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MAGAZINE OF AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL PORTRAITURE
ARTHUR BOYD LORD KITCHENER JOHN PERCEVAL ROCK ART NUDE NOSTALGIA ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE BOB ELLIS
WINTER 2016
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05 Observation point Fiona McMonagle 06 Apollo’s breath Christopher Chapman delights in the intimacy of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography. 12 Insight and identity Olivier Krischer in conversation with photographer Wei Leng Tay. 18 Boyd to man Christopher Chapman looks at influences and insight in the formative years of Arthur Boyd. 22 Naked nostalgia Penelope Grist reminisces about the halcyon days of a print icon, before the infusion of the internet’s shades of grey. 28 Look who’s coming to dinner Michael Wardell’s personal insight into Jacques van der Merwe’s new arrivals. 33 The hands have it Angus Trumble treats the Gallery’s collection with a dab hand. 45 Missionary positions Stella Ramage on Father McHardy’s Bougainville portraiture. 48 All the way of K of K Sarah Engledow bristles at the biographers’ neglect of Kitchener’s antipodean intervention. 56 Rock art Andrew Mayo talks to three of australia’s most prominent and prolific music photographers — Martin Philbey, Kane Hibberd and Daniel Boud — about the challenges and inspiration behind their craft. 64 The family scene Traudi Allen discovers sensitivity, humour and fine draughtsmanship in the portraiture of John Perceval. 70 On show National and international portraiture exhibitions. 72 Tribute Bob Ellis
Preliminary sketch of Bob Ellis 1999 David Naseby Gift of David Naseby 2001
15 JULY - 16 OCTOBER 2016 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY Spencer 2016 Warrick Baker Courtesy of the artist
CONTRIBUTORS
PORTRAIT#53 WINTER 2016 Portrait is the magazine of the National Portrait Gallery King Edward Terrace Parkes Canberra ACT 2600 Australia 02 6102 7000 portrait.gov.au/magazine Editor-in-chief angus.trumble@npg.gov.au Editor stephen.phillips@npg.gov.au Design brett@portrait.gov.au Rights and permissions katrina.osborne@npg.gov.au Photography mark.mohell@npg.gov.au Print adamsprint.com.au
Circle of Friends The Circle of Friends plays an important role in the life and work of the National Portrait Gallery. Friends contribute to the acquisition of works of art, the mounting of visiting exhibitions, continual learning and the publication of new scholarship. Friends enjoy many benefits through their association with the Gallery including an annual subscription to Portrait magazine and a 10% discount at the Portrait Gallery Store Join the Circle of Friends Contact the Membership Coordinator on 02 6102 7022 or join online at portrait.gov.au/site/member_apply.php Sponsorship The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the continuing support of its sponsors to present exhibitions, programs and publications
penelope grist (“Nude nostalgia” p. 22) is Assistant Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.
angus trumble (“The hands have it” p. 33) is Director at the National Portrait Gallery.
dr sarah engledow (“All the way with K of K” p. 48) is Historian at the National Portrait Gallery.
olivier krischer (“Insight and identity” p. 12) is a post-doctoral research fellow at the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World.
michael wardell (“Look who’s coming to dinner” p. 28) is the Art Gallery Coordinator, Logan Art Gallery, Queensland.
stella ramage (“Missionary positions” p. 45) is a freelance writer, reviewer and researcher living in Wellington, New Zealand.
dr traudi allen (“The family scene” p. 64) is a writer, academic and art historian.
andrew mayo (“Rock art” p. 56) is a Canberra-based photographer and writer.
dr christopher chapman (“Apollo’s breath” p. 6; “Boyd to man” p. 18) is Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery.
Distribution publicationsolutions.com.au portraitgallerystore.com.au has an extensive stock of back issues of Portrait and National Portrait Gallery publications Twitter Join the twitter feed twitter.com/NPG_Canberra Flickr flickr.com/photos/ nationalportraitgallery/ Facebook facebook.com/pages/NationalPortrait-Gallery-Canberra/ Online portrait.gov.au/magazine
Copyright The material in this publication is under copyright. Excluding fair dealing purposes, such as private study, criticism and review, research and education, no part of the publication may be reproduced or transmitted without permission from the National Portrait Gallery. Where applicable, every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and acknowledge the source material. Errors or omissions are unintentional and corrections should be directed to katrina.osborne@npg.gov.au © 2016 National Portrait Gallery issn 1446 3601
illustrator alice carroll
ATSI readers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this magazine may contain the images of now deceased Indigenous people
The cover: Lee Lin Chin 2004 George Fetting type C photograph Gift of the artist and Lee Lin Chin 2010 © George Fetting/Licensed by Viscopy 2016 In the eighteen months following its establishment in 1998, the National Portrait Gallery acquired just over 120 portraits depicting some 110 different sitters. Roughly a third of these were women. The current Women in Focus display highlights the energy the Gallery has applied to developing a collection documenting the strength, diversity and achievements of contemporary Australian women. The display presents a selection of these early acquisitions alongside a sample of the 2600 works subsequently added to the collection through purchase, gift and commission.
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Circle of Friends Acquisition Fund 2016 The National Portrait Gallery’s annual appeal, to assist in purchasing one extraordinary work, is on again. We invite Circle of Friends members and supporters of the Gallery to contribute to the ongoing mission of your national collecting institution, to enrich Australia’s cultural tapestry with our blend of art, biography and history. This year’s portrait is of Reg Richardson am, painted by Mitch Cairns. In 2007, Richardson was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the visual arts as a supporter, patron and
collector, and to the community through a range of social welfare and medical research organisations. Cairns, a three-times Archibald finalist, says of his sitter: ‘He is both affable and compelling; a tireless champion for all that he believes in. I hope this portrait, like Reg, is somewhat humble yet at the same time resonant with magnitude’. To contribute to the acquisition of this portrait, visit portrait.gov.au/content/acquisition-fund or contact membership coordinator Jody Barnett on (02) 6102 7022 or jody.barnett@npg.gov.au
Reg Richardson am 2014 by Mitch Cairns
Untitled No. 1 2010 Fiona McMonagle watercolour and gouache on paper
OBSERVATION POINT FIONA McMONAGLE
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good portrait requires much more than a good likeness to the subject; it must be a good painting in its own right. For me, this means you are able to communicate something to the audience that you cannot achieve with words. I paint people because I am interested in the complexities of the human condition. I want the viewer to feel a connection to the people I paint. I take a lot of my inspiration for my work from our suburban lives. I believe that where you spend your adolescent years will mark you as a person. I try to portray images that I have grown up with, and with which I feel enough of a connection to be able to make an interesting painting. The imagery that I work with is often ambiguous. I am not looking to capture the spirit of my subject or own them in any way; rather, they provide clues and suggest what their story may be. The audience will bring ‘themselves’ to the work – their own experiences and views – and this will ultimately influence their interpretation.
Unless I am making what I consider to be a ‘portrait’ in the traditional sense, I try to avoid referring to my works as portraits. I like to keep my works open to interpretation, and, somehow, labelling them as ‘portraits’ feels limiting. This could be because I feel that the subject matter is constantly shifting, depending on where I am with my own thoughts. And certainly it is ever-changing with each different viewer. The work I have selected, Untitled No. 1, from 2010, is slightly unusual for me in that it is lacking a definitive title, but also because of the overly muted palette. Normally I would give my works a title that would give away a bit of a clue about the subject, and this is not the case in this instance. The muted palette adds to this mystery. I enjoy playing with how the palette and application of paint can really affect the image and trigger an emotional response. This work is an attempt to depict a private moment. I tried to focus on the psychology of the girl; I wanted her body language to suggest what her story may be. 5
Apollo’s breath christopher chapman delights in the intimacy of robert mapplethorpe’s photography. Apollo 1988 Sebastian 1980 gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Robert Mapplethorpe Estate
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In his photographs, artist Robert Mapplethorpe seeks out beauty. His portrait photograph of a boy, Sebastian, promises the elegance of youth, the frame of the boy’s shoulders supported by supple
arms. Reflecting on this captured moment, perhaps Sebastian might have later declared: ‘My long limbs, my skin, were unknown to me in my boyhood – I was in them and I couldn’t see them. Their flex and softness were true as nature. I was running and climbing, barely panting, eyes darting to see a bird, foamy sea tickling my armpits and shins’.
Body-building world champion Lisa Lyon is captured as she flexes; her energy is distilled into a cropped image of arm, bicep, shoulder and breast. Her upperarm muscles are taut as twisted silk sheets, soft as billowing curtains. In the silvery photo her breast is a sun-warmed river-stone. Her collarbone is sculpted rock. The dark curled hair of her armpit portrait 53 winter 2016
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is rainforest moss. Mapplethorpe’s photographs evoke the mass of muscle and flesh. In 1986, sixty of Mapplethorpe’s photographs were shown at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. His work had already been bought by the Australian National Gallery, but this was his first Australian exhibition. John Buckley, the curator of the exhibition, remembered him as softly spoken and gentle in jeans and a denim jacket, a quiet young man with a keen eye for ‘precision’. Mapplethorpe’s ‘grace and manners’ calmed the American writer Dominique Dunne’s nervousness when he sat for his portrait in 1988. When I saw a collection of Mapplethorpe’s photographs spilling from a manila envelope in a Sydney gallery office, I sensed overwhelming intimacy. My work as a curator had afforded direct access to these small black-andwhite Polaroid pictures, taken in 1973 and 1974. I gently held in my hand the evidence of what Robert Mapplethorpe had seen, and what he had chosen to preserve: the crumpled white sheets and pillows of an un-made bed, self portraits and pictures of friends. Looking at the small photographs I felt a deep sense of joy. These quiet pictures evoked for me the shivery pleasure of touching warm skin, the closeness of a dear one’s breathing, the tingle of us embracing. The classical forms of Greek and Roman figure sculpture idealise the beauty and strength of the human body. Greek statues depicted the gods and goddesses of mythology, young athletic victors and scenes from daily life. The power of white marble earned its symbolic purity during the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo’s towering statue of the youthful biblical David, destined King of Israel and slayer of the Philistine Goliath, replays the naturalism of Classical Greek figure sculpture minus the painted and gilded surface. Like much ancient Greek statuary, Michelangelo’s David was designed to be viewed from below – his scaled-up body and oversized
Lisa Lyon 1981 Philip Prioleau 1979 Black bust 1988 gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Robert Mapplethorpe Estate
‘If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make a sculpture.’
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head an intentional counter to perspectival foreshortening. The strength of symmetry, the solidity of musculature and Michelangelo’s artistic touch combine to give David his enduring power. A photograph of Michelangelo’s sculpted Dying slave was central to a 1976 Mapplethorpe photo-collage, and in 1978 he made photographs of a fragmented bronze sculpture of a man and a marble torso of a woman. ‘If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago,’ Mapplethorpe told curator Janet Kardon in 1987, ‘I might have 10
been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make a sculpture.’ The camera was traditionally built on Renaissance principles, says philosopher Arthur Danto. ‘If one aimed at beautification,’ Danto wrote, ‘one was obliged to beautify the object of the photograph, and then record that, which Mapplethorpe did in part with lights and shadows.’ Mapplethorpe would say to his friend Patti Smith, when looking over the frames on contact sheets, ‘that’s the one with the magic’. That magic is manifest in
James Ford 1979 Skull walking cane 1988 gelatin silver photographs National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Robert Mapplethorpe Estate
the poise that his pictures relay. They are breathless, floating and evanescent. They are strong, clear and statuesque. The physicality of his portrait photographs is characterised by silkiness; they are satin-smooth. Mapplethorpe said semi-matte photographic paper suited his portraits because ‘they look better on a softer surface’. In the early 1970s, Mapplethorpe’s good friend John McKendry, curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, provided him with private access to the museum’s historical photography collection. ‘Looking at these photographs made me think maybe photography could be art’, observed Mapplethorpe. He was impressed by the palpable physicality, the intimacy and the sensuality of photographs of nudes by Americans Thomas Eakins and Alfred Steiglitz. Diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, Mapplethorpe died two-and-ahalf years later, aged forty-two. During these last years he made portraits of Greek gods and their messengers – Icarus, Hermes, Mercury and Apollo. For several years Mapplethorpe’s minimalist photographs of flowers had been styled for him by Dimitri Levas, and now Levas brought him reproductions of classical statuary. Mapplethorpe had them cleaned to a pristine glow, and he shows the face of Apollo in a close-up profile portrait. Apollo’s lips are gently parted; Mapplethorpe gives him life. In 1979, the National Gallery of Australia acquired a suite of Mapplethorpe’s delicate photographs of flower still-lifes, and then followed throughout the 1980s with portraits and figure studies, to arrive at a holding of over sixty of his photographs. Eight of these photographs have been selected for the National Portrait Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition, Tough and tender, which presents the work of seven Australian and American artists whose photographic work imbibes sensitivity and beauty. Mapplethorpe’s work is a poignant chord in the exhibition – a song of youthfulness and mortality. portrait 53 winter 2016
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Insight and identity olivier krischer in conversation with photographer wei leng tay. For three weeks in March, Singaporean photographer Wei Leng Tay was a visiting artist at the Australian National University’s School of Art. Tay’s exhibition, The Other Shore, is showing at the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World until late July 2016, and focuses on young mainland Chinese migrants in Hong Kong. A day after the opening, Tay discussed the development of her practice with the exhibition’s curator, Olivier Krischer.
wei leng tay: I work mainly with photography and sound. When I say sound, it’s sound from interviews and conversations that I have had with people. The photography is shown as prints, lightboxes or projections. I’ve also done stand-alone sound installations. Most of my work is in places that are familiar to or important to people’s lives, or part of their routine – a place that would have some significance to them. Both images: Untitled from The Other Shore 2014-15
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wlt: Hong Kong Living is the first project I started working on in 2005. I moved to Hong Kong in 2000; I was working in journalism back then. I started doing my own work because I was feeling a bit frustrated. Work was really hectic, and I wanted to figure out how it was for other people, living in Hong Kong, dealing with the spaces, the economics, everything – just being there – and how it affected people’s relationships. It was about the stresses of living in that kind of city. It’s really expensive and hectic. How do people balance all of that? That’s how it started, but as it progressed I started thinking more about myself. Living away from home, you start thinking – as you get older too 14
– about obligations to your family. Hong Kong Living really was all about that, about my relationship with my family, or expectations people have of someone – of a thirty-seven year old Chinese woman – what you’re supposed to be doing right now, at this age. I think family and relationships run through all my projects. When I started doing this project I wanted to photograph in people’s homes, because I think Hong Kong is so much about that veneer and how you project yourself. I wanted to see how other people were living. When people are at home they almost act differently – you’re a lot more comfortable; your guard is down. It’s a much better way of working with people.
