To the applause of a public meeting in Sydney on January 28, 1944, artist Mary Edwards urged that children and pregnant women not be allowed into the National Gallery of New South Wales until it had removed William Dobell's portrait of Joshua Smith, which had just won the 1943 Archibald prize for portraiture. The Daily Telegraph, projecting itself as the voice of an otherwise invisible and inarticulate entity called 'the general public,' reported that only three out of fifty people interviewed had said they liked Dobell's painting. The paper was helping to set up a court of public opinion in which the claims of a new kind of art were to be debated and judged.
There was another court. In October, 1944, the New South Wales Supreme Court heard argument on behalf of Mary Edwards and others that the National Gallery Trustees had breached the terms of the Archibald bequest by selecting a caricature rather than a portrait. Among those who supported this view was former Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who said 'Dobell's work is remarkable but it departs from true portraiture.' The judge disagreed, ruling that 'Joshua Smith' was a portrait within the terms of J.F., Archibald's will.
This famous judgement can be celebrated as Progress - a defeat of narrow and vindictive conservatism by an enlightened minority, and a victorious episode in the retarded advance of artistic modernism in the Antipodes. But to join 'our' history with the world history of modernism in this way is to elide the issue of national identity. The 'elites' and 'publics' produced in the rhetoric of Australian debates about modern art are cross-cut by another axis: nation versus imperium. Thirty years after the Dobell case, the press again displayed a range of opinion for and against a modernist work, Jackson Pollock's 'Blue Poles.' The 1970s debates featured terms of praise and disapproval similar to those used in the 1940s, but configured differently. In noting the differences, it is possible to trace a (speculative) history of the self-consciousness of the middle and professional strata.
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1939-44: 'A Convincing Picture of Australian Life'
There are ironies in the Dobell case. Dobell saw himself as more classical than modern, as he understood those words. It was as a student of Rembrandt, rather than of Picasso, that he painted the human form. It is ironic, too, that the controversy about his work erupted in Sydney rather than in Melbourne. Bernard Smith (1981:26-34) and Janine Burke (1981:35-41) have argued that Sydney was more receptive than Melbourne to changes in artistic fashion, that Sydney's art world was built around commercial institutions including a number of department stores with galleries, and that the visual themes of modernism adorned an affluent, if superficial Sydney lifestyle. Melbourne was the place where serious debates went on about the purpose and value of different kinds of art. The close alignment of several Melbourne modernists with the left in politics was hardly paralleled in Sydney.1
That it was in portraiture rather than landscape that the conservatives made their stand is a third irony. Landscape painting was the genre in which there seems to have been the most solid base for popular hostility to modernism. The paintings of the Heidelberg school had become not only respectable but canonical by 1939. Artists such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Elioth Gruner, David Davies and Fred McCubbin were well represented in public collections, and artists who worked in their tradition, such as Hans Heysen and W.B. Mclnnes, sold well and won prizes between the wars. In this tradition there were established techniques for rendering the light, flora and topography of the pastoral regions of Australia, techniques which defined standards of painterly excellence (Hughes, 1981; Burn, 1980; Burn, 1982).
Opponents of modernism were often defenders of the Heidelberg school. The Bulletin's 'Red Page,' under Doublas Stewart's editorship, joining the discussion of Dobell's Archibald Prize, was concerned at the emergence of the landscape equivalent of 'Joshua Smith,' the 'slum backyards' such as those entered for the Wynne Prize for landscape by Sali Herman. An apparently mordant urban imagery threatened to displace the dominant images of pastoral splendour. Good landscape painting was central to national pride, 'Gruner, Streeton ... were not only fine creators of art, but creators of a nation,' the 'Red Page' boomed. Attacking the Sydney Morning Herald's defence of modernist tendencies in Australian painting, the 'Red Page' scorned the trend towards 'more "melancholy" in Australian landscapes' as typical of the Herald's infatuation with European decadence.2 Sydney Ure
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Smith, President in Sydney of the Society of Artists, told ABC listeners in 1940:
Advocates of the distortionist modern art group will have a tough time to produce a convincing picture of Australian life ... A dose of life on a sheep or cattle station might turn some of our local modernists into bearded he-men and their paintings would improve in the process.
The Melbourne painter, Max Meldrum, had said in 1937 that 'modern art is a pathological symptom of disease' (Lawler, 1937:55). Another artist and critic, Lionel Lindsay, in his 1943 polemic Addled Art, called modern art 'Jewish' and 'Bolshevik.' Strangely, Lindsay was one of the Trustees who awarded the Archibald to Dobell. Portraiture was a more difficult terrain than landscape painting on which to mark the lines of battle. In landscapes there was less doubt about what was at stake. Lindsay commended Tom Roberts for 'painting our characteristic life, which he rightly centred on the pastoral industry' (Lindsay, 1943:62).
