Antipodeans in America: a cautionary tale
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 6: Our Global Face
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Patrick McCaughey
Download the complete article PDF
Patrick McCaughey's biography and other articles by this writer
I left Australia in 1988 with a bad conscience. Eighteen months earlier, the trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria had given me leave to take up the visiting chair in Australian studies at Harvard for a full academic year. Within weeks of my return in mid-1987 I told them I had accepted the directorship of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. They were shocked and dumbfounded. They had supported me unstintingly through seven years at the gallery, notably sticking by me during the furore of the theft of Picasso's Weeping Woman. Perhaps to assuage my mauvais foi, I resolved that I would do whatever I could to further the cause of Australian art in America – corny and grandiloquent though it sounded.
When I arrived at the Wadsworth Atheneum, the exhibitions officer told me with ironic pride that there was one Australian painting in the collection. It turned out to be quite a good Arthur Boyd landscape from the mid-1950s and hung in the basement office of the archivist. (It is still there.) Surprised, I remarked casually that it was quite a valuable painting back in Australia. "Sell it, boss, sell it!" one of the cheekier technical assistants urged. Unsurprisingly, I had no wish to start my American career by de-accessioning the sole Australian painting in one of America's most distinguished collections.
The Wadsworth Atheneum was in many ways an ideal launching pad to further the cause of Australian art in America. Among the oldest art museums in America, pre-dating both the Metropolitan in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it holds historically and artistically key collections of American art as well as rich holdings of European painting and the decorative arts and, thanks to its brilliant director in the 1930s and early1940s, A. Everett "Chick" Austin, it has for the past 70 years collected and exhibited contemporary art. No stuffy New England antique, believe you me.
Daniel Wadsworth, the museum's principal patron, was an early collector and friend of Thomas Cole, the founding painter of the Hudson River School, and later persuaded Cole to take on the young Frederic Church, the dominant member of the second generation of the school, as a pupil and assistant. On Wadsworth's death in 1848, the Atheneum had the ur-collection of the Hudson River School, which was steadily augmented through the latter half of the 19th century by Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, the widow of Colonel Sam Colt of revolver fame, and other collectors. For anybody even moderately versed in the pictorial culture of his or her country, the similarity between Australian colonial painting and the Hudson River School springs easily to mind. There are no precise equivalents. Thomas Cole does not exactly "fit" John Glover any more than Frederic Church does Eugene von Guerard, but certainly Asher B. Durand can match Abram Louis Buvelot in dullness and occasional brilliance. Sometimes there are simply absences. There is no Australian equivalent to the exquisite marine painting of Fitzhugh Lane nor the "luminist" depictions of sea and shore found in John Frederick Kensett or Martin Johnson Heade. But the underlying experience of wilderness and settlement, of sublimity and exploration, of the ambivalent treatment of indigenous people as "noble savage" and as "the last of their tribe" engages the imagination of both national schools.
Move to the last two decades of the 19th century and the connection between the Heidelberg School and the "nativist" branch of American Impressionism – Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, William Merritt Chase – becomes tantalisingly close at certain points. Charles Conder, for instance, on the shores of Port Philip Bay or the surf beaches of Sydney with a staffage of women and children comes within a whisker of Chase amid the sand dunes of Shinnecock on Long Island in the 1890s with young girls and women in striped dresses and red bonnets sheltering from the summer winds off the Atlantic. Again the underlying experience of the two schools was similar. Both in America and Australia by the 1880s and '90s, the drama of wilderness and settlement was set aside as anachronistic in favour of the populated world, the figure in the landscape, the din of cities or their immediate environs – the beach, the holiday resort, the suburban bush.
CLEARLY HERE WAS AN EXHIBITION WAITING TO HAPPEN: a comparison between the American and Australian 19th-century experiences of their respective landscapes and an opportunity to place the otherwise unknown Australian school alongside another national school and to demonstrate its quality and significance to a wider world. Given its reputation, collection and scholarly resources, the Wadsworth Atheneum was an ideal starting point in America. From the very beginning, Betty Churcher, then director of the National Gallery of Australia, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project. Admirably, she believed that winning international recognition for Australian art was a prime responsibility of a national gallery. Earlier attempts to promote an exhibition of the Heidelberg School had proven unsuccessful with both American and British museums. The way forward lay in the comparative exhibition, each school holding up a powerful mirror, reflecting and refracting the other in its gaze. From the start, the American scholars, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, curator of American painting and sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Professor Elizabeth Johns of the University of Pennsylvania, were enthusiastic about the project; both visited Australia and became well versed in Australian art and its historiography. The Australian curatorial response was guarded, grudging and unenthusiastic.
