The Art of Australia by Robert Hughes

The Art of Australia Reviews

• 
  Alejandro Teruel

  A fascinating, outspoken and, for its time, polemical view of Australian painting from 1778 to 1964 with, as the author puts it in the preface to his second edition, "[a] few excursions up to 1966 [that] dealt principally with Australian artists living in London whose work I could see."
  
  The book was written before aboriginal art began to be appreciated by australian and international art circles in the 1970s and thus, sadly, omits any mention to aboriginal rock paintings, arts or crafts, in fact there is no entry for aborigines in the index. While the book is ostensibly about the art of Australia, it only covers the history of western-style drawing, painting and engraving. The only reference to sculpture is a passing mention of Colin Lanceley´s mid-1960s work.
  
  The story of (western-style) Australian art up to the nineteenth century is the story of how provincial art slowly outgrows its colonial dependence, and, in particular, how european-based perceptions and culture slowly come to terms with a very different landscape and very different cultures and evolve their own myths and images. I believe that there are many interesting parallels between the evolution of latin-american art and australian art: aborigines and the amerindians are first depicted according to hellenistic models and then grotesquely caricatured, nature is forced into an unreal and highly distorting european mold, and both peoples´art are, by and large, largely ignored or belittled until well into the twentieth century. From the nineteenth century onwards, as artistic avant-garde movements appear, it also becomes the story of how Australia responds to them, sometimes ten or more years after these movements appear and have reached their pinnacle in Europe or USA. Up to the close of the book, only a handful of Australian artists had achieved some kind of international recognition and they have, up to now, certainly had less of an impact on twentieth century art than recognized latin-american artists like Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Botero, Guayasamín, Lam, Matta, Rufino Tamayo, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz Diez, Oscar Niemayer or Carlos Raúl Villanueva, to name just a few.
  
  The book closely follows the evolution of Australian landscape painting in particular, from misleading pastoral fantasies on a european theme, to sweeping german romanticism, to the predominance of blue and gold palettes, to plein-air attempts to emulate what was believed to be impressionism, to post-impressionism, to gilded stylism to more contemporary attempts to capture the essence of the continent´s interior. The book also follows some fascinating developments in portrait painting and, more recently, the invention of autochtonous myths, starting with Sidney Nolan´s fabled Ned Kelly series, which signalled a major change in the direction of Australian art, a direction which, in retrospect, seemed bound to finally provide aboriginal art with the long-overdue recognition and appreciation it deserved.
  
  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the reproductions are in black and white; I highly recommend the non-Australian reader google images for works by the painters in order to develop a better understanding of the the evolution of Australian art and an appreciation for artists such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin (the main figures of the so-called Heidelberg School), John Russell (who befriended Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Monet in France), Roy de Maistre (who developed a colour theory loosely based on an a synesthetic analogy between colour and sound), Margaret Preston (who later played an important role in building appreciation for aboriginal art), Albert Tucker, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Charles Blackman (and his extraordinary Alice in Wonderland series), John Brack, John Olsen, Ian Fairweather, and, of course, Sidney Nolan.
  
  Robert Hughes (1938-2012) finished writing this book when he was twenty four years old, before he left Australia for Europe and later the United States where he became Time magazine´s leading art critic and before he had a chance to actually see and closely examine european and american masterpieces he had come across in magazine reproductions. It was his second published book (the first was on the australian artist Donald Friend) and even though he claims to have heavily revised it for the second, 1970, edition, he became unsatisfied with it, as he points out in his preface to that edition:
  

  It seems to me that the most interesting issue raised by Australian painting is the complex, partly sociological, issue of its pendant relationship to the European tradition, both old annd new. A history of Australian art should be written in terms of its overseas prototypes. I did not write The Art of Australia in such terms because I was largely ignorant of those prototypes [...]
  
  With all its deficiencies, I still hope that The Art of Australia may be of some interest. I doubt whether I would now endorse everything about the twenty-four year old who wrote it. His luxuriant metaphors and tendendy to jib at formal analysis are irritating. But I am still fond of him, and feel a certain responsibility for his first book.

  
  Robert Hughes always kept his youthful energy, his outspokenness, his evident love and understanding of modern art and a wonderful eye for the telling and relevant anecdote which you can find in this book. He later learnt to prune "luxuriant metaphors", which are particularly irritating in the last chapters of the book. In my opinion, in this book he does not succeed in communicating his perceptions and ideas on abstract art, which he finally manages to do so brilliantly in his later The Shock of the New. However, recklessly judging from a recent two part video, Australian Art: 1788 till Now (A romp) , by australian gallery owner, Michael Reid (
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV8Sp-...), Hughes´ outline of australian art history up to the 1960s still appears to be sound.
  
• 
  PJ Ebbrell

  As I read Robert Hughes' prose, I can hear him talking to me. He has been my favourite art critic since watching him on The Shock of the New. Here, he looks at his native homeland artists, as this is an early book. It cover up to the early 70s. Great reviews and I found one new artist, who I have never heard of before; even though I had been to Aus.
• 
  Lisa

  I must say I was surprised at Hughes' audacity to be writing like this in the sixties at such a young age (just 27). He was pretty harsh on artists like Heysen and Streeton and with Australian art in general during the first 100 years after settlement, but I really enjoyed his perspective and his courage in taking on the art establishment. Obviously, he continued in this vein all his life ...