Rupert Bunny: what lies beneath?

  Rupert Bunny comes in for close scrutiny in a new survey exhibition, writes Christopher Allen

Rupert Bunny Art Gallery of NSW. Until February 21.
RUPERT Bunny (1864-1947) was one of the most successful Australian artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

While our greatest painters, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, struggled to impose themselves in London and to convert provincial stardom into metropolitan recognition, Bunny was a recognised member of the Parisian artistic establishment, admired, socially well-connected, regularly hung in the Salon and even patronised by the French government.

Today, a century after his heyday in the Edwardian period, everyone is familiar with Bunny's large canvases filled with dreamy or simply sleepy young women, mostly modelled on his beautiful French wife, Jeanne, which in their own way seem to embody that sense of being at a loose end, at the twilight of an era, so typical of Chekhov's contemporary plays.

Yet for all his talent as an artist and undoubted charm as a man, the more closely one examines the new survey exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW - accompanied by Deborah Edwards's well-researched catalogue - the more one wonders what, if anything, lies at the heart of Bunny and his work. The painter was a friend of Sarah Bernhardt and he reminds one of Oscar Wilde's famous definition of the Divine Sarah as a sphinx without a secret. Is there something more to Bunny?

The artist was born in St Kilda, Melbourne in 1864, to a well-to-do family. His father was English, with French forebears, his mother Prussian. He studied at the University of Melbourne and the National Gallery School before travelling to Europe in 1884, enrolling first in an art school in London, then, disappointed with the teaching, moving to Paris, where he lived for most of the following five decades before returning to Melbourne after Jeanne's death in the 1930s.

From 1890, when his Tritons was awarded a mention honorable at the Paris Salon, Bunny's gifts began to be recognised and he was increasingly a part of the French artistic world. He had considerable ability as a draughtsman. But there is something facile in the early paintings, and near enough too often seems to have been good enough; indeed, his prominence in the last generation of Parisian academic art is in part a testimony to the decadence of that tradition.

His early narrative pictures are sometimes charming but too often vapid. Mythological subjects, which from the Renaissance to the 17th century crackled with life - playing with multiple registers of literary erudition, intellectual and spiritual speculation, and sheer sexiness - are here reduced to generic figures with only the faintest of wistfully erotic overtones. Who are these fauns and Tritons? What are they doing? They sit in attitudes of melancholy or lie around listlessly like the exhausted citizens in Constantine Cavafy's poem Waiting for the Barbarians, half-hoping that the invaders will arrive and put an end to their torpor. Oddly enough, it would not be long before modernists from Picasso to Cocteau would breathe new life into the ancient myths, while Freud and later Jung, in different ways, found in these stories pathways to the hidden recesses of the mind.

Not surprisingly, Bunny's later mythologies, after he came under the influence of the decorative modernism of the Ballets Russes artists such as Leon Bakst (1866-1924), are far more dynamic. They deal with specific myths instead of a generic cast of characters; the primal energy of the figures seems to animate the painting with a brio of design and colour unprecedented in the earlier work.

Bunny's Christian subjects are no more convincing than his mythologies. They are painted in a bloodless late Pre-Raphaelite manner and are generally sentimental rather than spiritual. Angels are represented as girls, which is pure Victorian kitsch; though incorporeal and therefore sexless beings, these divine messengers are properly represented as male.

The emotionally colourless quality of Bunny's early subject matter is mirrored in a manner of painting that frequently lacks definition, modelling and articulation. Broad, uneventful areas of flesh are offered to the eye in pictures such as An Idyll (1901), matching the generic, anecdotal nature of the motif. If the painting is feeble, the colours are wan. The overall impression is of pastel hues with a want of substance. There is very little tone, little tension between highlights and darks. To some extent, for example in the girls and swans of A Summer Morning (c.1897), this may be defended as the expression of a fin-de-siecle love of dreamy, muted, misty nostalgia. But it is a rather tiresome and enervated sensibility that makes one long for a breath of fresh air.

The composition of Bunny's early works reveals a similar want of rigour. In Pastoral (c.1893), for example, the old faun on the right, the couple in the centre and the other figures in the middle distance are all on different planes. There is no central grouping that dominates the composition and establishes a proper foreground. Instead, each group competes for our attention and the composition remains shapeless.

This is a youthful work, but even towards the latter part of his career, Slave Women (1926) is based on four main figures, all completely uncoordinated. Those on the right and left exist in no meaningful relationship to each other, but worst of all the one in the centre, who could have held the others together, instead turns away, moves too far into depth and consequently leaves a hole in the centre of the picture.

