ART IN ACTION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 259, 9 June 1944, Page 18

ART IN ACTION

William Dobell Again

‘(Written for "The Listener’ by

KAY

e E have not done with William Dobell yet. Not only has he won this year’s Archibald Prize with his portrait of a fellow artist, Joshua Smith, but now, from a Sydney correspondent of the Otago Daily Times, comes the pleasant news that Mr. Dobell has been appointed as one of the 12 trustees on the National Art Gallery Board of Trustees, Sydney. When his name was submitted, even Mr. Dobell’s most ardent admirers doubted if the Government would declare itself on such a highly contentious matter, After weeks of indecision, the Government had the good sense to

appoint him, and it will be interesting to watch for the result. Mr. Dobell’s own reactions are refreshing. He says that one thing is paramount in his mind: that conditions must be made easier for the young artist, and that he should have access to examples of the world’s finest art in the local galleries. He declares also that he would like to take some of the Gallery’s outmoded pictures to pieces and distribute their canvases and frames among Australian painters and students, Here is art in action, against art in reaction and the dead hand of the past. For we must not forget that Australia began by describing the portrait of Smith as a gargoyle, a praying mantis, a caricature, and that only a few voices voted it a masterpiece. Even our own New Zealand papers took up the cry, and many New Zealand voices joined in. There was a heated correspondence in several of our dailies. The picture, in short, created a _ sensation. While I hold no brief for sensation for its own sake, it can be safely said that any work of art that does not arouse controversy must be safely dead. We may therefore take it as a healthy sign that in Sydney crowds have flocked to see the portrait, an unusual phenomenon in the midst of a war. (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) If one may judge by a photo of the sitter, the Joshua Smith portrait is an excellent likeness-in reverse. But the public is unaccustomed to such daring and free treatment, and it naturally howls its protest. Any departure from the stock ingredients for landscape or portrait is anathema to them. After all, the draughtsman’s eyé is more sensitive, mote acute and delicate than the lazy, untrained eyes of the general public, who are conditioned more than they know by the chocolate-box pictures they see everywhere around them. And just as Blake can see a tiger BURNING bright, the artist may sharpen his sense of reality by exaggera‘tion, distortion, or understatement. Note the recent trends of the more experimental films and-also signific-ant-how they are received. Gaudier Brezka, by a few scribbles, can give all that is essential in an elephant. In a sense, Daumier’s figures are all caricatures, but how much more living than careful camera studies, El Greco. must have horrified the people of his day with his paintings, which were never drawn "straight," but askew, elongated and distorted, He was, perhaps, the first great distortionist, yet how innocent his work appears to-day, compared with the strange imaginings of the surrealists? Mestrovic, too, gets his effects by a singular elongation. Need we condemn Modigliani because he paints girls with giraffe necks? A friend said that he saw them through the empty necks of wine bottles. Rembrandt himself is perilously near caricature in his painting of Samson defying his father-in-law. Through a biting and formidable caricature George Grosz brought to life the bitter postwar generation of Germany. These caricatures hurt the authorities so much that Grosz was forced to leave Germany. These examples I cite to show what a power parody or caricature can sometimes exercise. If the artist has anything fresh to say, he brings down a hornet’s nest. The French Impressionists, because they had a fresh conception of painting, were howled down. Our own Constable and Turner were frowned on because of their revolutionary methods. The English satirists Hogarth and Rowlandson fared no better, Similarly the Rodin monument to Balzac was considered so shockingly rough that it was rejected by the Academy. So was Wyndham Lewis’s fine portrait of T. S. Eliot. Nature Sets the Example With all this in mind, we can .congratulate the Sydney Art Gallery Board all the more. Whatever one may think of the Dobell portrait, whether one arrives at the truth by the obvious or the subtle way, by penny plain or tuppence coloured, by a literal transcription or by some form of exaggeration, I think the cartoon or caricature has an authentic place in art. We have room for the Lewis Carrolls as well as the Miltons. After all,

Nature herself has her own _ superb caricatures. Witness those examples of jocosity, the kangaroo, giraffe, or daschshund. Since Nature sets the example, I consider that parody has a definite place in art.