Style over substance in the work of artist John Power

ART historians sometimes disagree about the national affiliation of an artist who has been long resident in another country.

J.W. Power

ART historians sometimes disagree about the national affiliation of an artist who has been long resident in another country, the classic cases concerning the foreigners who settled in Rome or, later, Paris, when each was successively the capital of modern art.

These questions are partly anachronistic, arising in hindsight out of the post-romantic nationalism and cultural chauvinism of the 19th and 20th centuries. But it is not fruitless to reflect, as I have suggested elsewhere, on the new critical edge that the French brought with them and synthesised with the cultural richness of Rome. Something analogous could be said about what happened when the great Spanish modernist painters came to Paris.

Australian art history raises evident issues of this nature, beginning with the cultural affiliation of colonial artists, the circumstances of their immigration to this land, their role in an emerging society and, in many cases, their temporary or permanent re-emigration. With native-born artists the most important questions relate to expatriation, for a limited time, for the purposes of training or work, or in some cases indefinitely.

One of the main interests of Australian art history to non-Australians, in fact, lies in the series of fascinating case studies it offers of what happens to artists when they migrate to a new land.

An important thing John Glover, Eugene von Guerard and Louis Buvelot, for example, have in common is that each became a greater artist here than they had been, or were ever likely to become, in their native lands. Even more significant is the way an Englishman, an Austrian and a Swiss so quickly became attuned to and spoke of the concerns they encountered here.

Within the nationalistic assumptions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the development of Australian art was naturally thought of as part of the emergence of Australians as a supposedly distinct people, and this is one of the reasons for the special cult of Arthur Streeton as our first great native-born artist, as well as the tendency to depreciate the colonial painters and to claim, in the most stubborn cliche of Australian art history, that they could not see the land properly because of the European habits and conventions they had brought with them.

The truth is less to do with being Australian than in being in Australia. More generally, it is a matter of responding to a new set of natural and cultural circumstances; and each artist brings to this encounter ideas and a language formed in the course of previous experience.

Such a model can account for what is common as well as for complexity and diversity. It helps to give colonial artists their due and makes the national and ethnic origin of the individual far less relevant. And similarly it allows us to think of expatriates in a way that transcends simplistic dichotomies.

One particularly significant figure is John Wardell Power, almost unknown to most people except as the benefactor of the University of Sydney: it was his bequest that funded the Power Institute of Fine Arts, as it was originally known, the Power Collection - which evolved into the Museum for Contemporary Art - and the Power (now Schaeffer) Art History Library. The bequest was contained in the will drawn up in 1939, years before his death in occupied Jersey in 1943, but could not take effect before the death of his widow in 1961; it was announced in 1962 and the Power Institute was founded in 1968.

Power was born in 1881 and was descended on his mother's side - as his middle name attests - from colonial architect William Wardell. He studied medicine at his father's behest, first at the University of Sydney and then in London and Vienna. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I - when he also married his wife, Edith, in London - but abandoned medicine for art at the end of the war.

The most important phase of Power's career as an artist came during the early 1930s, when he was involved in Paris with a modernist group known as Abstraction-Creation, which had an annual review as well as its own gallery, both with the same name. Power was represented in the list of artists that appeared on the cover of each of the five numbers that were published from 1932 to 1936.

If the name Abstraction-Creation does not immediately ring a bell for readers, it is because it was indeed a rather minor affair - less a movement than a kind of practical alliance of artists committed to abstraction and formalism in the face of one of those brutal changes of art fashion so typical of the 20th century, which had brought surrealism to the fore in the later 20s; surrealism itself had peaked by the early 30s, but that was not apparent yet. It was the outbreak of war and the Nazi occupation that finally ended the hegemony of a movement whose leaders mostly fled overseas in the face of a real crisis.

We owe what we do know about Power and his activities in Paris at this time to the admirable art-historical detective work of ADS Donaldson and Ann Stephen. The results of their researches are published in a valuable catalogue, while an accompanying exhibition in the War Memorial Gallery at the University of Sydney, astonishingly enough, reconstitutes the artist's solo exhibition held in the Abstraction-Creation gallery in 1934. Additional works and studies are well worth visiting in the Schaeffer Library, also on the campus.

