The Revolt of the Pendulum (34 page)

In Paris, all the Impressionist and Post-impressionist paintings that are now coldly housed in the Muse´e d’Orsay were still splendidly concentrated in the natural warmth of the Jeu
de Paume, where, dare one say it, they belong. We can safely deduce that she was thrown for a loop, because a large part of her subsequent career has been devoted to searching through that
concentration for its essence. She came back to Australia in 1957 and for twenty years didn’t sail again. Nowadays she travels all the time – she doesn’t miss a major exhibition
anywhere in the world – but for those two decades her journeys were in the mind: for any kind of artist, the journeys that matter most. And just as, when in Europe, she had maintained a
presence in Australia – she sent a whole exhibition back to Brisbane from the south of France – she never, when she came back to Australia, ceased to live in Europe. That indeed, was
what her journey in the mind was about.

It was conspicuously a journey away from the specifically Australian subject. In her early days, off in the bush at Hill End with Donald Friend, she had painted what was in front of her.
Recently there was a rich little exhibition at the National Trust’s Samuel Henry Ervin gallery on Sydney’s Observatory Hill to prove that Olley and Friend got results a long way beyond
the merely decorative. Robert Hughes said that they were two members of the ‘Charm School’ but the term is dismissive only if you underestimate just how charming charm can be. But now
that she was back where she started, Olley painted as if she was still in the Jeu de Paume and the doors had been nailed closed, leaving her there unaccompanied except perhaps by Morandi and Ivon
Hitchens. By the time I got to know about her she had been in there for almost forty years.

As I started flying back and forth to Australia more and more often, the question of the duty of the arts to the Australian Identity was taking more and more space in the media. One look at a
roomful of Margaret Olley’s pictures was enough to prove that the question was a mare’s nest. This wasn’t Australia being painted, nor was it French pictures being echoed: this
was the deep, layered memory of colour and balance being analysed for its coherent force. Mainly the objects in the pictures were items from the flea market that Olley is still running in the Hat
Factory, the old name for the annexe of her Paddington house: a flea market where none of the
brocante
is for sale. (The lucky lunch guests, who amount to a long-running
tertulia
of
everyone prominent in the Australian arts world, have to get used to being surrounded by knick-knacks recognisable from pictures they have seen and might even own.) But it’s doubtful if we
should talk about objects at all. Imploding nebulae of colour, her pictures, Australian only in the sense that it’s an Australian who paints them, continue to raise the question of whether
she is a figurative painter leaving the people out or an abstract painter putting objects in. I tend to the latter view. I think that with her, as with Olsen, there is constant and deliberate
adventure into the territory where the subject yields its full material glory by ceasing to matter. But the question, with both those painters, will always remain moot.

With Jeffrey Smart it was settled from the start. There has to be representation, because form is his mainspring. The literature on him is already rich but Barry Pearce’s recent
Jeffrey
Smart
is the best thing yet, a truly beautiful book. As we have come to expect from the Beagle Press, which is by now setting world standards and not just matching them, the colour
reproductions are sumptuous, and because Smart works hard to achieve perfectly flat planes of colour – there has been no impasto for sixty years – every major picture can be not only
present but pretty well correct.

The first thing you notice is that hardly any of them are about Australia. Very early on, before he made his first trip abroad in 1948, he painted local subjects, but even then they tended
towards the uniquely personal international landscape that his pictures live in now. Blessed like his friend Barry Humphries with original taste, Smart already knew an awful lot about what had
happened overseas before he left for Europe via America. Initially, like Margaret Olley, he was stymied by London’s National Gallery. But we have to remember that the process of absorbing
influence is highly complex. Smart was in search of stillness and proportion. He was already at home with Mondrian, Ben Nicholson, Balthus and Edward Hopper. In Paris, the personal teaching of
Le´ger took him further into a conceptual range of ideal proportion and geometric balance. So when he says that a single ancient mosaic he saw in Naples has had fifty years of influence, he
might only be saying that it confirmed what he had already worked out.