But many artists did not agree with Meldrum and Lindsay. They had been learning the lessons of European post-Impressionist painting and sculpture in the schools of George Bell and Arnold Shore (in Melbourne) and of Grace Crowley and Rah Frizelle (in Sydney), schools more open to modernist inclinations in their students than Melbourne's National Gallery school and the East Sydney Technical College. There were enough of these students to form Contemporary Art Societies in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide in 1938. Sir Keith Murdoch's Melbourne Herald exhibitions of recent European painting in 1931 and 1939 encouraged them, and people in Sydney could see post-Impressionist work in 1936 at an International Art Exhibition. Melbourne's Contemporary Art Society presented its first annual show in 1939. These efforts were needed to counter a curatorial caution that was evident when modern works in the Herald exhibition of 1939 (sponsored jointly by the Daily Telegraph) could not return to wartime Europe: the paintings were placed for some time in storage, rather than put on permanent display, a decision scorned by the Sydney Morning Herald in its editorial on Dobell's prize.
These developments polarized the tastes of people interested in art, and the debate seemed to Brian Penton a turning point in Australia's history. Penton, editor of the Daily Telegraph from 1941, pointed to a deep psychological connection in many powerful Australians between their adherence to the country's tradi-
29 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
tional economic role within the British Empire and their intellectual complacency and provinciality. In Advance Australia where? (1943) Penton urged Australians to take stock of their country, to think critically about its past and to welcome the changes that he saw as necessary. He championed modernist art, acclaimed Dobell 'one of the greatest contemporary British (sic) painters,' and sat for him as a subject. Art such as Dobell's, he observed, was an enemy of complacency, a 'flight from the rural scene to the sophistication of a great modern city, a pendulum swing from innocent extroversion to introversion and complex soul-searching.3
To see Dobell's significance in this way was more than Pen-ton's fancy. By 1939 some economists, politicians and industrialists were no longer satisfied to see Australia forever a pastoral dominion in an imperial trading system. They wanted an economy based more than ever before on urban manufacturing. The needs of war advanced their cause. The Labor government, in office from late 1941, could more easily seize the chance to make Australia an industrial nation than could the non-Labor parties because its traditional constituency included most of the urban working class and excluded most owners and workers in rural industries. It was both perceptive and persuasive of Penton to connect the aesthetic to the political-economic defences of the pastoral vision of Australia. Penton's exhortations about the nation's future helped pass the initiative in public affairs in the 1940s from those who gave pastoral industries priority to industrialists and to an urban middle class that was beginning to rejoice in its own discovery of modernism.
During the war a number of writers made a connection between democracy and design, promoting a new, functional conception of the artist as designer of everyday objects. The student frustrated 'that he wasn't going to turn out to be a Peter Paul Rubens, now prides himself that as a designer of kitchen utensils in chrome or steel or plastics - he isn't bad at all,' wrote artist Hal Missingham (1943:70). Sydney Ure Smith had begun to publish Australia: National Journal in 1939 'to give expression to our progress in Art, Architecture and Industry' and to 'form a practical link between them.' In the first issue, R. Haughton James (1939:87-91), 'designer and publicist,' announced the foundation of the Design Industries Association of Australia. If Australian manufacturers were to export, he argued, they would have to compete with the standards of design that had been fostered in Europe and the United States between the wars. He espoused a doctrine of form without clutter, of design that fitted purpose.
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Virulently anti-Victorian ('that cosmic farce, the Great Exhibition of 1851') he reproduced in his article a precis of the teaching principles of the Bauhaus School of Design and paid tribute to its founder in 1919, Walter Gropius.