Tanny and Candy 2006 from Hong Kong Living 2005–15
[Referring to Tanny and Candy]: he is my insurance agent {laughs}; this is actually a way in which I’ve continued working – I find people through people I know, because a lot of things we talk about are very personal, so there’s a certain level of trust for people to want to be a part of the project. [For exhibitions], I always separate what is said [ie – my sound recordings] from the actual person, because I don’t think it’s necessary. I guess the sound helps contextualise people, but I really like people to look at photographs for what they are, as opposed to reading a caption or listening to something that will tell you about it, because the photograph does something else. portrait 53 winter 2016
Where do we go from here? from Impressions of Japan 2009
wlt: I think in some places people look at my work and take it at face value; I can use this photograph [Where do we go from here?] as an example. I was in Japan for a residency in 2009. This is a similar theme to my previous work, but perhaps it was more about gender also. For some people it was very obvious that it was about gender, but for others it might seem like I was taking family photos in Japan. This was done in Fukuoka, with the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. It actually made me very conscious of working in a short timeframe, and also in a place I don’t know very well. With these images, I know that my life is entangled with whomever I meet, and I actually like that. Because when I meet particular people and I’m talking to them, we share histories and past experiences. For me, that’s what makes the photo better – what makes the work better.
wlt: I’m Chinese Singaporean; my family is from Malaysia, but originally from southern China. What really made me think about doing this [Convergence 2009-10] was being in Hong Kong, and being asked ‘Where are you from? Are you a cousin from up north?’ This made me think, ok, obviously I’m not ‘Chinese’ enough for them. But in Singapore it’s a different issue; it’s very racialised, actually. So that made me think about my own identity; I wanted to do a project thinking about how we are who we are, why we are like that. So I went and talked to and interviewed many people who are part of my family – my extended family – in Singapore, Penang (which is where my mother’s family is from), Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh.
Eldest Aunt 2010 from Convergence 2009-10
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olivier krischer: The Other Shore was developed between 2014 and 2015. The project deals with young mainland Chinese who have migrated to Hong Kong for education, family or work opportunities. wlt: Even though I started the project thinking about [the mainland China/ Hong Kong] tensions, after a few months I moved away from it, because, how much can you say about it really? I started talking to people about their education; their background; where they came from; their relationship with their parents; their desires and aspirations – it became more about those things. For example – one young woman – she’s from Zhejiang, and her mother is a successful businesswoman with an 16
agricultural business. She was talking about that, and about how her father used to be in the military. I was thinking about how her mum’s business grew with the 80s and 90s boom in China and so on, then I said to her: ‘It’s really rare for a woman to be so successful; how do you feel about that, and what do you think about what your mother’s done in terms of what you want to do?’ And she said to me, ‘The reason my mother’s career went so well is because she didn’t want to stay at home and be with my father, because she doesn’t like him’. I have a few friends from China, so I asked them if they wanted to be part of it or if they knew people who might want to be part of it. When I first started doing it, people were very suspicious. But then when I told them I’m
Singaporean, they’d be quite relieved; some of them have told me they don’t get to talk about those things very much with their friends, who are often other mainland Chinese migrants. You know – you’re out having a meal, having fun, drinking, or whatever– but you don’t really talk about anything meaningful. So to get to talk about their family or their upbringing; some of them really enjoyed it, then they would ask their friends to be a part of it too. My pictures are not staged. A lot of people, when looking at my work, think it’s staged, but it’s not. Because the camera is big and they’re very aware of the fact that I’m there, there is that awareness, but I don’t say ‘do this, do that’. We’ll decide on a place together, then they’ll think of an activity they
Untitled from The Other Shore 2014-15
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want to be doing, or something like that, then we’ll just go from there. ok: You’ve been in Hong Kong for fifteen years, and in that time all of this has developed and changed, and many of the people you’re photographing have grown up in that period. How has that shifted since you arrived? wlt: I think when I was younger, in the 1990s or even in the 1980s, there was this idea of the mainlander as backward. You can see it in the Hong Kong cinema, for example, and it’s across everywhere – Singaporean, Taiwanese, etc – a lot of people have those kinds of opinions. I think in the last decade and a half, perhaps it’s become more politicised, and it’s also wrapped up in the economy, with the property prices going up and so many things that affect your day to day life. I think that’s changed and that’s affected people. Also, if you go to different places, like Causeway Bay, it affects the kinds of shops that you get: now in Causeway Bay you get watch shops, jewellery shops. A lot of the shops cater to tourists, and I guess that makes people unhappy, as you see your city changing. Untitled from The Other Shore 2014-15
Untitled from Karachi 2015
ok: You were recently in Karachi for an artists’ residency. Is your work there similar? wlt: It’s a work in progress, but it also focuses on ideas of family and relationships, but also about Karachi. It’s a messy city, but a beautiful city. It’s a city that is extremely divided by class, by religion, by ethnicity; and there’s a lot of gang warfare at this point, with different monopolies in the city. But one of the things that really struck me was family – family in terms of expectations, for women, but also for men. Because of your family, and sometimes because of religion, it can be hard to do what you want. So I wanted to explore how family affected those kinds of dreams and aspirations, but also how it is entwined with religion, with history, with the kind of longing that quite a few people I met had for India; it was lovely, the way they talked about it. 17
Arthur Boyd’s studio (1945, not dated) Albert Tucker gelatin silver photograph State Library of Victoria
Boyd to man christopher chapman looks at influences and insight in the formative years of arthur boyd. When artist Arthur Boyd died just shy of his seventy-ninth birthday in 1999, the obituaries recalled a man defined by a gentle disposition. Fondly reminiscing decades later, Barry Humphries wrote: ‘of all the friends I have had in my life, I miss Arthur Boyd the most’. Humphries remembered Arthur as ‘loveable, decorous, slightly apologetic’. Art museum 18
director James Mollison described Arthur as ‘a deeply humanitarian man’. Photographs show the young Arthur as a man with soft features. Aged twenty-one or twenty-two, a slight smile plays across his lips, and his rounded cheeks provide a cherubic counterpoint to the intense look in his eyes. A group photograph from 1945 shows Arthur in his mid-twenties surrounded by friends; his brother David is at his side and his betrothed Yvonne stands behind him, claiming Arthur as
her own. His face is gentle and his eyes are shadowed. They are all gathered in his painting studio, and Matcham Skipper holds Arthur’s painted self-portrait aloft for the occasion. Albert Tucker was behind the camera. As Patrick McCaughey recently wrote, the self portrait depicts the young artist as ‘self-questioning’, a ‘perplexed young man’. As a boy aged fourteen, Arthur looked intently at those around him. The portraits of his mother and father show his capacity to convey the nuances of his sitters’ psychological and emotional bearing. He had already left school, and, at fifteen and sixteen, turned his gaze upon himself, attempting to manifest through paint on canvas the complexities of his own inner workings. Living with his beloved grandfather and making light-filled paintings of the countryside and seashore, Arthur was also painting those around him. ‘I painted the Driscoll kid’s portrait today’, he wrote to his mother. Written in winter, Arthur’s letter, sprinkled with idiosyncratic spelling and grammar, is intent on reassuring
Yvonne Boyd (1945, not dated) Arthur Boyd oil on muslin on cardboard Bundanon Trust
his mother that he and his grandfather are warm and well: ‘I hope everybody is cosy as can be at Murrumbeena because Gramp and I are as cosy as cosy as cosy as can be, so don’t you worry about us one scrap Mummums. The little flowers you picked are still in their pot on the table and are almost as fresh as the day when they were picked. Well good bye for the present my own sweet dear little Mummums with tons and heaps and heaps of love from your ever loving son Arthur Chook Chooks’. His guardianship of the family’s chickens as a child, another footnote to the young Boyd’s gentle nature, earned him the affectionate nick-name ‘chookie-boy’. Accordingly, at boy scouts, fourteen-year-old Arthur was known as ‘Chooka’ Boyd. Two young men entered adolescent Arthur’s life at this time, both of whom were to become role models. The scoutmaster of the 2nd Murrumbeena Troop, Max Nicholson, became a close family friend of the Boyds. A student of English at Melbourne University, Nicholson was a man inspired by intellectual adventure. He introduced Arthur to the literature of Arthur Rimbaud, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. There was also the painter Wilfred McCulloch, who Boyd met on one of his solo painting expeditions to Wilsons Promontory, high above the seas of Bass Strait. Arthur was aged fourteen, Wilfred twenty-four. The two became good friends, and Arthur painted with Wilfred, his brother Alan, and Max Meldrum at their artists’ camp above Gunnamatta Ocean Beach. Boyd and McCulloch travelled and camped together along the coast to Sydney. McCulloch was sent to Singapore in late 1941 as portrait 53 winter 2016
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Arthur Boyd c.1938-39 Wilfred McCulloch oil on canvas Private collection Self portrait (1945-46, not dated) Arthur Boyd oil on canvas Purchased with funds provided by the Liangis family 2014 Carl Cooper (1945-46, not dated) Arthur Boyd oil on canvas on board Bequest of Alan Boxer 2014
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Betty Burstall (1945, not dated) Arthur Boyd oil on canvas Purchased 1998 Douglas Woods 1945 Arthur Boyd oil on cotton gauze mounted on cardboard National Gallery of Australia The Arthur Boyd Gift 1975
a stretcher bearer, and was killed after three months’ service, aged thirty-one. Wilfred painted a portrait of Arthur when he (Boyd) was eighteen. Arthur is enclosed by the army-green canvas of their tent, his bare torso lean and pale beneath prickly pink sunburn across his skin. His shoulders and neck are strong, his haircut ‘short back-andsides’ with a mop of hair falling across his forehead. His serious expression is the visage familiar from his own self-portraits.
