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What follows are some deliberately generalized impressions of the nature and background of recent Australian painting. For aesthetics in a vacuum are meaningless: the way a man paints and the image he constructs has to be considered in relation to his character, and this is affected by environment. Specific references to individual artists are reduced to a minimum on the assumption that it is boring and unhelpful to read about a man’s work when there is either no visual evidence available or else only a black and white reproduction. The notes stem from the experience of a six weeks’ highly compressed but avidly inquisitive journey round Australia in the spring of 1960. There were three objectives: to lecture on recent British art for the British Council, to meet and talk to Australian artists with the idea of making an exhibition of their work in London, and to explore life in the cities and in the country. There were many excursions into the bush and other remote parts in cars and jeeps and charter planes.

     The journey was the culminating point of many years of speculation on the possibilities of Australian painting and the idea of a peripheral culture, remote from Europe. This curiosity had been nourished by close friendship with Sidney Nolan. He and Russell Drysdale have acted indirectly as cultural ambassadors for their country. Taken together, the paintings of Drysdale and Nolan, the plays of Ray Lawler and the novels of Patrick White have made it possible for other artists from their country to have their work assessed seriously in England: in the same way as Moore’s prestige abroad has broken the ice for younger English artists when their work is subjected to foreign scrutiny.

     The present exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, on view through June and July, was selected by the writer and consists of a broad but condensed survey of what is happening now in Australian painting. The accent is on work by younger artists of the generation following Dobell, Drysdale, Boyd and Nolan. Next winter at the Tate Gallery we may see a larger exhibition of Australian art, with some indication of historical perspective, showing its evolution through the past hundred years. But exhibitions sent out of Australia under government auspices have suffered in the past from strongly conservative constraints, and there seemed to be a case for making an independently selected exhibition to supplement any show that may materialize at the Tate. Large one-man shows are needed more than anything else.

i. From the early nineteenth century onwards, Australian art reveals a natural and instinctive feeling for the sensuality and the plasticity of paint. This is more in evidence than in English painting during a comparable period. The actual sense of touch is more direct and lively than in English painting.

ii. An all-pervading tactile quality, of great freshness and often of considerable urgency, is matched by a high pitched, high keyed tonality and range of colour. The shrill sweetness and the brilliance of Australian colour is often part of the expression of a tightly strung lyricism, whether abstract or figurative in form. This lyricism or extreme romanticism has a bitter-sweet flavour such as we find, roughly speaking, in the world of Berman, Tchelitchev or Chagall — though it would be misleading to invoke those names for any corresponding image. Australian painting often hovers near an acid sentimentality, quite unlike anything in European art. The poker-faced suavity and the reticence of feeling in much European art are almost totally lacking.

iii. Although a tactile sense is so vividly developed in Australian art, a self-conscious element of bravado often enters into the actual manipulation of paint. This highly charged activity is placed, as it were, in inverted commas.

iv. The light, the atmosphere and the texture of the landscape fills Australian art and determines its colour, tonality and density; but the slightly self-conscious tactile quality, so passionate and yet on occasion so detached, may come from the fact that Australian artists have been insurmountably dependent on reproductions for stimulus. Their idea of art, as we know it in Europe, has been largely nourished by these mechanical means.

v. A shock of recognition between men and nature still gives intense life to Australian painting. In Europe, a young artist is faced with the problem of a landscape saturated with the gaze of five centuries of artists. The land is heavy with the buried imagery of his fellow-artists, and all the graveyards of the memory constantly give up their dead. In Australia, the landscape still waits to be humanized, though it is not without association.

vi. Australian painters are still much nearer their own landscape than European artists, still excited about it and often passionately identified with it even when the images they make from it are entirely abstract. Very sophisticated young artists in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth still travel into remote areas of their country and spend long periods of time observing the land, in isolation. They know the geology of the land and the names of plants and trees and the histories of particular regions in a way that European artists do not. It is still possible for Australian artists to get into their landscape and to feel a part of it. This is hard for European artists and almost impossible for English painters. Australian painters have reacted against the ‘gum trees and sheep’ picturesque convention but they are looking at the land with a fresh gaze and from new angles; in some ways extending the possibilities, common also to European and American painting, of integrating a human image with a vision of the land so that the landscape evocation is articulated in terms of human posture, gesture and psychology. This intensity of gaze is similar to the depth of observation in the writings of Lawrence or Faulkner.

vii. An element of paradox enters into Australian painting only to be explained in terms of other paradoxes in the national life and character. For Australia is an ancient land mass on which white people have lived for only a short time. This comparatively new, white race lives in uneasy proximity with an old race, the aboriginals. There is only partial assimilation. The Australians are predominantly northerners living on a southern continent.

     Into this paradoxical situation, the Australians have brought a truly Arcadian sense of life as a reaction against earlier constrictions and oppresslons. Colonial architecture has this Arcadian sense: the style of the old country is transplanted into a new and better climate and becomes transformed, expanded and full of optimism. A small balcony turns into a lofty veranda.

     With this relaxation and optimism comes an almost total irreverence towards authority and a sharp impatience with convention — and yet Australia is still a conservative patriarchy, for a century of mateship has tended to keep women in the background. The anti-authority pattern is accompanied by an equally militant puritanism, so that Australians dislike convention but uphold it. They must be descended from warders as well as convicts. And there is a strong Celtic strain in Australia, notably Irish.