Exhibitions of exemplary design, said James, 'are best put in shops. Fine art galleries savour too much of that bogus figure, the bearded artist. Everything must be done to demonstrate that good design is for ordinary people in the ordinary things in their own homes.' Art was 'the common sense solution to every problem,' wrote Frank Medworth in the 1943 Society of Artists' Yearbook. 'Whether it be the question of what picture shall decorate a wall, what chair you will feel comfortable in, or whether the sign over the shop window shall be well spaced and legible or not.' To Sir Keith Murdoch it appeared that Australia, 'so strong in so many desirable ways, is very ill-trained in its aesthetic sense' (1946:11). In the way Australians dressed, their housing and furniture, their bad town planning, Sir Keith saw evidence supporting this assertion. To make Australia a modern society of practical elegance was one of the tasks of post-war reconstruction.6
With such notions in the air it is not surprising that Penton was confident that a section of thoughtful opinion would welcome the stimnulus of the modern in art and would join him in questioning Australia's cultural and political leadership. In 1937 Robert Menzies had been equally confident, speaking, as he claimed, for a 'class of people which will, in the next hundred years, determine the permanent place to be occupied in the world of art by those painting today.' Menzies had suggested that an Australian Academy of Art be established, to restore authority to tastes challenged by modernism. Prime Minister Lyons did not seek the King's patronage for the Academy, as Menzies wanted, as he thought the idea would divide the artistic community. But the Academy held several shows in Sydney and Melbourne, until the middle years of the war, rivalling the Contemporary Art Societies. Penton and Menzies and the tendencies for which they stood struggled to define the interests and tastes of what Menzies called 'the reasonably cultivated layman.'4
The Press was the only institution which could give any substance to this vague and disputed figure. In his pro-modernist polemic Arquebus (1937), the artist Adrian Lawlor had reprinted thirty-five letters to Melbourne newspapers commenting on Menzies' proposal. They were evenly divided in their verdicts. However, there were important consistencies in the ways writers on both sides of the debate characterized 'the public'
30 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
The anti-modernist tended to value the broad intelligibility of traditional landscapes and portraits. 'Great art,' Menzies told the guests at the opening of the Victorian Artists Society Show 'speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today talk a different language.' Pro-modernists agreed that they were more distant from the 'public' Dobell worried that the public's lack of familiarity with art was a problem. Commenting on the public discussion of his prize he referred to an 'average slice of the pulic, which resents anything new.' People 'who have no qualifications to criticize are condemning my success.' Other defenders of modernism also made a distinction between the qualified and the unqualified. Lawlor wrote of his 'increasing awareness of the gulf that divides one's own opinion from that of the "plain man" where aesthetic values are concerned.' He cited a letter from George Bell saying that lay taste was not sufficiently qualified to have 'sympathy with earnestness of aesthetic purpose.'
The pro-modernists could not afford to value a broad audience for art. Some people's hostility, being uninformed, did not matter. But to refuse the criterion of popularity did not entail that pro-modernists entified with any particular elite public: their constituency was imagined not so much in sociological as in spiritual terms. Pro-modernists were more confident in describing enemies than supporters. Critic Clive Turnbull in 1947 condemned the anti-modernist public as wealthy philistines. Traditional landscapes were 'the delight of the wealthy lower orders,' a socially acceptable investment, 'well-beloved of politicians' and accepted 'by members of the more opulent clubs.'
Nor did opponents of the modern necessarily celebrate the popular. Sir Lionel Lindsay loftily acknowledged that the traditions he favoured did not require a trained public. 'Without for a moment pretending to a knowledge of art, the public likes pictures, and in the last thirty years its taste has improved.'
These polarities in the evaluation of art's intelligibility to the general public arose with particular force when the Press displaced the Gallery as the institution constituting the public. At the cost of acknowledging some isolation from the broadest public, the pro-modernists could enjoy a benefit intrinsic to the social logic of avant-gardeism. Assured of the democratic application of designed objects, they could also enjoy the sense of distinction that modernist painting conferred on those who were not daunted by its difficulty or its apparent ugliness. In fact some could see themselves as leaders and educators. R. Haughton James, Sydney
31 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
artist and teacher, in his 1947 primer Art Appreciation, distinguished between seeing an object aesthetically, 'as a thing-in-itself,' and seeing it naively, non-aesthetically, 'as a thing-with-a-story.' An education in art appreciation would enable viewers to go beyond the naive to understand the obscure and irreducibly aesthetic qualities of much that was modern. We can deduce from James' argument that a reason for modernism's heroic reputation has been the potential of 'difficulty' to confer a sense of expertize on the appreciative viewer. If art, by becoming more widely available through published reproduction and display in public collections, was losing some of its power to confer distinction on its viewers, as Benjamin suggested, then perhaps difficulty in the modern movement established privileged access on a new basis, and so helped to define a distinctive social identity for those possessing cultural capital.
1973-7: Modernism as Monument
In August, 1973, the Press reported that the Council of the Australian National Gallery, led by its Director, James Mollison, had agreed to purchase a large abstract canvas 'Blue Poles,' by the New York painter, Jackson Pollock. The seller, a Texas oil millionaire, would receive US$2 million or A$l,348,177. This figure advertized a new determination by the government to buy art. In the three years 1967-9, the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board had spent $518,000, only $150,000 of which was used on the Australian National Gallery's collection.
Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, able to take for granted support from the labour movement and from working class voters, developed a rhetorical rapport with a public that saw itself as educated but ignored by government. Because his government promised to fund the arts more handsomely than the coalition had done, such people celebrated his victory in December, 1972, as a rout of the philistines. The Whitlam government promised to build an Australian National Gallery.
News of the Pollock purchase touched off a wide public discussion of arts policy, further fuelled by the purchase of William de Kooning's 'Woman V for A$723,000 in 1974, and by the Fraser cabinet's decision to block the purchase of Braque's 'La Grande Nue' in 1977. The newspapers again made public reaction to these events possible and visible.
