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Example research essay topic: 20 Th Century Avant Garde - 2,580 words

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The environment was major contributing factor to the evolution of Australian art in the 20 th century. The elemental landscape; isolation and distance, the imposition of the mythical and the visionary on the landscape, national identity (the universal and the regional) and the demise of Arcadia and romantic idealism interweave magnificently to present the impact of surroundings on the artwork of such a then delicate nation. In retrospect it was the surroundings / climate /atmosphere / feeling and people of our unique nation that undoubtedly shape what we know as Australian art sure there are direct influences from other cultures, but while knowing this we have to understand that a perfect combination of outside cultures is the main ingredient in the recipe of our own culture. Our flirting with the idea of rural Australia as a sun-drenched pastoral arcadia (a Heidelberg school vision) was extremely deviated from with Russel Drysdale's compelling early painting Sunday evening (pictured below). Completed in 1941, this work is of decisive significance in the growth of Drysdale's sole vision. With an inland theme imagery had come to represent for Australians the fundamental uniqueness of our land and people.

In its place, in a work of art that exposed a promising individual manner, and signalled the upcoming meaning of the body to his interpretation of Australia, Drysdale affianced in an evocation of outlandish human endurance amidst the remoteness and destitution of the interior. Sunday evening, with other paintings of 1941 on similar themes, indicated Drysdale's future function in determining a different national identity based on the uniqueness of Australian inland life. This was without a doubt one of the works that helped change the way Australians viewed themselves and their country. The barren background to show despair and isolation complements the gaunt, elongated figures. To many artists the search for national identity has been a stimulating force, for others it has represented a blunt parochialism, betraying the municipal, logical complexity of Australia as a Westernised civilization. The apparent remoteness of Australia as a Western society in the southern hemisphere, actually outlying and detached from the main currents of Western intellectual thought in United States or Europe, certainly belongs more to the realm of myth than fact.

Even in the 19 th century, when the onset of the mail on arriving ships was enthusiastically expected by Australia's white population, the flood of books, art reproductions, journals, and so on kept the local intelligentsia remarkably well informed of current developments abroad. The landscape tradition dominated the art of the period as the landscape itself came to represent the ideals of freedom and egalitarianism that Australians had struggled for in the war. An ahead of its time modernism with increased legitimacy surfaced in the late 1930 s and 1940 s in premeditated insubordination of the narrow-mindedness of Australian society. Drawing on the joint resources of Surrealism and Expressionism, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, and Sidney Nolan called attention to the up to date metropolitan scene and the ethical deprivation of Melbourne's wartime society. Regardless of the growing internationalism of post-war Australian society, the Australian landscape has been persistent to preoccupy artists and to excite the in style thoughts. In the 1940 s and 1950 s Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan endeavoured further than the established rural districts to illustrate the ruthless and bleak situation in the Australian outback; and yet, in spite of its hostile traits, the landscape is offered as the inner heart and soul of the country.

Two significant landscape artists of the 1960 s, John Olsen and Fred Williams, reinvigorated the landscape custom by infusing it with some of the official characteristics of worldwide abstraction. Issues of physical distance and isolation become more relevant when one considers Australia's environmental diversity, and this is why these artists ventured further than others. The imposition of the mythical and the visionary on the landscape is epitomized by the works of Arthur Boyd. Boyd's paintings, drawings, lithographs and ceramics changed the cruel reality of urban and bush Australia into a mythical place, a country occupied by an diverse gathering of characters and events drawn from ancient Greece, the Old Testament, and Australian history. While Boyd was reliant on the Australian scenery for visual stimulation, his work rose over its environmental origins to observe widespread shared and personal themes love and affection; jealousy, deceit and vanity; racism, poverty and war.

Reflected bride 1 (1958, seen below) came in the middle of Boyd's Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-caste series. The surroundings, as opposed to being the barren stage set of earlier paintings in the series is a ditch where Boyd's dark bridegroom firmly holds his spirit bride is made essential to their marriage: the bride merges with the watercourse; the groom's foot is curved around a stem in the knotted grove. This an archetypal Boydian landscape. Boyd's half-caste groom, has lost all hope, his blue hands and feet set him apart, half deity, half derelict. Boyd's leading theme here is hopelessness. The environment was made a vast input to what is known today as Australian art.

