William Robinson: Genesis, SH Ervin Gallery
Superficially, William Robinson’s work seems radicallÂy at odds with the classical tradition of landscape painting.
One of the most striking differences between Western and Chinese art is that for the latter landscape has always been the highest expression of painting, while for us narrative or history painting was traditionally the most important genre, and the one from which the others — landscape, still life, portrait — emerged as specialisations.
The primacy of history painting explains the central place of figure drawing in Western art teaching for the past half-millennium, but it is itself explained by the humanistic tradition inherited from antiquity: human moral experience was simply the most important subject of art, which was expressed in a narrative art composed essentially of figures and drawn from scripture, mythology or historical sources.
Within the history of modern art in the West, landscape begins as the background to outdoor narrative subjects such as the Flight into Egypt, and one could illustrate the evolution of the genre through a survey of this subject alone, from Giotto’s austere Mountains in the Scrovegni Chapel (1304-06) to Tintoretto’s dramatic version in the Scuola di San Rocco (1582-87), in which the figures are surrounded by the burgeoning life of nature, and Annibale Carracci’s beautiful lunette (1603), in which the small but centrally placed figures are set harmoniously in a grand classical view of countryside and distant architecture.
The evolution of the classical landscape took place in several stages. The first of these was the discovery of perspective in Renaissance Florence, which was not merely a technique for achieving greater realism in pictures but, above all, a model of a rational world, and thus part of the intellectual template for the development of modern science. Above all, perspective showed that the world could make sense from the point of view of man and not only, as assumed in scholastic philosophy, from that of God.
So perspective is itself imbued with a humanistic belief in the capacity of the human mind and its adequacy to the task of understanding reality. As far as painting is concerned, the next step was to apply that intellectual model to real places, and this is what we see happening in late-15th-century Florence, in the works of artists such as the Pollaiuolo brothers, who include views of the Arno valley in the background of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1475) and other works.
Florentine rationality was supplemented by a new romantic spirit that arose in Venice, inspired by the Venetian love of colour and light and the rediscovery of the bucolic poetry of antiquity: this combination of influences lies behind the work of Giorgione and Titian. The Flemish artists, meanwhile, coming from a flat and low-lying land, imagined fantastic landscapes of mountains and gorges. And finally, in 17th-century Rome all of these elements came together, no doubt inspired by glimpses of surviving Roman frescoes, to produce the mature classical landscape of Carracci and, after him, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.
In Claude’s landscape, the perspectival and humanistic vision characteristic of Western landscape is preserved, but the sense of space is much vaster and more complex. Ultimately, all the natural and architectural elements of his compositions, as beautifully conceived as they are, exist to convey the more intangible experiences of space and light, evoking the life of nature itself and leading, in the distance, into a horizon of the luminous sublime that transcends the human and continued to inspire subsequent painters of nature, most famously Turner.
We can recognise the same infinite depths of light and space in the work of William Robinson too, although superficially his work seems radically at odds with the classical tradition of landscape painting. From his earliest landscapes, Robinson has turned perspective upside down, in the process leading us to reflect on conventions that we take for granted as the commonsense view of the world.
In what we usually take to be the normal way of looking at the world, we assume that the viewer is standing up, so their body is perpendicular to the plane of the ground. We also assume that their gaze is directed straight ahead towards the horizon, which means it is parallel to the ground plane. We thus have the requisite conditions for a spatial matrix formed on a framework of orthogonals, a geometric system for rationally plotting distance and scale.
This system of rational vision was frequently perturbed in various ways in the art of the past, especially for religious purposes, as when baroque painters wanted to evoke visions of the heavens opening to reveal infinite spaces filled with saints and angels. In the modernist period too it was subtly disrupted by painters such as Degas to imply personal engagement rather than impersonal vision, and then by the cubists, who deconstructed the assumptions of the singular gaze and of the distinction between figure and ground.
In Robinson’s work, perspectival vision is fundamentally perturbed in ways that appear at first unexpected but turn out to have something in common with baroque painting. At times, trees are seen from below, as though the viewer were lying on the forest floor and looking up. And why not? No doubt we have all lain on the ground looking up at trees above our heads.
