Discovering Dobell: a thoughtful study in progression

William Dobell caused a furore with his Archibald Prize winning portrait of a friend.

William Dobel's Mr Joshua Smith (1943); Mr Joshua Smith (c.1943) a pencil study.

Today, the word controversial has become an insipid and shopworn part of the vocabulary of press-release writers, intended to pique the interest of jaded readers but doomed like all the other cliches and hyperbole in such documents to provoke the opposite reaction. Part of the problem is that in such usage of the term, the work in question is understood to be controversial in the eyes of someone else. When a work is described approvingly as controversial it really means that ignorant philistines or prudes — often straw-men conjured up for the occasion — disapprove of it but that you and I know better.

That is why the recent argument about Hermann Nitsch’s work was a genuine case of controversy, because the work really did affront beliefs and values held by a significant number of people, even including members of the professional art world. In such a case it was worth considering the value of Nitsch’s work and its aesthetic claims.

Historically, artistic controversies were part of the unsettled cultural environment of modernism, which we can now see from a distance as part of much broader growing pains of the modern world, related to cultural and social changes that helped bring about the catastrophe of the Great War and its sequel in World War II.

Art controversies are conventionally seen from the perspective of modernism, in which, as already suggested, they are taken as examples of aesthetic avant-gardism challenging the obtuse conservatism of the academy, or of the established social order more generally. Underlying this perspective is the fallacy of progress in art, extrapolated from the progressive model of science and technology established from the industrial revolution onwards.

In that way of thinking, it was easy to see impressionism as a scientific way of looking at the world, although Monet does not represent an improvement on the realist or romantic painters any more than the post-impressionists such as Cezanne represent an improvement on Monet. What impressionism really represents is a change of orientation, of aesthetic priorities, an interest in the intimate and optical experience of the world, akin to the close analysis of subjectivity by contemporary writers.

The other thing that is misunderstood about controversies, especially in the progressivist modernist perspective, is that those who objected to the new at various points cannot always be dismissed as simply wrong.

Thus the notoriously reactionary Jean-Leon Gerome failed to prevent the Manet retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1884 and, as late as 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, stopped the president of the republic from entering the hall of the impressionists, calling them le deshonneur de l’art francais — the disgrace of French art.

Gerome’s own art, although striking in its way and the subject of a recent renewal of interest — with an important exhibition at the Getty Museum in 2010 — also could be criticised on moral and aesthetic grounds. Yet at least he took painting seriously and believed, as did many of his contemporaries, that the state of art was symptomatic of the state of the culture, if not of the soul of the nation more generally.

No one really believes that today, when contemporary art is treated by corporate sponsors as a content-neutral signifier of innovation, and when prominent art spaces alternate supposedly cutting-edge events with fashion shows, dinners, farmers markets and other activities that effectively reduce art to the same status as the other luxury consumable goods and services that make up a certain lifestyle.

Dobell's Study for Helena Rubenstein (1960), left; Mrs South Kensington (1937).

Things were different in Sydney in 1943-44, when William Dobell became, very much against his will, the champion of modernism in a genuine controversy that ended in an extraordinary court case. Even in the middle of the war and in a country not known for taking art particularly seriously, there seemed no doubt that important principles were at stake.

Dobell had won the Archibald Prize — not previously associated with the idea of controversy — with a portrait of his friend and fellow portrait painter, Joshua Smith. The picture was a striking image of an unusual-looking man and two of the unsuccessful entrants in the exhibition protested against the award on the grounds that it was a caricature and not a true portrait. In the ensuing court case, the plaintiffs and the defendants were represented by two of the most prominent barristers of the day — Garfield Barwick and Frank Kitto respectively. Almost everyone in the country who could be considered an authority on art was called to testify on one side or the other.

The case, however, was extremely distressing to Dobell and even more so to Smith, who had to endure discussions about whether the artist had exaggerated or merely faithfully reproduced his odd physiognomy. In the end, the judge held that the work was a true portrait and that it was therefore eligible for the award.

But neither artist recovered from the controversy: Smith, who had been made to feel like a freak of nature, was haunted by it to the end of his life.

The reality of the artist behind this notorious and even tragic episode is displayed in a new exhibition at TarraWarra, which brings together works originally acquired by the Besen family — whose gift forms the basis of the TarraWarra Museum — with many other items from private and public collections.