Another of Boyd’s formative friendships was with the young painter Yosl Bergner, the two boys about seventeen years of age when they were introduced by Max Nicholson. Bergner had been brought up in an intellectual household – his father Melech Ravitch was an important Jewish essay-writer and poet. Before Germany invaded Poland, Ravitch brought his wife, son, daughter and younger brother to Australia; Yosl arrived in Melbourne in 1937. Ravitch’s mother is believed
to have died in the Belzec concentration camp, and his older brother had committed suicide before Yosl was born. Arthur and Yosl became firm friends, both exploring life through art and ideas, with Bergner’s openness and sensitive nature appealing to Arthur. Yosl was frank in his critique of Arthur’s landscape paintings, and helped draw out the psychological intensity in Arthur’s work. Arthur recalled that Yosl made paintings based on the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky – also an influence for Arthur. Taking his cue from Dostoyevsky’s moral drama The Brothers Karamazov, Boyd painted head and shoulder portraits of himself and his two brothers Guy and David, in deep intense colours. The sense of dark stillness in this picture would foreshadow the flurry of portraits he painted aged in his mid-twenties. Arthur’s self portrait, painted when he was twenty-five, is among one of the most forceful visions of selfhood in Australian art. Arthur’s soft features are made angular, his gaze penetrating. He looks out at the world with a resolute desire to comprehend its darkness as much as its light. His portraits of those around him are equally moody. Wheelchair-bound pottery-decorator Carl Cooper sits against a nightmarish sky. Arthur’s portrait of deaf neighbourhood boy Douglas Woods is solemn and poignant. His portrait of Betty Burstall – who would go on to found the La Mama theatre – was painted near the time when she lost her baby. Arthur captures her distant gaze. A group of portraits painted by Arthur Boyd around 1945 have been gathered together to complement those in the National Portrait Gallery collection; they are borrowed from the National Gallery of Australia and Bundanon Trust. These form a focus exhibition showing until 14 August at the Portrait Gallery that reveals the culmination of Arthur Boyd’s young manhood – a vision of himself and of the world shaped by a psychological insight perceptive and sensitive in equal measure. portrait 53 winter 2016
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Jacinta Stapleton 1999 Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins photograph Dave Graney 1996 Bleddyn Butcher gelatin silver photograph Gift of the artist 2002 Cover black+white #39 (feat. Jacinta Stapleton) 1999 Studio Magazines
Naked nostalgia penelope grist reminisces about the halcyon days of a print icon, before the infusion of the internet’s shades of grey. Six times a year, every year of the 1990s that I remember, as I got off the school bus in a cloud of red dust, a sleek black package from Sydney would be poking out of the old chook-feed tin that was our mailbox: not only black+white magazine (‘black+white’). A rollcall of turn-of-the-millennium fame from the acting, dance, music and sports worlds brought the art of the photographic nude to a mainstream audience. It is no coincidence that this particular teenager in rural north coast New South Wales grew up to curate the National Portrait Gallery exhibition Bare: Degrees of undress. ‘It was a bizarre relic of the ‘90s and ‘00s that still amazes me ever existed’, Nick Dent wrote to me around the time Bare opened. In that exhibition I
argued, as black+white did, that nudity in portraiture illuminates a sitter’s complex humanity. Dent’s email continued: ‘The range and number of famous people who appeared undressed in its pages is really something, and a window into a more relaxed and liberated time.’ Now working at Time Out Australia, Dent was black+white’s last editor and a member of its editorial team for many years. Several works in the Portrait Gallery’s collection are associated with black+white’s shoots. Fascination, tinged with nostalgia, spurred me to speak with a few of those who worked on this Australian magazine that, for a moment, transformed international celebrity portrait photography. black+white #00, published in the summer of 1992/3 and retailing at $10, sold out quickly. ‘Starlust’, black+white’s nude celebrity portraiture section, was unashamedly the drawcard for sales. From the beginning, editors
and photographers collaborated closely with the celebrity sitters. The sitters’ reflections on their nude shoot experience provided crucial editorial content and compelling personal insight into the photographs as portraiture. The cover of #00 featured twenty year-old Kym Wilson of Brides of Christ and A Country Practice. Wilson transformed into Marilyn Monroe, Queen Nefertiti and Rubens’ Venus: ‘They’re pictures of an actress. It was like I was re-creating some strange personal fantasy – living out past lives’, she told Gina Kelly, in her interview to accompany the portraits by young American photographer Tony Duran. For his part, Duran returned to the US after four years in Australia; now based in Los Angeles, he built a stellar career and a reputation as one of the foremost creative portrait photographers of international celebrity. The photographer (in the middle of moving house) replied immediately to my email 23
asking about his time shooting for the magazine: ‘You are not going to believe this story ... I came across the very first issue of black+white... this was just hours ago! I shot that when I was a child, practically! And I was explaining to my assistant how I was doing shoots like this so many years ago ... I am literally looking at the magazine as we speak ...’ black+white was to be a large format magazine with exceptionally high production values that was simultaneously a pop-culture journal, art photography portfolio and graphic design tour de force. The publication’s founder, owner and Editor-in-chief was Marcello Grand, a former architect and advertising consultant who had started Studio Magazines a decade earlier. ‘No one here ever counted on the enormous splash that our first issue would make 24
on the newsstands and the collective media imagination’, wrote black+white’s inaugural editor, Horacio Silva, in #1. Karen-Jane Eyre was the magazine’s editor for over twelve years. She liaised with sitters for the nude celebrity portraits, commissioned the photographers and produced the shoots. This involved, at times, dozens of phone calls to agents in Australia and overseas, and meetings to develop the shoots’ concepts with sitters. ‘I spent a lot of time talking with them about the image they would like to project’, Eyre says. She used to remind herself ‘it was a big decision for people to consider posing for a magazine like this – but they were always flattered to be asked’. All the photographers I interviewed recalled the positive collaborations and creative freedom when shooting
Annalise Braakensiek 1997 Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins photograph
for black+white. Eyre explained the process: ‘Every shoot was a team effort, but someone had to be in charge’. Eyre selected and briefed photographers and discussed mood and styling. She then worked with the photographers during shoot production – booking hair and makeup, stylist, studios, props, locations and managing the budget. ‘My final responsibility’, Eyre remembers, ‘was working on selecting the images to be published with black+white’s Art Director and Creative Director, Marcello Grand, and then getting sign-off from the talent.’ black+white existed in the moment between ‘the mass media’ and ‘social media’. The ‘information super-highway’ was under construction. As technology was recalibrating lives and cameras to digital black+white thrived in analogue. It straddled the end of the millennium. Frozen in its undigitised, copyrightlocked 1990s/2000s time capsule, very little exists online about the magazine, where it is, oddly, easier to research the first decade of the 20th century than the last. Reliant on those who remember it, I wish I could have talked with every contributor to black+white – not least so I could thank them personally for a magazine that was so important to me. I could not get in touch with black+white’s visionary founder and Creative Director, Grand. Much discussed at the time, public, personal and media opinion was divided on the line between art and provocation. ‘Looking at the naked body extends the boundaries of our perceptions about who we are … black+white continues with its agenda to demystify the body, thereby revealing the true nature of our humanity’, wrote Eyre in #4 in 1993. Not all saw it this way. Bleddyn Butcher’s portraits of musicians Dave Graney and Clare Moore were shot for the 1997 ‘musicians’ special issue, and are held in the Gallery’s collection. In a recent ‘Portrait Story’ interview for the Gallery, Graney says they are unrepresentative out of context, as they did the shoot regaled in cuts of meat as a joke, and in a pointed subversion of what they saw as plain voyeurism clothed in ‘‘90s pompousness’. For black+white, the freedom to have this argument was part of the point. That special issue’s introduction asked: ‘Legitimate or gratuitous? Tasteful or titillating? And does it matter anyway? It’s all a question of personal aesthetics.’ Its aim was ‘to portrait 53 winter 2016
extend the boundaries of the Australian celebrity portrait’. Revisiting the magazines a decade on, the portraits taken as young stars’ big careers were taking off are peculiarly powerful. Andrew Craig Steinman transformed Portia de Rossi into a post-modern Botticelli sprite – all tousled hair and flooded projected text; Tony Duran photographed Naomi Watts as an 18th century beauty in a verdant European garden; Guy Pearce’s shoot with Simon Anderson bathed the effervescent co-star of Priscilla in subdued light and shadow. Nude portraiture was able to simultaneously reflect these sitters’ physical beauty, youthful vulnerability and striking confidence in pursuing their ambitions. Design studios in London, fashion designers in Paris and photography studios in New York noticed black+white. Top international photographers, including Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts and Ellen von Unwerth, attracted by the quality of the design, paper and printing, began sending work. ‘We could never have afforded them had they not been submitted’, says Dent. ‘No one realised how small the budgets and team were.’ black+white was widely imitated. By around 2005, half its sales were international. The magazine had an air of glamour as its reputation grew through the 1990s. ‘People thought that we must have naked women racing around the offices – that never happened!’ laughs Dent. black+white’s artistic integrity secured its sitters. ‘Frankly, pornography bores me, but nude photography, when it’s done well, is a different thing. The naked body is beautiful’, asserted Kym Wilson in #00 – an observation echoed through the years. Annalise Braakensiek agrees. Responding to my request for permission to print her beautiful portrait by long-standing photographic duo Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins, from #26 in 1997, she wrote to me: ‘I am a lover of art. I respect Mother Nature and the body I have been given. The human body is itself a work of art. For me nudity and posing for, or admiring, artistic photography is nothing to be ashamed of – quite the contrary.’ For Balzer and Perkins, ‘without clothes there is an honesty and a pure sensibility – there can be a storytelling aspect to the shoot, as opposed to documenting the clothes’. They provided these insights via Skype from
Cover black+white #00 (feat. Kym Wilson) 1992 Studio Magazines
their warehouse studio in Sydney (around the corner from where the Studio Magazines offices used to be). They continue to exhibit photographic nudes internationally. In black+white, this freedom from clothes released the storytelling potential of photographic portraiture for many of its sitters. Of photographing twenty-one year-old Natalie Mendoza, the star of stage musical Les Miserables (for #32 in 1998), they remember ‘a beautiful pared down shoot’. Director Baz Luhrmann subsequently saw the portraits and cast her in Moulin Rouge.
Mendoza sent me an eloquent reflection on this shoot, describing it as ‘the very first time experiencing a new way of viewing who I was’. She wrote: ‘Lyn and Tony asked me what statement I wanted to make as an artist. It was seductive to all my hidden sensibilities and for that reason it was also most terrifying … I grew up amongst the loud personalities of a large creative family. In that world full of noise I barely spoke as a child. I had an inner life nobody knew of. My fascination with Zen and minimalism was first captured in these early images. I wanted to convey the 25
yin and yang energies – the beauty of antithesis, the world of opposites and all that flowed in between. Art without vanity was such a beautiful and rare jewel of an experience. My inner emancipation had begun.’ Many sitters grasped the opportunity to capture, for the future, a transient moment of their youth in peak physical condition. In interview after interview accompanying the ‘Starlust’ portraits, the sitters describe being initially nervous, overcoming apprehensions, and feeling liberated. Tony Duran learned a lot about how to work with his sitters from his 26
black+white shoots. ‘I have carried this with me over all these years’, he told me. Duran’s stunning portraits of eighteen year-old Home and Away star Melissa George were published in February 1995. In her interview with Athena Thompson, George spoke of the chance to be seen in a different light; she identified with the strong feminine aesthetic and story of Tamara de Lempicka, a quasi-cubist painter of the 1930s, and plotted the shoot with Duran accordingly. Twisted into angles and precisely controlled shapes, George’s smooth luminous form, unified by dramatic gesture or fiery look,
Natalie Mendoza 1998 Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins photograph
re-enacted the artist’s forms. ‘On the day of the shoot she worked her butt off’, Duran said of the eighteen-hour session. ‘I remember those pictures like it was yesterday.’ Another television star shedding her popular persona in a nude portrait shoot for black+white was twenty year-old Jacinta Stapleton, in #39 from October 1999. ‘Any chance I get to go against the stereotype, I take’, she told Merran White in her interview. Stapleton had recently decided to leave the Neighbours cast. ‘We were trying to get a feeling of looking ahead. All I was thinking, all day, was how I was leaving this part of my life behind.’ Balzer and Perkins remember Stapleton saying she spent the ‘whole Sunday before the shoot naked at home, to get used to it’. ‘She sent us a letter a few weeks later saying the shoot was one of the best experiences she has had in her life, breaking down her own boundaries.’ ‘The aesthetic and content stayed true to the original intention and ethos’, Eyre reflects. I wonder if black+white could have existed anywhere else. Eyre thinks it ‘was Australian, without “being Australian”’. Her feeling is that ‘something in the beach culture, the physicality of Australians, the openness of Australian culture meant that the nude celebrity portraiture aspect was unlikely to have evolved elsewhere’. ‘I am such a prude,’ laughs Tony Duran, ‘an Irish Catholic Midwestern uptight guy’ – but black+white, he says, ‘allowed me to go there’. ‘If I had started in America, I would have become a very different photographer’, he reflects. ‘The freedom of Australia, the strong sensuality and confidence rubbed off on me.’ black+white thrived in the environment of cultural confidence and optimism created by the turn of the millennium and the Sydney Olympic Games. The Olympics Special Issues, Atlanta Dream, Sydney Dream and Athens Dream flew off the shelves, according to Dent: ‘They staked out our place in the popular and international markets.’ Stories of ancient Olympians competing naked and the Greek aesthetic of the heroic nude cemented the concept. Over ninety of Australia’s top athletes’ extraordinary discipline, resilience and physiques were celebrated. Photographer James Houston did nine striking shoots for the Sydney Dream. In Houston’s portraits of pole-vaulter Tatiana Grigorieva, she portrait 53 winter 2016
gently descends, twisting her exquisite athletic form in mid-air, one arm trailing up behind her floating blond hair, toes pointed. In her interview, she reflected that as an athlete and as a model: ‘you fly because you want to fly … I can express myself freely but keep total control.’ black+white sought out young talented photographers, even if they had no experience with nude portraiture. Eyre rang Adam Pretty out of the blue to shoot for the Athens Dream. He did a shoot with swimmer Brett Hawke at midnight on a windy, freezing cold Sydney beach. A multi-award winning sports photographer, Pretty works all over the world for Getty Images. He was in Munich when I rang him. Kayaker Nathan Baggaley had never paddled in Sydney Harbour (‘It was like a washing machine out there!’) before doing his shoot with Pretty, who was treading water and dodging ferries under the Bridge. Doing these shoots, Pretty says, opened doors and helped develop his career and practice. Rio 2016 will be his eighth Olympic Games as a photographer. By the mid-2000s, the culture was shifting. ‘It was a real shame to watch the open, free, liberal environment start gradually to feel constricting and judgemental’, regrets photographer Luke Feltham, who felt this change occurring from the mid-1990s. A consistent contributor to black+white from the beginning, Feltham was working between Australia and Europe, including with Vogue España. Potential ‘Starlust’ sitters were increasingly nervous (and reasonably so, given the dross that fills online ‘comments’ pages) about how their portraits would be distributed and endure. The information revolution had its victims. A sense of personal freedom succumbed to new privacy settings. ‘Celebrity has changed’, observes photographer Michelle Day. Canberraborn Day relocated to Los Angeles in the 1990s to build a highly successful career in celebrity portraiture. She photographed Australians Rebekah Cross (with a live python), Gabrielle Fitzpatrick (in a cloud of feathers) and Max Sharam (as queen of a surreal party), in Hollywood for black+white. ‘This combination of nudity and celebrity would never happen today – the way that celebrities now have to fiercely protect their privacy … never before or again – it was incredible.’ Both Dent and Eyre reflected on the
Billy Slater 2005 Julian Kingma type C photograph Purchased 2012
public mood after September 11, the effect of the internet and increasing dominance of ephemeral imagery. It was a different world when a celebrity did a nude photo shoot and it would appear only in beautifully printed hardcopy editions of a magazine. ‘We could feel the change’, Eyre remembers. #88, the last, was published in summer 2006/7. ‘black+white suddenly seemed oldfashioned’, Dent told me. Could it exist again? Everyone I interviewed for this article agreed – no: not without the physicality of the printed page; not with the internet; not with social media; not with a society
that is, maybe partly as a consequence of these things, more fearful and conservative. I wonder how many creative lives black+white touched: the actors, dancers, artists, curators, graphic designers, writers and photographers out there living the legacy of this bizarre relic from a more liberated time. Re-reading the magazines now, I am struck by its unembarrassed candour, and a gentle and hope-filled striving after honesty, strength and humanity through portraiture. I am struck by its assumption of an enduring freedom of creative expression. Sometimes, it is indeed hard to believe it ever existed. 27
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Angelo Valiante – Country of birth: Italy 2016 Brigitte Doering – Country of birth: Germany 2012
Michael Wardell – Country of birth: Ireland 2014 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
Look who’s coming to dinner
michael wardell’s personal insight into jacques van der merwe’s new arrivals. According to 2015 figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics earlier this year, over 28% of Australia’s population was born overseas. In excess of a quarter of the national population, then, has gone through, or is going through, the experience of adjusting to a new culture. For some, this might be a relatively easy transition from an English-speaking, Anglo-Celtic culture to one strongly influenced by an Anglo-Celtic colonial history. For others, it might entail exposure to a different language, religion and system of governance, as well as smaller changes such as alterations in diet or variations in social customs.
