Modernism Revived, Realism Reduced

Home , Angry Penguins, Australian Modernism, Heidelberg School, Humphrey McQueen, Margaret Preston

Terry Smith discusses Humphrey McQueen’s book The Black Swan of Trespass.

Why should modern art be of interest to principle of a system of social domination communists? which justifies its dynamism and its notion of progress by repeating every day and ad Because it is a major element of bourgeois nauseam the litany of constant improvement ideology. in unlimited consumption and technological Because cultural practices under capitalism happiness. are sorted into a hierarchy in which the She went on to begin to characterise professional arts are the most celebrated, modernity as: acting as the course of the unattainable cultural tokens of the rich (both as individuals .... an ideology of constant movement and and as a class). These professional arts also progression, daily regeneration and act as laboratories of new images, forms and effervescent mutation, masking the ideas for the "lesser" productions of permanence and static quality of the advertising and amateur art. structures of the order which generated it. Our objective is to analyse the insistent Because, despite these factors, some modernity imposed upon us every day by "popular cultural practices and artists society (advertising jingles, elegant fashions, ("modernist" as well as "realist") can directly new forms, artificial atmospheres, plastics, serve the political aims of communism and, it savoir-faire,) as well as the ensemble of is often claimed, provide models of freedom images, the spiritual and motivating ("unalienated labor", for example). dimensions which assure individual and In Chile in 1971 Michele Mattelart set out a collective response to a conception of project which she described thus: development enclosed in its own determinism.1 The concept of modernity has assumed the role o f an aegis, a watchword in the "Modernity" is a key concept in imperialist production of goods and signs in capitalist domination of dependent countires. "The industrial society. A thorough inquiry into Modern" becomes the latest styling of that this concept may prove to be one of the more which the metropolitan economy produces worthwhile ways o f approaching the guiding for its privileged. It is exported as normality 42 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77

Detail from Noel Counihan's "At the start of the march, 1932 to dependent countries where it is attainable 3. What were the resistances to capitalist only by the compradores yet remains an modernity, and what forms should they take aspiration for most. A political history of now? What is to be learnt from the "modernity" in Australia has yet to be progressive aspects of modernity and of written.2 artistic modernism? What has this inquiry to It would seem, then, that a study of say to radical cultural work now? modernism in relation to the visual arts would 4. Can a study of modernity and modernism be of considerable political interest if it could throw any light on vexed issues such as the respond to questions like these: appropriate model for Australia's 1. How did the ideology of modernity take relationships to international capital? shape in Australia in the context of our The Black Swan o f Trespass as its subtitle imperialist dependence, and what were the The Emergence of Modernist Painting in particular roles of the visual arts in this Australia to 1944, indicates, focuses on the development? second of these questions and deals partially 2. How did modernism take shape within the and inadequately with the third. McQueen relatively autonomous development of does not acknowledge the economic role of Australian art itself? modernity — indeed, he curiously accepts the MODERNISM REVIVED 43

"new world" implied by scientific progress, but the ohane of emphasis in this case is sure the discovery of the unconscious, the to lead to the question being asked in others, agitation of the working classes and the which is all to the good. Many people, unfamiliarity of art. He explores the including myself, have pushed explanations responses of artists to these factors, not their in terms of provincial dependence too far. response to the reconstruction of work, (More accurately, we have pushed "leisure", everyday life, the media and the explanations appropriate for the periodin state, affected by monopoly capital in which they were developed — that is, the mid- different w ays, at different times, in different 1960s to the mid-1970s — too far back into places throughout the world. His method Australian art's history.) challenges standard histories of Australian art but, in the end, gives us lesser modernism McQueen's major methodological than they provide. And, in the course of assumption — that modernism is not merely a style of painting but rather "a range of chasing this contracting subject, he deals responses to a nexus of social-artistic- drastically with both the Communist Party scientific problems" — is a novel attempt to and