Salute to a 'blue bitch goddess'
The Sydney Morning Herald December 1-2, 2007
John McDonald
John Olsen has always been among Sydney's chosen sons. When he returned to the city in 1960, after three years in Europe, he plunged into a series of paintings that established his reputation as one of Australia's great modern artists. His 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.
At the same time, Olsen wrought an equally vivid transformation on the city. Think of those grey romantic pictures of terrace houses that Sali herman painted in the 1940s and'50s and put them alongside works by Olsen such as Entrance To The Siren City Of The Rat Race or Half Past Six At The Fitzroy (both 1963). If that wasn't a revolution in Australian painting then nothing deserves that description. Robert Hughes said these city pictures were 'full of humanity and conversation', two qualities that had gone AWOL in Australian art at the time when abstract painters were shaping up against their figurative counterparts. Olsen had experiemented with figurative and abstract idioms alike, emerging with a mature style that made a mockery of the distinction.
These vibrant, hyperactive canvases revealed a painter whose lust for life had no parallel in this country. If his work owed a debt to European artists such as Karel Appel or Antonio Saura, he took the rudiments of a style and turned it into an unstoppable force.
One of Olsen's chief virtues was that he has a great deal of poetry but little theory. Despite his omnivorous reading habits and his willingness to quote a range of writers and philosophers, the power of Olsen's work came from his ability to respond with tremendous sponaneity to his surroundings. The three years he had just spent in Europe has inoculated him against the cultural anxieties that gnawed away at his peers, who never stopped wondering how their work fitted the international templates.
Like artists of the past, such as Tom Roberts, John Longstaff, and George Lambert, Olsen was enjoying the electrical charge that surges through an Australian when he returns home after a long absence.
Forty-eight years later this may all seem like water under the bridge but in A Salute to Sydney, a show at his son's gallery that celebrates the artist's 80th birthday, Olsen has returned to the scene of past glories. If it sounds a little corny or too well rehearsed when he refers to 'that blue bitch goddess named Sydney', there is nothing half-hearted about these new paintings. They are as youthful as anything he has created in decades.
There have been many occasions during the past 30 years when Olsen's palette has become mired in tones of brown, red and black, partly as a reflection of the dry Australian landscape but sometimes as an indication of his own moods. When his Self-Portrait Janus Faced won the 2005 Archibald Prize, many expressed dismay at such a gloomy canvas could take out the award. It was, however, a moving, complex picture that turned a cold eye on age and mortality.
Now those clouds have been dispelled. Olsen at 80 is painting with the verve of a 20-year-old but with an ability to keep his colours fresh and unmuddied that only comes with long experience. Paintings such as Sydney Harbour, Spring Tide and Lunch at Doyle's (both 2007) are as livey as anything he has ever attempted. It is as though the artist has stepped over a threshold and stopped worrying about the encroaching years. On the contrary, he seems to be enjoying himself immensely. And when Olsen is enjoying himself, that's when he is painting well.
Many of these pictures embrace the idea of a second childhood. Olsen harks back to memories of popping bluebottles on the beach when he was a boy or a king tide overlapping the walls of the Bondi Icebergs pool. On canvas these memories are made wonderfully vivid - particularly the spectacle of the swimmers in the Icebergs pool, thrashing about like raw, pink prawns in a seething green soup.
One can almost measure Olsen's high spirits by the quantity of looping, twisting lines of paint that whirl around like spaghetti unravelling in boiling water. The sun in Sydney Harbour, Spring Tide sends out long yellow tentacles in all directions that become entangled in the green and blue ribbons representing the sea and its currents. Olsen invests every subject, every part of the picture, with a squirming animal vitality.
This is put in perspective by the upstairs display that features a mini-survey of Olsen's work over the past 45 years. Many of the earlier paintings seem sombre and subdued campared with the riotous abandon of the new work. The exception is Spring At Rydal (1992), a diptych in which a grass-green backdrop is overlaid by a tangle of red lines that occasionally coalesce to form figures. In the centre of the picture Olsen has attracted a real table cloth and a couple of plates. This is too tricky for comfort - and in compositional terms, too symmetrical - but the sheer energy of the picture is irresistable, infectious, electrifying.
As ever, there will be some who find Olsen's indulgent approach to be a big turn-off. Does he have to keep reminding us of idyllic days at the beach? Fabulous, boozy meals at good restaurants? Perfect spring days? No prizes for answering in the affirmative. Olsen's philosophy seems to be: 'If you've got it, flaunt it' - an attitude that is precisely in tune with the brash, vulgar city celebrated in this exhibition. It is quite a spectacle to watch a great hedonist (aged 80) saluting a renowned shrine of hedonism (aged 219). It seem that Sydney fireworks have arrived early this year.