Bohemian Harbour: Artists of Lavender Bay, Whiteley, Shead, Kingston

This exhibition puts Lavender Bay on the map as an artistic quarter that we had not paid enough attention to.

Detail from Henri’s armchair by Brett Whiteley (1974-75). All images from the exhibition Bohemian Harbour: Artists of Lavender Bay, at the Museum of Sydney

Max Beerbohm, pondering the resonance of toponyms, once observed that while Oxford was beautiful and Manchester was ugly, the reverse was true when their names were attached to streets in London: Manchester Street conjured up pleasant associations, Oxford Street evoked unpleasant ones.

The mysterious power of placenames is not a minor literary curiosity; it underpins our love of travel, and thus the immense global industry of tourism, which at its mass level is so destructive.

Names such as Paris or Venice, even if you have been to those cities many times, never quite lose their echoes of infinite promise, of travel in time and space, of encountering a differe­nt quality of existence. Yet dreams of esca­pe into a different world are ubiquitous: I once met a man in Venice who longed to visit Fiji or Vanuat­u, which was incomprehensible to me since from an Australian perspective these are commercial tourist destinations devoid of charm or mystery.

For mass-tourism promoters, Paris is the Eiffel Tower, Montmartre and maybe some generic images of art or of open-air cafes. At the more sophisticated end of the market, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) epitomised the fantasy of dropping magically, as though passin­g through the wardrobe into the land of Narnia, into the Paris of Jean Cocteau, Picasso, Hemingway, Dali, and even further back to the fin-de-siecle with Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and others. The reality is all too often hordes of tourists, trampling what is left of authenticity in the hopeless pursuit of a mirage.

On a more local scale, the mystique of names underpins the property market too: in Sydney, an address in Potts Point is better than one in Woolloomooloo, a flat in Vaucluse is more valuable than one in North Bondi, and so on. Their associations can change, too. Several inner-city quarters, once considered slums, are now chic because they have beco­me centres for various cultural activities and have attrac­t­ed wealthier residents. But what is fascinating is the way the name of a city quarter or suburb becomes shorthand for a whole way of life and outlook. It is virtually impossible to name a suburb of any Australian city without instantly conjuring up a set of positive or negative associations, and sometimes quite extreme prejudices.

These associations, however schematic and even caricatural, are nonetheless originally formed by the kind of people who live in a place and the work they do there. Places come to be associated with the ethnicity, social class or occupa­tions of the inhabitants, or the kinds of shops and businesses that predominate, and these associations evolve with the change of socia­l groups or businesses. Thus, in Paris, Montmartre became associated with one generation of artists and Montparnasse with another, although only the former remains a tourist destination, still haunted by the faded ghosts of the Belle Epoque.

Bohemian Harbour is devoted to the artists who lived, and in some cases still live, in Lavender Bay, near Kirribilli and close to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Other locations in Sydney are more commonly associated with artists and writers, especially the area of Elizabeth Bay, Potts Point and Kings Cross, home of the famou­s Yellow House in the 1970s, and Padding­ton and Woollahra, where groups of artists lived in houses such as Merioola, home to ­Donald Friend, Justin O’Brien and others in the late 40s, and where many of the city’s art galleri­es were set up in the later 20th century.

Detail from Roland Wakelin’s Lavender Bay (c.1948).

This exhibition puts Lavender Bay on the map, so to speak, as another artistic quarter that we had perhaps not paid attention to, although a significant group of artists did live there during the 70s.

The most notorious of these was Brett Whiteley, and his many views of Sydney Harbour with a characteristic ferry wharf projecting into the bay are painted from his studio there during the 70s and into the early 80s, before he purchased in 1985 the building in Raper Street in Surry Hills, near the intersection of Crown and Devonshire, which became his studio and is today the Brett Whiteley Museum.

Whiteley was not the only artist living and working in Lavender Bay. Others included Tim Storrier, Garry Shead, Peter Kingston, John Firth-Smith and a very young Tom Carment, and most of these are interviewed on a short documentary film that is screened in the exhibition. So is Whiteley’s former wife, Wendy, who still lives in Lavender Bay and has landscaped a large garden, now known as Wendy’s Secret Garden but open to the public, on what used to be derelict land belonging to State Rail and adjace­nt to her property.

Many of the artists interviewed recall a social life that revolved around the Whiteley house. Because of Brett’s fame, there was a constant stream of international visitors, including artists and film stars. Parties were loud, with a lot of drinks and recreational drugs, but it all seemed to be reasonably good fun until Brett ­succumbed to heroin addiction. Wendy was an addict too for a time, but she eventually broke the habit. The fact he could not or would not make the effort to led to their separation and his progressive personal and artistic decline.

