hard to achieve perfectly flat planes of colour – there has been no impasto for sixty years – every major picture can be not only present but pretty well correct.
The first thing you notice is that hardly any of them are about Australia. Very early on, before he made his first trip abroad in 1948, he painted local subjects, but even then they tended towards the uniquely personal international landscape that his pictures live in now. Blessed like his friend Barry Humphries with original taste, Smart already knew an awful lot about what had happened overseas before he left for Europe via America. Initially, like Margaret Olley, he was stymied by London’s National Gallery. But we have to remember that the process of absorbing influence is highly complex. Smart was in search of stillness and proportion. He was already at home with Mondrian, Ben Nicholson, Balthus and Edward Hopper. In Paris, the personal teaching of Le´ger took him further into a conceptual range of ideal proportion and geometric balance. So when he says that a single ancient mosaic he saw in Naples has had fifty years of influence, he might only be saying that it confirmed what he had already worked out.
In 1951 he came back to Sydney for twelve years, during which time he made a hit as Phidias on the radio show The Argonauts. Phidias knew all there was to know about art, both Australian and foreign. Characteristically I managed to miss his every appearance: he might have woken me up a lot earlier. He might have told me in advance that those Australian Impressionists – Streeton, McCubbin, Tom Roberts – were really something. Smart was helping to educate the next generation of art-lovers in the true principle that painting has no nationalism, only painters in different places. But all that time he was getting ready to leave again. One of the reasons is revealed in his autobiography Not Quite Straight: Australia was not yet ready for its gay artists.
But another reason can only be called destiny. He was destined not to be caught up in the question of how or what an Australian should paint. He had another country in mind. It wasn’t even Italy. He loved Italy, and after a crucial move from Rome to Tuscany he settled down and lived in Italy. He is still there, at the Posticcia Nuova, which must be one of the most beautiful houses any artist has ever inhabited. The exiled Victor Hugo lived in more splendour, but not with such taste. Thus lodged within driving distance of Arezzo, Smart painted Italy, or seemed to. But what he was really painting was a new world; a really new world; the world of Europe’s post-war reconstruction, when the colours came out on the sign-systems of the highways and on the cranes above the white buildings. It was a look destined to take over the planet. Whoever said that eventually everyone will live in the Smart country was exactly right.
What he painted was a vision. ‘The world’, he said, ‘has never been so beautiful.’ It was the deepest kind of aesthetic perception talking: the kind that can see the formal music of a pre-pyramid Egyptian bas relief and a Giotto Madonna in a late-night diner by Edward Hopper, and see all three in a row of modern apartment blocks half hidden by a hill. But it was a view of the world so contemporary that it was prescient, and he might have gone broke if he hadn’t been hard-headed about business. It’s a characteristic he shares with Olley, who realised early on that she should put her earnings into houses if she wanted to go on painting. Smart did the same, and his ability to put the painter’s inherently boom-and-bust finances on to a stable basis meant that he was able to ward off more than one great danger.
He was never tempted into painting sequences just to fill a too-hastily scheduled exhibition: one of the temptations which, for Brett Whiteley, might have been almost as fatal as heroin. Every Smart picture was, and is, an individual construction. He was also able to ward off the temptation posed by nationalist pressure. Nolan, in my view, fell for both temptations at once when he churned out too many desert landscapes. Smart was not to be forced home, even by his home culture’s increasing gravity. Always favoured by discerning Australian collectors who could see that its internationalism was what made the Australian culture boom formidable, he comes home of his own free will, and that’s what has made his career a triumph. One of his biggest and greatest pictures, The Container Train, now hanging in the Victorian Arts Institute, started to roll in Yugoslavia two years before it reached a forest in Gippsland. There could be no neater way of saying that the old world and its new country are continuous.
You can’t read one book about any of these people without running into stories about all the others. Painters have more fun than poets. It seems unfair. Even in the rare cases when they don’t get on, the painters are in a club, and quarrels are either settled or become a recognised axis for gossip. (While working on my left ear, Jeffrey Smart told me a scarcely believable story about Dobell and the man in charge of Wiseman’s Ferry.) This feeling of fraternity has certainly helped the Australian painters keep the courage of their convictions, the chief conviction being that a painting should be a thing in itself, and not a fleck in a trend. When all else fails, they’ve got each other, even beyond death. Olsen drew Brett Whiteley in his last years, when the golden helmet had gone dark. After Whiteley died, Olsen made a set of prints acknowledging the everlasting beauty of those early pictures of Wendy in the bath. He drew only the bath, because she was gone, too.
