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Raising the Famous Father...
The Weekend Australian Financial Review June 28-29, 2008
Andrew Clark
Last November, there was a crush of patrons at the Time Olsen gallery in Sydney’s Paddington as wannabes rubbed up against the great and the good for a major John Olsen exhibition. When the 80-year-old artist appeared in his trademark beret, he met a reception worthy of Johnny Depp.
Such was the anticipation that all 26 Olsen paintings on show were sold by the day of the exhibition opening, with one going for $700, 000. It was a scene of family triumph reminiscent of another painter-father and dealer-son pair, Henri and Pierre Matisse.
And yet Tim Olsen says that at one point in his childhood he was “just this little boy in the corner” and “I suddenly felt like nothing”. Tim’s sister Louise says: “It wasn’t about me at all; it was about him.”
During this period, Olsen snr says he had “primary needs to deal with”. Son Tim puts it this way: “You have to be a selfish bastard to be a good painter.”
These comments provide a wrenching insight into one of Australia’s best-known artistic families, highlighting the conflict between demands of fame and the needs of family. James Reston, the iconic New York Times political commentator, once told me: “The worst book I could write would be the biography of the children of the 100 most famous people in America.”
Examples abound, from Randolph Churchill, the pompous drunk and ditherer who was Winston’s son, to Christian Brando, the troubled eldest son of the genius actor Marlon Brando, who died at 49 after serving time for the manslaughter of his sister’s boyfriend. Another Brando daughter, Cheyanne, committed suicide at the age of 25 after losing custody of her daughter.
The impact on family of fame is examined in the new ABC TV series Family Fortunes. It focuses on the Olsens; the Manifolds, scions of Victoria’s Western District; and the Ainsworths, children of the poker machine maestro. The team behind the program is the same one that generated the Dynasty series on Australian families.
For the Olsens, their father’s punitive heritage is enormous. Raised in a struggling family in Bondi, Sydney, Olsen is the last living link with the giants of Australian art – Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Russell Drysdale and Albert Tucker. Instead of the pessimism and despair that dominated so many Australian canvasses, he gave us joy and whimsy.
According to art critic John McDonald, Olsen is “possibly the most distinguished Australian painter” at this point. “His place in Australian art is assured.”
Olsen has “re-arranged” the way we see Australian landscape. He’s done something “totally different”, McDonald tells the Weekend AFR.
Stuart Purved, head of Australian Galleries, says Olsen is “one of the most significant post-war artists in the country. He was able to bring another vision of the Australian landscape.” In doing so, he “helped us grow up”.
Robert Berlind, writing for Art In America magazine, says Olsen “has taken as his chief subject the Australian landscape. He employs simultaneously the contrary vantages of naturalist and geographer or, to put it another way, the viewpoints of frog and eagle”.
McDonald, who is writing a three-volume history of Australian art, has written that Olsen’s You Beaut Country series “exploded the stereotypical view of the landscape as a placid ensemble of sheep and gum trees. He also challenged Russell Drysdale’s vision of a wasteland bathed in the perpetual orange glow of a furnace. Suddenly the bush became a joyous place, bursting with life and incident”.
Olsen’s “vibrant, hyperactive canvases” reveal a painter with an incomparable “lust for life”. He has a “great deal of poetry”, and his visual power comes from an “ability to respond with tremendous spontaneity to his surroundings”.
Olsen is also an artist for what he calls his “blue bitch Goddess” – Sydney. “Above all Sydney sparkles with bouncy light – the hills surrounding the harbour cradle the light to make a radiant bath,” Olsen has written. “The beach, a place of primitive sensuality, bold and brassy, promises freedom if only for a hedonistic moment.”
According to art critic Robert Hughes, Olsen’s city paintings are “full of humanity and conversation”.
Olsen himself feels humanity and conversation translate into family life. “You don’t go to work. You are at work, family life is much more complete. The door is very open to a much wider world,” he tells the ABC.
A lengthy stay in Europe gave him “a more generous concept of life, how to love”.
A different view emerges from his children. Daughter Louise says fame in Sydney “kind of eroded him in a way”. Her mother “did have to look the other way to keep the family together”.
Olsen married four times. On one occasion, Tim recalls, “Dad had gone to judge an arts prize and he didn’t come back.” But for Olsen snr, “you are talking about personal survival and what it’s like to be an artist”.
McDonald tells the Weekend AFR Olsen is “very self-indulgent and incredibly vain: he’s like a geriatric child. Everything has for to be for John. He loves the attention”.
But after many years of pain and separation, the Olsens have reconciled. According to Tim, “I think it meant a lot to me that Louise and I did forgive him. I still don’t know whether it was weakness or strength of character.” Out of all the grief, “something great has happened”.
The last word should go to Australia’s greatest living artist: “It’s a wonderful thing to have us all together.”