John Olsen’s instinct and intuition on show at Melbourne’s NGV

John Olsen is considered Australia’s most important abstract painter but how seriously should we take his works?

Detail from John Olsen’s Summer in the you beaut country (1962). © John Olsen / Viscopy

There was a time, about 50 years ago, when abstraction was regarded by many as the consummation of the art of painting. According to this narrative — satirised a decade later by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975) — modern art had been tending towards flat surfaces of colour for a century or so before reaching the point of postwar gestural abstraction and then ultimately the pure flatness of post-painterly abstraction or colour-field painting.

Almost immediately after the enthusiastic declaration of victory by the supporters of the movement, the whole project stalled in the turmoil of competing avant-gardes of the 1970s, from conceptual and minimalist forms of expression to political agitation and feminism, all different and yet mostly agreeing that painting itself was obsolete. But painting, as it turned out, was neither dead nor had it reached the culmination of its historical destiny with abstraction.

From today’s perspective, we can see abstraction as a historical style, arising within particular circumstances and manifesting itself in several phases in the past century. In its original incarnation, it was one of the many new movements that arose in the most dynamic decade of modernism, the years immediately preceding World War I, which gave birth to cubism, futurism and expressionism as well as abstraction.

All of these forms were responses to a changing world in which human beings seemed increasingly overshadowed by the power of machines and lost in the faceless crowd of mass society. Analytical cubism was the most intellectual, in effect deconstructing the rationalist premises of the scientific revolution, first laid in the Renaissance discovery of perspective and the construction of a coherent model of space.

Futurism was the most obtuse in its celebration of technology, industry and war, but it was still driven by an urge to transcend the banality of modern urban life. Expressionism represented an anguished rejection of the industrial and urban world and sought renewal in primitivism. And abstraction looked for spiritual transcendence through the quasi-mystical doctrines of theosophy, whose origins lay in the late 19th-century spiritual revival.

Kandinsky and later Mondrian were inspired by theosophical doctrines of a deeper spiritual reality behind and beyond the world of appearance, although one sought to express his insight through emotion and the other through reason. After World War II, when the US assumed a leading role in modern art, gestural abstraction again arose first with the generation of American “action painters” and was again followed by the non-gestural form of hard-edge abstraction.

Detail from Olsen’s Improvisation on Basho’s frog (1995). © John Olsen / Viscopy

With historical distance, the American painters of these decades, who were actively promoted as the quintessentially individualistic art of the free world, have now shrunk to the scale of a regional movement. If Jackson Pollock remains the most convincing of them, it is perhaps because he had somewhat different roots. His mature style of drip-painting represents the most complete expression of the surrealist idea of automatic painting, which never got much beyond the level of an exercise in the heyday of the surrealist movement.

When we consider the work of John Olsen, generally thought of as the most important Australian abstract painter and the subject of a comprehensive retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria, we may wonder where he fits into this narrative. His immediate influences range from Spain’s Antoni Tapies to France’s Jean Dubuffet, and he has little obviously in common with American abstract expressionism, and still less with hard-edge abstraction.

There is indeed not much evidence in his work of any sort of deliberate or programmatic adoption of abstraction, or of a determined avoidance of representation and figuration. In reality Olsen’s works are full of figurative details and motifs, sometimes recalling the naive scrawls of art brut, and often adopting the overall form of a landscape.

One of the most telling parts of the exhibition is the display of his diaries, which tell us a great deal about both the man and the artist. There is his evident love of travel, his observations about places, often in the Mediterranean, that appeal to him. There are many notes about friends and fellow artists, which — unlike the diaries of Mike Parr I mentioned a few weeks ago — always seem to have been written with the thought they might be seen one day by the interested parties.

But what is most striking is Olsen’s irrepressible love of drawing. There are sketches of people in bars, and strangers — often satirical and drawn with the cartoonist’s graphic flair — and of fellow artists, all of the latter respectful like the written commentaries. One, for example, is of James Gleeson, apparently after Olsen was invited to present him with a prize (which he duly notes was well-deserved). Above all, there is the sense of someone who draws instinctively and whose immediate response to seeing something interesting or picturesque is to sketch it.

And this love of drawing expresses itself ­directly in some of Olsen’s best-known imagery, in his drawings of frogs and other animals, a selection of which occupies one room of the exhibition. These drawings have an affinity with the forms that animate his larger paintings. But they do make us wonder why he did not attempt some more ambitious figurative compositions. Perhaps, for all his love of drawing and his gift for graphic expression, he had nothing to say on a larger scale in a figurative idiom.

