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The Sydney Morning Herald Feb. 9, 1976 Outgrowing art's apron strings By Nancy Borlase No longer poles apart The need to assess the extent of the American influence in Australian art over the last two decades is a pressing one. Exploring its long-term implications requires the hindsight of history, however, and this survey will touch on only its outward manifestations. The organisers of the Australian American Festival are at pains to stress a new reciprocity in our links with the United States, focusing on areas of mutual interest, and here they are right on target. As we enter an era of greater awareness of our own capacity and creative drive, the old concept of this international relationship is rapidly being outmoded. Up to now, exchanges between our two countries have been heavily weighted one way, to our advantage. And as eager suitors for American favours, and grateful beneficiaries, we are still immeasurably enriched by American contacts and generosity. But we are no longer going all the way with Uncle Sam in a one-sided exchange which carries the dubious connotation of cultural handout. With American art in a watershed period, no longer so sure of its own hegemony in the world scene, Australia presents a new frontier, not to be annexed, but an escape hatch, perhaps, for American artists who have reached the top and have nowhere else to go. The 1970s have been a shift away from a mendicant role (or what looked like being a mendicant role), in a tipping of the scales towards a more equable alignment in our relationship. And no single act has highlighted this more dramatically than the purchase of Blue Poles for the National Gallery, at the record price for a modern painting of $US2 million ($A1.3 million). This spectacular coup, which sky-rocketed Australia to world prominence in the international art scene, was followed by the purchase, by James Mollison, the man with the "golden purse,"" of other examples of New York School painting from its most illustrious period, notably de Kooning's Woman V. Also, the acceleration of cultural exchanges initiated by us, through the Visual Arts Board, the Power Institute and the Crafts Board, has considerably narrowed the gap between our two countries. The concept of "provincial," as against "central," is being whittled away. But with the American dream, in art as in politics, becoming increasingly blurred; with "mainstream" dissolved and art in a state of flux; with critical opinion split into two hostile, warring camps-the formalist one and the socio-political one; and as the influential journal, Art-forum, goes political, with three of its editors resigning in protest, New York still remains a magnet. Whatever happens there, the shockwaves are felt here and in every other open society. The Australian American Festival celebrations, in the line-up of exhibitions, visiting artists, craft workshops, heritage happenings, and regional grants to buy paintings for sister towns in the United States, are the culmination of an extraordinary growth of interest and activity between our two countries. As Waldo Rasmussen, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art International Program, has pointed out, it's an association which goes back more than three decades, to when the museum participated in the organisation of the exhibition, Art of Australia, which toured the States and Canada, in 1941. It has been a cordial association. As a younger, more pliant and receptive nation, the promotional excesses by American critics on behalf of their own artists have not raised the same hackles here as they have, for instance, in England, where Patrick Heron, in a series of articles in The Guardian (October, 1974), spearheaded an attack against the "art chauvinism" of Clement Greenberg and Micheal Fried. What is often over-looked (conveniently so) is the tremendous stimulus given American painting by the influx of European artists to New York, before and shortly after World War II. The cant of today's xenophobes is not far removed from that of J.S. MacDonald who, in his book, Added Art, published during the 1930s, viewed the modern movement as part of an international conspiracy against the Aryan race. By and large, public responses to touring exhibition of American art have been enthusiastic, if sometimes perplexed by the elitist nature of many of the works. Perplexity was a common reaction to the minimalism and conceptualism of Some Recent American Art (1974); but a valuable adjunct to that show was the person-to-person contact between our artists and a number of the exhibiting artists, brought here by the Visual Arts Board, in some instances to set up their works. The inclusion of the Australian artist, Robert Hunter, in an important exhibition of minimal art in New York, selected by MOMA's Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture, Jennifer Licht, was a direct consequence of those contacts. The exhibition which created the most public controversy and which was the most influential in Australian art since the diminution of the French influence, was Two Decades of American Painting (1967). Critics were fulsome in their praise, more so in Sydney than in Melbourne, and record crowds-20,000 in one weekend-were undeterred, or perhaps led on by aldermanic outbursts of "atrocious" and "hopeless." (The cartoonists, Mercier and Benier, had a heyday too.) Before that, we had the James R. Michener Collection, in 1964, which included paintings by Morris Louis, Hans Holfmann, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers and Helen Frankepthaler[[?]], seen here for the first time. The salutary influences of these two exhibitions, coming at the right historical moment (as a similar show did in Europe in 1957-58), led to an increased confidence in the handling of scale and colour. Coming to grips with a "major style" was evident in The Field exhibition, 1968, and reached its zenith in last years's touring exhibition, Ten Australians. A significant private collection of post-war American art will be on view to the public during the Sydney festival, on open-house day (March 29) at the house of Mr ans Mrs Harry Seidler. The main thrust of the festival is towards areas of mutual interest, on a grass-roots level. Thin at the top, it bypasses the elitism on which our art exchanges have tended to operate. The choice of James Rosenquist as a [[Image-trees]] We took a leaf from the Australian Eucalypt The Australian Eucalypt knows no environmental boundaries--it grows in the Snowy Mountains, in the heat of the Red Centre, in coastal rain forests and on the plains--meeting every condition of soil, altitude and temperature. We at Lincoln Australia have taken a lesson from the adaptability of the Australian Eucalypt. With our own design and manufacturing facilities--backed by the resources of our U.S. parent in R & D-- our Australian arc welding machines and electrodes are designed specifically to meet every technical requirement in every market area. LINCOLN ELECTRIC SYDNEY NEWCASTLE MELBOURNE BRISBANE TOWNSVILLE ADELAIDE PERTH special Bicentennial guest looks like being an apt one in this context. A third generation new York School artist who broke through abstract expressionism into the wide-open world of pop imagery, his paintings have been described by the American critic, Law-rence Alloway, as capturing the "the tangy flavour of American life, a folk-realism of encounters and [[Image-trees]] We took a leaf from the Australian Eucalypt The Australian Eucalypt knows no environmental boundaries--it grows in the Snowy Mountains, in the heat of the Red Centre, in coastal rain forests and on the plains--meeting every condition of soil, altitude and temperature. We at Lincoln Australia have taken a lesson from the adaptability of the Australian Eucalypt. With our own design and manufacturing facilities--backed by the resources of our U.S. parent in R & D-- our Australian arc welding machines and electrodes are designed specifically to meet every technical requirement in every market area. LINCOLN ELECTRIC SYDNEY NEWCASTLE MELBOURNE BRISBANE TOWNSVILLE ADELAIDE PERTH surprises." Included in the Two Decades exhibition, his paintings entitled I Love You with My Ford, Morning Sun, and the billboard-sized Growth Plan, were instantly communicable to the general public. Recently works of his will go on view at Gallery A, on March 27. At the Art Gallery of NSW, the Form and Freedom exhibition of North-west Coast American Indian wood carvings, and photo-graphs of the Indians by Edward S. Curtis, as well [[logo-star]] American Revolution Bicentennial 1776-1976 as lectures on Curtis, will throw the spotlight on an art and a culture which, by implication, should have special relevance to our own indigenous people. 2.76 A Choice of Three [?]