socially committed artists. On first break with the inadequacies of conventional reading, one is dazzled by the frequent art history and to locate artmaking as an brilliance of the writing, the daring freshness ideological (material) practice. Specifying his of vision, the breathtaking insults. But, on "nexus" a little more closely, the key "social" reflection, the book seems to have so much problem becomes class struggle, the reduced its subjects that it becomes a route from which one can only emerge puzzled, "scientific" ones are "the unconscious" and "space-time" (relativity), and the major disappointed and sadly unconvinced. "artistic" one is landscape. The relationships These are serious reservations; they are between these problems, and the artists' based on a year's thinking with the book, responses to them, are seen as constantly teaching with it in a course on Australian art changing, producing "new movements, styles and (visual) culture, and discussing it often. I and subjects". will try to indicate what the reservations are This approach generates some startlingly based on, beginning with the book's positive new perspectives. McQueen's unrivalled achievements. ability to lay bare the contours of petty McQueen's subject — why and how bourgeois ideology is revealed in the passages modernist painting emerged in Australia in on J.S. MacDonald, and Daryl, Lionel and the period before the mid-1940s — is of Norman Lindsay. At the same time he shows pivotal importance in grasping the history of how often they grasped the situation more our art. The conventional view, most clearly than their modernist opponents. influentially promulgated by Bernard Smith Exchanges between painters and poets are in his Australian Painting 1788-1970 (Oxford explored more thoroughly than hitherto, U.P., 1971), is that modernism "arrived" here although much remains to be done. Attention via reproductions, books and other is called to the formative role of ideologues information, and that it developed through such as Sir Keith Murdoch. Relatively phases roughly consonant with the successive devalued styles such as surrealism are given phases of European modernism from Post- due emphasis, as are artists such as Elioth Impressionism onwards. McQueen ridicules Gruner, and lesser-known aspects of this as a "station-master's log-book" celebrated artists' work are highlighted (for approach to art's history and, quite properly, example, the 1920s Flinders Ranges argues that modernism arose here primarily landscapes of Hans Heysen). McQueen's "from and through identifiably local emphasis on Margaret Preston is both part of, conditions". He does not indicate the degree and a stimulus to, the positive and growing to which he would insist that this is also the upward valuation of the work of women case for other tendencies in Australian art, artists, particularly those most active in the 44 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77

1920s and 1930s. tendency have been reduced to style terms: the Yet, despite these gains, the picture of 1910s, when local artists began to explore Australian modernism with which we are left Post-Impressionist techniques, and the later is not, in the end, a clear one. Indeed, we are 1920s/early 1930s when local artists began to left wondering why so much attention was adopt/develop late Cubist, Art Deco, devoted to what ultimately emerges as a geometric abstractionist styles. Usually, only relatively insignificant development. these tow developments are labelled Style terms in art history are notoriously "Modernist" in Australian art, the former is opaque and misleading. Usually coined as devalued in comparison with the "more rule-of-thumb descriptions, they gradually advanced" (read: "up-to-date")latter, and a acquire a normative force — not only for large range of artists who were clearly historians, but for artists as well. modernists are in the general sense outlined "Modernism" has developed two usages. The above are labelled with other style terms (e.g. general one begins as synonymous with surrealists, figurative expressionists, Angry "Modern Art", picking out the tendency to Penguins, etc.). A central problem in give visual form to "the experiences of McQueen's account is that he has fallen modern life" (Baudelaire): That is, the urban, victim of this specialised (albeit confused) bohemian intelligentsia's responses to social usage: his "nexus" approach is not applied to changes effected by the (French) bourgeoisie modernism as a tendency but to modernism through the nineteenth century. Towards the as a style. The artists whose responses he end of the century, the term gradually characterses as "modernist" are only those becomes more specific and two elements already labelled as such by prior, narrow and assume priority in the aesthetic ideologies and questionable usage. He certainly treats other the work of modernist artists: personal artists, and shows them responding to the expression and formal innovation. In this same nexus, but they are said to respond sense, the "isms" of the late nineteenth and the differently. The result is a sense of analytical early twentieth centuries appear as the overkill, the emergence of one artist, "flowering" of modernism as a tendency. Margaret Preston, as the only "real" modernist and, despite McQueen's acute The second, extremely nebulous usage is as criticisms, the values, priorities and basic a style term consonant with "Cubism" or organisation of previous accounts are "Fauvism", usually pointing to art which does perpetuated. We are still left with the not fit clearly into any of these terms but impression that cultural struggles were fought which is nonetheless abstract in form. out between two monolithic aesthetic Underlying this usage is the (now questioned) ideologies: progressive modernism (a.k.a. assumption that modern art moves Anti-Modernism or Nationalism). increasingly, necessarily, towards ever- greater abstraction. In this latter sense, the There are other important methodological term is used more often in cultural provinces assumptions which prevent The Black Swan than in the metropolitan centres. And, in both of Trespass from becoming a full and senses, it appears most often during periods balanced treatment of its subject (although when the tendency was perceived as in crisis, McQueen could reasonably claim that his or as changing significantly: in the 1830/40s, intention was more polemical than this). the 1920s and the later 1960/70s. The shift of emphasis to the local origins of Much would be gained by dropping the modernism has gone too far — relationships secondary usage altogether. But natural with European art and ideology are reduced languages do not work so simply, given than to token connections. one of their important jobs is to mark out Like most writers on art, McQueen does "temporary" meanings with such not have a developed sense of the competing "transposed" usages. This has been the case in visual cultures which are part of the ways Australia; two phases of the modernisi ideological struggle is shaped in a society. MODERNISM REVIVED 45 Visual cultures are produced and reproduced artists and writers associated with the in and across different media, groups and Communist Party during the 1930s and class fractions. His respect for the autonomy 1940s. He fails to recognise that their of art is properly aimed against mechanical paintings were part of a progressive tendency determinism (he rejects reflectio theory in to work across a variety of media favor of a notion of "response"), but it is simultaneously. He thus devalues Counihan's nearly total. The autonomy is relative, after contribution, and virtually ignores all; high art is not entirely separated from McClintock, Cant, Dalgarno, Maughan, other elements in he visup* culture. Some Finey et al. (I will return to this treatment of specific confusions result. this tendency later.) The same stress on high McQueen mostly accepts, for example, the art limits severely his account of modernism: modernist dismissal of the "national school" he ignores the great degree to which it was of landscape painters (such as Arthur imported, and developed locally, in design, Streeton) as conservative. fashion, commercial art and architecture, often preceding developments in painting and But recent research into the clsoe certainly more widespread than them. relationship of the Heidelberg School artists to photography and to black and white More generally, any treatment of newspaperand book illustrations, reinforced modernism should deal with the prima facie by studies such as Connell and Irving's Class relationship between it and the growth of Structure in Australian History (Longmans, monopoly capitalism. McQueen does so 1980), has led to the perception that this through his central notion of artists school emerged as part of the populist responding to a nexus of problems. But this hegemony of the mercantile bourgeoisie, fails to mark the class character of setting up contexts for painting open to larger modernism: for despite all the refusals and and broader audiences than hitherto counter-moves by particular artists, and the acknowledged.4 The character of this anachronistic tastes of some members of the populism in the 1920s and 1930s needs to be bourgeoisie, modernism becomes the cultural charted, but already new questions are being style most favoured by the progressive asked, such as: what were the relationships sections of the European, then the United between Heidelberg School landscapes and States bourgeoisie. And so it is in Australia. It the widely-disseminated images of World is clear in the support given modernism by the War I? Can we continue to dismiss the Murdochs, Lloyd Jones, Horderns, et al, and academic landscapists of the 1920s and 1930s in the class situations of nearly all of the as reactionaries and poor artists when we modernist painters. But, as Bernard Smith recognise that it was they who expressed a points out in his review (Meanjin 4, 1979,523, regionalist relationship to the land, a citing the work of Mary