Rethinking an artist cast in a whole new light

The National Gallery of Victoria has gone to considerable lengths to highlight the work of Roger Kemp, in some cases quite literally.

Detail from Roger Kemp’s Music forms (1938–41). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

When you look at the early work of a significant artist in past centuries, it may be formulaic and comparatively stiff, without the freedom that comes later with greater experience and understanding of the medium. Above all, it is likely to be closely modelled on the style of the master, repeating his painterly manner and habits as well as types and compositional solutions.

But it will generally be competent and relatively skilful, even if the artist is not a prodigy like Leonardo, Michelangelo or Bernini, whose youthful work soon surpassed that of their masters. And this is simply because the pupil has been taught a range of skills and techniques and given a sense of purpose, an idea of what sort of thing they are doing and why they are doing it. The result is that even a third-rate picture of past centuries is worthy of some consideration, like any other well-made object, and even if it fails to speak deeply to the imagination.

When we look at the work of artists trained – if that word is not begging the question – from the middle of the last century, it is a very different state of affairs. Youthful work is often radically disoriented, and if students have a glimmer of inspiration, they lack the technical training to allow them to articulate and express that inspiration effectively. Work of this nature is too often not merely second- or third-rate, but ultimately without any real value at all.

Among some of the artists I have discussed here over the past few months, it is instructive to compare Nora Heysen, Margaret Olley and Jon Molvig. Olley was not well trained, and her early work was mediocre but, as the retrospective in Brisbane showed, she began to improve quite remarkably from her 50s onwards, impelled, it seems, by the posthumous influence of her friend David Strachan. On the other hand, the Brisbane retrospective of Jon Molvig revealed an artist who had never learned to paint properly and was too arrogant or deluded to understand the weakness of his own work.

Roger Kemp’s Sequence 2 (c. 1970–73). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Heysen represents an interesting contrast again. She was in fact trained rigorously by her father, Hans Heysen, but she did not have a strength of purpose or vision equal to her training and succumbed to the less rigorous standards that surrounded her. She was a good portraitist, but the intense vision of her early pictures gave way to a more workmanlike manner during the war years and she virtually gave up her career in her mid-30s.

At the root of the problem during this period was a deep distrust of what was thought of as academic training; that is, any training that imparted discipline and technical mastery. Modernism had been built on a mythology of rebelling against the academy, but unless they were willing to submit to an alternative discipline like the sterile aesthetics of the Bauhaus, artists were left adrift. Art schools were typically staffed, and often still are, by people teaching yesterday’s fashions or desperately trying to catch up with those of today, which are deceptive and constantly changing.

But it was not just that art schools had given up teaching the traditional techniques. What is much less widely recognised is that they didn’t understand the tradition of modernism either. Art schools, even in Australia, were filled with people who worshipped Cezanne, but who really had no clue what his work was about. And the reason for that is that they lacked an understanding of the history of art before the time of Cezanne.

I remember years ago reading Michael Levey’s From Giotto to Cezanne, first published by Thames & Hudson in 1962 in the World of Art series. The title itself sums up the matter: you cannot understand what Cezanne is doing with space unless you see it as part of a history of modern painting that begins with Giotto’s experiments in spatial representation. And because Picasso and Braque in turn took their cue from Cezanne, you cannot understand cubism either except in relation to six centuries of Western meditation on the pictorial representation of the phenomenal world.

Kemp’s Flight in space I (1961– c. 1965). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Without any grasp of the centuries of pictorial thinking that lies behind these works, art schools, and secondary schools too, have for years treated cubism and other modern styles as vacuous formalistic games they can set their students as exercises from which neither skill nor insight can possibly be gleaned. To understand cubism properly, students need to learn perspective, and then reflect on what this means as, in effect, an epistemological model; and then ask themselves why modernist artists might have wanted to reconsider this model as a way of accounting for the world of experience.

The retrospective of Roger Kemp at the NGV presents us, initially, with a spectacle of disorientation typical of the art of this period. You would never imagine from the first room that this was the survey of an artist who came to be considered a leading figure in Melbourne art in his generation. These are pictures that barely merit exhibition in their own right, and would not be shown in this way if Kemp had not subsequently found a distinctive voice.

