Not quite the master

Despite his exalted status, Jon Molvig’s works suggest an artist who never learned to paint.

Jon Molvig’s Lunatic (1957). Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

One of the most striking revelations of the Margaret Olley retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art was that she improved so dramatically after the age of 50. As I observed in my review some weeks ago, if Olley had died before this period her early work would scarcely be remembered. And I also noted in passing how rare it was to see an Australian artist improve with age.

In Brisbane again, we have an example of this principle in the work of Jon Molvig (1923-70). It was evidently a good career move to come to Queensland when he did; his status as the leading modernist in a very small art scene in the later 1950s and especially the 60s has given him a kind of historical importance that explains this retrospective, regardless of the intrinsic merit of his work.

Jon Molvig‘s Charles Blackman (1966). Collection: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

That Molvig did not get better in the course of his career is pretty clear from even a cursory view of this exhibition, with its weak beginning and appalling end in the Tree of Man series, which is portentous in theme, inept in concept and facile in its repetitive execution. There are several reasons why an artist does not get better. The first of these is that they don’t start well; the second is that they don’t want to improve; the third is that they don’t know what good or better actually mean; and the last is that they don’t know where they are going.

Molvig was born in Newcastle and served in the war before spending three years at the National Art School in Sydney (then usually known as East Sydney Technical College), supported by the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. It would have been an interesting time to be a student there, with a number of fellow students who would later become significant figures, as well as well-known and popular teachers.

But this was also a period when the de-skilling of modernism was beginning to take its toll. Some able or inspired artists came out of art schools at this time, but others got through without mastering any of the fundamental techniques and practices of drawing and painting. Technical incompetence was never tolerated in cinema or music but, in painting, sloppiness was mistaken for inspiration or rebellion.

Jon Molvig’s Primordia (c.1956-57). Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

The early works in the exhibition make it clear that young Molvig never mastered anything much. Among the drawings, there is one of a model reclining, from 1957, in which we can feel that the artist is in control of his medium, and that the lines he makes are both informed by what he sees and expressive of some response to the subject. But another of the same model on her side is less assured, and a third in which she sits up and holds her knee collapses into incoherence.

The paintings reveal similar weaknesses. The little early self-portrait is appealing enough, but one can already sense a complacent satisfaction with approximation, and there are no further works in which he can be seen searching, as one might expect, for greater rigour or articulacy. These are in fact, as we shall see, fundamental qualities that always remained foreign to ­Molvig.

After the portrait, there are several still lifes and other things that were presumably art school exercises, but all of them banal and forgettable. The young Molvig seems to have been one of those unfortunate people who want to make art but have little or no inherent ability; someone like that can be helped to a certain degree by rigorous teaching, but Molvig was either not taught or didn’t listen.

Jon Molvig’s Study for Joy Roggenkamp (1961). Collection: University of Queensland Art Museum

Molvig’s Joy Roggenkamp (1963). Collection: University of Queensland Art Museum.

After art school he spent some years in Europe, and works made following his return show various influences, like a painting of a cat that imitates the look of Pierre Bonnard without the latter’s subtlety or feeling for colour. Colour, in fact, is one of the weakest points in Molvig’s art. In 1955 he won the Lismore Art Prize with a picture of a child that is almost completely yellow. Later there are paintings all in lurid orange, others in daubs of grey and white, or blue and mauve, and so forth. He seems never to have understood anything about colour mixing, balances of warm and cool, subtlety of mood, or any of the things that differentiate grown-up art from the daubs of ­children.

The case for the defence seems to be that he was devoted to wild and passionate expression. But the trouble with that line of argument is that expression requires articulacy. Groaning, macho howling and inarticulate ranting are not expressive, they are merely symptomatic.

There is a wall of figure subjects in a style that is clearly trying to imitate that of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, but even a glance at Kirchner’s paintings shows the German expressionist’s primitive form and coarse brushwork are all carefully controlled, and that his pictures are held together by a sense of compositional unity. Molvig’s work is just confused.

Nearby is a large drawing study for the head of a madman, and above that the finished painting of the same subject. Stylistically, it is derived from Tucker, but what is particularly striking is the overly emphatic, almost hysterical treatment of the subject, yet without any depth or sense of the inner life of the supposed madman.