Whiteley’s influence is visible on several other artists in the show, including an early painting by Shead; there is a work loosely based on the composition of Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ in the National Gallery in London, except that the main figures are replace­d by naked girls and there is a characteristic Whiteley touch floating in the middle of the picture, a girl’s bottom. This was a motif that became increasingly mannered and even self-parodic in Whiteley’s later years.

Whiteley’s most specifically Lavender Bay pictures, as already mentioned, are views over the bay, but they are also interiors that allude implicitly or in one case explicitly to Matis­se in their use of decorative materials such as rugs. They also evoke the Dionysiac vision of life that he like to celebrate: a favourite subject, which appears in large drawings but also here as small drawings within the paintings, is of a headless man and woman coupling, their anony­mity reflecting the impersonal, anonymous state of sexual ecstasy.

Detail from Last Train to Coney Island (2015), by Peter Kingston.

The exhibition includes several other works, including some fine earlier pictures by Conrad Martens, Arthur Streeton and Roland Wakelin, and a group of works by Martin Sharp alluding to the fairground of Luna Park, for the bay looks out at the park with the looming arch of Sydney Harbour Bridge above it — a combination of the circus fantasy and the industrial ­sublime so close to the city yet remote from it, which must have been part of the bay’s appeal to the artists who lived here.

The bay itself offers a secluded retreat from the activity of the city, and this is the aspect that is particularly evoked in the work of Peter Kingston, who was probably the instigator of this exhibition, seeking to preserve a piece of our cultural memory before it was forgotten with the disappearance of the various individuals involve­d and the relentless march of redevelopment.

It is one of the ironies of that process that the rediscovery of a neglected urban quarter often begins with the arrival of bohemians — students, artists, people who are trying to become something but haven’t quite got there yet — who take advantage of low prices and bring new anima­tion to a moribund area. But then as the place becomes more interesting young professionals are attracted to it, and gradually prices rise, attractin­g investors and further price rises, until finally the bohemians themselves can no longer afford to live there and drift away to colonise anothe­r neglected quarter.

Kingston, however, loves the bay and observe­s that he could spend the rest of his days drawing what he sees from his house and from the Secret Garden. There is something endearing about this assertion, for the artist recognises that it is not novelty, in style or in subject, that makes art interesting but intimacy with the subject and close attention to it.

Kingston has painted and drawn this view for years. The little wooden ferry that used to cross from Lavender Bay to Circular Quay until only a few years ago has been a familiar leitmotif of his pictures.

The exhibition even includes a short film — part avant-garde, part amateur home movie, made by Shead and including Kingston as a shy and awkward young man who has a Walter Mitty-like fantasy of being the Phantom­, important sections of which are set on the old wooden ferry. The film also includes Wendy Whiteley as the glamorous vamp and the late Michael Hobbs as the villain.

Detail from Seagull over Lavender Bay (1979), by Brett Whiteley.

The exhibition contains several works by Kingston, including an oil painting of the ferry, but some of the most substantial pieces in the exhibition, the ones that particularly invite our attention, are several large drawings in charcoal. The contrast with Brett Whiteley’s views in the other room is particularly striking, for White­ley tends to paint the view looking out to the harbour and to see it framed not by the natural environment but by the interior of his own house. It is as though the view is what he sees between drink, drugs or sex, and it is alway­s looking out and beyond.

Kingston’s work, in contrast, is set outside, in the garden and among trees; it is a view from the standpoint of nature rather than from that of the artist’s own personal interior, and so is less self-centred and more objective, or at least imperso­nal. But is also a vision less concerned with wanting something beyond the here and now. Whiteley’s images, typically, evoke egoism and desire; Kingston’s drawings are not grasping at anything but are content to explore the environment around him.

The harbour is thus in the background, but the artist’s real focus is on the trees and buildings and other details of the environment that surrounds him, including human figures, birds and animals. In one image, two tawny frogmouths sit in a tree. And when I was there a ­little handwritten note had been discreetly stuck to the frame in the lower right-hand ­corner.

It turned out to be a note by Kingston addressed to his sister, Fairlie Kingston, also an artist, telling her about the frogmouths: a little iconoclastic gesture leavening the seriousness of the museum with a touch of bohemia.

Bohemian Harbour: Artists of Lavender Bay

Museum of Sydney, to November 25.