Eagle), it is clearest in relationship which accounts for their huge the growth of retail trading and advertising, popularity as shown in reproductions and especially in Sydney, in the 1920s and 1930s. imitations by amateur artists? McQueen is right to revalue Heysen and Gruner, but these The pages of Art in Australia and The questions should lead us to a revaluation of a Home, the windows of David Jones and great number of artists’ work, and to seeing a Horderns, the society photography and the strong populist imagery which was used as architectural magazines of the period are ideological material by different class dominated by modernist imagery. This points fractions at different times.5 On this basis, we to the economic base of Australian will be able to more clearly assess the modernism, but a full consideration would locate its class character by pointing to the conservative and/or progressive nature of the imagery. limited circulation of cultural media such as The Home and by contrasting its design forms Similarly, McQueen's stress on art's with those of the bigger circulation Women's autonomy compromises his critique of the Weekly. 46 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77

A recognition of the class character of subjects (local flora, places) in order to create modernism is, I think, fundamental to a truly national art. But we need only to ask McQueen’s conception of modernism, but is whether any viewer would be likely to see her curiously, not declared anywhere in the book. work as Australian if its subject matter were I think it is also present in his evaluation of something other than distinctly local flora Margaret Preston, to whom over a quarter of and places, to see that too great a claim is the book is devoted. I sense a rather simple being made. McQueen too often mistakes equation: Preston as the single most intention for achievement and, more progressive practitioner of the cultural style importantly, mistakes subject matter for of the most progressive class fraction. Preston content in his discussion of her work. For was, even is her own strongly stated terms, an example, if we take the Prestons in the artist of frequently variable achievement: the collection of the National Gallery (touring in still-lifes, flower pieces and the self portrait of the exhibition Aspects of Australian Art the late 1920s, and the landscapes of the early 1900-1940) we need only contrast the fine and 1940s, are outstanding but much of the rest is subtle Banksia 1927 to the slack, coagulated not. There are, as well, some problems with Watermelon 1930 to make the point about both Preston’s artistic program and variability of achievement, and to cite The McQueen’s presentation of it. Without Aeroplane woodcut, or contrast the two wishing to reduce to impossible crudity a woodcuts Plaid Bow and Waratah, to lifelong struggle, the essence of Preston’s demonstrate how much the claim for national program can be seen in her efforts to apply content depends on her depiction of local formal lessons learnt from studying European subject matter.6 Late Cubism and Aboriginal art to Australian Margaret Preston is singled out as the

Detail from "Banksia", Margaret Preston, 1927 MODERNISM REVIVED 47 major — indeed, the only — modernist of the our present scope. between-wars period. All the others are McQueen’s treatment of the conservatives relegated to the lowly level of ‘surface and the modernists appears extremely modernists', that is, artists whose only generous when placed against his dismissive relationship to the tendency was at the condemnation of the social realists. Artists superficial level of adopted style. This such as Noel Counihan and writers such as accurately characterises her position Bernard Smith are shown as incapable of compared to that of Sydney modernists such going beyond the political limitations of the as Fizelle, BalsoA and, to a lesser extent, Communist Party — a party which had been Crowley, but it is inaccurate in every other ‘born in a series of defeated strikes in the respect. Permitting only one ‘real’ modernist 1920s, grew up amongst the unemployed of severely limits McQueen’s thesis about the 1930s, and matured in time to help lead modernism’s emergence (as opposed to the war effort’ (p. 75). The Party and the arrival) to a single case. Artists of equal, if not artists are seen as reformists because they greater, interest than Preston are not given failed to ‘raise the alternative of public art’ their due: Grace Cossington-Smith was and because they were incapable of offering ‘a technically just as daring, more consistent, vision of a radically transformed future’. and searched across a greater range of content Rather, they were tied to bourgeois forms — yet most critics, including McQueen, fail to such as novels and easel paintings, and to the go much past a reading of her style as retarded depiction of ‘work, privilege and suffering’in Post-Impressionism. The art of the the past and present. Melbourne modernists is hardly mentioned, the singificance