The Revolt of the Pendulum (33 page)

He might have been premature in that judgment. Quite often, an original artist starts off looking like every artist he admires, and then his own uniqueness emerges after everyone else’s
has been absorbed. The future critic might have criticised himself too much. Another reason he might have stopped was that I shot a hole in one of his pictures. At the family house in Rose Bay, he
and I were diving around the garden with an air-pistol, making life difficult for the sparrows. When my turn came I tried a deflection shot on a passing spag and the pellet went past the target and
on into the garage, where Hughes’s latest painting was leaning against a wall. It was a painting of a sad, rather Eliotesque broken king and when we held it up to the light it became evident
that the disconsolate monarch now had a hole in one eye. My suggestion that the defeated central figure had thus acquired an interesting new connection with infinity did not go down well. Hughes
was as put out as the eye was but he was a generous soul and soon forgave me.

I like to think it was a coincidence that he left for Europe shortly afterwards. Probably his real reason for heading out was a belief that the action in the art of painting, as in the arts
generally, was elsewhere, in that distant place we called Overseas. I can remember taking that belief for gospel, even when it came to an art-form that I knew next to nothing about. The first art
books with more of their reproductions in colour than in black and white were reaching Australia about then, and I thought I could see from my imported books about Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec that
the so-called ‘Australian Impressionists’ in the Art Gallery of NSW were a secondary event by comparison. Much later on, Hughes the world-famous art critic talked about the effect on
Australia’s would-be painters of what he called ‘the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece’. He took it for granted that for the painters to actually see Europe’s heritage of
great paintings was crucial. But a loose interpretation of his principle – and a journalistic interpretation, the interpretation that sets the agenda, is almost always loose – tends to
neglect the fact that Australia’s post-war wave of painters already knew quite a lot about the European heritage before they went abroad. And they all went. As Hughes himself would now be the
first to point out, Margaret Olley, John Olsen and Jeffrey Smart had already made their first trips to Europe while we were still shooting sparrows. But Hughes might not have known that then, and
as for me, I didn’t even know their names. I had heard of Russell Drysdale because some of his outback scenes had been reproduced in the
Women’s Weekly
. Sidney Nolan I knew to be
associated in some way with Ned Kelley. But I didn’t meet an actual Australian painter until I got to London and found myself living in the same house as Brett Whiteley.

The house, in Melbury Road, Kensington, had once belonged to the pre-Raphaelite crowd-pleaser Holman Hunt. The bunch of recent arrivals that I was with all moved into the ground floor of the
house and started being poor. Brett lived in the studio out in the back yard. Brett had obviously already left poverty behind. He had all the signs of success including a blindingly beautiful wife,
Wendy. Forty years on, now that my elder daughter is an up and coming painter, I know enough about the harsh economics of the painter’s life to realise that Brett might not have been that
well off after all. But he certainly got invited out.

It was a tough moment for the rest of us when Brett and Wendy emerged from the studio one spring evening on their way to dinner with Sir Kenneth Clark. Brett, whose tightly curled tea-cosy of a
hairstyle was bright blond in those days, a kind of golden helmet, was almost as lovely as his wife. The two of them made us feel very downmarket. But Brett was no snob and seemed not to mind when
I spent hours drinking his beer while explaining to him that technique in the arts was a side issue. Brett countered with the argument that one of the reasons Matisse could leave out so much was
that he knew exactly how to put everything in. This was a perfectly true statement but I was years away from realising how true it was, because I had never had to sit down and keep reshaping a
sentence while the light changed on the verb.

