Margaret Olley exhibition puts Donald Friend, William Dobell in the picture

The Margaret Olley exhibition shows how sociability and learning together can enrich an artist’s experience.

Portrait in the mirror (1948) by Margaret Olley.

Artists, like writers and composers, typically spend much of their time by themselves. They need the solitude, but they can also suffer from it; from antiquity, and especially from the Renaissance onwards, there were elaborate theories about the psychology of artists and intellectuals and the maladies to which they were prone.

These theories, however, were only part of a complex system that for centuries was fundamental to medical and psychological thinking, and has left unsuspected traces in expressions we still use every day, starting with the word “humour” itself. The four elements — air, fire, earth and water — are mirrored in the four humours that compose the human body: respectively, blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile and phlegm.

These humours, in the earliest version of the system, were balanced in a healthy body; illness resulted from a breakdown of what we might today call homeostasis. But soon it was realised there might be a relative preponderance of one humour or other even within healthy individuals. This accounted for differences of character or temperament — anger, melancholy, cheerfulness, calmness — which were in turn visibly manifested in our composure.

Renaissance writers such as Ficino were concerned with remedies for melancholy, such as getting out in the sun, taking exercise, drinking red wine and having sex — advice that is probably just as good today as it ever was, and which most artists follow instinctively, even without knowing they are seeking solar correctives to their saturnine temperaments.

Sociability, networks of friendship and artistic camaraderie are equally important to artists. Working in a master’s shop or later in a big early modern studio was like being a member of a family; and when artists were working on their own, they often formed social groups, from the informal clubs of foreign artists in 17th-century Rome to the impressionists gathering in cafes to talk about art and life in Paris.

Chinese screen and yellow room (1996) by Olley; Margaret Olley interior (1992) by Cressida Campbell.

It is this sense of sociability, of learning together, mutual encouragement and common purpose that is the most appealing aspect of the Margaret Olley exhibition at Sydney’s SH Ervin Gallery. Olley was not herself a great artist, although she painted some appealing pictures, but she was part of a network of relationships that extended from her days as a student to her later encouragement of younger practitioners.

The element of common purpose is crucial, however, and it is the lack of that basic agreement about what one is trying to achieve that makes life hard for artists today, when the market, conditioned by the habits of a consumer economy, rewards the idiosyncratic and the gimmicky rather than the workmanlike. The idiosyncratic can also more easily evade measurement against benchmarks of quality, whereas when you paint like most of the artists in this exhibition, your strengths and weaknesses are clearly visible.

It is an example of that common purpose that Olley’s first teacher, Caroline Barker, herself a competent painter, knew Olley had to travel to Sydney to pursue her studies at the National Art School. NAS was then the only art school in Sydney apart from Julian Ashton’s. Some 30 years later, in the mid-1970s, NAS was split to produce the two art schools now known as the Sydney College of the Arts (part of the University of Sydney) and the College of Fine Arts (University of NSW), and the result was that one institution became three.

Today, the situation of Sydney’s art schools is a matter of serious concern. The University of Sydney has threatened to close, move or cut back the SCA and the situation remains in suspense; there is again talk of merging NAS with the COFA. The loss of an independent NAS would be a catastrophe for art teaching in NSW, reducing the diversity and quality of instruction, and above all losing NAS’s most precious asset: its emphasis on drawing, art history and studio practice. Surely Sydney is a big enough city to offer art students a meaningful choice of vocational art curriculums.

There are some fascinating pieces from Olley’s student years, including drawings and paintings by her and by other young women, such as Mitty Lee-Brown. Two oil studies of nudes by Olley and Brown have been borrowed from the NAS collection. Brown’s is particularly impressive for a student, and other drawings by her confirm she must have been among the most promising students of her generation. Facing the nude, with its soft modelling inspired by Dobell, is another striking work: a group of sleeping soldiers at a train station, in which we can see her responding to the example of Drysdale.

