Mortimer Menpes exhibition at Art Gallery of South Australia
MORTIMER Menpes deserves to be considered on the fringes of Australian art history, but his story is still an interesting one.
ONE of the relatively recent new directions in the study of Australian art history has been an increasing interest in expatriate artists, especially those who went overseas early, never returned and thus had little or no bearing on the development of art in this country. On the face of it, such individuals, including Mortimer Menpes, who is now, more than a century after the height of his career, given a thorough monographic exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, can seem to have stepped out of the history of Australian art and into a kind of art historical limbo.
But the question is in reality a much broader one and has important ramifications for the definition of the corpus of Australian art history. For even the most central, canonical and defining of Australian artists, such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, spent considerable periods abroad, and easily could have remained in Britain if they had encountered greater success there.
Others, such as Rupert Bunny, came back only in retirement; Hugh Ramsay, sick with tuberculosis, came home to recover but died soon afterwards; George Lambert returned to complete commissions as a war artist. He at least was received in Australia as a star, while painters such as John Peter Russell were ignored. Nor was the pattern of expatriation confined to the early 20th century. Some of our most important painters in the postwar years, including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Jeffrey Smart, were more or less permanently resident abroad.
And that is only half of the story: the other face of the coin is immigration. One of the reasons for the special status of Streeton in the tradition of Australian art was the fact he was the first important artist, of those we consider Australian, to be born in this country. All the earlier figures, including John Glover, Augustus Earle, Conrad Martens, Eugene von Guerard, Nicholas Chevalier, Louis Buvelot and even Roberts, were born overseas; and some of these, such as von Guerard, eventually returned to Europe. Yet even Streeton left for many years.
If we were to write a history of Australian art restricted to artists who were born and permanently resident in this country, the corpus would be drastically reduced and stripped of most of its greatest figures.
We can only conclude that it is not the fact of being born or permanently resident here that makes someone an Australian artist but whether they engage with the environment and the concerns of the people while they are here. In this sense, it is striking how quickly immigrant artists in the 19th century begin to respond to and speak of the Australian experience, even if, like Charles Conder, they have nothing more to say of it when they return home.
On this criterion, we can legitimately consider some artists to be more central to the story of our art and others more peripheral, even if they are still deserving of our interest as part of a wider story. Above all, though, it makes us realise the elasticity of any notion of cultural identity, especially in a colonial setting; and such a reflection may help us rise above the anxiety that Australians seem still to feel about this subject.
Just as ethnic identity is always mixed, and ultimately of only relative importance compared with our common humanity, national identity is a fluid process. Europeans living in Australia gradually came to feel more Australian as the 19th century wore on, but Australia could never expect to forge the more distinctive qualities that come from centuries of living with the same people in the same place; and postwar immigration and contemporary globalisation have brought us a new age of mobility, especially among English-speaking people.
Australians are less distinctive now in character and values than they were a half-century ago and, like it or not, that process is bound to continue. That is why our future cannot lie in cultural parochialism but in a deeper understanding of our ancient and modern cultural traditions in Europe and, more broadly still, those of Asia and other branches of humanity. What is important is not our idiosyncrasies but holding on to the great principles of our humanistic heritage in freedom of speech, democracy and the rule of law.
Oddly enough, this internationalisation, reversing the intervening process of nationalisation, has brought us back to a state of affairs not too far from that of the late 19th century, when the concept of Australian was a subset of British. When Vincent van Gogh first refers in his correspondence to Russell, who painted a fine portrait of him, he mentions him as un anglais, un australien — an Englishman, an Australian, as though specifying the variety of a plant.
This was the period when Menpes, born in Adelaide in 1855 of English immigrant parents, began to establish himself as an artist in London. Throughout his career he was frequently identified there as an Australian, but he showed little interest in antipodean life and never returned, despite being one of the most adventurous travel artists of the late 19th century. Menpes therefore amply deserves to be considered on the fringes of Australian art history, but that does not mean that the fringes deserve to be neglected, and his story is an interesting one.