Queensland artist Jacques van der Merwe left South Africa in 2008 with his wife, Madeleen, and two children, to find a place where he could raise his family without the constant fear of crime and potential for violence he experienced in Pretoria. While happy to find a peaceful haven in Australia, Jacques and Madeleen left family and friends and moved to a place where they knew nobody. At the time, Jacques was just beginning to establish a reputation as an artist in South Africa, and by moving to Australia he had to start all over again. For the first few years, the family was unsure if they would be allowed to remain in the country, as they tackled the bureaucratic quagmire of applying for permanent residency. Jacques found himself surprised 29
Vahid Eshraghi – Country of birth: Iran 2013 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
by how hard it was to adjust to this new land; this was the genesis of the New Arrivals project, which he started after finding himself comparing stories with other new migrants. Upon moving to Mount Tamborine, in the Queensland Gold Coast hinterland, Jacques found a community of artists and writers, many of whom were also born outside Australia. He began the New Arrivals series in 2012 with portraits of some of these new friends, accompanying each painting with a taped interview with the sitter, describing their story. Some had been in Australia for decades, like the ‘ten pound pom’ neighbour, Terence Kitching, who came here as a young man in the early sixties, seeking adventure and taking advantage of the White 30
Australia Policy. Others, such as German-born artist Brigitte Doering and American artist Mike Taylor, came here as tourists and fell in love with Australia and an Australian partner, enabling them to stay. Like Jacques and his family, all speak of their feeling of gratitude for being able to live in this country, but, with a reticence that almost borders on guilt, they speak of the difficulties they experienced adjusting to a new environment. The next group of New Arrivals that Jacques sought out to paint and interview were refugees, finding themselves here in Australia after fleeing their country of birth. Iranian-born Vahid Eshraghi was a student studying in the Philippines in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution saw the overthrow of
Hamed Zwafa – Country of birth: Iran 2013 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
Senait Asmelash – Country of birth: Eritrea 2012 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Khomeini. At the time, his mother in Tehran told him not to return to Iran, and he found himself homeless, and, when his passport expired, stateless. Eventually he met an Australian Immigration Attaché in Western Samoa who encouraged and helped him apply to come to Australia as a refugee. Hamed Zwafa, a more recent refugee from Iran, tells an even more dramatic story, fleeing prison, torture and likely execution in Tehran as a student activist; he is currently seeking a permanent visa in Australia. Two more recent refugees, Senait Asmelash and Bebe Selenani, were both painted and interviewed the year they arrived in Australia
in 2012. Senait Asmelash was born a Christian in Eritrea, and, fearing a lack of religious and political freedom, she fled to a refugee camp in Sudan, a country where Islamic Sharia Law applies. Bebe Selenani was escaping the continuing civil war in her country of birth, the Democratic Republic of Congo. She fled to Tanzania with her four small children and, from there, applied to come to Australia as a refugee. The two tell us stories of past hardship and devastating loss, and yet their experience of this new country is expressed primarily with relief and gratitude. The initial group of portraits, painted in 2012, was first exhibited at The Centre Beaudesert in 2013. For a second exhibition at Logan Art Gallery in 2015, Jacques added new portraits of both migrants portrait 53 winter 2016
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Bebe Selemani – Country of birth: DRC 2012 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
and refugees living or working in Logan. As a migrant myself, Jacques asked if I would agree to be interviewed and photographed for one of these new portraits, and, with some trepidation, I consented. Born in Ireland, I came to Australia forty years ago, working on a horse transport plane, not really knowing what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be. I was escaping family pressure to join the army in England, and I had a vague idea that I wanted to work in an art gallery. Like Jacques’ first sitters coming from Britain, Germany and America, my personal difficulties adjusting to the new culture of Australia were insignificant compared to those of the refugees. Just as some found it easier than others to adjust to life in a new country, some also found it 32
Anonymous – Rwanda 2012 oil on linen © Jacques van der Merwe
easier than others to share their stories with the world. One young woman, who migrated from South Africa in 2009 at the age of seventeen, initially agreed to be interviewed and painted by Jacques in 2013. However, when hearing her own words posted on the artist’s website, she found it too confronting, the experience dredging up too many unpleasant memories; she asked the artist to remove it. The painting still appears on the website as it was exhibited at Logan, covered in a semi-transparent gauze so that the subject appears to be emerging from the mist, or perhaps fading away. Other sitters, such as the young refugee from Rwanda who Jacques interviewed and painted in 2012, have allowed their portrait and interview to remain, but
requested that they be listed as anonymous. The New Arrivals portraits are all 122 x 91 cm; they are the same dimensions so that all are equal, like enlarged passport photographs. Each work is intended to be viewed with the accompanying interview, accessible via a QR code on the label when exhibited, or directly through the artist’s website. They are painted quickly with bold expressionist brush strokes, the composition loosely dictated by snapshot photographs taken while interviewing the sitter. By painting fast, Jacques allowed details derived from the sitters’ stories to appear almost without his conscious control. When painting Bebe Selenani, four babies, representing her four children, appear to float around her
neck, emerging as both a beautiful garland and a restricting yoke. In the portrait of the anonymous refugee from Rwanda, one of her white bead earrings has transformed into a skull. In my portrait, a disconcerting bloodlike splash appears by my mouth. New Arrivals is a visual and oral portrait of ordinary people representing over a quarter of the Australian population. We have all come from different parts of the world, carrying some degree of loss from what we have left behind, and each one of us has sought a better life in this country. In seeking to come to terms with his own immigrant experience, Jacques van der Merwe has given voice to a seldom heard minority and reminded us all to treasure our relative freedom and prosperity. portrait 53 winter 2016
The hands have it angus trumble treats the gallery’s collection with a dab hand. When they appear in portraits, and they appear very often, hands may perform any number of useful functions. They can be set to work doing something useful. They can be exploited as a refinement or elaboration of elements of the character of the sitter. They can enhance the composition through gesture— demonstrative, particular or vague as the case may be. They can place real emphasis upon qualities of grace, strength, endurance, frailty, delicacy or plain old age. They can be made to hold onto something, or to let it go. They can be clasped, or in repose. And the hands can be brought into suggestive dialogue with the face itself. As Montaigne put it (in 1580), What doe we with our hands? Doe we not sue and entreat, promise and performe, call men unto us and discharge them, bid them farewell and be gone, threaten, pray, beseech, deny, refuse, demand, admire, number, confesse, repent, feare, bee ashamed, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage, sweare, witnesse, accuse, condemne, absolve, injure, despise, defie, despight, flatter, applaud, blesse, humble, mocke, reconcile, recommend, exalt, shew gladnesse, rejoyce, complaine, waile, sorrow, discomfort, dispaire, cry out, forbid, declare silence and astonishment: and what not? with so great variation, and amplifying as if they would contend with the tongue. In general terms, it would seem that, if indeed we do all of these things with gesture, artists have always taken full advantage of their capacity to seize upon our hands, and capture parts of us in that way. En grande tenue, for example, Dame Mabel Brookes is shown to be partial to spry red nail varnish. In his laboratory, Macfarlane Burnet handles an egg just firmly enough to provide stability. There is a hint of reserve in the conjoined disposition of the hands, in each case, of Dora Byrne and Frank Fenner. Ann Moyal toys with her sautoir. George Judah Cohen literally applies the hand of experience to his business affairs. One hand may be shown somehow dealing with a glove that partly conceals the other – which often raises the question whether the sitter was captured in the act of putting them on or taking them off – such is the case with Herbert Badham and Charles
Lloyd Jones, who also holds his pipe, that now forgotten emblem of depth of thought. Repose itself, meanwhile, covers wide territory: Kate Hattam’s attenuated wrists embody personal style, while Lowitja O’Donoghue’s hands carry the eminence of age and experience. On the other hand – sorry – the passage of time, the action of history, often steers us towards the perception of larger cultural, even national tendencies – at odds with purely individual traits. Surely one can trace, for example, a taste in Chinese and Japanese Buddhist sculpture for sinuously curving fingers, a gentle resistance to the whole notion of joint articulation possibly arising from conventions of dance, of delicate motions, as much as one can point to a whole-of-life interest on the part of German and Austrian painters from Dürer and Grünewald all the way down to Klimt, Schiele, and Beckmann in the expressive potential of long, bony fingers, or sunken phalanges, or swollen joints, and creeping, protruding veins. French art, meanwhile, from the School of Fontainebleau, through Rigaud, Boucher and Fragonard, Vigée-Lebrun, Greuze and Boilly, to Bouguereau, even Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, exhibits what seems to me an undeniable taste for elegantly tapering fingers, tiny, not to say minuscule fingertips, and winningly dimpled knuckles. When in Marivaux’ play Jeu de l’amour et du hazard (1730), about to take Lisette’s hand in marriage, the character of Arlequin describes it affectionately as “rondelette et potelée” (strictly speaking the equivalent of ‘pottled,’ meaning plump, but surely also implying the presence of dimples) he could be describing exactly the hand of a Boucher shepherdess. Softness, delicacy, and an impressively independent, free-ranging cocked little finger seem to characterise the hand in French art. It may seem bizarre, therefore, to speculate whether, 300 years hence, any such thing as an ‘Australian’ hand will then be discerned in the portraits of our own time and place, when it is, of course, quite invisible to us. The diverse character of our society may well militate against such a tendency, but equally nobody could sustain the argument that all French hands of the eighteenth century, for example, actually conformed to the Boucher type – any more than that all Viennese fingers of the Belle Epoque were bony – yet that is how the visual culture of those times and places now powerfully urge us to remember them. 33
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Dame Mabel Brookes c.1955 William Dargie oil on canvas Gift of Rodney Davidson ao obe 2014 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Sir Macfarlane Burnet 1960‑61 William Dargie oil on composition board Purchased 1999
Dora Byrne 1951 Richard von Marientreu oil on canvas Gift of the Estate of Leslie Walford am 2013
Frank Fenner ac cmg mbe 2007 Jude Rae oil on canvas Commissioned with funds provided by Mr Anthony Adair and Ms Karen MacLeod
Ann Moyal 1957 Pamela Thalben‑Ball oil on canvas Gift of Ann Moyal 2012 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
George Judah Cohen 1925 George Lambert oil on canvas Gift of the National Australia Bank 2002
Self portrait with glove 1939 Herbert Badham oil on canvas Purchased 1999
Sir Charles Lloyd Jones 1951 William Dobell oil on composition board Gift of the Simpson family in memory of Caroline Simpson oam 2008 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program
Kate Hattam 1956 Clifton Pugh oil on board Purchased 2006
Lowitja O’Donoghue 2006 Robert Hannaford oil on canvas Purchased with funds donated by BHP Billiton Limited, Rio Tinto Aboriginal Fund, Newmont Australia Limited, Reconciliation Australia, Hon Paul Keating and Hon Fred Chaney 2006
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Matepai c. 1929-32 photograph Image courtesy of Marist Archives, New Zealand
Missionary positions stella ramage on father mchardy’s bougainville portraiture. A monochrome photograph fixed within a large and fragile old album shows a Melanesian girl of nine or ten peeking merrily over the shell of a giant turtle. The warmth between photographer and subject is palpable. A caption, typed on a slip of paper, has been carefully gummed underneath. It reads ‘Matepai trying to imagine she is a turtle’. The tone is chatty; the child is granted the ‘dignity of naming’; the words display an engagement with the inner life of the subject. This is one of hundreds of remarkable images taken by a Roman Catholic Marist missionary, Father Emmet McHardy, a young New Zealander stationed on Bougainville, in what was then the North Solomons, between 1929 and 1932. Emmet, together with his brother John, who remained in New Zealand, engaged
in a joint venture under challenging conditions. Between them they produced a photograph album which rapidly evolved into a public presentation of glass lantern slides toured on both sides of the Tasman. The colonial period engendered a hungry international traffic in photographs and footage of Pacific peoples. Images circulated in the West amongst ethnographers sharing information, adventurers seeking commercial gain, and Christian missionaries appealing for financial support. These categories were porous; images drifted and captions metamorphosed according to context. Nevertheless, such images were often how Europeans of the colonial period – whether from magazines, lantern slide presentations or church newsletters – gained their impressions of brown ‘otherness’. Pictures of indigenous people taken by Western photographers ‘in the 45
field’ were considered as documentary rather than portraiture. The majority do not meet art historian John Gere’s criteria for the latter: a representation of a person ‘in which the artist is engaged with the personality of his sitter and is preoccupied with his or her characterisation as an individual’. Disparities of power and the racialist ideology of the period made such crosscultural, humanist engagement unlikely. For example, consider a ‘Lantern Lecture’ circulated by the Bougainville Roman Catholic mission around 1929: the surviving typescript commentary lists sixty-two slides, although the slides themselves are missing. Excerpts from the script demonstrate the persistent seepage into missionary discourse of the ‘cannibal-headhunter’ trope ubiquitous to the adventure genre. Titles such as ‘A Fleet of the Head-Hunters’, ‘Head of a War-Canoe’, ‘Taboo House of the Head-Hunters’ suggest stock Solomon Islands popular travelogue imagery. But the more religious accent is equally sensationalist. One slide is entitled ‘A Pagan Trinity’. It carries the caption: ‘Here the devil remains very strong … there reigns here the threefold tyranny, here represented, of superstition, distrust and revenge.’ Another, entitled ‘An Old ManKiller At Buin’, announces that ‘This particular individual has, they say, as many murders on his conscience as he has bracelets on his two arms.’ Likewise, regarding the closing of an inland mission station: ‘… it became
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‘An old man in Evo country. He had never seen a camera before – but after a bit of palaver he did not mind running the risk!’ c. 1929-32 photograph Image courtesy of Marist Archives, New Zealand Pitakai and Tapisoko c. 1929-32 photograph Image courtesy of Marist Archives, New Zealand
necessary to abandon [it] because of the fewness of missionaries, and also – worse still – because the Father who was provisionally in charge had already had his name written on the menu of a cannibal banquet, of which he was to be the staple article … Behold the inland folk of Bourgainville [sic], man-eaters.’ Hearsay trumped evidence when it came to regaling wide-eyed listeners with the bloodthirsty behaviour of ‘savages’, and clearly this persisted even in missionary publicity. We may compare this to McHardy’s more measured comment from the same moment: ‘[the central interior] is another region in which I am now sure there is no cannibalism.’