In 1951 he came back to Sydney for twelve years, during which time he made a hit as Phidias on the radio show
The Argonauts
. Phidias knew all there was to know about art, both Australian
and foreign. Characteristically I managed to miss his every appearance: he might have woken me up a lot earlier. He might have told me in advance that those Australian Impressionists –
Streeton, McCubbin, Tom Roberts – were really something. Smart was helping to educate the next generation of art-lovers in the true principle that painting has no nationalism, only painters
in different places. But all that time he was getting ready to leave again. One of the reasons is revealed in his autobiography
Not Quite Straight
: Australia was not yet ready for its gay
artists.

But another reason can only be called destiny. He was destined not to be caught up in the question of how or what an Australian should paint. He had another country in mind. It wasn’t even
Italy. He loved Italy, and after a crucial move from Rome to Tuscany he settled down and lived in Italy. He is still there, at the Posticcia Nuova, which must be one of the most beautiful houses
any artist has ever inhabited. The exiled Victor Hugo lived in more splendour, but not with such taste. Thus lodged within driving distance of Arezzo, Smart painted Italy, or seemed to. But what he
was really painting was a new world; a really new world; the world of Europe’s post-war reconstruction, when the colours came out on the sign-systems of the highways and on the cranes above
the white buildings. It was a look destined to take over the planet. Whoever said that eventually everyone will live in the Smart country was exactly right.

What he painted was a vision. ‘The world’, he said, ‘has never been so beautiful.’ It was the deepest kind of aesthetic perception talking: the kind that can see the
formal music of a pre-pyramid Egyptian bas relief and a Giotto Madonna in a late-night diner by Edward Hopper, and see all three in a row of modern apartment blocks half hidden by a hill. But it
was a view of the world so contemporary that it was prescient, and he might have gone broke if he hadn’t been hard-headed about business. It’s a characteristic he shares with Olley, who
realised early on that she should put her earnings into houses if she wanted to go on painting. Smart did the same, and his ability to put the painter’s inherently boom-and-bust finances on
to a stable basis meant that he was able to ward off more than one great danger.

He was never tempted into painting sequences just to fill a too-hastily scheduled exhibition: one of the temptations which, for Brett Whiteley, might have been almost as fatal as heroin. Every
Smart picture was, and is, an individual construction. He was also able to ward off the temptation posed by nationalist pressure. Nolan, in my view, fell for both temptations at once when he
churned out too many desert landscapes. Smart was not to be forced home, even by his home culture’s increasing gravity. Always favoured by discerning Australian collectors who could see that
its internationalism was what made the Australian culture boom formidable, he comes home of his own free will, and that’s what has made his career a triumph. One of his biggest and greatest
pictures,
The Container Train
, now hanging in the Victorian Arts Institute, started to roll in Yugoslavia two years before it reached a forest in Gippsland. There could be no neater way of
saying that the old world and its new country are continuous.

You can’t read one book about any of these people without running into stories about all the others. Painters have more fun than poets. It seems unfair. Even in the rare cases when they
don’t get on, the painters are in a club, and quarrels are either settled or become a recognised axis for gossip. (While working on my left ear, Jeffrey Smart told me a scarcely believable
story about Dobell and the man in charge of Wiseman’s Ferry.) This feeling of fraternity has certainly helped the Australian painters keep the courage of their convictions, the chief
conviction being that a painting should be a thing in itself, and not a fleck in a trend. When all else fails, they’ve got each other, even beyond death. Olsen drew Brett Whiteley in his last
years, when the golden helmet had gone dark. After Whiteley died, Olsen made a set of prints acknowledging the everlasting beauty of those early pictures of Wendy in the bath. He drew only the
bath, because she was gone, too.

The same feeling extends even further back through time, to foreign painters long gone, whom they might never have met. Margaret Olley, who has always been shy about naming her lucky lovers, is
flagrant about her love for Bonnard. A real live Bonnard is one of her many bequests to the Art Gallery of NSW, and there are other, smaller galleries that benefit from her munificence. And,
standing out among her many still-lifes, what else is a figurative painting like
Homage to Manet
, with its scrumptiously creamy depiction of Berthe Morrisot, except a cheeky reminder that
Margaret Olley, too, had once been painted in white by a great man, and had still managed to lead her own creative life?