The same feeling extends even further back through time, to foreign painters long gone, whom they might never have met. Margaret Olley, who has always been shy about naming her lucky lovers, is flagrant about her love for Bonnard. A real live Bonnard is one of her many bequests to the Art Gallery of NSW, and the
re are other, smaller galleries that benefit from her munificence. And, standing out among her many still-lifes, what else is a figurative painting like Homage to Manet, with its scrumptiously creamy depiction of Berthe Morrisot, except a cheeky reminder that Margaret Olley, too, had once been painted in white by a great man, and had still managed to lead her own creative life?
Well, it’s also a nice picture. And people want pictures. They want poems, too, but they want them in another way, and it’s all too easy for poets to get depressed when they discover the deal is never done, the fait is never accompli, and the thing is never taken home to hang cherished on the wall while its creator banks the cheque and the critics shut up. We who push a pen had just better face it. Pushing a brush is in every way more satisfactory. But as long as the results matter, pushing a brush is also a lot harder. Any tribute to the Australian painters should begin with our gratitude for their belief that the results do matter. While the writers complained about being either shut out from the old world or else unable to get free of it – and there was reason for both complaints – the painters quietly enjoyed their privilege of helping to build an Australian cultural identity that the world could not resist. Always separate yet always together, they created an achievement so exciting for the eyes that it can make the blind see. I stand here as testimony to the truth of that.
Postscript
This lecture could easily have become a book if time had permitted. I barely mentioned Charles Blackman, whose accumulated work is one of the glories of post-war Australian painting. There could be a whole chapter just on the importance of East Sydney Technical College, where Rayner Hoff was the tutelary sprit. Hoff’s origins were in England, but after a long spell in the trenches of World War I, and a period of study in Rome afterwards, he carried a whole continental heritage with him when he set out for Australia. After he arrived there in the 1920s, he made a little statue of a lion, which you can still see in the Art Gallery of NSW. Hoff ’s lion became the bonnet ornament of the cars produced by General Motors Holden, and a version of it is still the logo for Holden today. The cultural interchange between Australia and Europe began in the nineteenth century. But then, when you think about it, it began with the First Fleet. National compartmentalization is a marketable fad in the minds of commentators who draw a salary for shuffling cliche´s. There were Chinese lacquer boxes on sale in the markets of Imperial Rome. Art travels faster now, but it has always travelled.
A QUESTION FOR DIAMOND JIM
The nickname ‘Diamond Jim’ fitted James McClelland the way ‘Big Julie from Chicago’ fitted the gangster in Guys and Dolls who rolled spotless dice, with the difference that Diamond Jim wasn’t acting. He was really like what his nickname said: spruce, sparkling, charming, the Australian politician with the touch of the patrician, the one whose jacket sat neatly on his shoulders, and who didn’t sweat even in the hot weather. In the late 1980s, at a time when I knew less than I should have known about what had been going on in Australia for the previous quarter of a century, I interviewed him for the one and only series of my talk show that I ever taped in Sydney. All the other series were taped in the UK, were broadcast there in the first instance, and appeared in Australia only in syndication. Predictably (predictably in retrospect, that is: if it had been fully predictable beforehand, I would never have made such a blunder), the series I made in Australia was the one greeted by the Australian critics as being, compared with the others, a patronising, sub-standard rush-job designed to lower Australia’s repute in the eyes of the watching world.
Actually we took great care with that series, and especially with the casting. Along with the veteran painter Lloyd Rees and the already illustrious poet Les Murray – I think it was the first mainstream television show Murray was ever asked to do – James McClelland was one of the guests I was determined to get on the air. I was pleased that he said yes, and he seemed pleased enough at the level of questions he was asked, but he must have been surprised not to have been questioned more closely about his presence in the blast area during the explosion that has come to be remembered in Australia as the Dismissal. I knew roughly what had happened: Whitlam, as Prime Minister, had incorrectly believed that his appointee as Governor General, Sir John Kerr, would not fire him. McClelland, a member of Whitlam’s Labor government and also a life-long friend of Kerr’s, had not guessed that Kerr would push the button on Whitlam. After Kerr duly did so, McClelland had never talked to Kerr again. It was a sore point, but that was no good reason for my steering clear of it. If I had realised just how sore a point it was, I would have asked McClelland about little else. I wasn’t there to soothe his ego, which, although nothing extravagant, was immaculately brushed, like his hair.