One of the things I most regret about my acquaintanceship with Brett Whiteley was that when he carried out his plan to visit the National Gallery before dawn – he had been given special
permission after Sir Kenneth Clark had made the right phone call – I was too hung over to join him on his expedition to watch the sun come up on the Piero della Francescas. (Youth is the time
of opportunities neglected: who would want to live through all that waste again?) One of the things I least regret is that I agreed he should do a triptych of nude lovers based on one of my poems.
I thought I recognised Wendy in the complicated and lascivious flourish of black ink on the white paper. Anyway the bits that I thought were her were a lot more interesting than my words. After the
pictures were framed at Brett’s expense (Wendy looked at me very darkly about that, and she was right) he made me a present of them, and I lugged them around for years until I finally left
them with a startled landlady in Cambridge as part compensation for being late with my rent. Unless she burned them, I suppose they will turn up one day and fetch a huge price, not because of my
lines but because of Brett’s line: and that’s just how it should be.

British critics were already writing about how Brett had brought his blue sky with him from Australia. I had seen for myself that he got some of his blue sky from Piero della Francesca, but it
didn’t occur to me that there was a potentially interesting aesthetic question here about memory, perception and inspiration. Nothing about painting occurred to me for some time. At Cambridge
I made regular visits to the Fitzwilliam to admire the Rembrandt. The Rembrandt subsequently turned out to be a fake but by then I could tell it was a pretty good one. With my future wife I spent a
lot of time in Florence and in the Low Countries, doing the grand tour of the Renaissance. What a busy bunch of guys the Renaissance had been, I joked to myself, but in truth I was duly
overwhelmed. I didn’t see how anything could compete with that, or even add to it. I liked quite a lot of the new art that was then invading London from America but apart from a few
unarguable stand-outs like Larry Rivers I didn’t see much that could convince me it was as hard to do as, say, painting the Portinari altarpiece.

Then something big happened, and, as so often happens when something big happens, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was; I just felt the thump. There was girl at Girton who wore pop-socks and
had that strange, rare, Zuleika Dobson-like gift of being followed around by a troop of prattling young men wherever she went even though she never said anything. One night she invited us all to a
party at her father’s flat in London. It was in St James’s, as I remember, possibly overlooking St James Street itself. I was more than slightly smashed when we all arrived out of the
night, but after guessing from the scale of the place that Miss Pop-Socks’s father must be loaded, the first thing I specifically noticed was that the walls were covered with paintings which
had to be Australian. I guessed this about the Arthur Boyd paintings, and I was certain of it about the Drysdales, which were so numerous that they sometimes hung one above the other.

Overcoming a rush of nostalgia about the
Women’s Weekly
, I proceeded to instruct the young company about the rise of Australian culture. Miss Pop-Socks seemed unimpressed, perhaps
because she needed no instruction. Her father had backed his appreciation with his money. Or to put it in a less vulgar and ultimately much more useful way, he had backed it with his love. This is
an aspect we should note. It wasn’t just a case of a pundit-cum-merchant like Sir Kenneth Clark investing in futures as he stocked up on the Nolans and the Whiteleys. It was a case of British
art-lovers seeing something that delighted them, and wanting to live with it. That night I got no further than realising that Drysdale delighted me. Yes, that was what a red dirt road looked like,
and a town with one pub. Taking it for granted that an Australian painting should have an Australian subject, I could have cried with homesickness.

Homesickness was unrelieved for another ten years at least, until finally the
Observer
sent me back to Sydney on assignment. Until then, I hadn’t been able to afford a ticket home.
That was the reason, incidentally, why the first trips of the Australian painters to Europe tended to last for years rather than months: it was so expensive getting there that you would have been
wasting the money if you didn’t stay. I wonder if, nowadays, easy travel really has brought the other side of the world any closer: if you arrive ready to leave again, how much do you learn?
How much do you submit, which is the big secret of learning anything?

Anyway, I had been away a long time: long enough for the Opera House to be finished. When I left, it was just a set of foundations. When I got back, it was Sydney’s most famous thing since
the Harbour Bridge. Before the war, Grace Cossington Smith had painted daringly
pointilliste
pictures of the Bridge when it was being built, but that was as close as art got to engineering.
Now the Opera House was there, and it had its own art inside it, including John Olsen’s huge painting
Five Bells
inspired by Kenneth Slessor’s poem about Sydney Harbour, out onto
which the painting looked through the glass: a virtual image observing its reality. The painting knocked me sideways. For a while I thought it was an abstract, until I began to notice that it was
composed of natural details. But the natural details were dotted through coloured space, in roughly the proportion of space to object that obtains in a Japanese screen, and with the same touch of
quietly ecstatic wit that I had learned to look for in Paul Klee. You will notice that my range of reference had expanded.