Partly it may be that Olsen never planned his work in the sense of conceiving an overall compositional structure, but simply made it up, as it were, as he went along. Borrowing Paul Klee’s formulation about taking a line for a walk, he spoke of taking a line for a holiday: in that sense each of his works is like an improvisation, and it is not surprising that he recalls painting the ceiling of art dealer Frank McDonald’s dining room while listening to Louis Armstrong.

This ceiling and another, displayed hanging as originally intended above the head of viewers, who can recline on specially made seats to admire them, are some of his most successful works. Interestingly, although planned from the beginning on removable panels, they were executed in situ and painted standing underneath.

This is obviously far less comfortable than working on a vertical surface, but at the same time more effective if the artist wants to have the sense of painting a sky. Because Olsen is such an intuitive and instinctive artist, it was probably vital for him to paint them this way. From below and looking up, he evokes the almost ecstatic experience of painting the sun in the heavens.

This whole process cannot fail to make one think of the contrast with Olsen’s slightly older contemporary Jeffrey Smart, who died — it is hard to believe — a little over three years ago. As a man Smart was, like Olsen, a lover of life, but he could not have been more different as an artist. He was methodical and considered; compositions were carefully planned and researched, sketches of real motifs were executed and studies of the provisional and final compositions were painted and often included in the later exhibitions.

Detail from Olsen’s Seafood paella (2007). © John Olsen / Viscopy

In a sense Smart was an intellectual artist, although he never allowed ideological or theoretical ideas to distract him from an essentially intuitive sense of suitable subject matter and appropriate painterly style. And he certainly never attempted to explain the meaning of his work or of his choice of subject matter, knowing very well that an artist articulates what he has to say in the work itself. But he had an unfailing sense of thematic consistency from which he seldom, if ever, deviated.

Olsen, on the other hand, seems to be a purely intuitive artist who responds to his environment, as in the series on Sydney Harbour, with a constantly varied and yet ultimately similar series of improvisations on certain colours and a restless, constantly moving line that becomes a metaphor for the peculiar natural and social experience of Sydney.

At other times, as in a series of paintings of Lake Eyre, he adopts an aerial view and produces a kind of topographic landscape as the general form, around which he improvises lines and colours very much as a jazz musician would. But in all these works, though unlike Pollock in his refusal to restrict himself to non-figurative marks, one can see that Olsen too could be considered as an heir to the tradition of surrealist automatism.

In fact, if we look at the automatic drawings of Andre Masson, we find characteristic tangles of lines that seem abstract but in fact contain a great many legible graphic motifs. The same is true of Olsen’s paintings: complex ­tangles of lines that typically wind and knot themselves together, but throw up identifiable motifs of all kinds in the process.

Formally, we can see it is not planning or any kind of compositional idea that gives these works unity. In some cases the overall structure comes from a reference to landscape, whether in aerial view or in a more conventional perspective that allows for a horizon separating earth and sky. But when this landscape reference is absent, it is something more instinctive that governs pictorial unity.

Ultimately, the model of the non-landscape compositions is the explosive solar mass of McDonald’s ceiling, which in hindsight seems to have represented a truly significant moment in the artist’s evolution. The central mass that dominates this ceiling composition is repeated in many later pictures, even ones that are not intended as ceilings or as in any literal sense images of the sun.

It seems rather that as the artist paints — or perhaps one can say draws with paint, since all his work is made of line, not of the modelling of masses — the restless linear motion seeks unity by clustering towards the centre, creating these central tangles that become so characteristic of his work. At times they remind us of ­microbial life seen under the microscope, of a world of cell growth and division that is like the biological microcosm of the cosmic order.

Except that we are left in some doubt as to how seriously to take these works, indeed how seriously Olsen himself takes them. Impressive as some of them are, it is sobering to consider that he could paint a five-panel polyptych with a characteristic cluster pattern that we might well associate with a cosmic vision were it not that the title informs us that it represents a seafood paella. Is this amiable self-deprecation, self-conscious bathos, or the clue to a vein of frivolity that runs more deeply into the heart of Olsen’s painting?

John Olsen: The You Beaut Country

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until February 12. Then Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, from March 10 to June 12.