The truth was that McClelland, the most intelligent of men, had become a walking reminder of just how wrong one man can be about another. In a key sentence from his wonderfully entertaining autobiography Stirring the Possum he stirs the possum by putting his elegant finger on the exact nub of the whole Dismissal issue. At this point in his book, McClelland is delivering his assessment of Kerr’s Matters for Judgment, an embarrassingly limp apologia written by Kerr in the last and unhappiest part of his life. McClelland’s key sentence goes like this:
At no point does he [i.e. Sir John Kerr: CJ] explain why, apart from his fear that it would ensure his own sacking, he did not simply say to Whitlam: If you can’t get supply by a certain date I may have to dismiss you.
According to McClelland, the best Kerr can say for himself is that he couldn’t warn Whitlam that dismissal might be in the wind, because if he had warned Whitlam, Whitlam might have dismissed him, Kerr: in other words, it might have been a race to telephone the Queen. As Paul Kelly convincingly shows in his admirable book devoted exclusively to the subject, November 1975, the race to the telephone was a mythical scenario: Whitlam could never have got the Palace to dismiss Kerr before Kerr had irretrievably dismissed Whitlam. But those technicalities aside, McClelland hits the point that would have mattered anyway, even if Kerr’s warning Whitlam had cost Kerr his job: that Kerr should have been thinking about more than the job. Thinking about more than the job was the job, or else the job meant nothing. McClelland quotes devastatingly to show Kerr advancing his own silence as some kind of qualification instead of the opposite. ‘I kept my own counsel as to the constitutional rights and wrongs of what was happening until I decided what must be done . . .’ But keeping his counsel was exactly what Kerr couldn’t do and still be acting according to the Constitution, since the constitutional provisions on the reserve powers stated clearly that among the Governor General’s first duties were to advise and warn.
He neither advised nor warned. Kerr resented Whitlam’s using him as a rubber stamp. But Kerr had already kept silent on the crucial Loans issue: i.e. he had submitted to being a rubber stamp at the very moment when he should have been asking Whitlam what his government thought it was doing by trying to raise money privately so that it would be able to go on governing without the Senate’s approval. By being silent about that, Kerr tacitly encouraged Whitlam to slide further into folly. McClelland rather soft-pedals that last point, as you might imagine; when it came to a choice, he was definitely Whitlam’s man and not Kerr’s; a preference for which it is hard to blame him. (I should say at this point that I, too, find Whitlam’s charm hard to resist: if I had ever worked for him, I would have been no better than anybody else at telling him what he didn’t want to hear.) Personal preferences aside, McClelland in his memoirs is as good as any dramatist about the main characters stalking the halls of Canberra in those stirring times – Kerr, whose injured vanity decided the issue; Whitlam, who didn’t see the crunch coming; and himself, who should have foreseen it all but somehow didn’t. On a detached estimate, however, McClelland can be seen (a) to have got Kerr right, (b) to have been too hard on himself, and (c) to have been nothing like hard enough on Whitlam – or, rather, on Whitlam’s government. That government, with McClelland included, belonged to Whitlam to a da
ngerous extent. By even thinking of raising money to govern without the Senate’s approval of Supply, Whitlam was preparing to govern without a parliament – the very thing that the Governor General’s reserve powers are designed to stop.
While proposing to govern without a parliament, Whitlam was already governing without a cabinet: scarcely anyone knew about the Loans scheme, which was cooked up in a secrecy that was a tacit avowal of its fundamental unreality. The Loans affair was merely the latest in a series of bizarre episodes that had reduced Whitlam’s administration to a wreck. His government had become deeply and deservedly unpopular with the electorate. McClelland is well within his rights when he says that it had already recovered from its low point and might have gone on recovering. (Certainly he himself had brought a welcome air of competence to his own department.) If an election had been called for late enough in the following year, Labor might conceivably have been back with a chance. But here, again, is a nub, and this time it is a nub that not even the unflappable Diamond Jim could bring himself to point out with the fine flourish due to it. Malcolm Fraser, leading the Liberal opposition, was ready to break the crisis by offering his assent to a double dissolution with a late election date. Whitlam refused the offer. Whitlam preferred the crisis: he thought he could face the opposition down. And indeed he might have done, if Kerr had given him another week. But Kerr’s decision isn’t the issue. The issue is how Whitlam got his government into that situation. He did it by making his isolated will prevail. There is no point making a fuss about how the Governor General carried on like an old Queen if one is unable to contemplate that the Prime Minister carried on like an autocrat. McClelland is ready to accuse himself of having been bamboozled by Kerr. He is less ready to admit that he was buffaloed by Whitlam. He can bear the idea of having failed to guess what the position of de facto Head of State would do to a man of Kerr’s character. What he couldn’t bear was having failed to guess how the advent of charismatic leadership would affect the Labor Party.