In contrast, then, here are further examples of McHardy’s inclusive style of representing Bougainville people to Western audiences, evident not only in the images themselves but from the detailed captions he wrote to accompany them. Of a photograph of two barebreasted young women, one swathed in strings of valuable shell money, the other adorned with prestigious cicatrice markings, who smile for the camera with their arms round each other: ‘Pitakai and Tapisoko – two aristocratic young ladies in Rorovana. Pitakai, the younger, is baptised Doreen. Tapisoko is still preparing for baptism.’ And another of a similar subject: ‘Spring fashions in the Northern Solomons! And they think they are as swish as anything ( just as white girls do!).’ Of an older woman wearing a rain cape: ‘This lady lives about three days hard going from Tunuru; the little cape she is wearing is made from very strong leaves cleverly sewn together.’ Mature women are always, respectfully, ‘ladies’. The images of the girls could so easily, in other hands, be co-opted for the ‘native belle’ genre – that salacious tendency of Western travelogue illustrators to exploit the innocent nakedness of indigenous young women. But McHardy introduces them as named individuals with a social rank that has not been obliterated by baptism. He seems content for Pitakai to remain Pitakai as well as ‘Doreen’, and indigenous names appear frequently in both his captions and correspondence. Likewise, as regards dress and adornment, McHardy demonstrates imaginative cross-cultural relativism in how he wants his New Zealand audience to think of these individuals: he acknowledges otherness but frames it in terms of similarity: ‘… they think they are as swish as anything ( just as white girls do!)’. Indigenous skills and freedom from Western commodity dependence are emphasised: the rain cape is ‘cleverly sewn together’; a hand-crafted net is ‘better than a bought one’. He never ascribes ‘savagery’ to the wielding of weapons, but rather expresses his admiration for necessary and difficult skills. Of an image of a highland (and ‘pagan’) man: ‘Sicope, one of my old Evo Kukerai friends, giving a demonstration in the use of a real man-sized bow and arrow; he can shoot a pigeon at a hundred yards. And it is not as simple as portrait 53 winter 2016
it looks: it takes all a big man's strength to stretch such a bow …. But the old chap is an expert.’ During 1930, a systematic project got underway between the brothers, Emmet and John (known as Jack). The initial intention was the compilation of a photo-album, but rapidly evolved into a public lantern slide presentation. McHardy laboured over his photographs and their captions. The latter were typed late at night by lamplight in his little ‘presbytery’ at Tunuru. He had to hand either the negatives or copies of the positive prints sent back to him after processing. We can trace the brothers’ convoluted modus operandi – and gauge the effort involved – in further letters: ‘Dear Jack … I am afraid I am letting you down a bit this time for I am sending down a bunch of negatives without spills [typed captions]; sorry, Jack, but I stopped writing spills at 12:30 last night, and the Gabriel is now waiting to take me down to Kieta. As I say on the papers, index one of each of my copies that you send back and I will return a spill by next mail. I am hoping this business will not be too much of a burden on you. I think rather enviously of your nice album, it should be interesting.’ Father John studiously pasted McHardy’s typed captions alongside the photographs that fill the album. By early 1932, John was having glass lantern slides made (and hand-coloured) from some of the negatives and had acquired a projector. Emmet expressed interest in the ‘projection outfit’ and how his photographs ‘show up on a screen’. An undertaking is evident to show these images in public, to raise support. The McHardy album and lantern slide collection are now held in the Marist Archives of Wellington. In his 2005 essay, The Nation’s Portraits, art historian Roger Blackley appealed for recognition of such overlooked storehouses, where ‘millions of surviving prints, albums and negatives amount to a social documentation far beyond anything achieved by colonial painters.’ The vast majority of the McHardy slides are from Emmet’s negatives and duplicate those in the photograph album. My contention is that, given the brothers’ collaboration and the effort infused into those captions, Father John McHardy’s commentary to this slideshow, which he presented in both New Zealand and Australia, would have
absorbed and transmitted his brother’s ‘voice’ to a wider audience. These, I have argued, are qualitatively different even to those of his fellow mission-promoters, let alone the commercial travelogueadventurer genre. But photographic portraits also became part of the local visual culture, playing a multiplicity of roles on Bougainville itself. Thus they were not just documents of the white man’s
Sicope c. 1929-32 photograph Image courtesy of Marist Archives, New Zealand Maria and Baria c. 1929-32 photograph Image courtesy of Marist Archives, New Zealand
colonial gaze, but had (and have) their own significance for the indigenous residents of the colonised region. Photography formed a network of connections that transcends any simplistic reduction to an exploitative colonial gaze. McHardy was assiduous in sharing copies of his prints: ‘It is surely one of the greatest joys of photography to take snaps of people who have never seen a camera before; the exclamations when the finished snap goes round!’ There was, of course, a significant time-lapse and a considerable international journey between taking the ‘snaps’ and handing round finished prints. That McHardy conflates the two stages underlines the continuity of his relationships with his subjects. Sharing photographs is here a modern means of cultivating friendships rather than merely acquiring mission propaganda. A caption to a shot of a young woman adjusting her husband’s crucifix in preparation for a more formal portrait further exemplifies the community life of photographs, as well as the intimate relationship between modernity and photographic self-consciousness: ‘Preparing for the snapshots! Baria’s Catechist cross was not hanging to Maria’s satisfaction; she is here straightening it. This was a genuine [i.e. unposed] snap, and caused a whole lot of amusement in the village.’ Since this image also appears amongst Father John’s lantern slides, it had the further opportunity to inspire the trans-cultural rapport that is encouraged by any such appreciably natural and identifiable human gesture. Throwing himself into his work and travelling extensively under arduous conditions, Father Emmet McHardy’s precarious health deteriorated. He died in 1933 at the age of twenty-eight. But his legacy persists. Laboriously tapping out his captions late at night in the steamy lamplight of his hut in Tunuru, McHardy inexorably converted his ‘snaps’ into fully fledged portraits of indigenous Bougainville personalities – thus challenging entrenched colonial attitudes and offering both European and indigenous viewers a path from paternalism to modernity. The above is a revised excerpt from Stella Ramage’s 2015 doctoral thesis, ‘Missionaries, modernity and the moving image’. 47
sarah engledow bristles at the biographers’ neglect of kitchener’s antipodean intervention.
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener 1885 Alexander Bassano half-plate glass negative © National Portrait Gallery, London
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener 1895 Alexander Bassano half-plate glass negative © National Portrait Gallery, London
All the way with K of K 48
For two hours on 13 November 1915, Lord Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War and the face of World War 1, visited the freezing and verminous Anzacs at Gallipoli. As the men pressed in on him, he said ‘The King has asked me to tell you how splendidly he thinks you have done – you have done splendidly, better, even, than I thought you would’. Turning to his old friend William Birdwood, whom he himself had put in charge, he murmured ‘Thank God Birdie, I came to see this for myself ... I had no idea of the difficulties you were up against’. In the glittering Edwardian period, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, First Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, was the hottest star in the firmament of the British Empire. He was born in Ireland to English parents in 1850. His mother was tubercular, and his father, a disappointed military man, was a monstrous bully. The Kitchener children were forced to inflict punishments their father devised upon each other. Herbert was once pegged out on his back on the lawn in the sun for hours, his splayed arms and legs roped to croquet hoops. The whole family, including frail Mrs Kitchener, slept under layers of newspapers because Colonel Kitchener loathed blankets. He also detested education. For a while, Herbert attended school in Switzerland, where his mother was confined to a sanatorium. Commissioned into the Royal Engineers in January 1871, he spent some years at the School of Military Engineering and a spell as an aide-de-camp, without hinting at the greatness he’d achieve. Kitchener hit his straps in his mid-twenties over four years with the Palestine Exploration Fund. Obsessively focused, leading teams working day and night, he brought the massive project of surveying Palestine in on time and under budget. By mid-1882, he had also mapped Cyprus. From this period, during which he grew his trademark lush moustache and began collecting ceramics, his career skyrocketed. In Egypt, in 1883, he was promoted to captain. Egypt was nominally under the control of Turkey, but had come under effective control of Great Britain the previous year. Under the control of portrait 53 winter 2016
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Egypt, in turn, was Sudan. When forces of the self-styled ‘Mahdi’, Muhammad Ahmad, sought supremacy in the Sudan, the British General Charles Gordon – who had profoundly alarming personal issues – was sent to evacuate Egyptians from the danger area. Instead, once he arrived in February 1884, the iron entered his soul: determined to rout the charismatic Mahdi (who, in the 1966 film Khartoum, was played by Laurence Olivier), he dug in, and got trapped. Up until July, the English parliament declined to send relief on the basis of cost and principle. Once rescuers were dispatched from Egypt, progress to Khartoum was slow. Kitchener, who spoke Arabic, rode disguised as an Arab in advance of the party. Gordon was killed and his head put on display in a Mahdist camp a couple of days before they arrived at the end of January 1885. Henceforth, despite the sudden death of the Mahdi himself in June 1885, most of Sudan remained under Mahdist control. Gordon had flouted his orders, but his death outraged the English and most white subjects of the Empire. Soon after he was killed, the New South Wales Government volunteered troops for the Sudan, even offering to pay for equipping and transporting them. It was the first time that soldiers paid by the government of an Australian colony 50
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener 1890 Sir Hubert von Herkomer and Frederick Goodall oil on canvas © National Portrait Gallery, London Lord Kitchener in the trenches at Anzac. General Birdwood on Kitchener’s right. Nov 1915 Brooks, Ernest photograph Australian War Memorial Lord Kitchener, Chief of the British General Staff, visiting British troops in the trenches, Dardanelles Area, Turkey. Nov 1915. Unknown silver gelatin print Australian War Memorial
were to engage in an imperial war. That said, as it transpired, their engagement was minimal. On 3 March 1885, 522 men, 24 officers and an artillery battery of 212 men sailed from Sydney Harbour amidst expressions of festivity. They arrived home on 19 June having drilled for weeks, and then guarded railway lines. Sirdar of Egypt from 1892, Kitchener spent years training the army for the re-conquest of the Sudan. From 1896 he led Egyptian, Sudanese and English troops in a war against Mahdist forces that culminated in the massacre of thousands of ‘Dervishes’ at the Battle of Omdurman, and the blowing-up of the Mahdi’s tomb. (The fictional character of Corporal Jones in the British television series Dad’s Army served with Kitchener during the Gordon relief expedition, the re-conquest of the Sudan, the Boer War and World War 1.) Immediately afterward, Kitchener raced to Fashoda, where the French had planted the tricolore, diplomatically to restore British control in the easy French he had acquired in boyhood. He was created Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspall in 1898, and was henceforth known as ‘K of K’, or simply ‘K’. At the end of 1899, K was called to the South African (Boer) war, to act as chief of staff to Lord Roberts; he spent 1900 organising rail systems and securing supply lines. In November that year Kitchener became commanderin-chief. William Birdwood was amongst his trusted staff, who were often referred to as ‘Kitchener’s boys’. Ruthlessly, through 1901 and early 1902, Kitchener carried out a series of drives to round up Boer guerrillas, wiping out their support networks by razing their farms, killing their animals and collecting their families and supporters into ‘concentration camps’ (it was the first use of this term). In the camps, starvation and disease prevailed; the late historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who was no sensationalist, puts the fatalities at 28 000 Boer women and children, and 50 000 Africans. About 16 000 Australians fought in the Boer war, and as many died of disease as through battle. At the end of February 1902, as the third, dirty phase of the conflict was coming to a close, ‘Breaker’ Morant and his friend Peter Handcock (who were, at that time, not part of an Australian force, but members of a British irregular unit called the Bushveldt Carbineers) were court-
martialled and shot for murdering Boer prisoners and a German missionary. Although they didn’t deny killing their charges, they claimed that orders had come from the top – and the top was Kitchener – to ‘take no prisoners’. He makes a rigid yet sly villain in Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant, but there is no direct primary evidence that Kitchener gave the order to take no prisoners. Nor is it certain that he ordered their punishment to make an example of Morant and Handcock, curry favour with the Boers with whom he was attempting to negotiate a peace, appease the Germans, or provide a ‘firm but fair’ counterpoint to his own pitiless modus operandi with the Boers. Whatever Kitchener’s matrix of motives, the War Office statement, published in the London Times about five weeks after the executions, made no mention of any claim by Morant concerning instructions from up the line, nor of the defendants’ having been called to arms to help quell a Boer attack in Pietersburg while awaiting trial (which may have entitled them to ‘condonation’ under military law). Australians who persist in regarding ‘the Breaker’ as a hero or victim, and/or those who believe that the trial was shabbily conducted, bear an inextinguishable grudge against Kitchener for signing their warrants of execution, and also, just for being a stiff snob. By May 1902, Kitchener had punished the Boers – and then negotiated with them – to the extent that their leaders were prepared to sign the Treaty of Vereeniging in Pretoria. After his South African success, K became Commander-in-Chief of Army in India (where Birdwood served with him again). There, he set about consolidating the country’s many large armies into one – all the time, personally, hoping to succeed Lord Curzon, who disliked him, as viceroy. At the end of his Indian period in mid-1909, the Australian prime minister Alfred Deakin cabled Kitchener, asking him to come to Australia to advise on laying down the foundations of a new national land defence system. As it happened, K was in need of a break; he replied to Deakin ‘I will be glad of this opportunity of meeting again men who served so well under me in South Africa, and to help ... with any advice I can give’. Field Marshal Lord Kitchener arrived in Darwin four days before Christmas 1909. Travelling with him at the public’s portrait 53 winter 2016
expense was his companion, Captain Oswald FitzGerald of the 18th Bengal Lancers. The men had met in 1907, and from that time, according to biographer Philip Magnus, ‘Kitchener never looked elsewhere, and their intimate association was happy and fortunate. FitzGerald, like Kitchener, was a bachelor and a natural celibate.’ Claiming to have sensed imperial ambitions in Japan – where, as in China, he had filled many trunks with ceramics, paying for many of them himself – Kitchener found Darwin’s harbour promising, but its defences and communications wanting. Proceeding via Townsville, he was received with rapture in Brisbane on New Year’s Day. On January 4th he journeyed to Newcastle and evaluated Fort Scratchley, conducting himself with the reserve and taciturnity that was noted wherever he went; the local paper reported that ‘as cheer after cheer went up he remained perfectly composed, and but for the raising of his hat in response to the demonstration of welcome, might have been absolutely unconscious that he was the object of admiration and eulogy on all sides.’ On 5 January he took the train to Sydney. At Bathurst five days later, he unveiled a memorial to men lost in the Boer War. He was in Melbourne for a full week from the 11th; on 20 January he had a few hours in Adelaide, greeting old soldiers and taking afternoon tea at the Adelaide Club before departing on the Mooltan for Fremantle, where he arrived four days later. In Bunbury, he was presented with three trays of locally grown fruit; soon after, the Agricultural Society received his letter of thanks and congratulations. Meanwhile, Perth’s Western Mail wrote ‘The people of the Commonwealth are awakening to a real consciousness of their defencelessness and of the tempting prize their country offers ... The creator of army, a very marvel of organising genius, a sternly practical soldier of most exalted rank, comes along at the psychological moment, ready and willing to study our defence problem ... [and is] hailed everywhere with jubilation.’ Having spoken in favour of a ‘systematic, statesmanlike and comprehensive’ policy of railway extension throughout Australia – and, when pressed, having declared the Perth cadets to be ‘fine little chaps’– the colossus of empire sailed from Albany on 29 January, carrying away a gift of
