Art shows like this deserve to be reviewed. But who is left to judge?

Some of Sydney’s finest painters from the middle of the 20th century are on show. But who else will review exhibitions like this if mastheads keep sacking their art critics?

Jeffrey Smart’s The Stilt Race, 1960.

The Macquarie Galleries, established in 1925 by John Young and subsequently run by a series of formidable women, including Treania Smith, Lucy Swanton and Mary Turner, was among the oldest commercial galleries in Australia and for many years one of the most important and influential.

There was indeed little in the way of competition in Sydney before Rudy Komon opened his Paddington gallery in 1959. Even after the rise of new dealers like Gallery A (Melbourne 1959 and Sydney 1964), Watters (1964), Coventry (1970), Rex Irwin (1976), Roslyn Oxley (1982) or Australian Galleries (Melbourne 1956, Sydney 1989), Macquarie, with its premises in Clarence Street, remained among the handful of leading contemporary galleries in Sydney. The move to a new building in Rushcutters Bay in 1991 overextended the firm’s finances, and it closed its doors soon afterwards, in 1993.

Towards the end of the period covered by this exhibition, Robert Hughes famously characterised many of the artists regularly shown by Macquarie as belonging to the ‘‘Sydney Charm School’’, particularly in contrast to the earnest and often angry mood of mid-century painters in Melbourne.

The Sydney modernists had a lighter touch, ­emphasised colour and graphic elegance, were decorative and often witty. Donald Friend epitomised many of these qualities, in stark contrast to the grim, heavy-handedness of a quintessential Melburnian such as Albert Tucker.

The Charm School label has often been taken as dismissive, but Daniel Thomas argued as early as 1965, that like other originally derogatory names attached to artistic movements, it should now be reappraised as a stylistic category.

Grace Cossington Smith’s Interior with verandah doors, 1954.

Macquarie’s support for artists was, moreover, wide-ranging and unexpectedly eclectic. ­Already in 1944, they showed the abstractionists Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder under the title Constructive Paintings (the recent NGV survey of Crowley and Balson was reviewed here on Saturday, August 31). Twelve years later, in 1956, Macquarie presented what is usually considered one of the most important exhibitions of abstraction in the history of Australian art: Direction 1, which included the painters John Olsen, William Rose, Eric Smith and John Passmore as well as the sculptor Robert Klippel. But Sydney was more open to abstraction than Melbourne during these years. It was in 1959 that the famous Antipodeans exhibition was held in Melbourne to uphold the claims of figuration against the encroachment of abstraction; the group’s manifesto was drafted by the man who became the doyen of Australian art historians, Bernard Smith, and the participating artists included Arthur and David Boyd, John Perceval, Charles Blackman, John Brack and Clifton Pugh, together with one Sydney painter, Robert Dickerson.

The Bowral exhibition represents the full range of Macquarie’s artists, from a serene landscape by Elioth Gruner near the beginning, or a couple of 1920s landscapes from the south of France by Rupert Bunny, to a wild matter painting by Balson and the oddly obsessive constructions of William Rose. Most of the artists are moderate modernists like Roland Wakelin or later Sali Herman, as well as a number of pleasant but almost forgotten artists like Nancy Goldfinch or Ethleen Palmer. These were the individuals that Hughes considered ultimately lightweight and inconsequential, although as an artist friend remarked to me, many of the abstract painters of the time can be seen retrospectively to be just as deserving of the ‘‘charm school’’ label.

Roland Wakelin’s Portrait of Treania Smith, 1936, and The River at Windsor, 1934.

Almost all the big names of the time appear as well, from Dobell and Drysdale to Nolan. As Mary Turner said, in a remark that has given this exhibition its title, ‘‘the art world came to us’’. But the gallery played a particularly important role in supporting the careers of a number of artists, two of whom are picked out for special mention in the catalogue’s introductory essay: Grace Cossington Smith, who was regularly shown during several decades in which her work was generally ignored; and Ian Fairweather, one of the most brilliant but eccentric painters of his time.

Fairweather, who had come to Australia briefly after years of wandering in China and Bali, left in 1952 on the notorious raft voyage in which he very nearly perished, and only by good fortune landed on the Indonesian coast. In his last years, he lived as a virtual recluse on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, working on his quasi-mystical meditations in an idiom poised between figuration and abstraction. During these years he would periodically send rolls of paintings to Macquarie, and the gallery would send back payment as well as art materials, food and other supplies (on one occasion he had asked for a Chinese dictionary).