There is, however, one period in Bunny's career at which his compositions, colours and tones all cohere to form memorable images; one point at which his art comes into its own and that, significantly, is when he finds his authentic subject matter. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that we cannot choose our vocation, we can only choose whether or not to follow it; the same is no doubt true of our subjects and themes.

Insofar as Bunny has a distinctive view of human experience, it is epitomised in his images of women, usually in interior settings. In a variety of kimonos and other forms of fashionable deshabille, they lounge or dawdle, forever, it seems, waiting for something or someone; yet it is a waiting without the tension of real expectation. In Who Comes?, a young woman peers out the window, gazing from an enclosed feminine interior into the unseen outside world.

The most ambitious composition of this type is Summer Time (c.1907) from the AGNSW, an enormous assemblage of Jeannes in a bathing station on the Seine in Paris - a floating enclosed swimming pool where women could bathe discreetly, sheltered from prying male eyes. The bathing itself is left to our imagination, although one woman is disrobing before climbing down into the water; what we are shown is figures lounging and drinking lemonade by the pool.

This is Bunny's masterpiece, the picture in which his own particular imaginary world, his poetic vision, is most fully and elaborately realised. It is a sensuous feminine realm that could almost be an illustration of Baudelaire's luxe, calme et volupt aac - all words whose English cognates sufficiently explain their meaning, though it is worth recalling that the original sense of luxury was lust.

Voluptuous introversion is pervasive, from the lounging, half-naked woman who lazes in a deckchair while her hair is brushed by a servant to another whose face is rapturously buried in a rose. It is a dreamy and peculiarly female sensuality, indulging in the narcissistic pleasuring of the body, but only flirting with actual arousal.

The multiplication of Jeanne's features, with no attempt to disguise or vary them, lends the composition a unreal quality, while its separateness as a private space like that of erotic fantasy is emphasised by the figure of a woman on the left, who is adjusting her clothes before going back out into the public world in which ladies are dressed from head to toe, compose their expressions in self-protective reserve and keep their physical pleasures strictly to themselves.

Forever sultry and idle, Bunny's imaginary world reminds us of the opening lines of Tennyson's poem The Lotus Eaters; readers may recall that these are among the verses that Horace Rumpole mutters to himself on the way to the Old Bailey:

In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seemed always afternoon ...

Tennyson's poem is based on one of the first encounters in the wanderings of Odysseus and was enormously influential in giving modern currency to this episode and all its symbolism: the Greeks arrive at a land where the natives consume a mysterious fruit that makes them utterly apathetic. Odysseus's men taste the fruit and lose all will to proceed in their homeward journey; he has to bundle them back on board.

Bunny's women are, no doubt quite unintentionally, the embodiment of the lotus-eaters' state of mind. They are constitutionally vacant. Is anyone in his world troubled by thought at all? Here and there we have glimpses of an inner life: in the portrait of a French officer (c.1917), which stands out from the corpus of Bunny's paintings to such an extent that one would barely attribute it to him; the fine portrait of Percy Grainger too is the image of a complex human being.

Among the female figures, though, the portrait of Madge Currie (1911) is one of very few to embody any sense of a spirit or mind that is awake: she looks out at us quizzically, on the cusp of adulthood. By contrast, the mature woman in the painting next to her in the exhibition is not only lacking any such alertness but is actually asleep. Even in his impressive portrait of Madame Melba, the celebrated Australian opera singer, is doing little more than striking a pose.

It is through Jeanne, one feels, that Bunny discovered the dark continent of the feminine, so different from the prim or academic figures of the early pictures and so akin in many ways to Baudelaire's image of woman. Indeed, it seems possible that the young Bunny had been involved in a homosexual relationship and that Jeanne initiated him in every way into an understanding of the female; this may help to explain his evident fascination with her, although much about their relationship remains unclear.

It is probably also through Jeanne in a more general sense that Bunny became an increasingly French painter, almost without relation to the characteristic sensibility of contemporary Australian artists.

The Frenchness of his painting becomes more and more apparent as one looks attentively at the pictures of his best period. Not only are there obvious connections to the impressionists, to Gustave Courbet, to Theodore Chasseriau, to Eugene Delacroix and other 19th-century masters; there are echoes of the 18th-century rococo and realist painters as well.

One can even detect hints of some of the last painters of the age of Louis XIV, such as Nicolas de Largilliere. It is appropriate that one of the latter's most appealing portraits, of a woman with an unusual broad hat, known as La Belle Strasbourgeoise (1703), should be echoed two centuries later on a more domestic scale in Bunny's portrait of his wife, In the Summer House (c.1917), where for once we have a sense of the woman rather than the performer in one of the artist's lotus land pantomimes.