Without it the immense majority of influences and imprint on culture would not exist. Leaving Australia as culturally barren as the outback. The centres in 20 th century Australian art included Melbourne (in the 1940 s); the avante garde and intellectuals, the Australian Academy of Art, the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) and Herald Exhibition; the Angry Penguins; the rise of figurative expressionism and a national school. The emergence of Sydney in the 1950 s and the rise of modern abstraction were major events; Australia began looking outwards to the world.

These were all chief contributing factors and were all instrumental in the progression of art in Australia. Avant-garde was originally a French military term used to describe a small group who explores new territory ahead of the main army. In the visual arts it is applied to the innovative artists who, in any given period, are working in a way that is new and different from their contemporaries. Brett Whiteley was at the forefront of the avant-garde movement. His well-known work Alchemy (pictured below as would be in an exhibit) summarized Whiteley's state of mind at the time in all its myriad accumulation of influences in his own history as an artist; it was painted over one year. It is a self-portrait on a gigantic scale this had been seen before in his work The American Dream, without the intense political agenda in its impression.

Seeing as it is spread over 18 panels it may be read right to left as a vision of earth, ocean, sky through transmutations of flesh, genitalia, fornication and landscape, ending with a white sun and serpentine tentacles put in front of a gold background. The final two panels were from a ruined portrait Whiteley had produced in 1972 of Yukio Mishima, a Japanese writer who committed seppuku (suicide) in 1970, supposing that the space distancing art and action could be closed efficiently through ceremonial death. Literary mythology states that Mishima's final vision as the knife cut into his flesh, was of an exploding sun which lit the sky for an instant of so-called spiritual illumination. This hallucination became the official instigation of Alchemy. The work can be read either way (from left or right), or even from the centre, where the word 'IT' holds the swivel concerning competing ideas.

Then Attorney General and later Prime Minister Robert Menzies established the Australian Academy of Art in 1937. It was set up as an Australian parallel to the British Royal Academy. They (conservatives) aspired to provide a forum for Australian art, and promote art appreciation and art education. Resistance to modern art became hostile to the extent where the director of the National Gallery of Victoria did not allow contemporary art in his gallery. Modern painters feared that an academy would strengthen the oppression of contemporary art, basically empower conservatives, and they knew something had to be done. The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) set up to arouse public interest and awareness of present-day art.

This occurred on 13 July 1938; growing from a scheme devised by George Bell of robust opposition to Menzies Academy. Bell was the President and it was well known that the society was accommodating to modernist artists. The Society's philosophy was based on the ideal that art always progresses, and therefore if there was a lack of a new thought or feeling in any given exhibition, the Society would not be keeping to its name. Contemporary Art Society's sprang up over the east coast of Australia and proved to be a valuable forum for artists to show and seel work. The Society did as was intended and after a mere several years the Australian Academy of Art disbanded.

The Herald exhibition was named so due to sponsorship from the Melbourne Herald, it was an exhibition of modern art beginning in 1939; it graced Australia with a superb collection of modern European art. The Herald exhibition showed works from many famous artists including Matisse, Van Gogh and Dali. It had a vital influence on contemporary Australian Painting, instituting toned down versions of Cubism, Constructivism and Abstraction. The Angry Penguins were a loose affiliation of Melbourne artists, writers and intellectuals determined to break with the mythological ties of their past in favour of mythology linked to open association and individual expression. They sought after a fresh tolerance in the arts stimulated by events such as the expansion of fascism in Europe and its corrective mental and visual expression, Surrealism.

The name came from the journal, Angry Penguin, first published in 1940 by author Max Harris and philanthropist John Reed, became a leftist political magazine stating the attitudes of Boyd and artists such as Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Joy Hester. Divisions formed even within the ranks of the Angry Penguins. The Social Realists, declaring artists Noel Counihan and Daily Vasilieff, began to apply force on their Penguin equivalents, announcing the significance of merging art and politics and particularly with the communal principles of Communism. This was juxtaposition to the Surrealist enthused liberalism that had encouraged the Angry Penguins. A communist antagonism shaped within the Angry Penguins including Tucker, Reed, Boyd and Harris. Grace Crowley and Rah Fizelle set up a national school for art in Sydney, first and foremost to institute and explain the ideas of Cubism and Constructivism.