Hostility to 'Blue Poles' was not backed by dogmatic arguments for the kind of realist art that had been favoured by academicians
32 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
in the 1940s. Critical standards and the judgements of curators had become more pluralist since the 1940s. In a 1951 exhibition marking the jubilee of federation, in a National Galleries of Australia exhibition sent to Canada in 1957-8, and in 1962, when the Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board responded to an invitation from the Tate Gallery, traditional paintings were mixed with works of abstract and figurative modernism, by painters such as Sir Russell Drysdale, Sali Herman (painted of slum backyards), William Dobell, Arthur Boyd, Noel Counihan, Donald Friend and Sidney Nolan. Menzies wrote the foreword of the catalogue of the Tate exhibition, and in 1959-60, he consented to having his portrait painted for Time magazine by Dobell, who became Sir William in 1966.
Sydney painters had the reputation of being more abstract, as was evident in the exhibition 'Direction I' in 1956. The stature of artists such as Ian Fairweather, Godfrey Miller and John Pass-more grew as critics and curators in Britain, the United States and Australian recognized that the formal problems of painting itself were its proper subject. The critical realism of Melbourne modernists such as Noel Counihan, Albert Tucker and Danila Vassilieff enjoyed less prestige, especially in Sydney, than painting which was subjective and formal. Seven artists, six of them resident in Melbourne, expressed concern with this trend in an exhibition in 1959, featuring their 'Antipodean Manifesto': Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Robert Dickerson (who alone worked in Sydney). Bernard Smith, a historian and teacher of art who drafted the Manifesto, recently re-stated its politics as a critique of censorship. If 'the future now lay entirely with abstraction ... artists would be faced with a new and highly insidious kind of censorship proceeding not from a moral or religious point of view - that kind of censorship modernism had learned to combat successfully - but a censorship that had been constructed within the aesthetic realm itself and to which artists working figurally had no ready answer.' The Manifesto argued that, if art were to go on communicating, the inage must be re-emphasized in painting. The image 'communicates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences that the artist shares with his audience.' The Antipodeans were inheritors of modern paintings' figurative traditions and were certainly not anti-modernist. However, by insisting on wide intelligibility, they echoed the rhetoric of those who had rejected Dobell as 'modern' in the 1940s. It was no longer necessary or advisable to conduct the argument about intelligibility from the standpoint of a traditionalism self consciously external to the modern.5
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According to Smith, people inclined towards abstract painting resisted the Manifesto. For artists and art lovers who saw themselves as liberated from the traditionalism of the Academy, there was now an opportunity to link Australian art not to the 'people' but to the international history of the modern. In Britain in the early 1960s Australian painting, including some of the work of the Antipodeans, was praised because of its primitive power and for what some saw as its freedom from the formal conventions of Western art since the Renaissance. This kind of praise, insofar as it de-emphasized the documentary in favour of the mythic, may also have heartened the partisans of abstraction in Australia. In any case the approval of London was being challenged by that of New York. Abstraction allowed many critics, painters and curators to identify with an international milieu whose capital was New York, the city which had taken from the cities of western Europe the status of being the fount of progress in art.
The attitude of the wider public to non-figurative art remained untested by scandal in the 1960s, though among the buyers of pictures, there is evidence of a clear division of taste between admirers of 'realist' and of 'contemporary' painting. Jim Main, the historian who made this point in those terms in 1965 (Davies and Encel, 1965:176-89), found also that among members of the National Gallery Society of Victoria, the works of Dobell, Drysdale and Sidney Nolan (in that order) were most popular. In accepting these painters, now among the more figurative of contemporary Australian artists, into an overwhelmingly figurative national canon, this dedicated public substantiated the Antipodeans' remarks about the image. When the Australian offered readers cheap Australian prints in 1975, seven of the thirteen paintings were landscapes of the Heidelberg school and their immediate followers, and the other works were on the figurative side of modernism. They were accessible to a public that wanted pictures of something. In 1980, research for the Australia Council found that 'modern sculpture' and 'abstract paintings' attracted a smaller proportion of people (13.4% and 11.9%) than 'traditional Australian paintings' (46.5%).10
Politicians in the 1970s judged that it was safe to deride abstract or semi-abstract work. Of the Braque, Lindsay Thompson, acting Premier of Victoria, said 'It's not even a decent looking nude. It looks more like a rugby front row forward who has suffered a couple of dislocations.' Queensland Premier Bjel ke-Peter sen called it 'a pregnant sumo wrestler.' Sir Leon Trout, Chairman of Trustees of the Queensland Art Gallery said of paintings such as 'Blue Poles,' 'you would have to be sick to buy them and sick to appreciate them.'
