Timothy Hyman’s World New Made: Reshaping Figurative Painting

The strength of Timothy Hyman’s book is it is not a theoretical treatise but a patchwork of figurative art history.

Detail from Balthus’s La Rue (1933).

When in 1959 Bernard Smith, Australia’s greatest art historian, encouraged a group of contemporary painters to hold an exhibition in defence of figurative art and drafted its rationale as the Antipodean Manifesto, upholding the claims of representational and narrative painting against the new hegemony of abstraction, the contemporary art establishment was aghast. The whole enterprise was considered worse than reactionary; it was naive, ridiculous, embarrassing.

Didn’t Smith and his painter friends get it? Abstraction was the consummation of modernism, if not the endpoint of art history itself. The gospel came straight from New York, eloquently preached by Clement Greenberg and others. Not to be outdone, local epigones and would-be critics were even more strident in their support of the latest aesthetic dogma and their scorn for those who failed to toe the line.

A decade later, abstract painting had largely run its course and would never again enjoy the same prestige. But what a pity that Smith didn’t know in 1959 what came to light only in the mid-1990s: that the vogue for abstraction was not just another runaway art-world infatuation but the result of a deliberate, though necessarily secret, Cold War cultural offensive funded by the CIA.

Even though most Americans and even American politicians loathed it, abstract expressionism could be promoted internationally as demonstrating the freedom of the creative individual under capitalism (Nelson Rockefeller called it ‘‘free enterprise painting’’). The CIA spent large sums of money supporting international exhibitions, publications and lectures, but also covertly manipulating the market to ramp up the prices of abstract painters.

Abstraction had indeed existed for half a century before its American apotheosis, and had already posed a challenge to figuration, exacerbated by the disastrous events of the 20th century. Support for the movement came from sources as seemingly disparate as theosophy and revolutionary ideologies, until both fascist and communist regimes ended up rejecting it as elitist and obscure. But abstraction never established itself as the only game in town until its final incarnation as American action painting.

Nor would this matter particularly except that so many of the assumptions of modernist historiography were formed during the hege­mony of abstraction: certain individuals were given canonical roles in the great teleological unfolding, and others were virtually wiped from the historical record. This tendentious history was not properly revised during the postmodern period, which largely lost interest in painting, and lives on in fossilised form in secondary and tertiary curriculums across the world.

But these assumptions are precisely what Timothy Hyman’s new book calls into question, revealing or rediscovering a whole succession of artists, including Max Beckmann, Marsden Hartley, Balthasar Klossowski — better known as Balthus — Diego Rivera, Pierre Bonnard and Stanley Spencer, as well as many less familiar individuals, who strove to keep figurative painting alive against all the odds during the 20th century.

These individuals were not reactionary or unaware of the earthquakes of avant-gardism that preceded the Great War. Many of them had once been cubists or even abstractionists, but grew dissatisfied with the sterility of formalist styles. As Hyman memorably observes in his introduction, abstraction had ceded ‘‘all that was most loved’’ in the art of the past to cinema. Worse, as George Grosz wrote, formalism was essentially irresponsible in its refusal to speak of the social, political and human experience of its time. Bernard Smith was sneered at for making a similar point in 1959.

It was always a struggle, for the representation of the world and of human figures could no longer be taken for granted as the natural language of art. Cubism had deconstructed the rational matrix of space evolved since the Renaissance and abstraction had questioned the very reality of ostensibly objective appearance. At the same time, the catastrophes of two world wars, near economic collapse and the rise of savage and inhumane political ideologies had profoundly shaken confidence in the most basic assumptions and aspirations of western civilisation.

This is why the figure is so often painted in an awkward, gauche or even grossly distorted manner, as artists seek to express the pain and confusion of their time; or why so many seek inspiration in primitivism or the art of children or outsiders, striving to find new ways to evoke the poignancy of human destiny or the longings of the spirit, beyond forms that were felt to be shopworn, mendacious or too close to the superficiality of the photographic image.

Hyman touches on these and other themes, but the great strength of his book is that it is not a theoretical treatise but a kind of patchwork quilt of a history made up of individual studies of artists and close analyses of specific works, arranged in roughly chronological sequence.

Hyman rightly observes that ‘‘true painting goes deeper than concepts’’, and his focus is always on the artist and the work, seeking the unique quality of insight articulated in and made visible to us through particular acts of painting.

He is wonderfully perceptive and generous in his reading of paintings in widely divergent styles, passing with intuitive ease from the ­materiality of the painted surface and the ­structures of style to the most subtle biographical, historical or philosophical reflections. Time and again he makes us see familiar artists with fresh eyes, both in relation to their own time and as potential sources of inspiration for painters today.

So many books on modern art are unreadable because the authors are essentially reciting from the same historiographical autocue with its suave but dispiriting flow of predictable fallacies. This is the opposite — as indeed it should be, since Hyman’s purpose is to make us look afresh at what really happened in the past 100 years or more. The result is a delight, deeply but lightly erudite, intimate, written with exquisite intelligence, and entirely successful in revealing that the art of the 20th century was much more interesting than a long march towards nothingness.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.

The World New Made: Reshaping Figurative Painting in the Twentieth Century

By Timothy Hyman

Thames & Hudson, 256pp, $60 (HB)