Complex fields of vision at the Art Gallery of Western Australia

SINCE Stefano Carboni took over the directorship of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, he has brought several important exhibitions to Perth.

Vincent van Gogh's The Olive Trees

SINCE Stefano Carboni took over the directorship of the Art Gallery of Western Australia five years ago, he has brought several important international exhibitions to Perth, including a first one from the Guggenheim in Venice and a second from the Victoria and Albert in London.

In 2011 he announced a remarkable agreement whereby the Museum of Modern Art in New York would send out not one but a series of exhibitions. The first, last year, was well conceived as a series of mini-surveys of some of the most important artists of the 20th century. The format allowed for enough works by each artist to reveal their stylistic evolution as well as their distinctive sensibility.

Since then there has been a collection of photographs of New York City, which I was unable to see, and now another substantial exhibition devoted to the art of the 20th century. The trouble is this takes us back over much the same territory covered by the first show and therefore required some distinctive raison d'etre. The curators have had what sounds like a good idea on the face of it: a revisiting of the same range of material, now divided by genre rather than artist.

The exhibition begins with a kind of antechamber that announces each of the three genres and illustrates it with a suitably important work. There is a landscape by van Gogh made in July 1889, not long before the breakdown he suffered that month; a late still life by Cezanne; and Toulouse-Lautrec's painting of La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge, which was recently seen in the Lautrec exhibition in Canberra.

Each of these three pictures deserves and repays close attention, but this can be rather hard when every second visitor insists on taking a photograph on one of their numerous devices. The photograph is, as always, a substitute for looking, an excuse not to make the effort required to exercise attention, on the implicit but utterly implausible grounds that one will look at the picture later, at leisure, on a screen.

It is true people may have become more used to looking at art in this lifeless form, but the real meaning of compulsive photography is surely as an act of possession or consumption. And it reminds us that the paradigm of consumption, today so pervasive, is fundamentally inapplicable to the aesthetic. What you do in engaging with literature, art or music is actually the very opposite of consumption: you don't take it and use it, you give to it and make it live in the process. Culture ultimately is not something we consume but something we practise.

Far from possessing these pictures, we find they grow only more mysterious and elusive as we begin to attend to them properly. In the van Gogh painting - where he paints the olive trees he wrote of as so typical of the Mediterranean world, so different from the pollarded willows of his native land - we feel the terrifying wind of the approaching crisis; forms barely hold together, the paint is applied so quickly that the underpainting shows through everywhere. There is the same sort of ecstatic energy, verging on derangement, as in The Starry Night painted at about the same time, or Wheatfield with a Reaper, which he repeated in September after the crisis had dissipated.

In contrast, Cezanne's picture has been painted and repainted, as though his motifs - the fruit, the plate, the ginger jar - refused to let themselves be pinned down in a final and stable manner. Indeed these primary elements risk being submerged in what is ostensibly the supporting motif of the tablecloth, whose flowers and tendrils leap into vivid life and invade the picture space. Lautrec's picture, already discussed in a recent review, offers similar complexities in its combination of vividness and sketchiness; but all of these subtle qualities need to be discovered in the direct encounter with the work, which is the particular purpose of an exhibition, for they are largely neutralised in reproduction.

The following rooms - or the segments of the rather unfortunately labyrinthine galleries - are occupied by three sections devoted to landscape, still life and portraiture, but the result is much less satisfactory this time because the material is too diverse and disparate, both in kind and quality; at best, there are some thoughtful juxtapositions; at other times the result is simply confusing or even cacophonous.

Landscape is perhaps the weakest of the three categories, suffering from some lacklustre choices in the earlier period and a wild variation of styles from plein-air views of nature to imaginary cityscapes and from surrealism to abstraction; indeed the section drifts into some vapid American abstraction and rather unexciting conceptual work before ending more crisply with a series of fine and very dry photographs of urban and industrial subjects from the 1970s and a painting by Gerhard Richter. This view of gently rolling meadowlands with a town in the distance is not so much a painting based on a photograph as a painting of a photograph: and the weaknesses of the photograph as a source for the kind of information that a landscape painter normally requires become themselves the subject of Richter's picture, an image strangely poised between mechanical literalness and ineffability.

The still life section too is very uneven, although there is a fine Pierre Bonnard, full of warmth and intimacy, compensating for the relatively uninteresting Matisse; by far the best piece in this section, and probably the best work in the exhibition, is a little painting by Picasso, Violin and Grapes, painted in 1912 and showing the energy with which he continued to develop the analytical cubist idiom during the few short years of that movement. Here it is particularly the mastery of spatial effects that is so striking, the layering of planes to create powerful effects of depth within and around the deconstructed elements of the violin.