of George Bell’s teaching goes McQueen’s concept of the media for public unnoticed. art is too narrow. There were very few murals by Party artists in the 1940s; most were done in the 1950s and 1960s (eg, in the Waterside It is here that McQueen’s failure to Workers building by Rod Shaw and others, question the received notions of modernism and in the Party’s Day Street headquarters by as a style leads to a glaring omission. A broad Counihan). But cartoons, illustrations, view of modernism as a tendency in photographs, layouts, banners, posters and Australian art must recognise that the floats are also forms of public art, and there “Angry Penguins” — Nolan, Tucker, Boyd, were plenty of them, often done by people Perceval and so on — were extremely who were also painters. However, it would be inventive modernists, responding to the unhistorical to imagine that it was a simple problems which McQueen and others matter for artists to move suddenly and easily identify. These artists drew on stylistic from specialisation in one medium to sources similar to those usually labelled working across a range of media. As in modernist (late Cubism, geometric Russia, easel painting was highly valued — abstraction). But they also responded to even for artists such as Counihan who came to many other influences, particularly it after experience in other public media. But surrealism and expressionism, working them the point remains that this working across into a kind of abstract yet autobiographical media was one of the important factors image-making that was unique in art of the making the art of the social realists more period. As Bernard Smith noted in the review socially relevant and progressive (in the cited above, expressionism seems non circumstances) than that of the realist, existent as a category in McQueen’s text. The modernist or "national school" artists. ways in which these artists took the liberal McQueen’s basic equation is that the work option, and their art during the 1950s become of the social realist artists and criticis did not locked into “signature” narrative series in get beyond the limits which the Party reached bush settings (ideal ideological material for in its work. A whiff of The Eighteenth the industrial bourgeoisie), are issues beyond Brumaire... despite the fact that Marx was 48 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW No. 77

talking about the general relationship personal experience (a key element of between a class and its political and literary modernism, as we have seen). The 1943-4 representatives, where McQueen is referring paintings visualise aspects of working class to relations between the political and literary life in the present through images of its (artistic) representatives themselves. The experience of the Depression as witnessed by implication as to class here is that the Party, the artist. His use of colour is also modernist. the artists and the critics were petty Smith’s writing of Australian art’s history in bourgeois, assuming that the specific European style terms follows from his conditions of their emancipation were the acceptance of the other key emphasis of general conditions for the salvation of modernism, the stress on formal innovation. modern society and the avoidance of class He defends internationalism in art against the struggle. 7. The equation is unhistorically chauvinism of the ‘national school’, but neat: a reading of Harry Gould’s pamphlet modernist internationalism is bourgeois, not Art, Science and Communism (1946) Jack proletarian — it is, again, not a matter of Beasley’s reminiscences, Bernard Smith’s subject matter, but content. These are the recollections and the little research done on sorts of questions which need to be asked debates at the time indicate a searching for when a full account is written. positions by both Party workers and artists, McQueen finds the social realism of the rather than a Zhdanovist fixity.8 Australian artists lacking in comparison to a There are some odd aspects of Party- kind of art which, he implies, was both related social realism in the 1940s which possible and necessary: ‘proletarian art’. This demonstrate this. Counihan's best-known is not necessarily an art made, or even liked, paintings, such as At the Start of the March by proletarians; rather, it ‘points at 1932, were done in 1943 and 1944 — why such relationships between past and future, a retrospective vision? Smith's Place, Taste oppression and liberation, Imperialism and and Tradition of 1945 condemns most socialism; it approaches fundamental truths modernism as aestheticist, and celebrates about how the transitions from one to the realism as the present strength and future other can be made’ (p. 68). Unfortunately, it hope of Australian art, but it is also the first appears in his text as an abstract, reified history to treat Australian art firmly in terms object, with only Leger’s and Rivera’s names of European styles. Illustrations of Party given as instances. It is just as distant as newspapers and much of the