     The land itself is paradoxical. Distances are immense. To travel from Adelaide in the south to Lyre’s Rock in the centre of the continent is to travel the same distance as from London to Moscow. These vast distances and the very real isolation of many Australians give a special edge to whatever is created, as well as to behaviour. The legendary bush itself is often empty and monotonous when seen from a distance — until you get close to it and then it becomes alive with exoticism, for the insects, animals, vegetation and geology are infinitely varied and strange. The deserts and the rivers, the mountains and the jungles are in opposition but each has its kingdom.

viii. All these contrary factors seem to merge together in Australian painting. A friction in the air itself finds expression in the edge and bite which underlines this art. A fierce, tough, often rather slangy imagery is invariably described in the most tender and loving manner though the sensuality of a commonly shared feeling for paint.

ix. The imagery itself, cut off from our European environment, is highly inventive and has one unifying factor: an unremitting sense of the drama of the isolated moment. The specific incident is enmeshed in a generalized statement, like the bush seen close to and then at a distance. Australians have a great sense of the minutiae of experience. They have relentless memories for individual facets of that experience.

x. For a country in which Philistine hostility to art is more active than the smug indifference of the English, there are a startling number of public art prizes and recurring art competitions. Again, a paradox, and the result of a general lack of old possessions or antiques or old master collections in private hands and a need to encourage the establishment of new art. This encouragement is attended by intense criticism and considerable suspicion, but the patronage exists, however warily. It has increased notably in the past decade. The value of art as a cultural property is recognized if not yet widely enjoyed.

     A keenly competitive sense in the Australian character is shared by artists, much stimulated by the prizes and bursaries in existence. The prizes have, in turn, increased because of the competition in terms of cultural prestige that their existence brings to many commercial sources.

xi. Most Australian artists have been through gruelling ordeals in their early years through lack of contact with a sympathetic mental climate, the great hardships of survival in a materialist society — although this society is disconcertingly and unexpectedly imaginative on occasion — and isolation from the main traditions of art. The Renaissance tradition is utterly remote from them. There has never been an exhibition of Italian old master painting in Australia. The roots of Australian art only extend to the impressionists. Present-day artists have had to cut through a provincial strand of impressionism to get through to essential and basic concepts of a possible art form.

xii. If much of the instinctive exuberance and spontaneity of Australian painting comes from a natural plastic sense which is fed by the sun and the climate, like a harsher, more lurid and more tropical version of the Mediterranean countries, then much of their fluency as painters springs also from an early grounding in commercial work. Instead of the teaching routine which so emasculates English painting, Australians contrive to find greater opportunities for commercial art. This gives to their painting a swift, resilient confidence and flowing ease of execution — which can on occasion hover near a certain slickness.

xiii. Abstract painting is as strong, vigorous and inventive in Australia as the work of the semi-figurative artists. Sydney is the main centre for abstract painting, with its cosmopolitan atmosphere, and Melbourne is the stronghold for painting concerned with a more direct imagery and an attempt to build up a mythology of content. Melbourne is the Hampstead of Australia, a place for art movements, craft communities, and a certain home-spun attitude towards art. Sydney is more raffish, not unlike San Francisco in feeling.

xiv. But whether abstract or semi-figurative, a general pull towards metaphysical abstraction now informs nearly all Australian art, in common with America. A nation based upon an idea rather than on blood needs some transcendent image to reveal itself. The work of Nolan, Boyd and Blackman is part of this impulse, for folk art is only a primitive form of metaphysics and much of their earlier work was like a popular ballad. The impulse is also in the abstract work of Passmore, Olsen, Gleghorn, Daws, Molvig and others.

xv. Although abstract painting has gained ground in the past decade, it would be wrong to imagine that it is newly found. A handful of artists in late middle age have been painting abstract pictures in Australia for several decades, notably Miller and Fairweather, and their work is original and absolutely authentic. But Australian painters can still produce an image drawn almost directly from life and project it without embarrassment, recourse to decoration, or that sense of tired doubt which sometimes afflicts semi-figurative painting in Europe. A strong belief in the future gives a convinced momentum to Australian art.

xvi. Australian artists feel a special bond with the aboriginal art of their country, for it is the nearest thing they have to a tradition close at hand. Sometimes the bond has been betrayed by work which merely plagiarizes and vulgarizes this source of inspiration, but more frequently the source has yielded a genuine mythological and formal impetus.

xvii. There is a keen distaste among most painters in Australia, particularly those intent upon abstract terms of reference for their private or concrete physical world, for work which is too self-consciously or heavily Australian in content. The work of those Melbourne artists who have evolved something like an Australian mythology is criticized because of the possible dangers of over exploiting national themes and natural features of Australia, in an opportunist sense. Its enthusiastic reception in Europe, so starved for valid or fresh imagery, has aroused mistrust. There is always the fear in the Australian mind of the sell-out to foreigners, and the possibility of repeating again in a different guise the debased idioms of the ‘sheep and gum tree’ popular art of earlier years.

xviii. The prickly and ambiguous European and American attitude towards nationalism in art is in Australia, as well, with the same confusion between national roots and provincialism. Power politics have made nationalism a dirty word. Australian artists would not deny that their work contains certain qualities which are possibly peculiar to Australian art, but their attitude to all this is very touchy. They are at once passionately interested in what is Australian art and highly suspicious of any answer. At the same time, these problems do not concern the painters so much as critics and interpreters, for whom the painters feel mostly a proper and essential distrust. The best artists in Australia are concerned with problems which unite all art at this moment.

xix. For a country with vigorous and dramatic natural features and a wealth of natural woods and stones, there is a surprising dearth of sculpture. It is mostly bad and lacks the vitality and invention of the painting. The coming decade may produce more and better sculpture, for Australian art is approaching a maturity which can embrace extremely primitive forms, without devitalizing them, and trust an inner creative compulsion without the artificial pressure of trying to discover what art should look like.