Landscape and the dark side of experience

A RETROSPECTIVE exhibition taps our rich history

Pretty Polly Mine - Sidney Nolan

ONE way of disliking Picasso is to prefer his blue period; one way of disliking Australian art is to feel cheated when the bushrangers do not appear. - Robert Hughes, 1961.

THE critic was 22 and living in Sydney when he accepted an invitation to tell the world about Australian art. Even then, in 1961, before his name was known around the world, he had strong views and a sweeping, global perspective. And he wasn't shy about sharing them, which may have been one of the qualities that appealed to Bryan Robertson, the director of London's Whitechapel Gallery.

Robertson, a charming and influential figure in British cultural circles, wanted a catalogue essay for his upcoming exhibition dedicated to new Australian art. Robert Hughes had two works in the show, along with other artists, little-known painters with names like Dickerson, Olsen, Whiteley and Blackman. Hughes could also write, of course, so the commission came his way.

FIRST REVIEW: Australia, summed up in 200 images

In the essay, Hughes conveyed in piercing prose the isolation of Australian artists, their fragmented understanding of international trends and the "utilitarian" tendencies of local aldermen who would rather spend money on park benches than public statues.

"The groundwork is being laid for an Australian tradition, after all the false starts that went before," he wrote. "The form of the future tradition is hard to assess. Some attitudes and aims will dominate Australian art over the next few years, then shrink and let others take over: prediction is hardly possible."

When he came to matters of politics, debates over Australian art policy and the prime minister of the day, Hughes was brutal. Writing with the heightened flourishes of youth, he accused the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board of mishandling Australian art abroad. He said the board was stacked with personal friends of Robert Menzies - and that said it all really, since the prime minister was a man "whose longstanding dislike of contemporary art is paralleled only by his ignorance of its history".

He continued: "Much of the blame for the present isolation of Australian art can be laid at the door of this singular body."

These words, however, were cut from the final version. Robertson was a respected figure, highly tuned to the currents of the day, but his institution was subsidised by the state, so he drew the line at government criticism, at least in official gallery publications.

So Hughes's barbs on Menzies, in the draft version now secluded in the Whitechapel archives, remained unpublished. As did his criticism of the Art Gallery of NSW, and the reluctance of its director to display travelling works of modern art. Robertson edited that out too. But the rest of the essay was published with the exhibition that opened in October 1961 to great critical warmth, a show that did much to stoke the brief burst of British enthusiasm in Australian art at the time.

"Is there likely to be a national 'School of Australia', as immediately recognisable as the ecole de Paris or New York Abstract Expressionism?" Hughes wrote. "It is too early to give more than a partial answer. If such identity comes, it will have nothing to do with style or technical experiments. It will be a matter of vision, attitude, belief."

Five decades on, another Australian art retrospective is taking shape in the mother country, this time at London's Royal Academy, prompting once again questions about national identity and its expression through art. The show has an ambitious scope, if only to judge from its stated aims to "uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art".

It's tricky terrain, to be sure. Can a nation's character be captured in art? How can a show capture the nuances of a national art history? Which stories need to be told, and with what emphasis, and which are best forgotten? And the big one: is there such a thing as an Australian art?

How this show responds to these questions will not be known until the full list of works is revealed next week. What we know is this: the 209 artworks will span more than 200 years, and the artists include Sidney Nolan, Shaun Gladwell, Eugene von Guerard, Rover Thomas, Margaret Preston, Tom Roberts, John Olsen, Russell Drysdale, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin, Grace Cossington Smith, Simryn Gill, Djambawa Marawili and Hossein Valamanesh.

There will be oils, watercolours, video, photography, drawing and multimedia, and Aboriginal art will be afforded a healthy presence. Working alongside the National Gallery of Australia, the academy has selected works that will "shed light on a period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of colonisation on an indigenous people, to the pioneering nation building of the 19th century through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last 100 years".

As well as the NGA, other galleries have lent works too: the Art Gallery of NSW's offerings include Superb + Solid by Howard Arkley; Departure of the Orient - Circular Quay by Charles Conder; Big Orange (sunset) by Brett Whiteley; The Road to Berry by Lloyd Rees; Pretty Polly Mine by Nolan.