Indigenous Australian weapons and apparel from the Museum. Less than a week later, he was to depart Melbourne for Tasmania; on 12 February, having returned to Melbourne, he departed for New Zealand. To a friend, he wrote that the most exhausting aspect of touring was the attention he received from local dignitaries; indeed, in Dunedin,
the Mayor punched the prime minister, Joseph Ward, in the jaw, and shouldered him aside to take his seat next to Kitchener in a carriage (Kitchener, it was reported, didn’t blink an eyelid during the jealous exchange). Notwithstanding his incredible schedule of travel by almost every kind of vehicle that had yet been invented, 51
Kitchener wrote his forty-five page report while he was on the move, and by the third week of February parts of its contents were being reported in Australian papers. In essence, the Kitchener Report took the Defence Act as its base, but presented a workable, practical scheme for compulsory parttime training for all males between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, which would lay the foundation for a standing army of 80 000 men for defence and a mobile striking force. About half the report was taken up with detailed instructions for the organisation of martial units around the country, and most of the rest set out a firm structure for the military college that had been proposed in the successive iterations of the Defence Act. In addition, commenting that Australian railways, in their current form, would be more favourable to an invading enemy than to the defence of the country itself, Kitchener strongly recommended the formation of a war railway council. In parliament, Deakin announced that Kitchener, having organised several armies already for the defence of the Empire, had knitted together the parts 52
Britons. Join Your Country’s Army! 1914 Alfred Leete poster Imperial War Museums, London Lord Kitchener bisque-headed patriotic doll c. 1914-16 Unknown various materials inc. ceramic, felt, leather, nickel-plated steel Australian War Memorial
of the Act in a way that the government, having no pattern, could not have hoped to do. Soon after the release of Kitchener’s report, an Australian, William Throsby Bridges, who had served in Africa in 1899, was headhunted as the first commandant of the military college. At the time, Bridges was not long into a post in London, and he was rather irritated about being pressed to come back, but the defence minister, Joseph Cook, was insistent. The Australian High Commissioner in London, Sir George Reid, sent Kitchener a marconigram asking him to meet Bridges there before the latter left for Australia in the Malwa; they exchanged their impressions of West Point, the American academy upon which, on Kitchener’s recommendation, the Australian college would be modelled. Although in March 1910 it was still
expected that the college would be in Sydney, Bridges felt it should be away from the existing capital cities, and others favoured the site of the future national capital. An amendment to the Defence Act in January 1911 implemented most of the recommendations in Kitchener’s report. Bridges came to the federal territory in July that year, and nominated the site of Duntroon for the Royal Military College, which opened very soon afterwards. It was the implementation of the Kitchener Report that enabled the famous mobilisation of the AIF within six weeks of the declaration of the First World War in August 1914. With the perspective conferred by the passing of a hundred years, some historians have suggested that, while he spoke persuasively of defence, Kitchener’s object was always to facilitate the assembly of an Australian force capable of being roped into the war that many, by 1910, sensed was coming in Europe. On one hand, the time was right for K to foment Australians’ fear of Japan, which had been victorious over Russia in 1905, had ravaged the indigenous population of Taiwan, and was to annex Korea in 1910. On the other, it was discourteous of him, because after 1905 the British had signed a Treaty of Alliance with Japan, in which each power promised to come to the aid of the other in the event of an attack; Prince Arthur himself had conferred the Order of the Garter on the Emperor and the Order of Merit on General Togo. Whatever the old soldier’s private purpose, in October 1914, soon after he had been granted an earldom, it was reported that at his ‘personal request’ thirdyear class cadets at Duntroon Military College were to be attached to the Second Expeditionary Force as second lieutenants. As for William Throsby Bridges, he was to die in agony from a gunshot wound sustained at Gallipoli, twenty days after the landing. Soon after returning to England in the wake of his long southern tour, Kitchener bought Broome Park, a sixteenth century estate lying between Canterbury and Dover. From that time all his leisure hours were dedicated to the renovation of the stupendous house and grounds, and its decoration with treasures he had received, purchased and looted from foreign lands. His balls had been the talk of all India, and at Broome Park, according to Magnus, portrait 53 winter 2016
he often entertained at home, taking immense pains to set his table and arrange flowers with his own hands (the biographer notes that it also pleased K to ‘attend personally to all the needs of his pet poodle’). Despite his contentment at home, K returned to Egypt as agent and consul-general from 1911 to 1914. In August that year – having never engaged in political debate, having never been noted for cooperation, and feeling himself to be an old man – he became Secretary of State for War. Within weeks, his became the gimlet-eyed face on a magazine cover that evolved into the world’s mostappropriated poster, bearing the words ‘Your Country Needs You’, or variants thereof. Throughout the first half of the war, as he frustrated his Cabinet colleagues more and more, he was to command massive public support which translated to huge-scale enlistment in ‘Kitchener’s Army’. In November 1914, Kitchener assigned to William Birdwood command of the forces raised by Australia and New Zealand for service in Europe. Birdwood reached Egypt, where the men were assembling, on 21 December 1914. By April, there
were about 30 000 men and boys there from Australian and New Zealand, waiting to go to France. The British Expeditionary Force was floundering on the western front in the first half of 1915, and by midyear, Kitchener was under media fire for its desperate shortage of shells. At the same time, he was wrangling with Winston Churchill – more than twenty years his junior, yet first lord of the Admiralty – over whether a new, logistically and geographically unrelated campaign in the Dardanelles was going to be a naval affair, with a few troops sent in to finish up what the gunboats and minesweepers had all-but achieved, or whether a major military presence would be required from the outset. Initially, Churchill seemed confident that a passage through the Dardanelles could be achieved by naval bombardment of Turkish positions, with the dreadnought Queen Elizabeth leading the assault, but increasingly, as weeks wore on, he entreated Kitchener to commit a substantial military force. Kitchener had been in favour of an attack on the Ottoman Empire via the Dardanelles, but had seen it as the
Lord Kitchener's message to the troops c. 1914–18 postcard State Library of Victoria Gift of Mrs Shirley Jones 1999 Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener 1910 Bassano Ltd published by Rotary Photographic Co Ltd bromide postcard print © National Portrait Gallery, London
navy’s business. Now, he had to choose between continuing to throw all military resources at the western front, and opening up an entirely fresh sphere of action on the ground in the Dardanelles, a campaign for which there was not even an adequate map. At the beginning of the war, less than six months earlier, England and Germany had both been keen to have Turkey as a best friend. Now, nobody really knew what the Turks were doing, or how much support Germany was providing to them. Nobody knew what the consequences of victory against the Turks would even look like; many of the suggested outcomes, to do with alliances and division of spoils, were conjectural. For the secretary of state for war, there was simply too much going on for a decision to be made, let alone explained. While the issue of the number and role of troops was still hazy (as it remained), Churchill began the naval campaign precipitately on 19 February, thinking to capitalise on a Turkish shortage of ammunition. On March 10, Kitchener agreed to dispatch the English 29th division, who’d been destined for France, ‘on loan’. 53
Lord Kitchener c.1900 William Howitt carved jarrah Purchased 2016 Studio portrait of Lord Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War J Russell & Sons glass original half plate negative Australian War Memorial Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener 1910 Bassano Ltd proof print © National Portrait Gallery, London
Life-size effigy of Field Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum 1925 William Reid Dick marble sculpture Image courtesy St Paul’s Cathedral, London
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The rest is history well-known to Australians. Starting on 25 April, more than 8 000 Australians were to die in the Dardanelles campaign; as well as perhaps 213 000 British men, about 34 000 of them from the 29th Division; ten thousand French troops, many of them Senegalese; and a thousand Indians. More than half of the British died of disease. Nothing was gained, and none can say what was lost on the Western front through the diversion of troops to Turkey. To the last, nonetheless, Kitchener hated the idea of a withdrawal from the Dardanelles because he feared a ‘conflagration’ if the British were to lose face in the Muslim world (there were, for example, about 60 million Muslims in India). Still, he was moved by the conduct and condition of the men he met and heard about at Gallipoli. All his life, Birdwood, who credited Kitchener as his greatest influence, was to remember how, during K’s visit there in November, ‘he squeezed my arm and pressed it. He was normally so very undemonstrative’. In the weeks that followed, with great reluctance and in fear of the immediate outcome and subsequent ramifications, Kitchener recommended an evacuation to the War Cabinet. As it transpired, the covert removal of some 40 000 troops, planned by the Australian Charles Brudenell White and completed on the night of 19-20 December 1915, was a triumph. Kitchener’s is no longer a household name. Yet all kinds of depictions of him remain, including a life-sized marble figure of the man in full regalia sculpted
by Reid Dick that lies in its own chapel in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The National Portrait Gallery of Australia has recently purchased a more modest representation of K, whittled from jarrah and not much bigger than an Action Man. Its maker, William Howitt, began his career in the United Kingdom, decorating ships’ interiors and fashioning ecclesiastical trappings. Arriving in Melbourne in 1888, he established a sufficient reputation to be commissioned, in 1896, to make the pulpit, bishop’s throne and other furnishings for St Paul’s Cathedral. About three years later he moved to Perth, where he taught and sculpted with success. Howitt worked in a variety of native timbers, but he favoured jarrah, in which he produced reliefs that were displayed at the Paris Exhibition of 1900 and in San Francisco in 1915. In between, in 1904, his sectional model of the Great Boulder Mine was presented to the Princess of Wales. His idiosyncratic magnum opus, teaming a peace-themed sideboard with a dining suite and occasional table incorporating medallion portraits of leaders of World War 1, including Kitchener, Birdwood, Joffre, Haig and the Maharajah of Bikaner, was carved over a period of six years while he was attached to a property belonging to Western Australia’s pioneering Hardey family. The furniture, and the figurine, were auctioned from the Hardey collection in 2015. It is not clear whether the figure was made concurrently with the furniture or dates
portrait 53 winter 2016
from the exhilarating days of K’s visit to Western Australia, when he slipped ashore unperceived at the wrong end of the quay, rendering the official welcome a farce. By the end of 1915, Kitchener’s Cabinet colleagues were thoroughly exasperated by his way of working, and the responsibilities he’d borne alone – incredibly – until then, were divided. Yet the citizens of Empire were united in shocked dismay when in June 1916, hms Hampshire, on which K and Captain FitzGerald were travelling to Archangel, came into contact with a German mine not far out of Scapa Flow. Kitchener’s body was never found; FitzGerald’s washed ashore. K’s will had left his great Kenyan landholdings (traditional lands of the Nandi people) to FitzGerald, but inheritance issues were complicated by uncertainty as to which man died first. The commission of enquiry into the Dardanelles campaign opened a month after K’s disappearance. Because he was unable to speak for himself, he was largely omitted from liability for the poor planning, supply problems, procrastination and personality clashes identified by the commission in its final report into the affair, nearly a hundred years old, but apt to give rise to hot tears to this day. Lest we forget. We acknowledge the gracious assistance of the National Portrait Gallery, London (npg.org.uk) in providing a number of images of works from their Collection for this article. 55
andrew mayo talks to three of australia’s most prominent and prolific music photographers — martin philbey, kane hibberd and daniel boud — about the challenges and inspiration behind their craft. To the casual observer, music photographers Martin Philbey, Kane Hibberd and Daniel Boud live a dream existence. The trio have been photographing the biggest national and international acts for more than a decade — close to twenty-five years in Philbey’s case — for record labels, festival promoters, magazines and the artists themselves. They regularly enjoy the best view in the house from the photographers’ ‘pit’ at the base of the stage, while their portrait work provides unique access to an extraordinary range of artists, from Nick Cave and Paul Kelly to the Foo Fighters and Kylie Minogue. However, the romantic notion of a photographer going to shows of an evening and spending afternoons in the studio with celebrities ignores the tough reality of their work — the long days and late nights spent editing images, the relentless deadlines, and the never-ending quest for new ideas that all creatives face. That said, despite
Daniel Johns, Silverchair Melbourne 2007 Martin Philbey digital print © Martin Philbey Jared Leto, 30 seconds to Mars Sydney 2011 Martin Philbey digital print © Martin Philbey
Rock art 56
portrait 53 winter 2016
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the challenges, the sweat and the grind, Philbey, Hibberd and Boud love what they do. Unsurprisingly, their contrasting back stories and career paths are intriguing, not least because none of the three set out to become music photographers. Based in Melbourne, Martin Philbey started his photography career in the police force in the late ’80s as a crime scene photographer, where he learnt the technical fundamentals while shooting the absurd, the obscene and the grizzly. An avid sport and live music fan, Philbey began photographing live events in his spare time and contributing images to picture agencies. ‘I started to work my leave around sporting events, but it reached a point where I wasn’t getting a day off’, Philbey, fifty, laughs. ‘My part-time job started to overtake my real job, so I took the plunge and became a full-time sport and music photographer.’ That was in 1996. 58
Since then, Philbey’s work has appeared in countless newspapers, magazines and album sleeves, and his images are held in collections at the National Portrait Gallery and National Library of Australia. In 2012, Philbey’s striking portrait of musician Dan Sultan earned him a finals berth in the National Photographic Portrait Prize. The genesis of thirty-nine year-old Kane Hibberd’s music photography career was markedly different. Also from Melbourne, Hibberd worked as a sound engineer and ran a small record label in the early 2000s, before starting work with a technology company. At around the same time, he began taking photos at gigs he was attending. On a whim, Hibberd quit his job and enrolled in a photography degree at RMIT University. While he never intended to shoot music professionally, Hibberd often found himself photographing friends’ bands for uni’ assignments.
