Going forward and looking back : Sydney, abstraction & the fifties

Abstract

This project examines the artistic conditions that provoked major exhibitions in Australia in the Fifties including French Painting Today (1953) and Direction 1 (1956). It strives to give the reader a vernacular interpretation of the production of abstract art during that decade in Sydney. The Thesis argues that Australian abstract painting during the early to mid-Fifties was the product of a specific combination of artistic, political and social circumstances in Australian culture. The historical investigation concentrates on people and events - described in the writing as “drivers” - instrumental to the development of abstract art in Sydney in the early to mid-Fifties. In the context of this study drivers are the people and events that actuated change in the local art scene in that decade and became absorbed in a discourse about the role of abstract art in the production of Australian culture. As well, this project locates Australian art in the Fifties in relation to responses and participation in international art trends. It addresses artists John Olsen, John Passmore, William Rose, Eric Smith and Robert Klippel who participated in Direction 1 and nominates intellectuals, critics and tastemakers Paul Haefliger, Elwyn Lynn and Bernard Smith as provocative agents in the Sydney art scene. French Painting Today was an event that left a lasting impression on the artistic as well as the general community and this study traces that important period of transition for Australian culture, a period when the production of contemporary art and its relationship to society was continually evaluated and rationalised. This study contends French Painting Today was instrumental in contesting the autonomy of art and the validity of abstraction as a significant art form and proposes French Painting Today fostered an interest by Australian artists such as the Direction 1 group in self-expression and its potential to fuse with abstraction to create a personally invested abstraction that avoided rational composition. By looking at the way artists, critics, intellectuals and tastemakers reacted to social and political conditions, and abstraction as an international movement, this study tracks the debate, theories and promotion of abstract art in Sydney during the early to mid-Fifties. By way of investigating key players in the Sydney art scene at the time, this enquiry realises the proposal that Sydney artists such as Olsen, Rose, Smith and Klippel accommodated new ideas in art that came from the world outside Australia as well as each other. The studio component of this research sits parallel with the historical enquiry. As an abstract painter who also works in the area of assemblage and installation, I have tried to understand the local context of the 1950s as a way to situate and better understand my own practice. I have found the period of the Fifties under-researched in connecting the experimentation of new visual ideas with the artistic conditions of the time. My studio project is a combination of objects, media and the installation space that explores the activity of painting as an expression of the world around me. It echoes the insistent experimentation of artists in the Fifties who tested different approaches to modernist abstract painting and identifies with a generation of artists who improvised and explored different art materials, and who gradually incorporated this improvisation into a habitual and enduring part of their art practice.