He won the Archibald three times and then disappeared. Why?
Eric Smith repeatedly won some of Australia’s most important art prizes – including the Blake, Sulman and Archibald – but has in recent decades been almost completely forgotten.
Eric Smith: The Metaphysics of Paint, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, until August 1.
Justin O’Brien: Icons, Smith & Singer, Sydney, until July 12.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is relatively uncommon for significant artists to be ignored in their own lifetimes. In general, patrons and the public have little difficulty recognising talent when they see it. The myth of unrecognised genius is largely based on a misunderstanding of the career of Vincent van Gogh, who painted virtually all the pictures admired today in the short period between the spring of 1888 and his death in the summer of 1890, while living in isolation in the south of France.
It is only a little more common for artists once prominent to be forgotten and subsequently rediscovered. Vermeer is the most famous case, but once again this is an exception, because he painted fewer than three dozen pictures and many for the same patron. Other cases in which artists are relatively forgotten and then rediscovered are due to changes in taste, like baroque painting whose reputation sank with the rise of interest in the renaissance in the 19th century, and started to be appreciated anew from the middle of the 20th.
In Australia, we have a few interesting examples of such revaluations, most notably the rediscovery of colonial painters in the later 20th century, finally escaping from the early 20th century cliche that they had been unable to see the Australian environment properly. The new appreciation of John Glover and Eugene von Guerard has enormously enriched the history of Australian art; Abram Louis Buvelot still remains to be adequately studied.
Oblivion, with or without subsequent recovery, is more common in periods of rapidly changing art fashions, like the 20th century; notably the relatively mild and decorative modernism largely practised by women artists between the war was swept aside by the more dynamic and assertive “avant-garde” styles adopted by male artists during and after the Second World War: Nolan, Tucker, Boyd and Drysdale, who first made an impact internationally.
The second half of last century was convulsed by changes in art fashions, which ended the careers of some artists, caused others to seesaw between styles, and left a lot of wreckage behind in public art gallery basements. We only have to think of the so-called Sydney Charm School, Sydney abstractionists of largely European derivation, Melbourne Antipodeans, homegrown Melbourne abstractionists like Roger Kemp and Leonard French, hard-edge abstractionists of The Field exhibition in 1968, conceptual and political artists of the ’70s, postmodernists of the ’80s, and so on – most of whom vociferously declared that they represented the only valid way to make art and that their rivals were vacuous and futile. Only a handful of painters like Fred Williams rose above the frenetic noise and developed a consistent but evolving style.
Eric Smith (1919-2017) is an interesting example of a painter who navigated these choppy waters with some success for a time, and in fact repeatedly won some of Australia’s most important art prizes – including the Blake and Sulman, but especially the Archibald in 1970, 1981 and 1982 – and yet who has in recent decades been almost completely forgotten. Stranger still is the fact that he seemed to disappear from sight and stopped exhibiting in the last quarter of the 20th century, even though he continued to paint almost up to the end of his long life only eight years ago.
This exhibition at Macquarie University is a welcome opportunity to reconsider part of his oeuvre, although it is designed to focus especially on the abstract compositions of his later years and it would be good to see a greater range of his work in portraiture, including pictures held in the National Portrait Gallery like The Painter transmogrified and Mrs Smith (1973) or his portrait of Richard Divall in the robes of the Order of Malta (1999). It would be particularly interesting, in fact, to see a more general survey of the portrait in Australia in the post-war years – the sort of thing the NPG should think of if they were doing their job.
The first thing that strikes you on entering the gallery, however, is the profound contrast, even disparity, between Smith’s portraits and his abstract compositions. He is a talented portraitist, and the picture of his art dealer, the irrepressible Rudy Komon, which greets us as we enter on the left, is one of his masterpieces: he captures not only a likeness but the vivacious and energetic spirit of the man who had dominated the Australian art market for 20 years but would die the year after this portrait won the Archibald Prize in 1981.
There are three interesting self-portraits, the first from 1955 and painted in a style that is indebted to German expressionism; the second in 1989 at the age of 70, somewhat oversized but full of energy, the third in 1998-99 at the age of 80 and imbued with a certain weariness. And there are several other notable portraits, including a couple painted at the latter end of his career: a full length of his friend and fellow-painter Hector Gilliland (1995), and a head and shoulders picture of his patron Diane Taylor (1998).