Karina Utomo of High Tension performing at Laneway Festival, Sydney 2016 Dan Boud digital print © Dan Boud Hayley Williams – Soundwave Festival 2013 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd Stevie Williams – Poison City Weekender 2014 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd
‘My mates would say, “Hey, can we use that [picture] for our press photo?”’, recalls Hibberd. ‘That’s where the whole music photography thing started. I didn’t actually set out to do it — it just sort of happened.’ A turning point came in Hibberd’s second year of university, when a lecturer spotted some of his live music pictures and encouraged him to pursue it further. Momentum built, and Hibberd began applying high-end commercial photography techniques and production values to his music imaging. ‘I started doing things that you couldn’t really do when shooting on film — like digital montages and more conceptual stuff. And it really made my work stand out.’ By 2010, Hibberd was recognised as one of the leading rock photographers in the world by British music magazine NME, and in 2013, after five years as the official photographer for the Soundwave portrait 53 winter 2016
Festival, Hibberd published a lavish, 450-page coffee table book documenting the iconic heavy metal event. In the same year, he was a finalist in the Moran Photographic Prize. Sydneysider Daniel Boud, thirty-six, had a different starting point again. A passionate live music fan, Boud was seeing several bands a week at small, inner-city venues in the early 2000s when he started taking photos. ‘I bought a little digital camera and put it in my pocket and, like people do now with phones, I shot pictures at all the concerts I was going to.’ A web-designer at the time, Boud established a blog to publish his pictures, but he notes there wasn’t yet any grand plan afoot. ‘At that stage, I had no intention of making a career out of music photography or photography; I was just doing it because I loved it. It was just a really fun hobby.’ The blog, which continues today, rapidly gathered a large following and provided the springboard for Boud’s photographic career, as did a trip to Austin, Texas, in 2005, where he photographed the famous South by Southwest Festival. Upon returning home, Rolling Stone magazine published a number of Boud’s pictures, opening more doors for the photographer. Since 2007, Boud has been Chief Photographer for Time Out Sydney magazine, and shoots a diverse range of images, including celebrity portraits and live music. In addition, he’s regularly commissioned by artists, magazines and record labels for promotional and editorial work. Like Philbey, Boud was also a finalist in the 2012 National Photographic Portrait Prize. While all three photographers are technically proficient, you can’t manufacture the passion, inspiration and creativity that underpins their most compelling images. It’s those traits, plus a keen eye for detail and composition, which Philbey, Hibberd and Boud have in common. Perhaps more importantly, though, they have an ability to deliver results in the most demanding situations, both in a live concert setting and a portrait context. Live music, in particular, presents a number of challenges. Photographers usually have limited access — typically the first three songs of an artist’s set, sometimes less, and are generally restricted to shooting from the pit. The lighting is constantly changing and often
poor, especially in small pubs, clubs and university refectories. It can get crowded, too. Depending on the size of the artist or show, there could be twenty or thirty photographers jockeying for the best angles. Throw in a few crowd surfers tumbling into the pit, sweat and water showering expensive camera gear and the occasional crowd-borne projectile, and it suddenly becomes difficult to capture quality images. So how do Philbey, Hibberd and Boud do it? ‘I shoot live music like I do sport’, says Philbey. ‘I follow the action and try and anticipate. If you know an artist well enough, you get to know some of their
moves and what they do … so you can anticipate those moments and, hopefully, be in the right position.’ Being able to capture the big moments, the theatre and the frenzy, inevitably comes down to experience — time spent in the pit, learning from mistakes and selecting appropriate equipment. Philbey, for example, emphasises the importance of always having a wide-angle lens on a second camera, in addition to a longer lens on his primary body: ‘It’s happened to me a couple of times … when an artist comes too close and you don’t have a wide enough lens; I never get caught in that situation now.’
Kylie Minogue – Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Martin Philbey digital print © Martin Philbey Kiss – Melbourne 2013 Martin Philbey digital print © Martin Philbey
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That second camera and ultra-wide lens has saved the day on countless occasions for Philbey, including at a U2 concert a few years ago: ‘It was typical U2 — a huge stage with a big horseshoe catwalk, and we were a long way away. Everyone was waiting for the band to come out and had their long lenses on, but I had a wide-angle ready. And then Bono popped up out of a trapdoor right in front of us with an Australian flag wrapped around him! He was literally 60
four or five feet away; I got a sweet frame out of it while everyone else was scrambling.’ Techniques and tactics aside, access certainly makes it easier to produce strong, diverse live images. Fortunately, most of the limitations and restrictions imposed on photographers are removed when shooting directly for an artist, venue or festival organiser. As Hibberd points out, ‘When you’re working closely with a band, you have all the access you need … and you can capture
The Amity Affliction – Palace Theatre 2013 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd The Living End – Palace Theatre 2011 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd
a lot more. That’s when you get photos that you don’t see anywhere else.’ In particular, it opens up opportunities to explore different angles — from side stage, behind the stage and even directly above it. Hibberd has been experimenting with attaching a camera and wide-angle lens to lighting rigs in the ceiling, pointed down and triggered remotely, to capture a unique aerial perspective of shows. He’s also been using a camera and ultra-wide angle lens mounted on a monopod, which he portrait 53 winter 2016
holds above his head at the back of the stage, directing the lens’ gaze over the drummer’s shoulder out into the crowd. ‘It’s about capturing a unique or different point of view’, Hibberd explains. ‘You always want to get that shot that makes people go, “Wow, that’s such a great photo! How did he do that?”’ Often the most dynamic and captivating live images provide some form of context for the event, by including the venue or location, or perhaps the stage show, in addition to the
artist. But almost always it’s the crowd that completes the story. ‘Whenever I’m shooting a festival or a gig, I’m always thinking, “What one frame will sum this up?”’ Boud enthuses, ‘and if I can get the artist and the crowd in the same frame … I think that’s pretty magic.’ Hibberd agrees: ‘When you’re just shooting a band onstage, it could be anywhere. You have no idea of the venue. You don’t know how many people were there — they could be playing to 100
people or they could be playing to 1000 people. Having the crowd in the shot is a big part of the story.’ As exciting and captivating as their live images are, arguably it’s the trio’s portrait work that has made each of them so highly sought after in the music industry. However, while Philbey, Hibberd and Boud enjoy the creative process of making a portrait, they all agree that it’s significantly more testing than shooting a live show. ‘It’s a completely different ball 61
game’, says Boud. ‘With live work, it’s presented to you; it’s staged for you; it’s lit for you. You don’t have to give the artist any direction; you just rock up and shoot what happens. But portrait work is a blank canvas. It puts the burden back onto the photographer.’ That burden grows a little heavier when you consider that many artists don’t like having their photo taken – they’re musicians, not models, after all – and photographers are often given limited time, particularly when shooting bigger acts. Of course, there are inevitably a few horror stories. ‘Plenty of things can go wrong’, Philbey laughs. ‘I’ve had situations where bands have been up all night and they’re not in a great frame of mind. Or you’ve been told you’ll have twenty minutes and then you only get two minutes. I’ve even had sets built and then had artists walk in and say, “Nah, I’m not doing that!”’ 62
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for photographers lies in developing new ideas and concepts for portraits. ‘It’s the thing that stresses me out the most,’ Hibberd confesses, ‘especially because I seem to do jobs in blocks. It’s hard to come up with ideas when everything comes in at once.’ To put that in perspective, Hibberd was several weeks into solid, back-toback shooting when I spoke to him in early 2016. That run of work included eight magazine cover shoots in six days. Moreover, Hibberd does fifty or sixty band sessions each year, and many of those shoots require multiple ideas and concepts. Then there’s the time spent editing images, a commonly overlooked aspect of a professional photographer’s workload, which far exceeds any time spent behind a camera. It’s not easy keeping the creative juices flowing at the best of times, and it’s even harder
Kimbra 2011 Dan Boud digital print © Dan Boud Dan Sultan – Melbourne 2010 Martin Philbey digital print © Martin Philbey
when the work starts piling up. Boud and Philbey find concept development challenging, too. So where do the three photographers draw their ideas from? ‘I take a lot of inspiration from movies and TV – how things are shot and framed, and how things are lit’, says Philbey. ‘I steal a lot of ideas from my wife’, laughs Boud, referring to his photographer spouse, Cybele Malinowski, who specialises in fashion and artist portraiture. ‘We both draw a lot of inspiration from the classics like Annie Leibovitz – when she [Leibovitz] does a great shoot, there’s no-one better.’ Like Philbey, Hibberd loves cinematography and film. Interestingly, comic books fuel Hibberd’s creativity as well. ‘I love illustrators because they’re not limited by angles’, he explains. ‘They can create whatever perspective they like; they’re only limited by their portrait 53 winter 2016
imagination. I’ll see a drawing and think, “I wonder if I can shoot from that angle or get that composition?”’ However, wherever possible, Hibberd tries to take something from the band’s album and link it to an idea or concept. ‘It’s about giving their voice an image; trying to create something that sums up that band and their music.’ And that, essentially, is what these photographers do through their image-making — they provide a visual interpretation and representation of musicians and their craft. By doing so, they also capture a unique snapshot of culture and society, and the musicians that shape and define so many lives. But Philbey, Hibberd and Boud do it in such a thoughtful, clever way that their work transcends the simple documentation of a time and a place, featuring famous faces — it stands alone as art. Rock art.
The Amity Affliction – Brighton Beach 2014 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd Calling All Cars 2011 Kane Hibberd digital print © Kane Hibberd DJ Tigerlily 2015 Dan Boud digital print © Dan Boud
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The family scene 64
traudi allen discovers sensitivity, humour and fine draughtsmanship in the portraiture of john perceval. In the 1940s, John Perceval and Arthur Boyd were locating their friends and relations in part-known, part-imagined narratives, while at the same time also working on conventional portraiture. Informing their approach was study at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1949.
