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March 22, 2008
The title of this post refers to the blockbuster exhibition at the Australian National Gallery, which looks at landscape painting in the nineteenth century as it transformed from the depiction of known places to explorations of mood and time passing. This intimate image is included:
Van Gogh, Tree Trunks in the Grass, 1890, oil on canvas
The exhibition includes a large number of Australian landscapes. The key idea of the curators---Ron Radford, Lucinda Ward and Christine Dixon--- is that the Australian romantic painters----such as John Glover, Eugene von Guerard + Conrad Martens --were continuing British and northern Europe traditions of landscape; and that in responding to the Australian landscape these cliche-ridden and hack painters came into their own.
They stopped trying to imposing an inherited idiom and falsified ideal and started painting sunsets, the dramatic vistas with their mountains and seaside cliffs, and pastoral views that implied divinely ordained ownership of the land.
This view contest the traditional art historical interpretation of the Australian romantics that their fondness for the romantic sublime were simply unable to get to grips with Australian light and its anti-picturesque physicality. That only came with the noonday light of the plein-air of the Heidleberg school. What we have is an argument that is profoundly and strategically 'national'--Australia had its own culture and history--and which placed an emphasis on border protection not border crossing, essence rather than hybridity and centres rather than margins.
Radford and Co tend to downplay Australian exceptionalism and suggest that Australian art is a lot like that of other places.
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Gary,
I've always been suprised by the negative reactions to the paintings of the Australian romantics and their exploration of the sublime in Australia. They have been forgotten or ignored by the gentile impressionism of the golden summers Heidleberg school, which is interpreted as finally capturing what Australia was about. It complimented Australian literary nationalism in the larger imperial context and it's reaction to a commodity culture.
English and German-trained artists reinvented landscape conventions to portray the new, and often startling, continents of Australia and America. These artists ventured into the wilderness and sought the extremes of nature, elemental and untameable: stormy coasts and mysterious mountains, volcanic eruptions and raging fires, the bush as evoking in the infinite.