What is particularly appealing about this exhibition is the great number of preparatory drawings and studies that are shown with the portraits and other paintings and that help us to understand the stages of the artist’s thinking and the way he has solved problems of composition and expression.

These drawings have been carefully selected by the exhibition’s curator, Christopher Heathcote, whose Russell Drysdale: Defining the Modern Australian Landscape was held at the same museum in 2013 and reviewed in this column at the time, and whose book Inside the Art Market: Australia’s Galleries 1956-76 I also discussed in these pages a few months ago. Heathcote will be offering his own thoughts on the works in the exhibition in a lecture to be held at TarraWarra on July 22.

As Heathcote points out, many of these drawings have never been seen before, partly because of a lack of scholarly interest in the subject and partly because less industrious curators tend to reproduce or include in exhibitions works that have already been shown before and are already reproduced in catalogues.

The portrait of Smith is included in the exhibition and naturally attracts our attention, but it is hard to draw any conclusions from it about its aesthetic quality because — as though some fate hung over this work — it was largely destroyed by a fire at Carrick Hill in Adelaide in 1958 and not restored or, rather, repainted until 1972, after Dobell’s death. Even from photographs it is easy to see that the present version falls far short of the subtlety of the original.

Maimed as it is, the picture has been included partly for its fame and partly for the sake of the beautiful drawings shown with it. In these it is clear that Dobell has looked very closely and carefully at his friend’s features, and that the degree of distortion that he introduced into the final painting was not the result of a gratuitous desire to shock but grew naturally out of the exploration of what he could see before him. The ultimate soundness of Dobell’s process may be judged by the fact, noticed by many who knew him, that Smith actually grew to look more and more like the portrait as he aged.

The drawings in the exhibition include even a tiny sketch in silverpoint, one of the most refined of media used in the Renaissance, as well as other studies in pencil and ink, in which the artist can be seen not only discovering the fundamental structures and character of his sitter’s appearance but also determining a suitable pose and attitude that would be compositionally satisfying and at the same time express something of the personality of the subject.

There are many other drawings associated with minor pictures and with some of Dobell’s most important portraits, such as the famous one of Margaret Olley, with which he won the Archibald for the second time in 1948, and the impressive Mary Gilmore of 1957.

Gilmore by then was already 92, a legendary literary figure who had taken part in the failed utopian New Australia settlement in Paraguay at the end of the 19th century and who, despite her long history of espousing left-wing politics, had been made a dame of the Order of the British Empire.

By a particularly acute irony, Smith himself had painted a portrait of Gilmore that had been greatly praised by Julian Ashton and had hung in the same 1943 Archibald exhibition as Dobell’s fatal portrait of him. It had been widely expected to win the prize, and no doubt Smith shared this hope. Indeed the trustees narrowed down the choice to Smith’s Gilmore and Dobell’s Smith, and the decision in favour of Dobell was by a majority vote, not unanimous.

Once again Dobell’s drawings, using a variety of media with a fine sense of the particular qualities of each one, exploring the face and figure of his subject, studying her characteristic postures, and searching for compositional solutions. Curiously, a couple of light sketches seem to imagine a rotund figure under the head and shoulders, something that does not come out at all in the tall and regal figure with which he ends up.

But these odd thumbnails are telling, for we can see in other finished works in the exhibition, such as The Billy Boy (1943), that Dobell has a deeply uncomfortable relation to the body: it seems easily to collapse into a shapeless lump of flesh, while conversely, the expression of character stretches the figure into a tense, elongated form recalling the style of Italian mannerism, as in his uncomfortably pent-up image of The Student (1940).

His paint handling too, as we see in the very early Mrs South Kensington (1937), tends to the elastic and amorphous, apparently inspired by the example of Rembrandt. There is no classical modelling of facets or plane breaks articulating the lit and unlit surfaces of the features but the stretching and twisting of a sticky skein of paint that lends itself to a sense of animation better than to the definition of form and volume.

Both of these aspects of Dobell’s style — the expressive elongation and the stretchy skeins of oil paint — reached a sort of climax in the portrait of Gilmore. The elderly poet was delighted with the result and predicted, rightly as it turned out, that the picture would be celebrated long after her own writings were forgotten.

Discovering Dobell: TarraWarra Museum of Art. Tarrawarra, Victoria. Until August 13.

Discovering Dobell, published by Wakefield Press with TarraWarra Museum of Art, coincides with the exhibition Discovering Dobell, RRP $49.95.