Why isn’t this important exhibition being shown at the NGV?

This survey of Max Meldrum and tonalism at Hawthorn Town Hall upstages national galleries, which seem uninterested in showing Australian art.

Max Meldrum’s Morning sunlight, 1925.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Peter Perry, who became director of the ­Castlemaine Art Museum as a very young man in 1975, and remained in that position for a remarkably long tenure, which ended only in 2014, was one of the last of an older kind of art gallery director in Australia: ­connoisseurs, scholars or experts in varying measure, but in any case people profoundly steeped in the history and contemporary practice of the arts they collected and exhibited.

They were not all faultless, but most of them had some kind of intellectual and cultural authority: James Mollison, the founding director of the National Gallery of Australia (1971–1990) and later director of the National Gallery of Victoria (1989–95), was not really a scholar – I worked for him briefly at the NGV – but was deeply knowledgeable and understood that he needed to surround himself with experts and specialists. Patrick McCaughey, director of the NGV (1981–87), had a lively career as a critic, but was undoubtedly also an intellectual; Timothy Potts (NGV 1995–98), like Gerard Vaughan (NGV 1999–2012), was a scholar.

Edmund Capon, head of the Art Gallery of NSW for 33 years, though projecting a populist image, had a core of scholarship as a Chinese art specialist and oversaw a dynamic period at the gallery, supported by several capable curators. His successor, Michael Brand, too, was an expert, although you would barely have known it from his lacklustre tenure at the AGNSW, where he seemed to drift in the wake of contemporary art fashions.

In the last decade or more, galleries and museums in Australia have increasingly been entrusted to people who are neither scholars nor authorities of any kind, but are managerial types or the products of university courses in “curatorship”, void of any tangible art historical or critical substance.

The model of a first-rate museum director was the late Andrew Sayers, who was head of Australian works on paper and then Australian art at the NGA – and the author of important books on both topics – before becoming the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery and the commissioner of its successful building, and finally director of the National Museum of Australia. Sayers should have returned to NGA as director but sadly died prematurely in 2015. It is shocking to think that we have not had a museum director of his calibre in this country in the last decade.

A D Colquhoun’s Iceland poppies, 1927.

A E Newbury’s Morning light. 1919.

Today, unfortunately, the NPG is a sorry state with several surprisingly irrelevant shows and no sign of scholarly research or significant exhibitions on the history of the portrait in Australia. As for the NGA, it has been in an even more depressing stagnation for the last few years under Nick Mitzevich, who has wasted huge amounts of money on worthless acquisitions; has failed to build the collection or develop a culture of scholarship in the institution – relying instead on relentless virtue signalling – and even managed to close its popular cafe years before opening a new one.

Perry represents the antithesis of such vacuity. He was a director with deep art historical knowledge and expertise, founded in the experience of building an important and highly focused collection with his brother, John, over a period of what is now just over half a century. Their collection began with the purchase in 1974, as John Perry writes, of “a small sketch of a Brittany sunset by Max Meldrum”, and it grew into a comprehensive survey of the work of Meldrum himself and of the many painters influenced by his example and teaching.

As the exhibition’s title reminds us, Meldrum (1875–1955) was a tonalist, more precisely a radical exponent of a broader movement that was an important part of modernist painting. This broader movement begins with the work of painters such as Gustave Courbet and especially Edouard Manet, who was fascinated by the Spanish tradition, especially Diego ­Velazquez, as an alternative to the increasingly narrow academic manner. The impressionists turned from tone to colour, but the example of Velazquez continued to be formative for later Australian artists such as Hugh Ramsay and George Lambert, as well as the less well-known Violet Teague and others up to the middle of the 20th century.

Meldrum, however, was not content with a doctrine that asserted the primacy of tone or value in pictorial composition. He sought, as the title of his book, The Science of Appearances, (1950) makes clear, to make painting into a scientifically objective process. I tried to explain his system as it applies to a portrait or still life subject in my review of Light + Shade at the Ballarat Art Gallery on June 18, 2022: it involved setting the canvas beside the sitter, then standing back to a distance at which only the simplest areas of light and dark could be seen; then walking forward to place an equivalent mark on the canvas without looking again at the figure. When everything that could be seen from this distance had been rendered, the artist came forward to a second viewpoint from which further discriminations could be made, and so on up to a distance of perhaps two or three feet.

