Birth of the Cool, David Aspden, Sydney Ball, Michael Johnson and Dick Watson. ANU Drill Hall Gallery. Until December 13.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Was colour field painting, that arose in New York in the late 1940s with Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko at its helm, a culmination within Abstract Expressionism or an ephemeral cul-de-sac? In America it petered out by the mid-'60s and inspired what was popularly termed Post-painterly abstraction and such artists as Helen FrankenthalerMorris Louis, Kenneth Nolan and Jules Olitski.
The American critic, Clement Greenberg, enthusiastically promoted the style and, just as it was losing steam in America, young zealots appeared in Australia and the official art establishment endorsed this style in 1968 with the much-promoted exhibition, The Field, held at the National Gallery of Victoria and at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the time its most articulate champion, the art critic and academic, Patrick McCaughey, praised the exhibition, although in retrospect, in 2003, he reflected that most of the artists in show appeared "to be feeble imitators of their American models". In this he was absolutely correct and on occasion it was difficult to distinguish the American colour field originals from the 1950s and their Australian echoes in the 1960s, other than through scale, which was generally smaller, and the execution that less precise.
The new exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery assembles some of the paintings from the 1960s by four of the artists in The Field show, David Aspden, Sydney Ball, Michael Johnson and Dick Watson, under the provocative title Birth of the Cool. In the catalogue essay an even bigger claim is made. "With the benefit of hindsight, they [the four artists] can be seen to belong to a golden era of Australian art, with a brilliant generation emerging in full confidence of its powers, determined to excel at the highest level – not just locally, but in a global context."
It is not that the show itself disappoints, it does not and contains a number of strong and memorable paintings, but it does look very dated, a peculiar '50s/'60s look that could be accompanied with period-style spiky furniture and someone in the background humming All You Need Is Love. All four artists were in their late 20s or early 30s when they painted these works and I believe that they all got better as they grew older, particularly in the case of Ball, Johnston and Watkins. Whether the 1960s in Australian visual culture was a golden age or a decade which was marking time is all a question of perspective. However few would argue that the colour field painters were the best of the lot from that decade – think of John Brack, Fred Williams, Arthur Boyd and John Olsen, while even in The Field exhibition itself, Peter Booth and John Peart may have been the more challenging emerging artists.
The one painting that stopped me in my tracks in this show is Michael Johnson's Anna, c.1966, which I have never seen before, with its simple and majestic forms, subdued palette and strong resonating colour masses. There is a great subtlety in this canvas, which years later would find full-throated expression in his great paintings of the 1980s, such as After Sirius in the Sydney gallery. The other painting that I really enjoyed and which I know quite well is Sydney Ball's Pawnee Summer, 1973, from the Queensland Art Gallery. In this work, as well as in his "stain paintings", he breaks free of the constraints of geometric abstraction to unleash an explosive gestural power that took into account the liberating freedom of Jackson Pollock. Ball had the direct experience of the Art Students League in New York in the early 1960s and then again returned to New York between 1969 and 1971 and served as an important conduit between Australia and the New York scene. He is also an artist who has progressively grown stronger with time.
In some ways the "cool" sensibility of colour field painting and its minimalist aesthetic was a short-lived phenomenon in Australian art and the strongest artists who emerged from The Field quickly moved on to other more personal modes of expression. For a small number of emerging artists, this was their 15 minutes of fame, and they subsequently faded into repetitive mediocrity.
The Field has been reassessed for a few decades with The Field now (1984), Field to Figuration (1987), I had a dream (1997), Central Street live (2003), Gallery A (2009) and Tackling The Field (2009). Birth of the Cool adds to this growing list of reappraisals. Is it possible that we have reached saturation point?