Proudly shunning the trends

The work of 20th century Australian artists Arthur Murch and Jurgis Miksevicius is finally receiving long-due attention.

Jurgis Mitsevicius’ Still Life with Mask and Grapes (1947) from the Keepers of the Flame exhibition at Manly Art Gallery. Picture courtesy of Manly Art Gallery

Among the many popular myths about artists is that they tend to be ignored or underrated in life and only appreciated after death. This has rarely been true throughout the course of art history, at least before the modernist period, when there was often a time-lag between the appearance and the acceptance of a new or unfamiliar style.

In fact the myth of the unrecognised genius is largely based on the life of Vincent van Gogh, but his case is misleading. Vincent began his artistic career late, had a slow start, and produced almost all the paintings we now admire in a little over two years, while living in isolation in the south of France.

As a rule — especially in the Renaissance and baroque periods — talent was recognised early, fostered, appreciated and rewarded. The process was not seamless, and early collections of artistic biographies, those of Vasari, Baglione, Bellori, are full of anecdotes about things that could go wrong; but these are significant as exceptions to a norm.

All of this began to crumble with the romantic period and especially later in the 19th century and in the early 20th, as competing fashions undermined consensus about everything from the purpose of art to the standards of performance expected of practitioners. We began to see the familiar pattern in which a new style first encounters resistance, then is accepted, only to be superseded by a yet newer style.

Arthur Murch, Self-portrait, c.1933. Manly Art Gallery

This was the pattern of the avant-garde, which, as Baudelaire reminds us, was a military metaphor: the vanguard of an army moves ahead of its main body to ensure the way is clear. But as Baudelaire also astutely observed, the metaphor paradoxically appeals to followers rather than to leaders, because they can find safety in following the trend.

Impressionism was an early example of the modernist cycle. The style evolved in the 1860s, before the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), but only acquired its name after the first group exhibition of 1874. By the time of the last group exhibition in 1886, they were already becoming established. That was the year that their dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, held an enormous exhibition of 289 impressionist paintings in New York. Its success, in turn, drew European collectors to the movement.

By the time Vincent arrived in Paris, also in 1886, he could clearly see that the older impressionists were beginning to be established, and that a new and younger generation was emerging, including Georges Seurat and Paul Gauguin. He called them respectively the impressionists du grand boulevard and du petit boulevard because the former were now shown in the prestigious art galleries of Paris’s grand new streets.

Detail from Jurgis Mitsevicius’s Self-portrait (1954). Manly Art Gallery

The new generation, in turn, had its moment of being “controversial” — which soon became a standard initiation ritual — before being accepted as investment-grade art, while Monet, now increasingly wealthy, developed his house and garden at Giverny and sold ever more pictures to the rich Americans.

This whole process accelerated during the 20th century, when art fashions succeeded each other at an ever-accelerating pace, culminating in the hysterical overheating of post-war abstraction, with a new machinery of promotional writing asserting that each new form of painting rendered its precursors obsolete.

The effect of fashion has been far greater in the modernist period because art has become so alienated from society and from the expression of common values. As they grew increasingly disconnected from any social purpose, trends in art became as gratuitous and non-significant as fashion in clothing.

Thus during the vogue for abstraction, figurative work was ignored; but since abstract art has fallen out of fashion, important figurative artists of the period have increasingly been recognised: Hopper, Balthus, or in Australia, Jeffrey Smart and others. During the postmodern period, nothing that was not blatantly second-degree could be recognised as serious art; now that mode too has sunk down to the level of schoolchildren’s art projects, and so it continues.

This exhibition represents the work of two Australian artists of the 20th century who have been to some extent overlooked but whose work has been preserved, catalogued, published and exhibited thanks to the loyal efforts of their daughters, the “keepers of the flame” of the exhibition title. The stories are interesting ones, and they also serve as case studies of living and working in the kind of art environment that I have described.

Mitsevicius’s Elva (1952). Manly Art Gallery

Of the two, Arthur Murch (1902-89) is the better known, and his work has met with some recognition, perhaps increasing in recent decades with closer attention to the various movements in Australian art between the wars. He is best known for figure subjects, either mythological or family scenes based on his wife and children, executed in a sunny, high-keyed palette and a style that combines neoclassicism and modernism.

