No Country for Old Men: Australian Art History’s Difficulty with Aboriginal Art

Abstract

The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting, 1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.

Notes

1 See: Ian McLean, ed., How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (Sydney: Power Publications, 2011), especially 17–75; Susan Lowish, Rethinking Australia’s Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal Art (New York: Routledge, 2018), on pre-1971 approaches to Aboriginal art, particularly anthropologists and natural scientists.

2 Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1960, 1st ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1962); after reprinting in 1965, a revised edition appeared in 1970. Then for the 1991 third edition Terry Smith added three chapters, including on contemporary Aboriginal art, redressing Bernard Smith’s compartmentalisation of Indigenous art. On Smith see: Sheridan Palmer, Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016); Peter Beilharz, Imagining the Antipodes: Culture, Theory, and the Visual in the Work of Bernard Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

3 Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980), 52. On Spectre of Truganini see Tim Bonyhady, ‘The Uncritical Culture’, Eureka Street 7, no. 8 (October 1997): 24–32; above all see McLean’s definitive chapter on the historiography of Indigenous art, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Artworld’, in How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art.

4 On Smith’s refusal to consider Aboriginal art as Australian art see Palmer, 275–79; also see Susan Lowish, ‘European Vision and Aboriginal Art: Blindness and Insight in the Work of Bernard Smith’, Thesis Eleven 82 (2005): 62–71.

5 Smith, Australian Painting, 115.

6 Bernard Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1945), 21.

7 Ibid. Smith's emphasis.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: A Study in the History of Art and Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

12 R.M. Crawford, ‘European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850. A Study in the History of Art and Ideas by Bernard Smith’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 10, no. 39 (November 1962): 379–81.

13 Ibid., 381.

14 See Eric Dark, ‘Political Bias of the Press’, Meanjin 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1948): 23–29.

15 Letter by Joseph Burke to Clem Christesen, dated 25 October 1949, cited in Lynne Strahan, Just City and the Mirrors: Meanjin Quarterly and the Intellectual Front, 1940–1965 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), 124.

16 John Brack, ‘Critic or Historian? Bernard Smith, Australian Painting 1788–1960 [review]’, Australian Book Review 2, no. 1 (December 1962): 26.

17 Elwyn Lynn, ‘In Our Image; Bernard Smith: Australian Painting, 1788–1960 [review]’, Nation, 15 December 1962, 21–22, 21.

18 Ibid., 21.

19 Robert Hughes, The Art of Australia (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970).

20 Terry Smith, ‘Marking Places, Cross-Hatching Worlds: The Yirrkala Church Panels’, E-Flux Journal 111 (September 2020), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/111/345649/marking-places-cross-hatching-worlds-the-yirrkala-panels/ (accessed 1 May 2023).

21 Howard Morphy, ‘Acting in a Community; Art and Social Cohesion in Indigenous Australia’, Humanities Research Journal XV, no. 2 (2009): 115–31, 119.

22 Terry Smith, ‘Color-Form Painting: Sydney 1965–1970’, Other Voices 1, no. 1 (June–July 1970): 6–17, 6.

23 Ibid., 13. Smith's emphasis.

24 Ibid.

25 For a first-hand account of early 1970s Papunya artists, in particular their self-awareness about making ambitious art, see John Kean (who was a young art advisor at Papunya), ‘Dot, Circle and Frame: How Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, Tim Leura, Clifford Possum and Johnny Warangula Created Papunya Tula Art’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2020).

26 See Karel Kupka, Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965), originally Un Art a l'Etat Brut. Peintures et Sculptures des Aborigenes d'Australie (Lausanne: La Guilde du Livre, 1962). Kupka predicted, ‘today is the golden age for Aboriginal plastic arts … their disappearance is inexorably drawing near’ (166), a sentiment consistent with the tendency then to imagine the end of Aboriginal culture; see Nicholas Rothwell, ‘The Collector: Karel Kupka in North Australia’, The Monthly (October 2007), https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2007/october/1281338813/nicolas-rothwell/collector#mtr (accessed 1 May 2023). Also see Howard Morphy, ‘Coming to Terms with Aboriginal Art in the 1960s’, in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 153–67.

27 See Ronald Berndt, ed., Australian Aboriginal Art (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1964); Ure Smith was Art and Australia’s publisher; also see A.P. Elkin, Catherine Berndt, and Ronald Berndt, Art in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1950); those anthropologists wrote about art to explain traditional Aboriginal culture. Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) curator–painter Tony Tuckson wrote his essay, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Western World’, for Berndt’s 1964 book cited above, 60–68.