These are good likenesses, but they are relatively conventional and do not represent a distinctive pictorial style like those of Dobell or Brack, nor do they have any clear connection with his abstract compositions. The Komon portrait is particularly successful, in part because it does achieve some reconciliation between the depiction of the sitter and the non-figurative background that hints at a bench in a cafe but mainly suggests the resonance of Komon’s energy into the space surrounding him.
The portrait of Louis James, another painter friend (1995), is less satisfactory, the seat here becoming at once too literal and too gratuitously abstract.
There is a story about the large abstract paintings that dominate the exhibition. Smith had painted these in his later years, and some of them had been seen in a documentary made in 2012, but they had not been exhibited and were rediscovered almost fortuitously by their present owner, Benjamin Jay Shand, as he recounts in a short catalogue entry. Some of these are quite impressive large works, but they are all in a sense private experiments; there is much discussion in the catalogue essays about Smith’s search for a visual “language”, and these pictures certainly document that quest, and the exploration of quite different approaches to abstract painting.
But Smith never did find a coherent artistic language in the way that Fred Williams, as already suggested above, managed to do. And this leaves his oeuvre looking like a succession of different ideas and impulses about how to paint, sometimes even at the same time. As he himself said in the 2012 documentary, “you can’t change styles like I did and hope to get anywhere”. This is perhaps a rather harsh self-judgment, but it does reflect the predicament of many painters in the post-war period, buffeted by violently changing art trends and lacking a strong foundation in their art training in the first place.
The religious paintings with which he had remarkable success in the later ’50s and ’60s (he won the Blake Prize six times during these years) are influenced by the French painter Georges Rouault but without Rouault’s narrative and expressive clarity. While there is no doubt about Smith’s religious sincerity – he was a convert to Catholicism in the ’50s – a picture like The Scourged Christ (1956) must make us ask why the forms of the body need to be so rough and rudimentary, and why the face is reduced almost to illegibility.
When we look closely, we can see that Smith is trying to depict the depth of Christ’s suffering, but at the same time the features seem almost deliberately to avoid clear definition. No doubt this says something about the difficulty of expressing a theological vision in the materialistic world of the ’50s, and it would be worth reviewing the successive winners of the Blake Prize in these years, for many were ultimately unsatisfactory as religious art.
The Blake Prize was awarded for the first time in 1951, to Smith’s contemporary Justin O’Brien (1917-96) for his Virgin enthroned, a triptych now in the National Gallery of Victoria. The central panel represents the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints in a “sacra conversazione”, while the two side panels depict Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Baptism of Christ respectively. O’Brien is also implicitly dealing with the difficulty of painting the sacred in a world that has largely lost the sense of spiritual reality, but his approach is to adopt a highly artificial, almost faux-naif style loosely drawing on the so-called Italian primitives, especially the Sienese, whose school was discussed here a few weeks ago.
After serving in the war, O’Brien was Art Master at Cranbrook School from 1946-59 (he was the teacher and mentor of Martin Sharp), and later moved in 1967 to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life and where his work continued to evolve and become more sophisticated; he nonetheless returned to Australia every two years to exhibit, for like his friend Jeffrey Smart, he had understood that this was the best market for his pictures.
The last important public gallery exhibition of O’Brien’s work was Barry Pearce’s Justin O’Brien: the Sacred music of colour (AGNSW, 2010) but the auction house Smith & Singer currently has a beautifully selected exhibition of 12 paintings, appropriately titled Icons. This includes a couple of his early religious compositions, The Flight into Egypt (1945) and The Assumption of the Virgin (1952), as well as several portraits, a landscape of Scyros (1965), The Kiss of Judas (1969), Fishermen (1977) and Christ in the House of Mary and Martha (1984).
In the first of these pictures, O’Brien uses softly defined, dreamlike bodies with generalised features, painted on a fairly coarse canvas; by the time of the Kiss of Judas, perhaps after a deeper study of Sienese art in Italy, he abandons canvas for paper laminated onto board, a smooth surface that allows him to use gold leaf for the background and more precise painterly definition. Lucid narratives are set against the otherworldly radiance of the icon tradition, while his figures are impassive like those of Piero della Francesca, evoking a world poised between the real and the visionary.
The contrast between these two artists is profound and instructive: Smith struggles to discover a painterly language, while O’Brien very early finds one that he is able to develop organically throughout his career. Smith’s approach to religious subjects is to screw the intensity of emotion to the point of inarticulacy; O’Brien produces eminently legible narratives, but holds back any overt expression of feeling. One oeuvre is serene, the other restless; one painter is searching for a path that he never finds, the other travelling calmly along a known and familiar road.
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