Carl Hampel’s Study for Summer morning, 1920.

It is obviously harder to apply the same process to landscape, since one is looking at a whole view which extends in depth, not at a single motif at a fixed distance. But the same general principle is followed: looking at the view from sufficiently far away for it to appear as a simplified pattern of lights and darks – and of course learning to convert chroma into the equivalent value. This is the same process followed in a simple art school exercise like a pencil drawing of coloured objects: the point is to see that a green and a red, for example, may be tonally equivalent but both will be tonally darker than a yellow, just as they would appear in a black and white photograph. A skilled painter will have such a clear understanding of value even when painting in full colour, for value is fundamental to compositional structure.

Squinting at a scene – mentioned by Meldrum’s pupils – is a simple way to discover its tonal structure, because merely reducing the amount of light on the retina attenuates chroma and polarises lights and darks. As we can see in the exhibition, Meldrum also used varnished mirrors, already employed in the 18th century and known as Claude glasses because when you look at a scene reflected in such a mirror, it is simplified into a tonal pattern like a painting. A plastic diffusing screen was also included in a pocket at the back of The Science of Appearances.

It is interesting to look at some of Meldrum’s earliest paintings, strongly represented here, and to ponder the results of his method – bearing in mind too that these pictures from the first years of the 20th century, when the artist was in his mid-20s, date from long before he distilled his practice into the elaborate system set out in his book, published near the end of his life. The early French pictures are poetic and moody crepuscular views in which buildings and trees form picturesque compositions, but the later Australian landscapes are much more austere, often just a few tree trunks in a grassy meadow. The emphasis on tone tends to reduce these pictures to virtual monochrome, or to something like the colour vision of quadrupeds, which cannot see reds.

These pictures are more unusual than they may appear at first sight, and they invite us to consider what Meldrum’s quest for objectivity really means. For this is not the objectivity of scientific draughtsmanship, for example, which paradoxically shows what we cannot easily see with the naked eye, certainly not at a distance. Meldrum’s objectivity is not about existence but, as the title of his book tells us, about appearances. His painterly process may be compared to the roughly contemporary philosophical movement of phenomenology, which similarly sought objectivity while emphasising the primacy of appearance.

Percy Leason’s Eltham, c.1924.

In any case, the result is that his paintings embody a kind of radical detachment. He does not see a tree, for example, as a living entity, feeling its rootedness in the earth, the strength with which it stands, the energy of its spreading crown; he constrains himself to look only at the tonal pattern made by its bark or the light falling on its trunk. In consequence, as a painter friend observed to me, the world of phenomena seems to be receding, slipping away from us.

Perhaps this is why the paintings of Meldrum’s school have elicited such mixed responses. Much of this work was overlooked in recent decades, partly because of its austerity and partly because the fashion for abstraction obliterated other approaches to painting in the decades after the war. Clarice Beckett is the one who has been most eagerly celebrated since her rediscovery in 1971, probably because she succeeded in bringing more colour into her pictures. Yet, as this exhibition makes clear, Meldrum’s method was extremely influential and clearly appealing to many young painters. No doubt this was partly because it was a true method, a way of proceeding which could be applied to the study of the world and which led to reliable and consistent results.

It was in this respect very different from the stylistic formulas and devices adopted by many of the modernists of the same period – the various faux-cubists and their like – which produced arbitrary decorative pictures. Meldrum’s method may be austere and reductive, but there is nothing arbitrary about its results, and no doubt this is why it was also a starting point for artists who became teachers in their own right, such as Arnold Shore, who in 1932 founded the Bell-Shore School of Art in partnership with George Bell.

This is a significant and comprehensive survey of an important movement in modern Australian art, and we may wonder why it is being shown in a town hall rather than in the NGV, whose only notable Australian exhibition at the moment is a small room of drawings by Bob Klippel. It seems to be yet another illustration of the lack of interest in Australian art being shown by our biggest galleries. Of course there are three or four Indigenous exhibitions which are free because no one will pay to see them, and a couple of fashion shows which are ticketed because they will cover the bills. At least there is also the admirable French impressionism exhibition from Boston; these painters too were seeking a kind of optical naturalism in colour, but Meldrum would not have approved of their chromatic luxuriance.

Australian Tonalism: A selection from the John and Peter Perry Collection

Hawthorn Town Hall, Melbourne, to July 27