Unfortunately, there is little by Brown after these art school years; she was independently wealthy and lived for many years in Europe and Sri Lanka without ever fulfilling her early potential. But although unusual in being rich, she was like many art students in showing promise when given direction and when asked to complete defined tasks, but in lacking the independent sense of direction or the determination to pursue an autonomous career. Olley, on the other hand, though perhaps not as precociously able in some respects, had the all-important drive to work and pursue an arduous career.

Donald Friend’s 1948 drawing of Margaret Olley; William Dobell’s portrait of the artist from the same year.

There are several sketch portraits of her from this period, including two perceptive pencil drawings by Donald Friend and a small study by Dobell, a prelude to the famous portrait that won the Archibald Prize in 1948 and which is even more interesting to see in the company of these drawings. For although Olley was neither a beauty nor statuesque, Dobell has found in her the potential for transformation into a vision of opulent theatrical elegance.

An epilogue to the portraits is provided by Jeffrey Smart’s Second study for Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum (1994), where he has characteristically painted her in a long gallery with a hoarding put up for renovation or rehanging. The final composition is constructed around the golden rectangle, framing Olley in an order invisible to the uninitiated.

Nearby are three views of Hill End, which Friend and Drysdale rediscovered in 1947. One is by Olley, and the other two by Friend himself and Drysdale. The latter two have more artistic character, and they reveal the different sensibilities of these two friends: Friend has great graphic facility and an eye for the picturesque and anecdotal, but Drysdale has a more abstract, poetic feeling for meaning: his street becomes broader, and the composition is imbued with silence and solitude.

Olley’s best work was in still life compositions, particularly within the environment of her home, which became legendary for its dense assemblages of pictures, furniture, vases, flowers, screens and objects of all kinds. On a much more modest level, her house became to her what Monet’s garden was to him: a purpose-built, intimately familiar and continually evolving set for painting pictures. She produced many of these, always appealing and carrying with them something of the aesthetic opulence yet intimacy of the original setting, which saves them from what is otherwise a certain literalness of rendering. One of the best of the later interiors is Chinese screen and yellow room (1996).

In earlier work, such as Portrait in a mirror (1948), there is a gentler, more dreamy atmosphere, as well as reminiscences of classical form in the self-portrait that recall Picasso’s renewal of the heritage of antiquity between the wars. Both the lyricism and this modernist neo-classicism seem to have been assimilated from her slightly older friend and contemporary David Strachan, who is represented by several works, including his brilliant, tense but atypical Batterie de cuisine (1956).

The exhibition includes a card in which Brian Kennedy, then director of the National Gallery of Australia, asks Olley if she will make a gift of Portrait in a mirror to the NGA, observing that she has already been kind to Edmund Capon, then director of the Art Gallery of NSW. Perhaps she thought the request too perfunctory, or possibly presumptuous, but in any case the picture was given to the AGNSW.

There are many other attractive works in the exhibition, including paintings by Justin O’Brien, one of which is an interior of Olley’s house at Duxford Street, Paddington, where he stayed while in Sydney for medical treatment. As O’Brien observed, “everywhere you look there is another still life just waiting to be painted”.

O’Brien, like Friend and Smart, was an old friend from art student days, but Olley also fostered younger artists, including Nicholas Harding, Cressida Campbell, Cris Canning and Ben Quilty. Both Harding and Campbell had the opportunity, like O’Brien, to paint inside her house, and each typically found entirely different things in that dense interior.

Harding, in a large-scale ink drawing, has layer upon layer of tone, somehow evoking the depth of a complex space while also reducing it to the discipline of a two-dimensional graphic pattern. Campbell, working with her personal and highly-refined adaptation of Japanese coloured woodblock technique, introduces a crisp clarity and order that is quite unlike Olley’s own compulsive layering.

These images made in Olley’s house, particularly because it was designed as a set for painting, are among the most touching in the exhibition, as they so visibly evoke the sharing and the exchange, the camaraderie between artists we mentioned earlier. Between older and younger artists, that sharing is a form of tradition, in the sense that tradition means transmission, reception and adaptation.

Margaret Olley: Painter, Peer, Mentor, Muse

SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, until March 26