Pure Poetry of art's dreamers
The Sydney Morning Herald 14 September 2007
Steve Meacham
In March 1945, the artist Jeffrey Smart set off for the Flinders Ranges where he was inspired by the sight of a derelict bank set in a desert landscape.
The result was one of his finest early paintings, The Wasteland II. It was a reference to Smart's favourite poem, T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, published in 1922. Years later, Smart acknowledged the profound impact of Eliot's poetic images on his own imagery.
"Eliot's poems provided me with images of urban life which were valid," he recalled in 1996. "I had painted my last flower piece. The gum trees and the billabongs and blue hills had been thrown out with the daffodils."
Smart is not the only Australian landscape artist to be influenced by poetry. According to Jethro Lynne, the Art Gallery of NSW's coordinator of public programs, poetry has inspired some of Australia's greatest painters, from Charles Conder and Arthur Streeton, through Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman, to Smart and John Olsen.
It is a theme that will be explored in a series of Sunday morning events at the gallery, beginning this weekend under the title Dreamers: Australian Painters and the Poetic Imagination. Each two-hour happening will focus on one or several artists, punctuated with music, film and readings.
The idea came from Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian art, who has prepared the gallery's big summer exhibition, Sidney Nolan: A New Retrospective, which opens on November 2. Pearce's starting point was Nolan's fascination with the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. As a young man, Nolan was torn between becoming a painter or a poet. He chose painting but preferred the company of writers over painters - although, famously, his friendship with novelist Patrick White combusted spontaneously.
The effect of poetry on Nolan's artistic sensibilities is one of the main themes of the retrospective. So why not extend that perspective and see how poetry affected his forebears and peers?
According to Lynne, the painter with the greatest poetic talent was Michelangelo. "It has been said that if Michelangelo had never sculpted, never designed a building, never painted - all things at which he excelled - he would still have been remembered as one of the greatest poets of his day," says Lynne.
The nexus between painting and poetry was a feature of the Italian Renaissance, says Lynne, and that fundamental question was still at the heart of much of Australian art 300 years later.
All the artists examined in the Dreamers series demonstrated an enduring love of poetry. "Poetry was a big part of their imaginative landscape," Lynne says. "In many ways, it was poetry which gave them a connection far beyond Australia. Poetry was one of their links to the outside world at a time when international travel was terribly expensive and laborious."
So Blackman was inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Boyd drew from Ovid and the Bible, and Olsen painted his visual interpretation of Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells.
But it was Nolan who professed the poetic urge most keenly. Not that his judgment was impeccable. As part of Planet Sid, the opening event in the series, on Sunday, there will be a screening of the 1975 film, Beyond is Anything: Sidney Nolan and Ern Malley. As we now know, Ernest Lalor Malley was the invention of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who sent 17 "posthumous" poems by "Malley" to Max Harris, founder of the modernist magazine, Angry Penguins. Harris commissioned Nolan to paint the cover of a special Ern Malley edition of his magazine. It was soon exposed as a hoax to send up intellectual pretension.
But Nolan never accepted he and his friends had been duped, even when he knew Malley was a figment of the imagination. Poetic justice, perhaps?
Dreamers: Australian Painters and the Poetic Imagination begins at the Art Gallery of NSW on September 16.