All of these very different artists were shown at Macquarie and attracted crowds of well-to-do collectors, notably the society ladies referred to as ‘‘hats’’ and caricatured by Patrick White as ‘‘mink locusts’’. We may imagine that the taste of these ladies was fairly conventional, but evidently they were not unduly upset to find themselves among the arcane compositions of Fairweather, the sometimes tortured post-Cézanne works of John Passmore, the disturbingly erotic surrealism of James Gleeson or the fussy semi-abstraction of Godfrey Miller, even if they might prefer Margaret Olley, David Strachan or Lloyd Rees.

Much of the work in the exhibition – whether figurative or abstract – is admittedly fairly modest, even though almost always of a standard of competence less often encountered today. The distinguishing qualities in the leading painters are clarity and decisiveness, the sense that stylistic choices are driven by a real imaginative or aesthetic vision: such is the case with, for example, an early picture by Jeffrey Smart which no doubt for this reason has been chosen to represent the exhibition in its publicity. The painting is a very strange and ultimately surrealist image of men walking on stilts in an urban environment dominated by the curve of a median strip, various road signs and a zebra crossing directing and marshalling human movement; the road signs would become staples of his later work, although he would abandon images of alienation and malaise as explicit as the stilt walkers.

Smart was one of the painters whose potential was early recognised by Macquarie: he held six solo exhibitions there between 1955 and 1965, before he had gained any official recognition, in a period blinded by the fashion for abstraction; his case epitomises the essential role of private galleries and their collectors in helping to foster different tendencies in art when public museums and government funding bodies so often cling obtusely or lazily to what they think are the leading trends.

This is also why public galleries should not buy contemporary art. In the history of Australian galleries, the bureaucrats have seldom got it right; collecting new art should be left to those who are spending their own money and following their own taste and therefore more likely to recognise talent in whatever form it appears. When judgment is confirmed by the passage of time, the best of these collections can be selectively gifted to public institutions.

Even if the pictures in this survey are inevitably of variable significance, perhaps the most striking thing is that all of them have a certain intimacy of scale and invite the viewer into a kind of quiet communion. They do not try to bully us into believing that they are important; they make themselves available to our appreciation and judgment. In this they imply a different kind of art viewer, one that has become rare today.

This older kind of art lover enjoys looking carefully at pictures, appreciates their subtle variations of style and vision, and acquires things for the pleasure they give and for the mysterious sense of some aesthetic secret that lies hidden within them; they don’t buy pictures to make a design statement, or to advertise their wealth or display their political allegiances, let alone for investment.

Frank Watters used to tell the story of a woman who asked him whether a painting would make a good investment; he replied, ‘‘No”. Such an attitude towards art was rare enough then to be considered laughable.

But the history of Macquarie also reflects a very different cultural and critical environment. As we learn from the introductory essay of the catalogue, exhibitions changed every two weeks – far more often than is the rule today.

Openings were on a Wednesday – attended by the mink locusts as well as artists, bohemians and collectors. Tuesday was press day and the gallery could regularly expect five reviews over the following day or two: the Herald, Telegraph, Mirror and two afternoon papers. This meant that art lovers and potential buyers would have the weekend to read reviews and another week to visit the exhibition and possibly buy pictures.

Even when I started writing art criticism for The Sydney Morning Herald, in the last five years or so of Macquarie’s operation, it was possible for a daily paper to review most important commercial exhibitions. There were two art columns: a longer piece on Saturday and a shorter one on Friday, which I initially wrote and in which I could round up three or four commercial exhibitions. Copy had to be submitted by a normal press deadline, which meant a day or so before publication.

Today there are no more art columns in the daily pages, and reviewing is confined to the weekend ­supplements.

Indeed the very role of the expert and independent reviewer seems to be in the process of disappearing in a post-critical consumer culture. The Sydney Morning Herald has recently sacked its veteran critic, John McDonald, with whom I worked long ago at the same ­publication. This is a disaster for the Herald’s credibility and for the art world, and yet sadly not surprising considering the old Fairfax paper’s slow decline under the management of Nine Entertainment and its pathetic editorial policy in relation to important cultural issues like The Australian’s revelations about fraudulent practices in parts of the Aboriginal art industry.

What all this ultimately reflects is an art world in which critical voices are not welcome, and in which the only acceptable forms of commentary are praise and promotion, where everything is always for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But it is also a world in which audiences who have grown up in an environment of visual overload and instant gratification are less capable than ever of attention to art; now even serious galleries present exhibitions as ‘‘immersive’’ experiences for viewers who seem to have become incapable of reaching beyond themselves and participating imaginatively in a work of art while also maintaining their own moral and critical autonomy.

The Art World Came To Us: The Macquarie Galleries 1938-1963 Ngugunggula, Retford Park, Bowral, NSW, to November 17