This exhibition includes a striking nude self-portrait drawing — naked but for a slip — which he made at art school and which won him a travelling scholarship to London, Paris and Italy in 1925-27. On his return he worked as a sculptural assistant to George Lambert, whose own remarkable and sometimes enigmatic paintings based on his wife and family may have inspired Murch’s smaller compositions. The red chalk self-portrait from three years after Lambert’s death is the most refined and sophisticated work in the exhibition.

After the war, Murch won the Archibald Prize in 1949 for his portrait of a fellow artist, Bonar Dunlop. This and his other portraits were, of course, painted from life, unlike so many in today’s version of the prize, which, as I pointed out a few weeks ago, are not only copied from photos but actually painted over photographs printed on to the canvas.

Detail from Murch’s Bonar Dunlop (1949). Manly Art Gallery

After this success, however, Murch seems to have withdrawn from the public sphere, although he continued to paint some fine family portraits, like a series in which we watch his daughter Michelle grow from a little girl to the verge of adolescence. Presumably this was partly the effect of the changes of fashion that made his art seem outdated, especially when he had not achieved the kind of eminence that can allow an artist to survive fluctuations of taste, supported by their reputation and loyal collectors.

Jurgis Miksevicius (1923-2014) is less well-known. He was born in Lithuania, where his family were prosperous, but they were forced to leave the country when the Russians occupied the Baltic States in 1940, and Jurgis finished school in Berlin.

After the war, he trained as an artist at the Darmstadt Werkstaetten, which followed Bauhaus principles, and the Bauhaus influence can probably be seen in Miksevicius’s later and endearing tendency to paint and decorate every possible surface of his house, from cloudscapes on the ceiling to trompe-l’oeil plates and knives and forks on the kitchen table.

Unable to return to their homeland, which remained in the hands of the Soviets until 1991, he migrated to Australia in 1948, where he was eventually joined by his family. He lived for a time in a migrant camp, where he was employed as camp artist, because of his facility for caricature, to paint the interiors, including with images of contemporary sporting heroes.

There were many other Baltic immigrants in those days, including a number of artists, and Miksevicius took part for a time in exhibitions with the group Six Directions. After a few years, though, he became disillusioned with the Sydney art world and like Murch withdrew into a solitary practice, taking a job as a high school art teacher.

He continued to paint a few portraits, landscapes and other things, but in a rather disconcerting variety of manners that speaks not only of indecisiveness, but also of disconnection from styles, movements or traditions around him. His case is in stark contrast to that of the foreign artists who arrived here in the 19th century and who almost immediately began to speak to and for the local experience. By Miksevicius’s time both cultural experience and local artistic life had become much more confused.

Murch and Miksevicius were very different artists, both in training and artistic temperament, but what they seem to have had in common was an unwillingness to play the game of the local art market, which was just catching up with practices that had first appeared in the time of the impressionists. From the 1960s onwards, the Australian art market was becoming increasingly dominated by dealers who either bought and speculated in the value of pictures or showed them in their galleries for commission, or both. As well, they often used the auction system to ramp up the prices of the pictures they owned or represented.

What these new dealers’ galleries needed from artists was a regular supply of consistent product, with a clearly recognisable brand look. This was the system first developed by Durand-Ruel with the impressionists, which is why there are so many repetitious impressionist pictures. Even Monet’s famous series of grainstacks or cathedral facades, while they clearly have an aesthetic justification in his case, have set a bad example for countless vacuous serial paintings down to our own time.

Murch, as already observed, had the handicap of working in a style that had come to be viewed as old-fashioned. But Miksevicius, who was an energetic young modernist, could probably have done as well as anyone in this system if he had been willing to settle on one style and pursue it doggedly. But perhaps something in his training, as much as a sense of alienation from the Sydney art scene, made the demands of commerce uncongenial to him.

It is, of course, to their credit, in one sense, that Murch and Miksevicius chose to remain aloof from the new system of art dealing. But we all have to come to terms with the realities of the social world within which we live, at least if we want to achieve distinction in the art or profession to which we aspire.

You cannot be a barrister for example, without pleading at the bar, or a doctor without practising.

In the same way, it is hard, if not impossible, to be a writer without being published. And it is difficult be a painter alone in your studio, no matter how much time you spend there. You have to show your work and engage with an audience, for it is social contact that energises and renews us.

Perhaps artists were luckier when they were invited to fresco chapels, when they were given both significant subjects and a responsive public at the same time; but if your only outlet is showing pictures in a dealer’s gallery, that is still a way to escape from the quicksands of solipsism.