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'Blue Poles,' it was revealed in October, 1973, was probably painted by Pollock and friends when they were drunk. In modernist thought there were arguments in favour of accidental methods of painting and against 'craftsmanship' and individual genius. But the market and critical attention had continued to focus on the peculiarities of individual artists and to pay handsomely for genius. Was painting a Pollock 'simply a matter of bringing out your oil can and dripping paint everywhere,' to, quote painter Andrew Sibley? Senator Ian Wood, a Liberal from Queensland, said 'you have to be chickered to do "Blue Poles".' Comedian and former Sydney Harbour Bridge painter Paul Hogan appealed to the same preference for recognizable images from orderly minds when he likened 'Blue Poles' to 'the mess I've seen in the paint shed down at the Bridge.' When a Daily Mirror hoarding proclaimed 'Drunks did it,' the Prime Minister's Department made the proper but inadequate reply that that was irrelevant.6
The Council of the Australian National Gallery believed that it should buy masterpieces representative of all schools of Western painting, including abstract expressionism. In an address frequently cited in the Art Galleries Association of Australia Bulletin in the 1970s, Sir Kenneth Clark, an influential British art historian, had said that although 'the taste of the majority turns towards those works of art that cost the least amount of effort,' a good collection 'must represent the free personal choice of an individual lover of art; it must have some of the splendour and authority of the great princely collections; and it must contain pictures which confirm and extend the vision of the average man' (Stewart and Phillip, 1964).
Many 'average' men and women did not concede that authority to Mollison and his Council, if the letter columns of the dailies are any guide. The press was by then technically better able to present the issue to readers. Dobell had complained in 1944 that a newspaper's black and white photo of his work did not do it justice. In December, 1973, the Melbourne Herald published a colour reproduction of 'Blue Poles' on its front page and asked: 'Would you pay $1.3 million for this?' Mollison, while critical of the media's treatment of his purchase, was undaunted. 'Blue Poles' was 'one of the half dozen great things made this century,' he said. Sandra McGrath, the Australian's critic, had used similar words. Some reporters styled Mollison a 'Medici in blue jeans' striding the world with his cheque book. Patrick McCaughey, later appointed Director of the Victorian National Gallery, said that Mollison's audacity promised a 'dazzling collection.'
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Mollison said of people who refused to be dazzled, that their 'awareness of art has been awakened by a particular work and not through concern for art over a long period.' In some statements, Mollison seemed to invoke the interests of an international and professional public, people like himself and McCaughey. He said he wanted the Australian National Gallery's collection to rate highly with the curators, patrons and critics of other notable museums in New York, Paris and London. He would join this big league with a collection which, while small, was similar in its range to those of the great galleries. Indeed, when the Gallery opened, critics Julie Ewington and Ian Burn found that the arrangement of the collection resembled that of New York's Museum of Modern Art and so implied a progression in the history of Western painting towards abstraction 'in which Jackson Pollock's "Blue Poles" is a magnificent centrepiece.'7
There was some point politically in Mollisons invoking the opinions of a specialized public. Senator Reg Wright, a Liberal from Western Australia, conceded that he took experts seriously when he challenged the government to name the experts on whose advice the purchase had been made. The government defensively paraded the reputations of the members of the Gallery's Council. Other critics wanted a wider canvassing of opinion, though not too wide. A Canberra Times editorial noted that 'expert opinion is at times far removed from popular feeling' and said, 'there is room for wider consultation ... with educated lay people/ Donald Brook, Professor of Fine Arts at Flinders University, seemed to agree with these doubts when he asked 'why should we not ensure that the whole of educated taste is influential in buying?' Mollison's only concession to such qualified populism was to say that two public servants who once accompanied him to see the painting had been 'shattered by the effect it had on them ... They said you know when you are in the presence of a great masterpiece.' 8
In 1977, the Australian National Gallery Council accepted Mollison's advice to buy Braque's 'La Grande Nue,' as it had supported his choice of 'Blue Poles.' But Federal Cabinet now had the power to veto purchases over $100,000 - Fraser's attempt to avoid Whitlam's reputation for free spending - and it said 'no' to the Braque. In Sydney, the Sydney Morning Herald under the heading 'What the experts think,' reported artists, including Leonard French, Leslie Rees and John Brack protesting at the insult to the governing body of the Gallery. Lesley Walford, who wrote for the Sun Herald on interior design, said that Cabinet's decision created a crisis in which 'the tastemakers must stand up
36 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