In the alternation of positive and negative space, setting light against dark and vice versa, varying hue, tone and colour temperature, Picasso demonstrates his mastery of the traditional devices of painterly artifice to create a fictitious, restless yet harmoniously resolved pictorial world. The crackling painterly intelligence of this picture is all the more palpable beside its neighbour: Juan Gris, like so many others imitators of the cubist style, here mindlessly follows a formula, turning aesthetic inquiry into obtuse decoration.

The section devoted to the portrait is on the whole the most successful, containing not only some of the best individual works in the exhibition but also the most thoughtful conjunctions between pieces. Kees van Dongen's lurid painting of a singer draws the crowds, but far more absorbing is Balthus's double portrait of Joan Miro, the Spanish surrealist painter, with his daughter. The painting is so low-key, so deceptively straightforward, that its intensity is all the more affecting, while Balthus's realist idiom is almost disconcerting in the way it reveals all its own artifice; and the neutral background in two tones echoes the palette of the figures themselves, compounding the sense of a contained, private intensity.

In this respect - as well as in the formal echo of seated figures - Balthus is well matched to the little painting by Frida Kahlo in which she shows herself grieving after the separation from her husband, Diego Rivera, for this is a painting in which the open display of unhappiness and vulnerability is balanced against defiance and determination. Both pathos and irony are introduced in the love song reproduced above the self-portrait.

The adjacent wall presents an equally suggestive pairing. Alberto Giacometti's portrait of his mother is a tangle of perspectival construction lines: tables, desks, sideboards and bookcases seem to create an infinitely complex geometrical matrix in which the slight figure of the old woman is trapped like an insect in amber. Next to this is one of Lucian Freud's early portraits, in that distinctive manner that seems at once radically naturalistic in its attention to detail yet disturbingly unnatural in the short stature of the figures, their enlarged features and the flat opacity of the paint surface, more akin to the effect of tempera than of oil painting.

But here is the clue to this early style. The mature practice of oil painting, as it developed in the hands of Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt and others, revelled in the possibility of achieving a new kind of optical reality through the devices of sfumato and chiaroscuro: the former abolished the hard outlines of earlier painting and the latter allowed figures to merge into what was now conceived of as a whole visual field of light, shade and colour.

Together they amounted to a sacrifice of aspects of the individual figure and of objective rendering in the interests of the subjective, optical impression of the whole. But all styles can grow stale when their practice turns to automatic repetition, and artists resort to alternatives in their quest for a fresh perspective on the truth of visual experience: like the pre-Raphaelites before him, Freud renounces the dissolution of form into a subjective whole and returns to a stern objectivity in which the precisely defined form of the body is presented without any compromises of atmospheric effects against a starkly neutral background.

Again there are a few weak pieces in the portrait section, but the Warhol double portrait of Elvis, at once acting yet almost comically still himself, holds its own. The pictures from August Sander's great series are always affecting, and Nicholas Nixon's portrait chronicle of his wife and her three sisters, whom he has photographed annually since 1975 - five-yearly samples are displayed here - are a moving study in the progression of time, like a tide washing back and forth over rocks until they are worn away.

Here, the erosion of age is the obvious subject, but more subtle are the changes in the individual women as they seem to grow happier, sadder, more confident or more worn down by all the other processes of life - births, deaths and bereavements - that we can only imagine. Also moving, and even more mysterious, is the diptych of portraits of Tia by Rineke Dijkstra, one taken just after she had given birth, the other five months later: here no appreciable effect of time can be expected, yet so much has changed in the young woman's happiness, which seems to have reshaped her very features.

Symmetrically with the opening, the exhibition closes with a space representing the three genres. The items standing for portraiture and still life are sad shadows of Lautrec and Cezanne, belying the usual modernist narrative of a long march towards the future and some of the promises of the wall labels. The work that represents landscape, though not perhaps comparable to van Gogh, is nonetheless a fine photographic triptych that thoughtfully echoes the subject of Vincent's picture while making good use of its medium.

The three panels represent an olive grove, and effective use of a shallow depth of field means branches in the middle foreground are in focus while those closer to us and farther away are blurred. Where a greater depth of field would have offered us a more objective and detached perspective on the subject, JoAnn Verburg proposes a metaphorical world in which we are, like these artists, surrounded by complexity and with limited visibility.

Van Gogh, Dali And Beyond: The World Reimagined, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, to December 2