Naturally, one can’t help thinking of Theodore Gericault’s great series of portraits of insane men and women (1819-22), which are disturbing precisely because we are made to see their humanity as well as their madness or, to be more precise, their humanity corrupted by madness. In Molvig’s case, both here and in another work titled Lunatic, we are very far from such complexity of insight; we are not looking at works capable of offering us an insight into the deranged state of mind, but rather something more like outsider art, that is the art made by the deranged themselves.

There is one enormous painting with the title Primordia (1956-57), which a casual visitor might mistake for a frenzied tangle of scrawled brush marks. On the label, however, we learn that it is meant to represent “a demiurge, legs splayed out and arms flailing” with a blazing sun above. And indeed one can just about make out such a figure, whose attitude seems again to be imitating the pose of one of Tucker’s Images Of Modern Evil series.

But what is this meant to convey to us? Apparently the title is meant to evoke the beginnings of all things, but we come back to our earlier point: nothing can be conveyed when the artist has so little control over his expressive means. Nor does there seem to be any poetic or spiritual conception behind this incoherent and barely legible outburst. It is pathetic to learn Molvig believed this could be his masterpiece, and perhaps rival Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). There is no comparison between either the level of technical control or the imaginative vision of the two artists: everything in the Demoiselles is, in its own way, as razor-sharp, clear in definition and conscious in intention as a portrait by Ingres.

It is a cliche to say Picasso could do what he did because he was classically trained — and partly a cliche because it suggests he proceeded to something better — but it is not entirely wrong. Picasso had considerable technical ability and spent years exploring draughtsmanship, colour, tone and form, so that he was working with a range of resources that was simply unavailable to Molvig. The sad thing is that in the climate of disoriented modernism, Molvig’s ramblings were encouraged and it didn’t occur to him or anyone else that he should simply learn to paint.

Because he had so little ability, he ended up imitating others like Nolan or Tucker who had a wider range of references and culture, even if they were very limited in their own ways. So Molvig presents the dispiriting spectacle of a third-rate artist aping second-rate ones, with fairly predictable results.

There is thus a series of pictures of Adam and Eve in a dystopian environment, equipped with helmet heads borrowed from Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, and another of a dead stockman with effects borrowed from both Nolan and Tucker. In all of this, as wild brushwork is succeeded by flat Nolan-like skies, or as one colour scheme follows another, the lack of inherent or organic development is painful to watch.

In his lifetime, Molvig achieved some reputation as a portrait painter, even winning the Archibald Prize in 1966 for his portrait of Charles Blackman. Not surprisingly, these are his best works, because in portrait painting the artist has a clear subject and focus for attention, which in Molvig’s case provided a discipline and a degree of impersonal clarity he was unable to find otherwise.

He also had a reasonable ability to get a likeness, which suggests he could have been a better painter with a different approach. But as it is, with a very limited ability to handle paint, to define form and to manage colour, tone, light and shade, Molvig’s portraits are seldom good ­pictures.

His rendering of Charles Blackman is among the better ones, because the likeness is matched by some feeling in posing the figure and situating it in space, even if the colour palette is still lurid and gratuitous. Another that stands out is said to have been one the artist’s own favourites. Joy Roggenkamp was one of Molvig’s pupils, who was evidently close to him and whom he painted and sketched on several occasions. There are a couple of good studies in which he rediscovers the merits of close attention and care when it comes to describing the young woman’s voluptuous bosom.

In a video clip included in the exhibition, Molvig describes Joy as a very interesting sitter, and there is indeed little doubt of the interest he felt. The portrait itself shows him at his best, even if the overall conception owes much to Dobell’s portrait of Margaret Olley (1948), with its diagonal composition and large picturesque hat. In fact, Molvig has simply reversed Dobell’s composition so that Joy leans to the viewer’s right rather than to our left as in the original.

But even if he borrowed the composition, he certainly paid great attention to the likeness and made several studies of Joy’s features and expressions. And this adds a note of mystery to one of the few pictures in the exhibition we could call charming as well as passionate — a small erotic oil sketch of a couple making love. The woman is seen from the back but she turns around in the ecstasy of the moment and the features that are revealed are unmistakably those that Molvig had drawn to the point of reducing them to a pattern of desire.

Jon Molvig: Maverick

Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Until February 2