Well, it’s also a nice picture. And people want pictures. They want poems, too, but they want them in another way, and it’s all too easy for poets to get depressed when they discover
the deal is never done, the
fait
is never
accompli
, and the thing is never taken home to hang cherished on the wall while its creator banks the cheque and the critics shut up. We who
push a pen had just better face it. Pushing a brush is in every way more satisfactory. But as long as the results matter, pushing a brush is also a lot harder. Any tribute to the Australian
painters should begin with our gratitude for their belief that the results do matter. While the writers complained about being either shut out from the old world or else unable to get free of it
– and there was reason for both complaints – the painters quietly enjoyed their privilege of helping to build an Australian cultural identity that the world could not resist. Always
separate yet always together, they created an achievement so exciting for the eyes that it can make the blind see. I stand here as testimony to the truth of that.

Postscript

This lecture could easily have become a book if time had permitted. I barely mentioned Charles Blackman, whose accumulated work is one of the glories of post-war
Australian painting. There could be a whole chapter just on the importance of East Sydney Technical College, where Rayner Hoff was the tutelary sprit. Hoff’s origins were in England, but
after a long spell in the trenches of World War I, and a period of study in Rome afterwards, he carried a whole continental heritage with him when he set out for Australia. After he arrived there
in the 1920s, he made a little statue of a lion, which you can still see in the Art Gallery of NSW. Hoff ’s lion became the bonnet ornament of the cars produced by General Motors Holden, and
a version of it is still the logo for Holden today. The cultural interchange between Australia and Europe began in the nineteenth century. But then, when you think about it, it began with the First
Fleet. National compartmentalization is a marketable fad in the minds of commentators who draw a salary for shuffling cliche´s. There were Chinese lacquer boxes on sale in the markets of
Imperial Rome. Art travels faster now, but it has always travelled.

A QUESTION FOR DIAMOND JIM

The nickname ‘Diamond Jim’ fitted James McClelland the way ‘Big Julie from Chicago’ fitted the gangster in
Guys and Dolls
who rolled spotless
dice, with the difference that Diamond Jim wasn’t acting. He was really like what his nickname said: spruce, sparkling, charming, the Australian politician with the touch of the patrician,
the one whose jacket sat neatly on his shoulders, and who didn’t sweat even in the hot weather. In the late 1980s, at a time when I knew less than I should have known about what had been
going on in Australia for the previous quarter of a century, I interviewed him for the one and only series of my talk show that I ever taped in Sydney. All the other series were taped in the UK,
were broadcast there in the first instance, and appeared in Australia only in syndication. Predictably (predictably in retrospect, that is: if it had been fully predictable beforehand, I would
never have made such a blunder), the series I made in Australia was the one greeted by the Australian critics as being, compared with the others, a patronising, sub-standard rush-job designed to
lower Australia’s repute in the eyes of the watching world.

Actually we took great care with that series, and especially with the casting. Along with the veteran painter Lloyd Rees and the already illustrious poet Les Murray – I think it was the
first mainstream television show Murray was ever asked to do – James McClelland was one of the guests I was determined to get on the air. I was pleased that he said yes, and he seemed pleased
enough at the level of questions he was asked, but he must have been surprised not to have been questioned more closely about his presence in the blast area during the explosion that has come to be
remembered in Australia as the Dismissal. I knew roughly what had happened: Whitlam, as Prime Minister, had incorrectly believed that his appointee as Governor General, Sir John Kerr, would not
fire him. McClelland, a member of Whitlam’s Labor government and also a life-long friend of Kerr’s, had not guessed that Kerr would push the button on Whitlam. After Kerr duly did so,
McClelland had never talked to Kerr again. It was a sore point, but that was no good reason for my steering clear of it. If I had realised just how sore a point it was, I would have asked
McClelland about little else. I wasn’t there to soothe his ego, which, although nothing extravagant, was immaculately brushed, like his hair.