Some of these guesses about the kind of art that Olsen has been looking at I was able later to check up on, because with Olsen, as with the other major Australian painters, a useful tradition
began of publishing sumptuous monographs in which the reproductions not only got better and better, the text got more and more learned. To the row of Olsen books there has recently been added one
called
John Olsen: Teeming with Life, His Complete Graphics 1957–2005
. This book is an education: an education about the artist’s education.

In Olsen’s prints you get down to the basics of where his big, seemingly boundless paintings such as
Five Bells
and
The You-Beaut Country
got their centripetal strength:
detailed drawing. In all the prints of the 1980s that carried images of the now-famous Olsen frog, you can see how he caught the wildlife in motion through letting his line run as fast as it would
flow: the frog dives from a branch like a blob of spit. You can also see that all this lyrical freedom must have been the product of a discipline. And so it was. In the early 1950s Olsen worked
long hours in the drawing classes of three art schools in Sydney. Two of them were in sight of the Harbour and the third was the fabled East Sydney Tech, where Margaret Olley had already put in
what Australians call the hard yakka.

But the extra thing to grasp is that Olsen knew quite a lot about Klee and Kandinsky before he left on the
Orion
in 1956 for his first three years away. He might not have seen many
originals, but he saw all the reproductions there were. And the visiting exhibition ‘French Painting Today’ had taught him a lot, as it taught all the painters a lot, when it toured the
Australian cities in 1953. It could teach them so much because they were looking with instructed eyes. And indeed common sense tells us that the Australian painters had never been cut off from the
old world, but had been in a constant state of interchange with it, and all the more so because the actual pictures they had seen were so few, and thus so precious. Waiting for a long time under
the balcony is not necessarily the worst start to a love affair. But the big difference between Romeo wooing Juliet and an Australian painter saving up for his first European trip was that the
Australian painter already had a good idea of what he was going to get.

He, or, of course, she. Before the war, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith had always had the European heritage on their minds, if not before their eyes. After the war, Margaret Olley
might have preferred to have it on her mind for longer. She has always said that she was exposed to the European impact too early in her career. Meg Stewart’s excellent biography
Margaret
Olley: Far From a Still Life
is a lot better than its title. The book gives us a richly nuanced account of how the girl from Banyan Creek grew up in artless houses but had already seen her
first Medici prints while she was at school in Brisbane in the late thirties. We should pause here to remind ourselves, and to inform the incredulous young, of what a Medici print was: it was a
very good colour reproduction. What the Australian painters couldn’t see of the European masterpieces was the texture. They could see the colour, which meant that they could see almost all of
the form. And they saw more of the European modern painters than you might think because there were well-off and cultivated Australians who collected modern art and brought it home, and the same
spirit that made the collectors want to own foreign paintings made them want to know young Australian painters. It’s the story that’s so often left out: the story of the
appreciators.

Margaret Olley’s real life as a painter began in Sydney towards the end of the war. At East Sydney Tech the young Margaret was soon famous among the artists for her talent and Renoir-pure
pulchritude. Drysdale, Donald Friend and William Dobell all painted her, and in 1949 Dobell’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait of her, in her white dress of unrationed parachute silk, made
her famous throughout Australia:
Women’s Weekly
famous, famous in a way that a shy girl didn’t really want to be. The journalists, in both senses of the phrase, chased her onto
the ship. In Europe, she was overwhelmed by the galleries. We might tend to think that it was because she had no idea. A better interpretation is that she had a very good idea, but when she saw the
reality it was too much of what she wanted all at once.