Meetings were regularly hosted at the school where groups met frequently to talk about the character of these new styles. They believed that art should be use a figurative image (shape or symbol) since an image was a form of acceptance and involvement in life. Figurative Sydney painting continued in the 1950 s, despite the trend of abstraction, Dickerson, Dobell, Hester and Blackman all persisted with the technique, although shapes remained figurative elements of abstract where evident. Trailing World War II worldwide progressive art continuously inspired Australian artists and throughout the 1950 s and early 1960 s the influence of abstract art from the United States on Sydney artists was exceptionally important. As artists the people of Sydney were looking out on the world and made a name for them with the rise of modern abstraction with inspiration from Europe also. However this was strongly opposed with Antipodean Manifesto that warned abstraction reduced art to merely a decorative state and ultimately be the death of art.

The centres of art in Australia during this critical period of contemporary implementation made an avenue for artist to go and exhibit their work, and discuss where they intended their work to go. This was something that was very important in the maturing of contemporary art, and most certainly had a great influence on the direction which art took, without which Australian art would have differed immensely from what we know today. The artists, of course, were who decided upon the direction of art in Australia. Obviously there were influences gathered from various places, however it was Russell Drysdale that used the real Australia, making use of the people in the landscape. Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd utilized narrative history, myths and legends and religious subjects, examining humans in folklore.

The urban response; consisting of John Brack, Clifton Pugh, and Robert Dickerson were very influential. Equally as significant were the abstractionists, John Olsen, John Passmore and Ian Fairweather. The culmination of modern art was William Dobell winning the Archibald Prize, wit his portrait that was labelled a caricature. The surfacing of important women artists became very apparent and they played a major role in the direction of art in Australia. Women artists bean to come out in the 1920 s, they came as a noteworthy influence for a couple of reasons. The first being mainly to do with the tapering of the male population, as a result of WWI, the second reason was to do with a lasting knowledge of the feminist movement of the 1880 s- 1890 s.

Women were hitherto foreign to the Australian art scene, this being due to the status they once held in Victorian and Edwardian societies. There were many women eager to follow an artistic pastime, if these women chose not to marry, and instead decided to make a career out of art they were viewed by the public eye as non-conformist and sometimes odd. Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, Mary Cassatt, Joy Hester, Norah Simpson, Birth Morisot and Grace Crowley are some major names of women artists at the time. Perhaps the most innovative of them was Crowley who (with Rah Fizelle) set up an art school in Sydney to teach the concepts of Cubism and Constructivism.

William Dobell concentrated on character, not features. He believed how one lived was an important aspect if he was to paint them. Going beyond seeing the human face in proportion he used his style to convey the person and the distortion came via expressionism. Modern arts direction was seen clearly through the Joshua Smith (a fellow artist) portrait, which won him the Archibald prize. This he was awarded in 1944, traditionalist critics claimed the painting to be a caricature, not a portrait. A committee of the reactionary Sydney Art Society contested the award with court action.

Sparking the Dobell case (23 - 26 Oct. 1944) citizens that were concerned with art each put in 40 pounds in order to help pay the court costs. The outcome was a verdict in favour of Dobell and a loss for the conservative art establishment. The whole affair harmed Dobell's health, and put an end to his friendship with Joshua Smith. The case gave Dobell and his colleagues the respect and acceptance that they deserved, but did not have prior to the case. The abstractionists consisted mainly of Olsen, Passmore and Fairweather. Fairweather's work through contact with Chinese, Indonesian and Aboriginal art was based upon arabesques.

Though built on figure there was a lean toward abstraction, like Modigliani than Czanne. In Sydney the shift in the direction of casual abstraction increased in force centred upon affiliates of the Contemporary Art Society (John Passmore and his pupils). One of which was John Olsen, during 1955 he held his initial exhibition, the works were semi-abstract, level surfaces and lots of chunky colours like that expected of Czanne. This turned into abstract expressionism.

He journeyed out of the country put on displays in Paris, and living in Spain. Olsen seeks to come across form and image in the authentic procedure of painting. He inherit...


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