Robert Jacks: Rhythmic Compositions

ROBERT JACKS

RHYTHMIC COMPOSITIONS

A HIGH NOTE A leading proponent of abstract art in Australia, Robert Jacks holds a special place in the history of the Benalla Art Gallery, with his painting Compelling vesture no. 4 astutely selected by art critic Patrick McCaughey as one of our very first acquisitions.

To present this exhibition—duly recognising Jacks’ incredible legacy locally and in the broader national context—is undoubtedly a high note for Benalla Art Gallery, Rhythmic Compositions focuses primarily on the artist’s guitar-inspired work of the 1990s and 2000s, and pieces selected exude Jacks’ appreciation of music, through both a direct depiction of the guitar, and also the sense of rhythm and structure he was able to impart into each composition. I am positive Benalla audiences will be overjoyed to immerse themselves in this stunning body of work.

This exhibition would not be possible without the generous support of many, and I wish to particularly thank Julienne and Ellie Jacks, who have not only loaned the works, but who have so graciously and meticulously worked with the Gallery in all aspects of the exhibition’s development throughout the past year. Any acknowledgement I could put in writing would not adequately recognise your contributions.

To that end, I am also indebted to Kirsty Grant, who has penned such an insightful essay, while also warmly guiding the curatorial development of Rhythmic Compositions.

1.

My thanks to Ross Brookes and Kerrie Ann Roberts of Segue Art—our ‘curators on the road’—for their friendship and advice which set this project in motion.

Thanks also to our Presentation Partners for this exhibition, Benalla Signs, and VIC Grind and Coatings, who have enabled us to extend our ambition for the exhibition’s design.

Benalla Rural City Council’s continued support of Benalla Art Gallery is fundamental to the development of such ambitious exhibitions, and I gratefully acknowledge this commitment, and also the many unseen contributions to the Gallery’s successful running from Council colleagues across many departments.

I also wish to thank our extended community of supporters: Members, Volunteers, Friends, and Committee members for their enthusiasm and support across the board, which ensures we feel a great sense of purpose and satisfaction in our work.

To the Benalla Art Gallery team—you continue to work so admirably to ensure the success of all facets of the Gallery’s operations, and major outcomes such as this exhibition are your triumphs to share.

Eric Nash Director Benalla Art Gallery

RHYTHMIC COMPOSITIONS The art of Robert Jacks is not easily defined. Across a body of work that spanned six decades, flat painted surfaces line up against expressive texture; arcs and curves contrast with sharp angles and grids; and the cool refinement of Minimalism and intellectual focus of conceptual art, jostle against a romantic painterly approach. His ‘inventiveness and decorativeness constantly [met] an opposing instinct …: his desire for pictorial order or clearly perceived structural rigour.’1 Jacks worked across a diverse range of media too.

Best known for paintings, he also produced drawings and prints, artist books, sculptures and assemblages, and distinctive works where he cut serial shapes into rubber, felt and paper. Abstraction is a constant, as is colour, and he revelled in the exploration of its pictorial possibilities. Jacks was driven to create, and while his oeuvre shows experimentation and development, it also reveals a strong continuity of language and form, expressed through a series of key themes which reappear throughout the years, each time reimagined and reinvigorated.

As a lecturer at Prahran College in the mid-1980s, Jacks encouraged students to look to their earlier work as a source of inspiration, using the metaphor of a pendulum to describe the continuum between old and new.2 He did the same, and in the mid-1990s it was a group of small paintings from his late teenage years which gave rise to the large body of new work which is the focus of this exhibition. Sketches of Spain 1960 is one of these early paintings which the youthful Jacks regarded as his ‘serious’ work.

He recalled however, that at the time his teachers at Prahran Tech deemed them too primitive in technique and too advanced in their abstraction.3 The title of the painting was borrowed from a recent Miles Davis album which Jacks and his friends played – along with the Spanish classical guitarist Segovia, and gypsy music - at student parties in the late 1950s and sixties.4 Music was another lifelong constant for Jacks. The imagery draws on the Cubist abstractions of Picasso and Georges Braque, key figures of European modernism whose work Jacks knew – like most other twentieth century international art – through reproduction. The fragmented guitar became an important recurring motif, over time assuming an additional reference based on Man Ray’s now famous parody, Le Violon d’Ingres 1924 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), its sensuous curves echoing the female form.

2.

Another of these early works provided the model for the left-hand section of Guitar Woman, Tower Night 1997, a monumental painting which was included in the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria that year. It recreates the modest guitar of almost forty years earlier, but radically scales it up, sharpening edges and tonal contrasts, as well as brightening the colour.5 The geometric borders surrounding the early panels are expanded into a vast grid, monochrome and slightly irregular, from which the guitar/woman and adjacent tower advance to the front of the picture plane.

Jacks conjures up a sense of depth receding into the darkness, creating the illusion of three-dimensionality in the coloured forms which make direct parallels to related sculptures.

Sculpture was Jacks’ initial field of study – he enrolled at Melbourne’s Prahran Technical College in 1958 at the age of fifteen, later transferring to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where he moved to the painting department. There is constant movement between two and three dimensions in his work – from paintings to sculptures on the simplest level, but also as flat painted motifs become interchangeable with sculptural components. In the 1998 work Spanish Suite, a series of wooden panels – some of which are shaped like half-guitars – are arranged around a central wedge, their curvilinear forms playing off against its angular geometry. It is easy to imagine that these panels have jumped out of a painting, arranging themselves in space rather than across the flat ground of the canvas. The composition is carefully controlled – as angles balance curves, edges and lines intersect planar forms, and colour and pattern are juxtaposed and overlaid – each segment playing its part and contributing to a dynamic whole. In contrast, Untitled 1996, reads like a portrait of one of Jacks’ characteristic assemblages, right down to the square wooden feet which typically support the bases of these works.