Menpes’s greatest good fortune was to form a connection with JM Whistler, whom he always considered as his master. He became for several years in the 1880s Whistler’s assistant and pupil, and learned from him about etching, painting, aestheticism and the love of things Japanese, then at the height of their vogue in Europe. Thanks to Whistler, he came to know many artists, intellectuals, patrons and bohemians in London; he was even godfather to Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan, later Vyvyan Holland.
As Wilde observed in The Decay of Lying (1889), if you want to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokyo; you will steep yourself in Japanese art, and “when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere”.
He could well have been thinking of Menpes, who a few years earlier, in 1887, had indeed travelled to Japan in search of a deeper understanding of Japanese art and culture. In doing so, he knew he would almost certainly alienate Whistler, who was notoriously touchy and also had fallen out with Wilde a few years earlier. Menpes knew the risk but took the gamble in the interests of his career, and it paid off: the exhibition he had on his return made him what was then a considerable amount of money.
Menpes was undoubtedly fascinated with Japan, but he seems to have seen it mainly as a source of picturesque motifs, which he painted in colour harmonies recalling those of his master, framed tastefully and exhibited in a gallery installation that reflected the height of japonaiserie taste. Thereafter, his love of things Japanese became an important part of his persona as an artist, although nothing is more telling of the real depth of his engagement than a photograph of him painting in a kimono worn over a wing collar and bow tie.
The reception of the Japanese exhibition led Menpes to become a successful travel artist, voyaging to exotic destinations and bringing back a wealth of imagery, sold to the public in the form of small-format, framed and affordable paintings, ideally suited to the decoration of an urban apartment, or of etchings, of which he produced an enormous number. He went so far as to design illustrations for travel books, thus reaching an even more extensive public, although he lost some standing as a fine artist in his enthusiastic embrace of the mass market.
Menpes’s vast etching output has recently been thoroughly studied by Gary Morgan, who has published a three-volume catalogue raisonne under the title The Etched Works of Mortimer Menpes (Volume 1: The Early Years, 1855-1900; Volume 2, Etchings, 1901-1913; Volume 3, Etchings, 1914-1938 , Adelaide, Stuart Galleries, 2012). These volumes represent the fruit of a considerable labour of scholarship and connoisseurship, and are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Menpes’s oeuvre.
Menpes also had begun a new career as a portraitist. His expensively furnished and exotic house was part of the attraction; sitters must have felt they were entering a temple of aestheticism even before the gentleman in the kimono began to sketch them or to scratch directly into the plate in drypoint. But here we encounter the elephant in the room of Menpes’s portraiture, as indeed of many of his travel pictures. For all the sketching that may have been undertaken in the self-consciously artistic setting of his studio, most of the portraits are clearly based on, or more exactly copies of, photographs. The fact is given away by the use of casual or momentary attitudes and turns of the head, and by the reproduction of adventitious lighting effects from a two-dimensional source as opposed to modelling from a solid body.
At first, one is struck by the tantalising suspicion that this may have been invisible to contemporaries; perhaps they had assimilated the new standard of photographic realism so thoroughly yet naively that it had become invisible to them. But on the contrary, his indebtedness to photographic sources was recognised and rightly criticised by several writers and no doubt led to a decline in his reputation.
What is really curious is that a man who professed admiration for the great tradition of etching — and for Rembrandt in particular — should not have had doubts about a process that admittedly required considerable dexterity but that ultimately could be regarded as little more than camouflaging the lifeless photographic image with the illusion of an organic, hand-made surface.
What is strangest of all is that in cases such as the portrait of Henry Irving, we still have some fresh and living sketches from life, yet Menpes clearly chose to base the final portrait on a photograph, copied in drypoint to lend it the look of animation and yet inert and rigid compared to the drawings. The sketches from life have a spontaneity that recalls 18th-century drawings, while the final work seems to surrender to a positivistic obsession with facts — a literalism as stiff, under the veil of aestheticism, as the wing collar under the kimono.
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