Why we haven’t usually painted them like that is partly because it is neither comfortable nor convenient to do so, but also because we are in a passive mode when we are lying on the ground, enjoying our absorption in a nature that is immensely vaster than us. In order to paint, we need to get up, stand and face the subject we intend to represent. And in doing so we are also reasserting the claims of the human mind to giving a rational account of the world.
Robinson goes even further, showing trees from above and moving the night sky from the top to the bottom of the canvas, seemingly as he pleases. He loves the motifs of the sublime, including the sea, the dark and constellated night sky and the luminous infinity of the heavens by day, but seems bent on freeing them from their normal locations in space and time. The more we look at his paintings, the more we sense their affinity with the irrational space of baroque ceilings.
There is clearly something spiritual or religious about Robinson’s inspiration, which seems to have begun as a kind of pantheism and grown gradually closer to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This may also be a key to understanding other parts of his oeuvre, which at first sight seem completely different: his animal pictures and self-portraits.
The pictures of cows, goats, chickens and other farm creatures are ostensibly comical, but animated by a deep sense of the vitality and pathos of animal existence. Anyone who lives with or pays attention to animals must be struck by the mystery of their lives, their constant energy, instinctual drives and feelings, a non-reflexive and preconscious awareness of the world around them. From his earliest, clumsy cows to later barnyard fowls, Robinson’s animals testify to close observation and real sympathy for non-human creatures.
His self-portraits too could be mistaken for evidence of self-absorption, and indeed no one is free from traces of narcissism and vanity. But Robinson is unusual in making himself so often the subject of work painted for exhibition — he has won the Archibald twice for self-portraits — while at the same time presenting himself as a figure of comedy.
The equestrian portrait in this exhibition, his first Archibald winner, is an extreme case. Equestrian portraits are traditionally the grandest, most expensive category, followed by full-length standing figures, three-quarter-length portraits and the more economical head-and-shoulders format. The equestrian is usually reserved for monarchs; but here Robinson shows himself bouncing along in the sunset on a fat old horse wearing a bland half-smile.
Robinson includes himself in many other pictures as a kind of everyman figure, touching and slightly comical. His painted alter ego is unmistakable, in spite of his self-deprecating observation that “bald-headed men are not recognised’’. But the point is the comical self-portraits are a kind of emptying-out of the ego. They are not expressions of self-loathing, which is just inverted narcissism, but an attempt to eliminate attachment to the self; that is how the little alter-ego figure can become such an effective everyman.
The minimised self is a kind of precondition of the spiritual vision, which we here first see depicted in William by lamplight (1990), where we can detect affinities with another unconventionally religious artist, Stanley Spencer. This picture vividly evokes the kind of terror implicit in the experience of the sublime as the infinite world opens like an abyss in all directions and the little figure of William runs through the night, his lantern casting an ominous shadow at his feet.
If this painting expresses the dramatic encounter with a spiritual vision, the great triptych that inspires the title of the exhibition is a vast meditation on the nature of reality, inspired by scripture and philosophy. Creation landscape: The dome of space and time (2003-04) alludes to the creation of the world in Genesis, when God creates the firmament of the heavens (Genesis, I, 6). Robinson sees the dome — the vault of heaven — as the boundary between the domain of space and time, and of an ultimate reality that lies beyond or, more exactly, unconfined by these categories of the human mind.
The triptych offers a vision of the world that is still within the realm of space and time, and yet seen from somewhere close to its boundary, like the vision of a mystic who has glimpses of insight into the reality behind appearance: thus sky and earth and sea, day and night and different seasons alternate and are woven into each other across the three panels in an ecstatic alternation of close details and vast empty spaces.
Even a vision of near chaos must be expressed through pictorial order, and the composition is shaped by recurrent forms and the ascending curve of the horizon. The vast spectacle, moreover, carries conviction only because of the artist’s intimate knowledge of and feeling for the minutest natural forms. The transcendent is ultimately founded in a close, patient attention to the present world.
William Robinson: Genesis
SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, to October 7.
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