and fight, for they are the ones who know to care when the broader masses of the people are not alerted to the danger,' The view that the Council represented a popular interest in art thwarted by the Cabinet's mean philistinism was soon put to the test in the Australian. After a Queensland reader sent a donation towards the cost of 'La Grande Nue,' the editor, sensing a popular crusade, solicited other readers' money, hoping to mobilize a popular rebuke of the government. The results were pitiful - $1,424 from 275 donors - and the appeal was dropped. A petition in favour of the purchase got only 500 signatures in Sydney, though it got 7,000 in Melbourne. The Adelaide Advertiser and the Sydney Sun supported Mollison in editorials. The Australian printed several letters for the veto and several against it. A letter fo the Age invited Mollison to explain the importance of 'La Grande Nue.' He did not.9
Several people commented that referring purchases to Cabinet would throw artistic judgements into the political arena. Sir William Dargie, official portraitist of Sir Robert Menzies, said that uninformed people would thereby prevail. Did he mean Cabinet Ministers or voters? Elwyn Lynn, Director of the Power Institute of Contemporary Art at Sydney University, and a powerful promoter of the abstract, had earlier cast doubt on the principle of public accountability of curator's decisions because it would turn 'every art-minded Tom, Dick and Helen into Trustees.'10
But for a body of 'informed people' to exist, as was so often assumed, there had to be a tradition of critical commentary, of orthodox valuations, a shared sense of a canon of good taste. Because such traditions had hardly begun to crystallize around work as contemporary as Pollock's, and because Australian evaluations of pure abstraction differed so sharply, Mollison found that he could not appeal to a consensus of informed taste. Sir Daryl Lindsay, while chairman of the Interim Council of the Australian National Gallery, had anticipated this problem. Sir Daryl had advized Melbourne's Felton Bequest Committee in their buying of works of art which they thought represented the greatness of the European past. It was always difficult to decide which were the 'art monuments of the day,' he said in 1963. 'Perhaps we are too close to these monuments to make a true estimate of semi-abstract and abstract art, but it is desirable to have representative examples in our collection as they will be of considerable interest to future scholars and historians' (Lindsay, 1963:55).
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a figure Mollison did not wish to disclose. He was worried that to do so might attract vandalism, force up the price of other contemporary works, and distort public evaluation of the painting. Whitlam insisted on revealing the price because it was a publicly accountable purchase. This was bold, for it soon became known that at US$2 million, the price was four times any amount previously paid for a Pollock work. Sir William Dargie said that the Gallery 'could have had a Rembrandt' for the money. Art market writer Terry Ingram mentioned a Cezanne or a Picasso. Some letters to newspapers estimated the number of people who could be housed for that amount. Revealing the price paid from the public purse allowed the value of masterpieces to be calculated in terms of human welfare foregone.11
Some critics thought the Australian National Gallery had foundered in waters uncharted by critical consensus. The artist and teacher Paul Atroshenko, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald that Mollison was the victim of a sophisticated marketing strategy employed by the American owners of abstract expressionist paintings, whose tax concessions increased with the rising value of any art they loaned to public collections. The Melbourne Herald critic Alan McCulloch complained that the Pollock and de Kooning pure bases had now inflated the prices of all modernist work. (Some replied that if so, other modernist work bought by the government would prove to be sound investments.) Bernard Smith said that it was now all too clear that Australia 'had loads of cheap money and a provincial enthusiasm for the recent past.' He preferred to see such sums spent on the production and enjoyment of art in Australia. Finally, the Brisbane Courier Mail asked 'Are we trying to show the world how opulent we are?'12
Defenders of Mollison's judgement did not flinch from answering a proud 'yes': the Australian National Gallery had made an aristocratic gesture to Australian citizens and to the world. The artistic judgements of the 'opulent' have traditionally held authority. In the societies in which princely collections were first possible, wealth and good taste verified each other. But in Sir Daryl Lindsay's opinion, 'Australia has not yet produced a connoisseur class.' Could connoisseur public servants with large budgets be a substitute? Indeed they could, for it was a nation, rather than a class, which glorified itself in the Pollock purchase. Sir Russell Drysdale thought it was good to see Australia realizing that it had to pay for great works.' Sandra McGrath believed that the Australian National Gallery's purchases 'have in an incredibly short time enlarged and to some extent changed forever the image of
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Australia in the eyes of the world.' Eric Westbrook, Director of the National Gallery in Victoria, welcomed them as 'heralding the end of the cultural cringe in Australia.'13
The difficulty of pricing a priceless masterpiece seemed to be both the saving and the damnation of the decision to buy 'Blue Poles.' Mollison's worry that knowledge of the price would distort the public's evaluation of the work implies that the painting could have had an intrinsic value not reflected in the current price. Yet the intrinsic value was not easy to determine and to state convincingly. The plausibility of Mollison's judgement in paying an amount so much above the current market rested partly on a public trust in his and the Council's connoisseurship. Mollison had to present his judgement as exceptional but reliable. Many Australians refused to be impressed.