In the event, both Betty Churcher and I had left our respective institutions by the time New Worlds from Old: 19th Century Australian and American Landscapes came to fruition. Overall the exhibition was both beautiful and remarkable. Maybe too many fine or footnotey points were made in the early work, leading to repetition rather than re-enforcement of the larger themes. Both Australian and American impressionism were de-emphasised and the exhibition lost a bit of zip thereby. But the exhibition was serious and thoughtful.
New Worlds from Old opened in March 1998 at the National Gallery of Australia and closed just over 12 months later in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington after intermediary stops at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Wadsworth Atheneum. The story behind the story lies in the reception the exhibition received on either side of the Pacific.
The National Gallery in Canberra took pride of place for the most rigid and least imaginative installation. The exhibition was colour-coded. All the Australian paintings were hung on green walls, all the American ones on blue. The two schools were kept in near absolute aesthetic apartheid with hardly a wall directly comparing an Australian work against an American. It was as though two good soccer teams had run out onto the pitch, shaken hands but never actually got round to playing the game. In this frigid display, the exhibition was, unsurprisingly, not a success. The National Gallery appeared to be more concerned to elaborate the Australian story than engage with the comparison. It did give rise to the view, which Melbourne did nothing to dispel, that the Australian pictures were all much better than the American ones, turning the exhibition into a competitive event and not an opportunity to win recognition for 19th-century Australian painting internationally. It was Australian chauvinism at its worst.
The American reception turned this attitude on its head. Kornhauser, who had the best artistic and scholarly understanding of the project, at last installed the exhibition as a dialogue where likeness and unlikeness were freely displayed. The American response almost universally admired the Australian work, particularly that of Tom Roberts whose A Break Away! (Art Gallery of South Australia) was the American sensation of the exhibition.
The comparison drawn between the Roberts and Frederick Remington's Fight for the Waterhole, a pastel-toned Western painting of the most melodramatic kind, struck one of the few false notes. But in the galleries of the ancient and noble Wadsworth Atheneum, Australian painting spoke powerfully to an audience that could not have named a single Australian artist, living or dead.
The Washington show soon eclipsed this heart-warming experience. Over the years I have sat and stood through some tedious, bizarre and unconsciously hilarious exhibition openings but nothing can quite outdo the opening of New Worlds from Old in the Corcoran Gallery. One of the few "private", i.e. non-government-funded art museums in the capital, the Corcoran was founded in the 19th century, old by Washington standards. Like the Wadsworth Atheneum, it has an important historical American collection allied to a taste for contemporary art. The galleries are a little awkward and graceless but the many-pillared forecourt where the opening reception and dinner took place is a masterpiece of beaux-arts classicism.
United Technologies, the big Hartford conglomerate, which numbers Pratt and Whitney engines, Otis elevators and Carrier air-conditioners among its portfolio, was the American sponsor. It has a penchant for doing exhibitions in Washington where it can invite congressmen and senators, cabinet officers and undersecretaries with a smattering of White House staff and ambassadors to see and take note of its good works. Inevitably, there are a lot of no-shows on such occasions and the tables can be strangely imbalanced with a congressional spouse, a European ambassador, a junior from the Australian legation, and everyone struggling to find common conversational ground. Thus it was that night – not quite the A team, although some A-team players were definitely present.
The usual pleasantries and overflowing expressions of gratitude over, the Australian ambassador, Andrew Peacock, rose to open the exhibition. Standing at the foot of the stairs that led to the exhibition galleries, he waved behind him and said – here I must paraphrase rather than quote directly – "I don't want any of you here tonight to think that what you see up there is what Australia is like today. Australia is a high-tech, globally minded economy ..." And he was off on a stump speech that could have been addressed to the Des Moines Chamber of Commerce in his best Crocodile Dundee accent. (I have known Andrew Peacock since school and was puzzled when he adopted a super-Aussie accent on public occasions in America.)
Worse, however, was to follow. Brian Kennedy, the newly appointed director of the National Gallery of Australia, rose to respond. He confided that when he felt happy as he did this night, he liked to sing and so The Wild Colonial Boy, or some such ditty, rang through the peristyle of the Corcoran Gallery's forecourt. I have rarely been so embarrassed as an Australian – some of the nation's finest paintings airily dismissed with a wave of an ambassadorial hand and the director of the nation's principal gallery acting like a performing seal. What an end to so lofty an ambition!