Jacks moved deftly between media throughout his career and the range of works in this exhibition attests to his restless creativity: alongside paintings and prints (both individual and in book form), we see sculptures (in steel, bronze and painted timber) and wooden assemblages, including large, floor-based works and smaller versions that are hung on the wall. The simple pleasure of making is especially apparent in these suspended works, where we sense the artist’s delight in playing with the endless permutations of colour, shape and found forms.

Similarly, Jacks made little distinction between so-called high and low materials, and was willing to work with whatever was at hand. At one end of the spectrum, the guitar/woman featured in a range of small bronze sculptures such as Cast Guitar 1996, and at the other, in a suite of assemblages constructed from corrugated cardboard. These Floating Guitars are painted a single unifying colour and hover against a coloured, sometimes variegated ground, however there is no attempt to disguise their materiality. Edges, corrugations, and accidental dents and creases are happily incorporated, creating a rich patina that emphasises their handmade quality. The everyday simplicity of cardboard and relative ease of cutting and joining it must have appealed to Jacks – a feature which also accounts for the varied complexity of these works. Indeed, components of some of the bronze sculptures reveal that they too were cast from cardboard.

3.

4.

5.

The prominence of the guitar/woman motif in Jacks’ work is matched by that of the grid, which first appeared in the late 1960s. Most dominant in the 1970s, when he lived in New York – the centre of the Minimalist movement at the time – the grid has assumed many forms: painted, printed, drawn, constructed, stamped, cut and even folded; created by the lines of cracked paint which result from folding a sheet of painted paper along serial parallel and intersecting lines.6 His focus on the subject of the guitar in the 1990s gave rise to a new and surprising grid. Studying the instrument’s fretboard, he saw the strings as vertical lines and the frets, spaced further apart, as representing horizontals. Drawn from the real world, this abstraction is the primary focus of Saeja 1996, and features again as a smaller detail incorporating the sound hole of a guitar, in the 1999 painting, Guitar and Flag. Variations on the idea of the flag appeared in numerous works around this time. As Jacks explained: ‘Flags are distinctive symbols. Soldiers march into battle under them. They command loyalty. The abstract qualities and juxtapositions of images are endless. I can paint crosses, stars, and experiment with vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines using a multitude of colours.’7 This iteration, incorporating a pared back version of the Union Jack against a pale, earthcoloured field, was in part Jacks’ response to the republic debate which raged at the time, and a concept for a new Australian flag.

Jacks once said, ‘Each painting is a small part of a whole … It is the reworking of themes over and over again to arrive at an original turning point that has both reason and instinct.’8 Following the trajectory of the Cubist guitar over several decades, this exhibition reveals the development of a key motif as it inspires new work and ideas, assumes new meaning, and intersects with other important themes within his oeuvre – with both logic and the instinctual methods of the artist guiding the way. Inviting us into a rich world of art, music and creative expression, Robert Jacks: Rhythmic Compositions highlights the passions and the processes of one of Australia’s most significant and accomplished abstract artists.

Kirsty Grant 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

Patrick McCaughey, ‘Sensibility in the watercolours of Lesley Dumbrell, Robert Jacks and Victor Majzner’ in Irena Zdanowicz, Colour and Transparency: The Watercolours of Lesley Dumbrell, Robert Jacks and Victor Majzner, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, 1986, p.7.

See Kirsty Grant, ‘Robert Jacks: after 1978’ in Kirsty Grant, Beckett Rozentals and Peter Anderson, Robert Jacks – Order and Variation, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2014, p. 98.

See ‘Interview with the Artist’ in Diane Macleod, Robert Jacks: From the Studio, exhibition catalogue, Castlemaine State Festival, Victoria, 1996, p. 12.

Ibid.

Guitar Woman 1960, oil on Masonite, 36 x 27.5 cm, Estate of the artist; not in the exhibition.

For example, see Untitled c.1976, oil on paper, 100.5 x 50.5 cm, The University of Queensland, illustrated in Grant et. al., op. cit., p. 44.

The artist quoted in Ken McGregor, Robert Jacks: Past Unfolded, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, p. 39.

The artist quoted in Macleod, op. cit., p. 13.

Published on the occasion of

ROBERT JACKS RHYTHMIC COMPOSITIONS Benalla Art Gallery 30 April - 1 August 2021 Curatorial Advisor: Kirsty Grant

Images: 1. + Cover [detail]

Guitar Woman, Tower Night 1997

oil on canvas

198 x 365 cm

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria 2.

Sketches of Spain 1960 oil on masonite 42 x 27.5 cm Image: Annabelle Williams

3. Spanish Suite 1998

oil and enamel paint on wood

86 x 26 x 30 cm

Image: Annabelle Williams 4. Floating Guitar 1999

enamel paint on cardboard on enamel paint on composition board

62.2 x 61.7 x 9.3 cm

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria 5.

Guitar and Flag 1999 oil on canvas 183 x 244 cm Image courtesy of Julienne Jacks

6. Cast guitar 1996 bronze

33.5 x 11.5 x 12.0 cm

Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria All works Estate of the Artist, Victoria 6.

Benalla Art Gallery Botanical Gardens, Bridge St, Benalla VIC 3672 T 03 5760 2619 | E gallery@benalla.vic.gov.au W benallaartgallery.com.au Free Entry Mar–Aug, 10AM–4.30PM | Sept–Feb, 10AM–5PM Closed Tuesdays

Presentation Partners