At no point did Mollison appear to be worried. No doubt the approval of that specialized international public with which he identified sustained his confidence. That public could be invoked as a kind of Greek chorus confirming Australia's nationhood. Whitlam (1985) recalled he had made himself an instance of that modern nationhood when he put 'Blue Poles' on his 1973 Christmas card 'to somewhat provocative effect.' Since it was Whitlam's masterstroke to reveal a price which vastly exceeded any previous evaluation of Pollock's work - a lordly flourish that Menzies might have envied.
Conclusion
To note that art sometimes becomes a scandal is to note the effects of newspapers and the electronic media displacing the gallery as the institution constituting public responsiveness. Perhaps it is the Press, rather than galleries as legitimating havens of artistic experiment, which is the characteristic site of modernism, the condition and vaunt of its provocations. By looking at the terms of newspaper discussion of two art scandals in recent Australian history, I have tried to describe some of modernism's local social history. It is a story of the crystallization of public and collective cultural identities for what some have called the 'new class.'
It is notoriously difficult to establish a definition of modernism. In the perspective I have taken, it is reasonable to suggest its sociological continuity: modernism in painting creates a distinction between publics rejecting the modern as morally repugnant and pictorially unintelligible and publics finding in the modern
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something beyond common senses of the good and beautiful and expressing more precious and critical truths. Modern art as scandal makes public and dramatic a latent difference between the innocent (sometimes vile in their innocence) and the cognoscenti (sometimes arrogant in their clairvoyance).
The avant garde is implicit in this account of modernism, for it is the 'avant' which divides the public and, from one point of view, gives some a sense of being further along history's path. Both Penton and the apologists of Whitlam's leadership linked artistic with political progress. But the difficulty of avant garde ism, again notorious, is that, especially when the Press invokes the widest possible public, the popular constituency claimed by political reformers can be portrayed as hostile to any abstrusely progressive High Culture. Conservative populism is a staple theme of Australian political rhetoric, and Whitlam took risks in distancing himself from it.
But perhaps this contradiction within avant gardeism does not matter to modern social democracy. Penton and Whitlam mobilized and shaped constituencies of affluent, formally-educated middle class people as the essential constituencies of modernizing Labor parties. The cultural gap between Labor leaders and traditional Labor supporters matters less than the cultural solidarity between reformist leaders and the intelligentsia that will renovate entrepreneurial action and implement new public sector programmes. Such solidarity has not been effected by explicit symbols of class, but by symbols of urbanity and of achieved nationhood.
Between the Dobell and the 'Blue Poles' scandals, Canberra grew into a capital city. To grasp the symbolic significances of this in the 'Blue Poles' debate, we must remember some history. In the 1930s and 1940s there was a struggle within the Australian bourgeoisie over Australia's dominion economic status, over the mode of Australia's political integration, and over its cultural subordination to Britain. The Curtin and Chifley governments initiated a change in the direction of Australia's economic growth which transformed Australia from a loose federation of pastoral economies into a south-eastern bloc of industrialized cities, framed by an enlarged and educated federal bureaucracy. Menzies did not deviate from this trajectory, but supplemented it with an expansion of tertiary education, a diversification of the sources of foreign investment and defence alliance, and with the decree that Canberra, a country town since 1927, must grow to be a genuine capital.
41 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
If Menzies restarted Canberra, Whitlam gave it its finish, just as he finished the suburbs that had been the main site of Australia's post-war growth. To the outer suburbs Whitlam gave sewers and community centres; to Canberra, a new sense of importance and sophistication, especially in the construction of a place for the national art collection that Menzies had left in storage. Whitlam identified absences in Menzies' work which the younger educated middle class, the beneficiary of so much of Australia's post-war growth, had begun to find painful. Whitlam's leadership fulfilled the promise of the cosmopolitan, pluralist and managerial senses of nationhood adumbrated by the new critics in the 1960s. The 'Blue Poles' purchase was a chance for many who identified with Whitlam's symbolism to come out fighting. In the defence of 'Blue Poles' it was much easier than in the 1940s to refer to a formally-educated and pro-modernist public. However, that constituency seems to have been divided, for it included some who saw virtue in a nationalism alternative to Mollison's servile provincialism. We may see here two different rhetorics of Australian nationalism: one sensitive to Australia's reputation within certain international league tables (rankings of standards of living, the best Treasurer in the world, the America's Cup defence), the other more inward looking, provincial in a positive sense, and more concerned with the traditions of social democracy.
Thanks are due to the following who helped in the writing of this article: Ian Burn, Barry Smith, Ken Inglis, Allan Martin, Ann Courtheys, Alan Gilbert, Terry Smith, Humphrey McQueen, Bernard Smith, and the Librarians of The Australian National Gallery.
Tim Rowse teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University.