Perceval painted approximately thirty head portraits during his six months at the school. His teacher, Alan Sumner, who worked under the directorship of the well-known portraitist and multiple Archibald Prize winner, Sir William Dargie, treated the teacher-pupil relationship as one between equals, given that his student had an established painting reputation. Nevertheless, Sumner also insisted upon what he judged to be the basic tenets of drawing, as developed during his own studies under George Bell. Bell’s experiments in technique must therefore be considered significant, since Perceval’s acquaintance with them from various sources pre-dates Tucker’s discovery of Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist, which, first published in 1934 and revised in 1949, is often mentioned as central to all their methods. This connection relies only on a letter from Boyd to the NGV’s Ursula Hoff, written in 1966. Art historian Richard Haese argues that Tucker’s use of Doerner was to find cheaper materials, and that Boyd’s emulation of an Old Master finish by means of tempera and oil occurred as a result of Tucker introducing him to Doerner. However, in Perceval’s National Gallery head studies and the change in style they exemplify, it is clear he was substantially influenced in this same regard by the methods of his teacher, Sumner. Sumner’s emphasis was on harmonious balance and proportion, a softening of tones and the use of underpaint. An attitude of greater care in all matters was demanded: distilled water for Perceval’s egg tempera mix, for example, rather than the stale liquid in which he had stood his paintbrushes. Upon admission, Perceval joined what was called the ‘Head School’, and one of the most successful portraits he painted there was Woman with Fair Hair and Pink Cardigan (1949). His treatment demonstrates a fine and painstaking approach to the portrait that is not seen at any other time – a modification that was no doubt a result of Sumner’s influence. The combination of study at the school and Perceval’s own reading gave these National Gallery portraits a fifteenth-century quality. The tempera mix was absorbed when applied over a half-chalk ground, and produced a soft, ‘old-fashioned’ finish. Contributing to this effect is a delicate brushstroke and the placement of the busts against a dark background, creating a flattening of the features. Perceval showed he observed his subjects carefully and with a gentle sensitivity. His young subject in Woman with Fair Hair and Pink Cardigan is given a smooth softness to her cheeks that is achieved not only by colour, but also by texture. For the face of The Oldest Student at the National Gallery Art School portrait 53 winter 2016
(1949) he used a thick, scumbled egg tempera to give her skin a pitted and aged quality. Portraits drawn or painted before his attendance at the art school are more ambitious and expressive. He revealed his perceptual orientation in a portrait of his mother-in-law, Doris Boyd (1948), here shown with clenched hands and pleading eyes. Her left eye is larger than her right, to the extent that in life it would constitute a marked abnormality – and Perceval would have failed by Head School standards – but here it adds character. Though she was known for her intensely blue eyes, he painted them the deepest black, perhaps because there
was no blue left in his palette and he had either no time or no money to replace it. The brushstrokes are crude compared with those employed while he was a student, but her feelings, or at least Perceval’s understanding of them, become his subject. In a pencil sketch of his father-in-law titled Merric Boyd (1945), contrasting moods are shown: after one drawing was completed the paper was turned to make space for another until it was filled in the Old Master manner and, given his impecunious circumstances, saved paper. Perceval’s sense of humour and his subject’s extreme eccentricity, along with periodic bouts of epilepsy, suggest there was
Woman with Fair Hair and Pink Cardigan 1949 temper and resin on composition board Private collection The Oldest Student at the National Gallery Art School 1949 tempera and resin on composition board Private collection
Merric Boyd 1945 pencil on paper Private collection Doris Boyd 1948 oil Private collection
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Children Eating 1949 pencil on paper National Gallery of Australia Matthew Perceval 1950 pencil on paper National Gallery of Australia
Christ Dining at Young and Jacksons 1948 tempera and resin on canvas, laid down on composition board Private collection The Revellers c.1952 tempera and resin on canvas Private collection
some mischief involved in this pencil portrait. The upper Boyd persona is relatively benign; the lower version is not. In the lower portrait, the moustache is stern and the expression a little ‘Hitler-cum-Chaplin’. The hair has awkward strands that stand upright and his jacket whirls across his body. The other Merric Boyd is more relaxed, his hair falling carelessly about his balding head and the flesh around his jowls sagging amenably. His eyebrows and mouth curl with kindness and his moustache stands firm but unperturbed, as if thick with coffee or soup. Perceval’s easy, amusing and affectionate line takes a charming turn in the quietest moments, when he draws his children. Here, with sensitivity, humour and fine draughtsmanship, they arguably take a preeminent place among the best in Australian drawing. In Children Eating (1949), his son and daughter, Matthew and Tessa, concentrate on the full bowls of food before them. The little girl, with her arm over her brother’s, might be about to stake her claim on his dessert, but 66
the battle has not yet begun. Here we see the variously annoying, amusing and delightful naughtiness of children. Again, in Matthew Perceval (1950), there is the essence of the child aged five: his unruly hair, the clothes that are worn with a child’s untidiness, and the drop of saliva falling from his lips as he focuses on his food, detail that occurs again in three-
dimensional form in Perceval’s ceramic Angels. In 1947 and 1948, Perceval and Boyd integrated known places and the people who inhabited them with images from several centuries before, translated via the treatment of similar subjects in modern Europe. Perceval’s interest in the work of Hogarth also becomes most evident at this time. Indeed, an portrait 53 winter 2016
Flight into Egypt 1947 mixed media on canvas on hardboard Art Gallery of Western Australia
account of Hogarth’s aims and art might read as if referring to Perceval. There is an interest in literary allusion, the telling of a moral tale, plus occasional topical reference, as well as the inclusion of characters telling of the artist’s life. Certain vignettes revive the ‘conversation piece’, of which Hogarth was a major exponent. As the English variant of the Dutch genre style, the focus is on one or more family
members and friends engaged in a common domestic routine, or, as was often the case, an outdoors activity. But Perceval frequently replaced a literary reference with iconographic or thematic elements from twentieth-century cinema. In keeping with the Hogarth model, Perceval’s friends and relations are often identifiable. Tom Sanders, later to become a fellow potter at Murrumbeena, sits at the right-hand side of Christ in Christ Dining at Young and Jacksons. Perceval appoints himself as Simon Peter, who taps Saint John on the shoulder in Leonardo’s Last Supper (1494–98), and someone looking like Albert Tucker asks
for more. A table is about to be turned and money spilt, as in the ‘Cleansing of the Temple’ parable, in which Jesus is said to have driven out the moneychangers. Betty Burstall, married to the filmmaker Tim Burstall, and later known for her work as theatrical manager of La Mama in Melbourne, is portrayed as the serving girl. It is not surprising she gets a starring role in an all-male biblical story, as there had been an affair. Tim had worked as a ceramics decorator at the Arthur Merric Boyd Pottery, and the Percevals and Burstalls became close friends. In a milieu of constant social interaction, from the mostly male pursuit of drinking at the Swanston Family pub – on the corner 67
Mirka’s Studio 1961 oil on canvas Private collection
of Swanston and Little Bourke streets in Melbourne – to parties at one another’s houses, Perceval developed a clandestine affair with Burstall’s wife, Betty, but, unbeknown to him and Burstall, they were both having affairs with each other’s wives. Tintoretto’s disciples in The Last Supper (1592–94) are so dramatic in their expression of sorrow for Christ’s earthly demise that Perceval’s, by comparison, appear overly casual. They are again quite unlike the restrained men who attend the table in Leonardo’s Last Supper. Perceval’s facetiousness in setting his dinner in Australiana also involves art historical detail beyond the obvious Leonardo and Tintoretto antecedents. He built archways into the Young and Jackson dining hall, as El Greco did in Christ Cleansing the Temple (c.1570), 68
and placed an Australian counterpart to the sculptural reliefs that El Greco included as his homage to an earlier master. Melbourne’s notorious nude Chloé, painted in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre, is seen through the far arch. The irony of her notoriety would not have escaped Perceval, since she is naked and adored, but her genitals are not included, as if ‘air-brushed out’ by the artist. An unflattering sketch of Arthur Boyd standing beside the Dodge car he passed on to Perceval is shown at centre left of The Revellers (1947–48). In mood and general composition, the scene refers to The Peasant Wedding Dance (1607) by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who based his work on a peasant wedding dance painting by his father. From the younger Brueghel comes the basic composition, including the deciduous tree trunks, the central table and the milling crowd, but the scene is also late afternoon at Melbourne’s Rosstown Hotel at 1084 Dandenong Road, Carnegie. It was the hotel’s proximity to the
Murrumbeena pottery that led the potters to join its crowd in the late 1940s. Barry Humphries (lower right) and a balding man with white hair hold onto each other as they share a joke. The entire Perceval family appears in the very different atmosphere of Flight into Egypt, based on the biblical account from Saint Matthew’s Gospel. As in other paintings, the narrative involves a dream. This time it is Joseph’s and he is warned by the Lord that he needs to flee to Egypt because Herod, on hearing his child may become a leader and threaten his throne, wishes to kill him. The painting follows many on the subject by Lorrain, Annibale Carracci, Poussin and Caravaggio, but there are details coinciding with the version by the German artist Adam Elsheimer that suggest his was the most influential to Perceval, who mentioned him again in the development of the ceramic Angels. Elsheimer’s The Flight into Egypt (c.1609), in oil on copper, is powerfully striking. Perceval portrait 53 winter 2016
Kathy and the Mirror (detail) 1964 oil on canvas Private collection
Mr Dooley the Gardener 1966 oil Private collection
has the family fleeing at night, while the event is usually portrayed as occurring during the day. Elsheimer’s moon and its reflection are replaced by an enormously brilliant one after van Gogh. Mary Perceval performs the role of her namesake, the Israelite mother with her first born, while Joseph, who holds up a torch to light their passage, is Perceval himself – with angel wings attached. In donning wings, he foreshadows the role played by his children as models for his ceramic Angels ten years later. A comparison with Nolan’s Flight into Egypt of 1951 is interesting for its objectivity and relative lack of fluency and personal drama. A painting of Mirka Mora hidden among the clutter of her studio, in Mirka’s Studio (1961), brings together the good-humoured chaos of both studio owner and the painter of her portrait, and is as good a likeness as a character study. Mora is lost behind her easel, among the panoply of possessions that read like a child’s spot-the-item. From the chests of drawers that heave with clutter, to Mora’s own paintings that also included angels, to
the worn books, the musical instrument, one of Perceval’s own goblets featuring a face, and even the view of the street through the glass shutters, everything is on an angle and fighting for space. Mora’s studio at 9 Collins Street, Melbourne – home to herself and her husband, the gallery director Georges Mora – became the headquarters of the Contemporary Art Society, but one can only wonder where they found space to sit. As he suggests in his painting, Perceval and Mora were just as chaotically and creatively hilarious when they were together. As a friend of theirs recalls, one evening at a dinner party they both disappeared from the table without explanation, resuming their seats some time later wearing each other’s clothes. The Kathy series of 1964, featuring Perceval’s model and occasional mistress, constitutes a further stage in the unravelling and fragmentation of the standard portrait. Although the figure is intact, two aspects of her personality are shown: the first as she appears in the flesh, and the second as her image is reflected in the mirror. The white underpainting of her skin is blotched in a wide range of pastel hues, with strokes of every possible shape. Her hair falls over her shoulders and becomes detached from its roots. The wallpaper pattern runs over her legs, and segmented flowers and swirls
representing the compromised light of the chandelier clothe her like a veil. By the 1960s the painted portrait, as opposed to the pencil sketch, is largely abandoned but one of the most interesting is an affectionate oil sketch of the gardener at the Australian National University, painted while Perceval was Creative Fellow there in 1966. He clearly found ‘Mr Dooley the Gardener’ an appealing subject, and one might question how much he added to his character and appearance by giving him quirky features like a highly patterned jumper, a very wide brimmed hat, bulky fingers on his weeding hand and extra tines for his oversized rake. In holding his rake upended beside him, Mr Dooley mimics the all-American character in the Grant Wood painting of 1930, and in so doing creates an ‘Australian Gothic’. Although portraiture is not a major feature of the Perceval oeuvre, it occurs throughout, changing and developing in synchrony with the landscape. It reveals sweet, humorous and sensitive sides of an artist better known as a brusque enfant terrible of the ‘Angry Penguins’ modernist movement. The above is an edited extract from John Perceval: Art and Life, MUP, 2015 by Dr Traudi Allen. All images courtesy the author, © the estate of John Perceval. 69
ON SHOW
international
This exhibition provides new context for understanding the key genres that Mapplethorpe pursued: portraiture, the nude, and still life. His personal connections to sitters, his ability to manage a successful studio and his ambition to elevate photography to the status of contemporary art. lacma.org
Facing the World: Self-portraits Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei Scottish National Portrait Gallery 16 July - 16 October 2016 Ever since the Renaissance, and in some cases even earlier, artists have self-consciously created images of themselves. This exhibition presents an exciting selection of portraits, in various media, spanning six centuries, from Rembrandt to Ai Weiwei’s instagram posts. The topic is more relevant than ever, as social media thrives on self-portraits and the continual presentation of self. nationalgalleries.org
Russia and the Arts: The age of Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky National Portrait Gallery, London Until 26 June 2016 Focussing on the writers, artists, actors, composers and patrons whose achievements helped develop an extraordinary and rich cultural scene in Russia between 1867 and 1914. A rare opportunity to see masterpieces from the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. npg.org.uk
BP Portrait Award 2016 National Portrait Gallery, London 23 June – 4 September 2016 Selected from 2,557 entries by artists from 80 countries around the world, and now in its 37th year, the BP Portrait Award represents the very best in contemporary portrait painting. npg.org.uk
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Nick 1977 Robert Mapplethorpe © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; Modest Mussorgsky 1881 Ilia Repin © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; Silence 2015 Bo Wang © Bo Wang; Self Portrait with Fried Eggs 1996 Sarah Lucas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Robert Mapplethorpe: The perfect medium Los Angeles County Museum of Art Until July 31, 2016
Ben 2015 Robert Hague; Gentlemen Prefer Blondes © 1953 and 2016 Fox; Portrait of Carl Cooper 1945-46 Arthur Boyd National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Arthur Boyd gift 1975; Nobuhle 2015 Wawrick Baker
national portrait gallery
National Photographic Portrait Prize 2016 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Until 26 June 2016 The National Photographic Portrait Prize is selected from a national field of entries that reflect the distinctive vision of Australia’s aspiring and professional portrait photographers and the unique nature of their subjects. The National Portrait Gallery offers a prize of $25,000 for the most outstanding photographic portrait. portrait.gov.au
Marilyn Monroe Bendigo Art Gallery Until 10 July 2016 This exhibition, a collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox, allows unprecedented access to twelve of the films Marilyn completed with the studio, including glamorous studio portraits, wardrobe test photographs, lobby cards and film posters. It also comprises costumes, personal clothing and artefacts which have been drawn from private collections around the world and have never been seen before in Australia. bendigoartgallery.com.au
Mysterious eyes: Arthur Boyd portraits from 1945 National Portrait Gallery, Canberra Until 14 August 2016
Tough and tender National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 15 July to 16 October Featuring art from the 1960s to the present day, this exhibition explores the complexities of personal relations and individual expression. Photographs by Warwick Baker, Larry Clark, Rozalind Drummond, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe and Collier Schorr reflect the formative identity of young adulthood and the complexities of masculinity and gender. portrait.gov.au
A young man whose soft features betrayed the intensity of his own self-image, Arthur Boyd portrayed others with equally concentrated emotion. In this focus exhibition Boyd’s self portrait at age 25 is joined by his portraits of those around him. Through his eyes they are a reflection of the artist’s own state of mind. portrait.gov.au
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Bob Ellis 1999 by David Naseby oil on canvas Purchased with funds from the Basil Bressler Bequest 2001
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B
ob Ellis (1942–2016) was a journalist, columnist, screenwriter, film director, playwright, speechwriter and critic. His screenwriting credits, Newsfront, Goodbye Paradise, Maybe This Time, Fatty Finn, Top Kid and The Paper Boy all won major prizes, as did his collaborations with Paul Cox, Man of Flowers and My First Wife. For the stage, he collaborated with Michael Boddy on The Legend of King O’Malley. Having run unsuccessfully against Bronwyn Bishop for the seat of Mackellar in 1994, Ellis was answerable for the sensational ‘Abbott and Costello’ defamation case in March 1999. Finding assertions made in a short passage of his 1997 book Goodbye Jerusalem: Night Thoughts of a Labor Outsider false and defamatory, the judge ruled that his publisher pay compensation of $277,500 to
Liberal politicians Peter Costello and Tony Abbott and their wives. Later, in the course of criticizing Julia Gillard, Ellis was to praise Abbott’s manners and intellect. His later books include The Capitalism Delusion (2009) and One Hundred Days of Summer (2010). The Ellis Laws, the author’s ten ‘laws’ of life, was published by Penguin in 2014. Naseby met Ellis through Les Murray, his friend of forty years’ standing, and he comments that seeing the two men together was ‘awe-inspiring’. This painting was done at the time of the publication of Goodbye Jerusalem. Naseby intended to refer to the ‘Abbott and Costello’ affair in the work but was dissuaded by friends from doing so. He writes that Ellis ‘loves a stoush’ and that he painted Ellis in a t-shirt because it ‘made him look like the scrapper he is’.
portrait 53 winter 2016
Christian Hook Paints Celebrities
Tuesdays 7.30PM from May 24TH Portrait Artist of the Year winner, Christian Hook, paints celebrities showcasing his inspiring talent in fine art.
foxtelarts.com.au
Winter c. 1940 Percy Leason watercolour painting State Library of Victoria © Estate of Percy Leason
Winter should be warmer, not trauma.
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