Squaring the cube at Sydney Moderns exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW

EARLY Australian art, from the first days of the colony 225 years ago, was concerned with the experience of living in a distant and unfamiliar land.

Synchromy in Orange Major (1919) by Roland Wakelin

EARLY Australian art, from the first days of the new colony 225 years ago, was concerned with the experience of living in a distant and unfamiliar land.

At first there was the excitement of discovering the novel flora and fauna, and the celebration of growing townships. Later there was a more serious consideration of the problem of making a permanent home here, without the back-up of a real home somewhere else: this was the generation of the high colonial artists such as Eugene von Guerard.

These artists, inspired by the romantic feeling for nature, sought the spirit of the land in its most sublime and often remote locations.

The following generation, encouraged by Louis Buvelot's example, turned from wilderness to the inhabited, tamed settings of homesteads and grazing land, discovering a new kind of intimacy in the Australian environment. Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and others were part of the maturing of a colonial society approaching Federation and formal independence as a nation, soon to be involved in the biggest war the world had seen.

In the aftermath of World War I, in which Australia had suffered immense losses in proportion to its population but from which it had emerged with a new confidence in its autonomous identity, the vocation of Australian art became less clear than it had been in the previous century.

Some of our most significant artists continued to reflect on our place in our environment, and have continued to do so, from Hans Heysen to Fred Williams. But others began to look overseas and feel they should follow overseas movements.

There is an important distinction to be made here. All the artists who came to Australia in the 19th century, from John Glover to von Guerard to Buvelot, were equipped with some kind of training and had assimilated styles current at the time. But once they arrived in this country, they set about applying what they knew to the representation of the new world and the transcription of the experience of the community around them. They were not looking over their shoulders to see whether what they were doing would seem up-to-date in the places they had come from.

What happened after the war was the opposite, and it was the beginning of a pattern that recurs throughout the second century of Australian art: individuals born here and trained here worry about what is being done in the international capitals of modern art, do their best to imitate overseas models, and live in fear of being out-of-date or irrelevant by these foreign standards. And of course all this ultimately is caused by the fashion-ridden nature of modernism.

Sydney Moderns is a survey of the beginnings of modernism in Australia - or more exactly, Sydney - between the wars. It is beautifully put together and a pleasure to visit, and above all an excellent introduction to the period; it is also accompanied by an outstanding catalogue with many fine entries by specialist contributors, an invaluable reference on the work of both important and minor figures alike.

The exhibition begins in striking fashion with a collection of works celebrating the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, an event that effectively divides the interwar decades in two, between the 1920s, the party decade haunted by memories of the war, guilt and bereavement, and the 30s, the years of depression shadowed by the rise of fascism and the inexorable drift towards renewed conflict.

Coming at this juncture, an affirmation of purpose after an aimless decade and an act of faith in a time of hopelessness, the bridge was a powerful symbol for the people of Sydney. It also inspired the greatest paintings by Grace Cossington Smith and some memorable photographs, all of which gain a particular weight by being assembled in this way. Most striking of all, on closer consideration, are the remarkable etchings by Jessie Traill, whose survey at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra was reviewed here some months ago.

After this overture, the exhibition goes back to the beginnings of modernist painting during the later years of World War I and in its aftermath. Cossington Smith, Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre are the principal artists here, with small figure compositions and landscapes using flattened areas of colour in a decorative manner. Wakelin and especially de Maistre were interested in the synesthetic potential of colour as a kind of music, and a room is devoted to these theories, although ultimately they are probably of greater relevance to interior decoration than to art.

The pictures themselves are small and are intended for houses and flats, so it is particularly appropriate that they are hung in clusters, in a manner that emphasises the informality and intimacy of the settings for which they were made. It is striking, in fact, to consider the difference between the scale of these paintings and that of the contemporary works of Hans Heysen, whose scale asserts another level of ambition. Heysen's work continues a national narrative; the smaller colour compositions of the Sydney modernists are domestic and private in scope.

The difference is reflected in the way the two currents were publicised and promoted, in particular in the publications of the time. Sydney Ure Smith's Art in Australia (1917-42) - the predecessor of the current Art and Australia (revived by Ure Smith's son in 1963) - was the main serious art publication and naturally covered the artists who represented the continuing mainstream of national art, including Heysen and other landscape painters.