Notes
1. The Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Morning Herald from January 23 to
February 2, 19 , contain a number of news stories and editorials in which
the views of the public are reported. For accounts of Mary Edwards' public
meeting see the January 29 editions. Menzies' view was reported in the Telegraph
on January 25. For Dobell's account of his work see newspaper reports on
January 31 of his ABC 'Guest of Honour' talk the previous evening.
42 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
2. For the Sydney Morning Herald's views, see editorial of Febr
uary 2, 1944, 'Archibald Prize's Lessons.' The Bulletins 'Red
Page' commented on January 9 and 16. The salute to land
scape appeared on the 16th.
3. Brian Penton Advance Australia - where?, Sydney, 1943. See
chapter three in particular. Penton also wrote an introduction
to Sydney Ure Smith, The Art of William Dobell, Sydney,
1946. He commented editorially on the 1943 Archibald Prize
in the Daily Telegraph January 30, 1944.
4. The two comments by Menzies on those for whom he spoke,
appeared in the Melbourne Herald, on May 4 and 6, 1937,
respectively. For Lyons' and others views of the Royal Aca
demy of Australian Art see Hughes, Rebels and Precursors,
pp.40-4. For Menzies on the intelligibility of 'great art' see
Lawlor, Arquebus, p. 18. For Dobell's remarks on the public,
see the Daily Telegraph, January 28 and 31, 1944.
5. The signatories of the 'Antipodean Manifesto' were Charles
Blackmail, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Bob Dick-
erson, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Bernard Smith.
6. The Thompson and Bjelke-Petersen comments were reported
in the Melbourne Sun, June 23, 1977. Sir Leon Trout was
reported in the Sydney Sun, October 3, 1974. Andrew Sibley's
words come from the Age, September 24, 1973. The Mel
bourne Herald reported Senator Wood in October, 1973. And
the Sunday Telegraph, April 14, 1974, quoted Paul Hogan.
The Prime Minister's Department's reply is contained in the
Australian National Gallery's file of newspaper clippings and
memos. The Daily Mirror hoarding appeared on October 23,
1973.
Mollison's 'half dozen' assertion and his remarks on public ignorance were
reported in the Herald in September, 1973. For Sandra McGrath see the
Australian, August 25, 1973. For McCaughey bedazzled, see the Age, August 22, 1973.
Mollison's reference to the opinions of curators in the Northern hemisphere was
reported in the Sun-Herald, September 2, 1973. For criticism of the Gallery's
policies, see Julie Ewington, 'Whence do we come? What are we? Where are we
going? The International Collections at the ANG'; Ian Burn, 'The Australian
National Gallery: Populism or a New Cultural Federalism'; and Donald Brook,
'What is Wrong with the Australian National Gallery,' all appearing in Art Net-
43 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
work, No. 8, Summer, 1983. See also Gary Catalano, 'A Brief View of Parnassus: the Australian National Gallery and its masterpieces/ Meanjin, No. 4, 1978; and David Bromfield, 'Never Mind the Quality,' National Times, October 10-16, 1982. An Australian National Gallery booklet (untitled, 1982) called 'Blue Poles' the centrepiece of the International Modern collection on p.25.
8. Senator Wright's challenge appeared in the Hobart Mercury,
September 28, 1973. The Canberra Times editorialized on Sep
tember 25, 1973. Donald Brook wrote in Nation Review, Octo
ber 12-18, 1973.
9. For 'What the Experts Think,' see Sydney Morning Herald,
August 27, 1977. Lesley Walford's column appeared in the
Sun-Herald, August 7, 1977. For the Australian's campaign,
see issues in July-August, 1977. The figures on the petition
come from the National Times, September 12-17, 1977. For
the challenging letter, see the Age, July 12, 1977. The Adver
tiser and Sun editorials appeared on July 27 and August 31,
1977, respectively.
10. Sir William Dargie was an 'expert' interviewed by the Sydney
Morning Herald, August 27, 1977. Elwynn Lynn commented
on the 'National Gallery acquisitions,' in Current Affairs
Bulletin, August 1, 1977.
11. The exchange between Mollison and Whitlam about disclos
ing the price of 'Blue Poles' is documented in the Australian
National Gallery's newspaper clipping file, held in the Gal
lery library. Sir William Dargie commented in the Age, Sep
tember 24, 1973, and Terry Ingram on the same day in the
Australian Financial Review.
12. Paul Atroshenko's letter appeared on October 3, 1973. Alan
McCulloch wrote in the Herald, October 2, 1973. Bernard
Smith wrote in the Australian, February 22, 1975. The Cour
ier Mail posed its editorial question on September 25, 1073.
For Sir Daryl's comment, see The Felton Bequest, op.cit.,
p.61.
13. The Drysdale and Westbrook comments were reported in the
Age, September 24, 1973. Sandra McGrath enthused in the
Australian, September, 1974.
44 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:2 (1987)
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