Workers Art European modernism. It is so generally stated Club linocuts and woodblocks seem heavy that almost no art could be read as qualifying, with Socialist Realist imagery, especially the or a lot could — including, ironically, that of heroic male worker, yet they also look back to Noel Counihan (of the mid 1930s to the mid Expressionism and the Australian black and 1950s). white tradition. Many strong realists, such as Although McQueen cites class struggle as McClintock and Cant, were also the key social problem in the modernist expressionist surrealists at the same time. nexus, the working class is given no form in Why these apparent contradictions? There the book, except as a trigger to conservative are personal reasons in each case, but reaction. Working class cultures have no they are not sufficient to account for a existence, so social realism's relationships to tendency. Awkward relationships to both them are not explored. He comes close to political and aesthetic policies in the Party are Trotsky's early position: no revolutionary art part of the story (a story as yet untold) but until the Revolution, no proletarian culture pressures from modernist aesthetic ideology or art at all, because the period of the were just as important. dictatorship is a period of transition.9 Neither the Party nor the artists associated with it Counihan’s flashbacks occur because of the were progressive, so the only art that was, was importance he placed on the expression of modernism — actually, only Margaret MODERNISM REVIVED 49 Preston and some aspects of surrealism. The Australian labour movement has There is one further sense in which this strong visual traditions but their history has amounts to an inaccurately thin picture: it not been written. Some work has been done in ignores the realism forced on a number of the past, some is being done now, but much artists by their war experiences, and in their more remains to be done. The Communist efforts to visualise startlingly different social Party has, at times, played an important role relations. We need to look again at Dobells in working class and oppositional cultural such as Night Loading at Perth and Knocking work but too few of its members have taken Off Time, Bankstown Airport, at Drysdale's the time to secure this work historically. images of the rural proletariat, at Badham's crowded interiors and Kilgour's scenes of work and leisure. If in Place, Taste and Tradition, Bernard Smith tended to label as There have been, and are, strong political realists too many naturalist painters (outside reasons for doing so: the cultural arena is a the "national" landscapists, of course), crucial site of political struggle (as is so McQueen goes too far in the other direction. obvious when we look at Britain, for The real object of inquiry here is not example), a domain through which more and modernism as a style but modernism as a more people enter into political work. The visual cultural tendency in relation to other Black Swan of Trespass is the first book on tendencies, such as regionalism and realism. Australian art written by a marxist since It is both richer, and more problematic, than Bernard Smith's Place, Taste and Tradition McQueen allows. It forces us to ask hard of 1945. A detailed analysis of the successes questions about image making under and failures of the radical artists of the 1930s capitalism across the whole range of visual and 1940s is as important as that other, cultural practices, about image making within related necessity: a grasping of the bourgeois ideology and against it. possibilities for radical cultural practice now. notes...... 1 ‘Notes on “Modernity”: a way of rAiding 5 These questions are being asked particularly women's magazines ’, in Communication and by Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Class Struggle, vol 1. A. Mattelart and S. Merewether and Ann Stephen in an essay Sieglaub, eds., IG and IMMRC, NY and forthcoming in Arena. Paris 1979, 158-9. 6 An exemplary critical study is Ann Stephen, 2 Connell and Irving refer to ‘Margaret Preston’s Second Coming’, A rt ‘developmentalist’ ideologies in the 1950s and Network, no. 2 Sydney 1980. 1960s, Class Structure in Australian History, Longmans, 1980. See also Dave Clark, 7 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 'Unequal Exchange and Australian Bonaparte, Moscow 1934, 40-1. Economic Development’, in Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, 8 Beasley, Red Letter Days, Australasian E.L. Wheelwright and K. Buckley, eds., vol. Book Society, Sydney 1979, especially the 3, Australia and N.Z. Book Co., Sydney 1978. title chapter; Charles Merewether, ‘Social Realism: the Formative Years’, Arena, no. 46, 3 Irene Harris, graduate work, Department of 1977; Smith, review o f McQueen, Meanjin, Fine Arts, Sydney University. no. 4, 1979. 4 See essays by Burn, Lendon and Smith in Australian Art and Architecture, A. Bradley 9 Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, and T. Smith, eds., Oxford U.P. 1980. 1924, introduction.