There's a thematic focus. All the works will be concerned, some more broadly than others, with "the influence of the landscape". The reason for this is that the "story of Australia is inextricably linked to its landscape".

The academy has been here before, having first staged an Australian art show in 1923. But the last time a major British institution ventured into this territory was in the early 1960s, a fertile time for Australian artists making a name for themselves in London.

In 1963, the Tate presented a retrospective of Australian art that had been conceived as an epoch-defining episode in Australian art. In reality, the show was an anti-climax, not the least for having been bogged down in shifting artworld politics over several years.

Partly to blame was the government advisory board held in contempt by Hughes and many of his contemporaries. The board, with the full support of Menzies, was operating with a distinct patriotic agenda, and the Tate show fell into this net. As detailed by art history academic Sarah Scott, deep divisions were exposed in the formation of a show that was limited to oil paintings, favoured narrative subject matter and overlooked Aboriginal art entirely.

By 1963 Australian art was no longer a novelty in London anyway. The Whitechapel exhibition two years earlier, along with a series of one-man shows, meant that the Tate contained few revelations.

Robertson had picked a suite of artists he felt could give the most comprehensive survey of what was taking place in Australia. Some were only starting their careers, including Whiteley, then living in London and the youngest in the show. His bold abstracts immediately attracted the attention of the Tate trustees, who bought one of them, making Whiteley the youngest artist to have work acquired by that gallery. (The Tate also acquired work by the oldest artist in the show, Godfrey Miller, in a development that delighted Robertson, who had lobbied on their behalf.)

"Ten years ago," Robertson wrote in his preface to the catalogue, "we only knew about Australian cricketers, and we have always liked them; but the possibility of so much creative activity from Australia so steadily infiltrating into the London scene would have seemed tenuous."

Robertson also pointed to news of the "extraordinary opera house" to be built in Sydney as helping to consolidate the "growing awareness of Australia as a fresh cultural identity". He listed elements including a self-conscious bravado; a shock of recognition between man and nature; irreverence; and a general pull towards "metaphysical abstraction".

Then came Hughes, well before the spread of globalisation, and his words contained insights into the preoccupations of a changing world. His theme was isolation. He said Australian artists had for many years risked a "half-assimilated influence", having had limited exposure to traditions and trends. Local media was starting to take art seriously, even though public taste lagged well behind, and professional private dealers were rare. He also took in the recent antipodean campaign in favour of figurative art, led by Bernard Smith, with many of the central protagonists included in the Whitechapel show.

It's hard to measure the specific effects of isolation, and vastness, on the work of Australian artists. But clearly it could be tough to work so far from London or Paris or New York. Donald Friend wrote in his diary in December 1945: "In Australia, it is so easy to forget that in the world there is Great Art. One becomes a big fish in a little pool ... Then unexpectedly one goes to sea and meets a whale or a school of whales, the smallest of which is infinitely larger than one can ever be oneself."

Hughes, writing for Whitechapel 15 years later, had a more positive angle. All this isolation meant there was no tradition, he said, to either inspire or oppress artists.

"The exhilarating sense of starting from scratch exists here on a far deeper level than in Europe."

He then had a stab at what made the Australians unique. There existed among local painters an "acute awareness of the dark side of experience": Robert Dickerson painted not people but "the terrible gulfs between them", Jon Molvig saw a country inhabited by men with fingers "hooked on the very edge of existence".

"To a great extent, Australian art is a hymn to the tender indifference of the universe," he wrote. "It is not easy to be a painter here and believe that man is the measure of all things. This being so, painting ceases to be a 'cultural activity'. It is exorcism, a ritual in the dark."

Looking forward, from Sydney and from the 60s, Hughes said a unique art was destined to emerge. It must, he said, considering the circumstances and talent all around. But did any of it matter? Hughes thought nationalistic ideals weren't important in the exercise of art, that what mattered was the purity of the intention and the integrity of the vision, rather than the locale in which the creative act took place. "In that sense," he wrote, "we are all painters before we are Australians."

Australia is at the Royal Academy, London, from September 21 until December 8.