Brave New World exhibition explores 1930s Australian art

An NGV show takes the viewer on a journey from delight in a new vision of humanity to the Depression.

Detail from Grace Cossington Smith’s The Bridge in-curve (1930). © Estate of Grace Cossington Smith

Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World was published in 1932 in the depth of the Depression. It was banned almost at once in Australia — Ireland was the only other country to suppress its publication — apparently because it was thought to promote irreligion and sexual promiscuity. It was released from the ban only in 1937.

Huxley’s novel imagines a version of England set 500 years in the future, when society will be organised in a ruthlessly functional way, ostensibly in the interests of efficiency and public wellbeing. Archaic differences of social class, based on the accident of birth, have been long abolished and replaced with a scientific breeding program. Humans are raised in five categories of ability and intelligence, so Alphas possess the intelligence and initiative to be leaders, while Betas are suited to middle management, Gammas merely carry out orders in an office, and so on.

Huxley did not make up the words of his famous title: they are, as readers no doubt know, an ironic borrowing from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where they already bore a charge of irony. For they are spoken by Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, who has never seen a man apart from her aged magician father, Ariel, Caliban and then Ferdinand: “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!” (V.1.205-06). Prospero replies dryly, “’tis new to thee …”

Both the grim vision of future dystopia and the original reference to a new world of beauty and human possibility are relevant to the use of these words as the title of an exhibition devoted to the art of the 1930s in Australia, even if the specific inspiration for this borrowing is a photomontage by Max Dupain, which itself alludes to Huxley’s book. Brave New World, indeed, takes the viewer on a journey from delight in a new vision of humanity to the nightmare of the Depression

The exhibition is effectively designed, setting works in spaces intimate enough to appreciate them, and clustering items of different natures or dealing with specific themes so it is not dissonant, for example, to put travel posters and other commercial material together with paintings and sculptures.

The inclusion of these materials, as well as the work of less familiar artists of the time, is part of a broader approach, opening our field of vision to the diverse social and cultural concerns of the time. The result is refreshing and makes us realise how often our view of the art of this period can be confined to a handful of relatively tame modernist painters and to their connection to the worlds of modern design and interior decoration.

Here, Grace Cossington Smith is prominent with what is probably her most memorable image, The Bridge in-curve (1930), but the theme of the new Sydney Harbour Bridge as a symbolic project and an affirmation of confidence that Australia would come through the Depression and prosper again is supported by photographs and a poster in which the great structure stands for the Australian spirit. Other photographs and paintings join in representing the city as a symbol of modernity. Trains are celebrated for their mechanical speed and aerodynamic forms, in the spirit of futurism, while modernist architecture and skyscrapers stand for ambition and progress. When the Manchester Unity building was erected in 1932, it became the greatest skyscraper of Melbourne and dominates a travel poster of the time that proclaims Melbourne to be “the seventh city of the Empire”.

Percy Trompf’s Seventh city of the Empire — Melbourne; Resting Diana by Dorothy Thornhill.

A particularly fascinating theme in the years between the wars is the concern with physical culture and the sense that Australians were or could be the healthiest and strongest men and women in the world. The interest in physical culture was not confined to Australia during the interwar years but was common to many European countries, and both democratic and totalitarian states of the left and the right.

In the broadest sense, the concern for physical fitness can be seen as a response, dating back 200 years, to the squalid conditions into which an increasing proportion of the population had been driven by the industrial revolution. Life in crowded tenements and work in factories and offices are inherently unhealthy, and the diet of urban dwellers was and has remained poor, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes. Physical culture programs, sometimes with quasi-militaristic drilling, were designed to build strong and healthy citizens, workers and soldiers.

In Australia, however, there were some distinctly local inflections to the theme. One was the idea this country provided a unique environment that was conducive to healthy living, so migrants from poor — or even convict — stock who came to Australia would be transformed into a new people. The pastoral countryside, the outback and the bush continued to be depicted in this spirit, but the most pictorially significant location in this period was the beach. The combination of sun, sand and salt water has seemed ever since quintessentially Australian. The beach was also the one setting in which it became socially acceptable to be nearly naked in the company of other people. One of Dupain’s photographs actually shows a family of naturists at Cronulla. Other photographs evoke healthy and beautiful bodies at the beach, and even travel posters take up the theme, often picturing life savers as the quintessential Australian body.

Following this theme casts a new light on the pictures of artists such as Dorothy Thornhill, who painted a naked self-portrait as Diana, as well as Arthur Murch, in paintings such as Beach Idyll (1930) or his portrait of a mother and two children, The Idle Hour (1933). For this latter picture, which recalls the Renaissance in subject and in its tondo format, Murch had made plaster models to study the fall of light, a practice that reflects that of some early modern artists, but also the teaching of Rayner Hoff.

Hoff is among the most interesting artists of this period, both for his sculptures — he created the sculptural program for War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park, perhaps the single greatest work of public sculpture in the country — and for the influence he had on several interesting female students he taught at the National Art School, particularly Barbara Tribe, Marjorie Fletcher and Jean Broome-Norton.

The vitalist philosophy that Hoff shared with Dupain seemed to manifest itself strongly in the work of these young women, many of whose works are charged with sexuality. Here are two freestanding figures by Fletcher: a male, Lewis (1934); and Kathleen (1933).

Broome-Norton’s relief Abundance (1934) evokes the strong, healthy and sexual body not only as the source of human fertility but as directly connected to fertility of the earth as well.

Posters of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with triumphant figures of lifesavers conclude this first part of the exhibition, after which we pass through a small room full of old wirelesses before reaching the second half, where a section deals with the discovery of Aboriginal motifs by Margaret Preston and others, and the first attempts to integrate Aboriginal themes into the idea of modern Australia.

There is an interesting section devoted to a number of artists of the time, each represented by a small group of paintings in an intimate hanging — notably Herbert Badham, Danila Vassilieff and Yosl Bergner. There are notably two curious if slightly eccentric self-portraits by Badham in a version of the modernist realist vein that used to be discounted as old-fashioned but is now taken seriously around the world again.

We can tell from these pictures that Badham was left-handed, for he resorts to a trick used by artists for centuries: since it is hard to paint the hand you are painting, and since our hands are reversed in the mirror, right-handed artists can hold a brush in their left hand and paint themselves with their right. Here, in Paint and Morning Tea (1937), he appears to be sitting looking at us with the brush in his left hand, but of course it is his right.

In Self-portrait with Glove (1939) this conceit becomes the subject of the picture, otherwise unintelligible: he has painted his right hand with great precision, then he clearly has painted the left one from a glove that has been stuffed and set up like a still-life object.

Bergner’s paintings and drawings are one of the most interesting parts of the exhibition, now evoking the grim world of the Depression. Berg­ner’s images convey something of the desperate poverty and hopelessness of the most disadvantaged.

Bergner was also one of the first — earlier than Arthur Boyd or Russell Drysdale — to depict the condition of the urban Aborigines, impoverished fringe dwellers and outcasts who reminded the artist of displaced people in Europe and particularly of persecuted Jews driven from their homes.

The conclusion of the exhibition brings us back to photographs, and to the theme of humanity subordinated to machinery.

This is where we encounter Dupain’s photomontage Brave New World: if the opening of the exhibition celebrated the modern city with its speed, lights and engineering marvels, and the new healthy body shaped by physical culture, the conclusion leaves us with questions that we are again asking today, about the future of humanity in an age dominated by the order — and now the artificial intelligence — of the machine.

Brave New World: Australia 1930s

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne to October 15.