Reassembling works from the past as they were originally mounted in palaces or chapels or private collections is often a difficult task, but because the main considerations are the survival of the material itself and documentation of the original display, it can actually be easier than trying to reconstruct a more recent but obscure exhibition. The hanging of an exhibition in a private gallery 80 years ago normally would be almost impossible to replicate.

The reason it has been possible to put the Power exhibition back together is, first, because most of the pictures remained in his estate and were bequeathed to the University of Sydney by his widow and, second, because of the fortuitous discovery of Power's plan of the gallery, on which he has carefully painted little thumbnails of each picture in gouache. This stands in a display case in the centre of the exhibition, and one can see that, allowing for the longer and narrower shape of the university gallery, almost every picture is in its original place and hanging beside its original neighbours.

The effect is quite moving and one is in a sense transported back to that strange time in Paris when intellectuals and semi-intellectuals squabbled about abstraction and revolution and surrealism, and whether abstraction or surrealism was or was not consistent with a millennial idea of a revolution that would never come, in the lengthening shadow of real catastrophe and unimaginable inhumanity.

In a fundamental way, Power's paintings belong to that climate of unreality. He is quite accomplished technically and not unable to achieve the effects he is seeking. But there is something ultimately mannered about his work, self-referential and repetitious.

He has this in common with most of the minor abstract painters of this time; unlike the original intellectual drive of analytical abstraction almost a generation earlier, or the first effusion of abstraction with the early work of Kandinksy at the same time, abstraction by then had settled into being an academy, an ideology - hence all the futile debates about what was or wasn't acceptable - or merely a decorator style.

One theme worth pursuing in this period is the discovery, or rather rediscovery, of the geometry of the picture plane. Painters had always known about the importance of the subdivisions of the rectangle (halves, quarters, thirds), including the square or squares latent in every rectangle, the main diagonals and the diagonals of the squares, as well as the golden section and many other vital and invisible dynamic points and lines within the picture plane. But these matters are seldom discussed in early modern art theory because they were assumed to belong to what we might today call studio knowledge, part of the craft that the pupil learned from his master.

It is not as surprising as it may seem that this ancient knowledge should have resurfaced in the early 20th century because it was precisely what the abstract painters needed to validate the claim of painting to be a self-sufficient, non-referential visual language like music. Perhaps the most complete book on the subject, a generation later, is Charles Bouleau's The Painter's Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art (1963), with a preface by Marcel Duchamp's brother Jacques Villon. Power himself published Elements de la Construction Picturale (1932), the cover design of which - illustrating among other things how the square within the rectangle is found with the compass - is reproduced as the endpapers of the catalogue.

The point of all this geometry, however, is to establish what lines and points are particularly meaningful on the picture plane and, in a sense, to anchor the composition firmly in this a priori structure. And, unfortunately, Power seems to ignore the application of such principles entirely in his own paintings. Almost all the compositions are conceived as groups floating free in a void, never connected to the frame or meaningfully related to its axes.

More seriously still, there is a fundamental confusion between abstraction and figuration in these pictures. Not only are the compositions full of quasi-illusionistic renderings of pipes, boards and ribbons, but pseudo-abstract forms are animated into the semblance of figures, now of dancers, now of a couple sitting together in the moonlight, now of Apollo pursuing Daphne. Making arbitrary shapes take the forms of bodies is at best a conceit, reminding one of nothing so much as the superficial stylisations of modernism in interior design and advertising.

All art is abstract in a certain way, and all great artists know how to play on the twin realities of any image, at once as a picture of something and as an object with its own formal properties and independent coherence. But whether the artist is Piero della Francesca or Cezanne, such abstraction serves to renew our perception of the world around us.

Power, on the other hand, uses the human figure as a device to give his quasi-abstract shapes meaning in a manner that is essentially parasitic: the figure is exploited to hold the picture together, instead of the picture serving to reveal something about the figure. And in the process his quasi-abstract compositions are deprived of any presence or coherence of their own; the resulting forms are arbitrary without being autonomous.

John Power: Abstraction-Creation, Paris 1934. University of Sydney Art Gallery, until January 25