28 Tuckson, ‘Aboriginal Art and the Western World’, 60; Berndt expresses queasiness about Tuckson’s claims in that book’s ‘Epilogue’ (69–74).

29 Vivien Johnson, The Art of Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (Sydney: Gordon and Breach Arts International, 1994).

30 See Patrick McCaughey, ‘The Significance of The Field’, Art and Australia 6, no. 3 (December 1968): 235–42; McCaughey approved of Color-Form painting as the ‘alignment of Australian art with the modernist tradition’ (235).

31 Terry Smith, ‘The Provincialism Problem’, Artforum 13, no. 1 (September 1974): 54–59.

32 ‘Provincialism Problem’ appeared two years after Sandra Le Brun Holmes’s book, Yirawala: Artist and Man (Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1972), two years before the Sydney-based art journal Art and Australia’s special issue, ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’, of January 1976.

33 Terry Smith, ‘Aboriginal Art: Its Genius Explained’, The Independent Monthly (September 1989): 18–19; ‘Aboriginality: Contemporary Aboriginal Paintings & Prints by Jennifer Isaacs’, Australian Journal of Anthropology 1, no. 1 (1990): 63–65; ‘Aboriginal Art Now: Writing Its Variety and Vitality’, in Contemporary Aboriginal Art 1990: From Australia, Australia Council exhibition catalogue (Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1990), 3–14.

34 Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

35 Gary Catalano, ‘A Trespasser Confronts an Unlikely Hero’, The Age, 31 May 1989, 14.

36 For Tim and Vivien Johnson’s 1980 Papunya visit see Donna Leslie, Spiritual Journeying: The Art of Tim Johnson (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019), 30–33.

37 Daniel Thomas, curator and ed., Venice Biennale 1978: From Nature to Art, from Art to Nature, John Davis, Robert Owen, Ken Unsworth, exhibition catalogue (Sydney: Visual Arts Board, Australia Council, 1978).

38 Norbert Loeffler, ‘John Davis’, in Thomas, 5.

39 John Davis, artist’s statement, Singular and Plural, exhibition catalogue (Adelaide: South Australian School of Art Gallery, 1985), not paginated.

40 Suzi Gablik, ‘Report from Australia’, Art in America (January 1981): 29–37.

41 Paul Taylor, ‘Introduction. Special Section: Antipodality’, Art & Text, no. 6 (Winter 1982): 49.

42 Imants Tillers, ‘Locality Fails’, Art & Text, no. 6 (Winter 1982): 51–60.

43 Juan Davila, ‘Aboriginality: A Lugubrious Game’, Art & Text, nos. 23–24 (March–May 1987), 53–56.

44 Tony Fry and Anne-Marie Willis, ‘Aboriginal Art: Symptom or Success?’, Art in America (July 1989): 108–63; also see the furious response by Roger Benjamin, ‘Aboriginal Art: Exploitation or Empowerment?’, Art in America (July 1990): 73–81.

45 A first instance of this shift is Nicholas Baume, ‘The Interpretation of Dreamings: The Australian Aboriginal Acrylic Movement’, Art & Text, no. 33 (1989): 110–20.

46 Ian Burn et al., The Necessity of Australian Art: An Essay About Interpretation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1988).

47 Ibid., 8.

48 Ibid., 8–9.

49 Ibid., 132.

50 Ibid., 7.

51 Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, ‘The Transfiguration of Albert Namatjira’, The Age Monthly Review (November 1986), republished in Ian Burn, Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 52–66, 62.

52 See Ian Burn and Ann Stephen, ‘Namatjira’s White Mask: A Partial Interpretation’, in The Heritage of Namatjira: The Watercolorists of Central Australia, ed. Jane Hardy, J.V.S. Megaw and M. Ruth Megaw (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1992), 249–82.

53 Ian Burn, ‘The Re-Appropriation of Influence’, in Australian Biennale 1988: From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c. 1940–1988, exhibition catalogue, Nick Waterlow (curator) (Sydney, Biennale of Sydney, 1988), 41–48.

54 See Bernard Smith, ‘On Cultural Convergence’ (1986), in The Death of the Artist as Hero: Essays in History and Culture (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), 289–302; on cultural convergence between Indigenous and White art see Patrick McCaughey, Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2014); Sasha Grishin, Australian Art: A History (Melbourne, Miegunyah Press, 2015).