There are traces of Cezanne, of his landscape and bather pictures in particular, but the connection is superficial and imitative rather than organic. What is more interesting is that a subsequent body of work seems to be influenced by a mixture of expressionism and futurism. They are ill-digested and suggest no awareness of the historical connections of those styles to time and place in Germany and Italy before and after the Great War. In the almost complete absence of art-historical perspective, the art of the past is just a jumble of styles that you can pick through like a dress-up box.

Kemp’s Relativity (1972). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

What makes these pictures more impressive than the first group, nonetheless, is that the style is idiosyncratic and spontaneous rather than just art-school generic. They are the work of a young man who is not an intellectual artist, not an analytical thinker, but is drawn to the expression of a kind of energy and exaltation that, as is the case with so many abstract artists, had roots in the mystical theories of theosophy, but which would eventually transcend the subjective or emotional to reach a more universal ­vision.

There is a transitional phase in Kemp’s art when he paints semi-abstract pictures with recurrent motifs like birds, but a period working with George Baldessin’s printmaking studio in London, from 1972, seems to have played an important part in clarifying his thinking and shaping his mature style. This is the period when he produced some impressive prints, including Sequence ten and other works.

Kemp’s Music forms (1938–41). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

In these works, perhaps partly because of the inherent flatness of the printed surface, and possibly even from the experience of working with the metal of the plate and machines such as presses, Kemp develops a repertoire of mechanical forms that look something like the workings of a watch and, when taken out of any mechanical and functional context and extended across the field of the picture and into depth, suggest metaphors of the universe itself as a kind of divine clockwork.

The image is clearest in the graphic works, but it broadly underpins most of Kemp’s later paintings as well. These pictures are all rather similar and yet each one is a distinct creation, and a film clip of the artist at work gives the impression of an intuitive rather than consciously designing artist. Each picture seems to be painted by a process of improvisation, as though he were not quite sure of where it was going, and yet they all emerge from the same process and thus end up as variations on the same shapes and motifs.

Many of these later works have fields of colour with strong black borders, an effect that recalls stained glass and again suggests associations of spirituality and transcendence. In this sense these pictures seem to be intended to convey a sense of the majestic but incomprehensible movement of the spirit that underlies and governs the world of nature as we experience it all around us.

The final room of this exhibition can be said, without exaggeration, to be breathtaking. Even if you are not entirely convinced by Kemp’s art, it is impossible not to be startled and even delighted by the vast space and the grandeur of the display of very large canvases that surround you.

I have rarely seen a museological display that makes such an effort to set off an artist’s pictures so dramatically. The NGV, it seems, has made a big effort to impress on the public the interest of an artist who has always been considered significant in Melbourne but has never been broadly popular.

The real secret is the way that the pictures are hung against a black wall and then precision spot-lit, so the light is confined to the canvas and does not spill onto the wall around it. This is what makes each painting glow in the ambient darkness, and is indeed so effective in making them luminous that they appear at first sight be light boxes or quite literally stained glass. The display recalls the way the stained glass is sometimes shown in museums, backlit to simulate the effect of seeing it in a church, animated by the light outside. The room is a remarkable feat of installation and a credit to the exhibition designers. The only trouble is that it ends up making these paintings look more beautiful and impressive than they are under normal conditions. Those of Kemp’s pictures that are shown under normal gallery lighting in the preceding rooms have none of this remarkable luminosity.

This raises an interesting question about the ethics of museum display: hanging should clearly aim to show a piece off to its best advantage, to help viewers discover and be inspired by it. It is also legitimate to light pictures in such a way as to aid the viewer to focus on them in isolation from the other things that crowd around them. But it is a little more questionable when we use strong lighting to make the work look brighter or more colourful than it really is.

In defence of this installation I suppose we can reflect that it is hard enough to capture the attention of today’s gallery visitors for more than a few seconds, and anything that can make them dwell on the pictures, appreciate their aesthetic qualities and simply experience wonder must be a good thing. Not to mention that the room is too dark for anyone to be taking selfies or pictures of each other to post on social media. They have to expose themselves to the disconcerting experience of actually communing with the work.

Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist

National Gallery of Victoria, until March 15