But Ure Smith was a man of catholic tastes and he also supported the modernists. The new style was most forcefully promoted in another of his publications, The Home (1920-42), subtitled "the Australian journal of quality". This publication is particularly remembered - and an excellent selection is included in this exhibition - for the many beautiful covers commissioned from modernist artists and designers, including Thea Proctor, Adrian Feint, Hera Roberts, Margaret Preston and others.

Thus the modernists, so many of whom were women, were promoted in a magazine mainly addressed to a female readership and concerned with the design of the domestic environment for which these small paintings were naturally intended.

Indeed, the exhibition includes the reproduction of an actual room designed by Roberts for an exhibition of interior decoration held at Burdekin House in 1929. It is a small sitting room in a deco style of geometric shapes and high-gloss lacquer paint finishes that today has a kind of nostalgic charm, although if we look at it soberly, the apparent minimalism combined with gratuitous geometric featurism has something of the unlivable quality of the modernist house in Jacques Tati's memorable film Mon Oncle (1958).

The importance of The Home as a vehicle for the Sydney modernists reveals their connection not only to interior design, but to consumer products and thus in turn to advertising - Ure Smith was also a partner in the advertising firm Smith and Julius - which, as the covers remind us, eagerly embraced the new manner.

The weakness of this whole movement is recognisable not only in its involvement in commercial and consumer interests, but in its ready commodification as style with very little content. Modernism, in the often pleasing but ultimately undemanding form that flourished in Sydney between the wars, became essentially a symbol of chic.

It is interesting, in view of this, that the exhibition begins with the images of the Harbour Bridge, the strongest works in the show.

After this, the latent weakness and lack of substance seem to grow ineluctably more apparent as we proceed though the work. The early artists mentioned - Cossington Smith, Wakelin and de Maistre in their colour period - have a fresh appeal that is undeniable, even if their more ambitious theories about colour are a conceit that is soon abandoned.

When we come to the works that attempt some form of cubist style, however, we encounter the fundamental problem of replaying yesterday's avant garde long after its moment has passed.

Cubism was a process of experimentation that unfolded across a few years, never standing still and never settling into a formula that could be repeated unthinkingly. In the years between the wars, so-called cubism could never be anything but an academic exercise or, in a very watered-down form, simply an approach to painting that emphasised geometric structures.

This was the kind of thing practised in France by Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote, two painters who were themselves of minor significance; the latter taught Australians such as Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black, who learned their lessons and wrote back to friends in Australia about the wonders of this ultimately derivative modernism. There is something a bit depressing about an eagerness to be modern whose ultimate effect on the teaching of art in Australia was probably deleterious.

What the three paintings of Mirmande - of which the best is clearly by Dorrit Black - really exemplify is a kind of neo-Cezannesque post-impressionism.

More directly indebted to the original cubism are several pictures by de Maistre, Jean Appleton and Paul Haefliger, later also the art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. De Maistre seems to have very little idea of what cubism was originally about and his pictures of this period are distinctly less successful and less appealing than his earlier work. Haefliger has a better sense of the rationale of cubism and in his hands the result can be a kind of sophisticated decoration, but has nothing in common, either in terms of seriousness or intellectual backbone, with the exceptional little Picasso now in Perth as part of the new loan exhibition from New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The deeper problem here is the stuffy, ingrown quality that afflicts art that is based on style for its own sake rather than for any reality that style was originally forged to articulate. One feels these artists ultimately have very little to say beyond the ambition of being modern and of making elegant things for the contemporary interior.

The lack of connection to nature - the deepest core of Australian art - is a serious handicap. Flowers are often sensitively represented in vases, that is in the genre of still life, but landscapes are not strikingly successful: two by Cossington Smith are surprisingly weak compared with her bridge paintings, because she seems to put gratuitous art deco patterning before sensitivity to the scene itself.

Any image of the world is both an account of visual experience and an abstract construction; the problem in this case is an overvaluation of the abstract, which leads to insufficient attention to the world outside the painting. And that overvaluation is associated with the vogue for abstract painting that leads to the final room and the decorative but vacuous abstract paintings of Ralph Balson - works far less deserving than the opening group of paintings and prints of the exhibition's subtitle: Art for a New World.

Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until October 7