Christine Nicholls in her review in Asian Art News (Vol. 28, No. 4, 2018) of the 100th anniversary of Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz’s abstract paintings at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery in 2018 implies that there is regional art history of abstract modernism in Adelaide that is different from a national one. What happened in Adelaide was different to what happened in both Sydney abstraction and the reaction against abstraction in Melbourne by the Antipodeans who defended a figurtartive tradition, and whose manifesto asserted that the art of “Tachistes, Action Painters, Geometric Abstractionists, [and] Abstract Expressionists” was “not an art sufficient for our time … not an art for living men”. It was different because of the European visual art culture and sensibility of the postwar migrant European artists. Was this the case?
Ostoja arrived in Adelaide in 1954 — he had been exhibiting in Melbourne with the likes of John Brack and others associated with the Antipodean Group. His drawings from that time show influences of Matisse and Picasso. There are a lot of these up in the collection of the Flinders University Museum of Art, as well as the State Library. I had hoped to do a monograph on the under-appreciated aspects of his career, but could never get the funding or time. Ian Davidson wrote an important document, recollecting his creative activities in Adelaide 1954-1972. It was interesting but needed a lot of reforming to make a good book of it. But in the previous five years a lot had happened in Adelaide, and a lot of that momentum came through migrant artists like the Marek brothers, the Dutkiewicz brothers, Alex Sadlo and Stan Rapotec, who moved to Sydney c.1955. Other migrant artists came but most of them undertook studies here — even Rapotec was self taught during his early years in Adelaide, as he had not had a connection with art before the war. My father, Wladyslaw (Wlad), had held six solo exhibitions showing expressionist and abstract work in Adelaide and had shown interstate. in solo and group exhibitions, by 1954. My uncle Ludwik had held two solo exhibitions of mostly abstract paintings here by then, but in 1953 was employed as a professional botanical illustrator for the State Herbarium — he continued to paint mostly abstracts for the rest of his life. A number of females made contributions, and perhaps the most individual and modern painter among them was Margarita Stipnieks, who began as an expressionist but became almost exclusively a modern interpreter of the female form and flowers. The sculptor Ieva Pocius was also a solid contributor and carved a unique path in modern form — but she trained at the School of Art. Others came and went; possibly the most notable was Anton Holzner, who from the start showed abstract paintings — the first entirely abstract show in Adelaide in 1957.
So, while surrealism had taken a foothold in Sydney and Melbourne, and figurative expressionism held sway with the Antipodeans in Melbourne, Adelaide had a fully formed Ab-Ex movement going on here from 1950, before it took root in Sydney. In Sydney, their own Constructivist group said they felt like pariahs; in Adelaide, the experimental local painters were winning almost all the main prizes.
If there was a regional history, then what is not helpful is to seek an answer to the question of the relationship between photography and art in general — we need to think of the two histories of photography and art in general as intertwined, each impacting on, and influencing, the other.
Given the outline above, it’s clear that art photography in post-war Adelaide overlapped with the fine art world, as some of the main practitioners in avant-garde art had a foot in both media. That said, photography was not so easily accepted at the CASSA — the first photograph presented for exhibition, by John Walpole, was rejected; the re was much consternation about it and after debate the second work, by Ian Davidson, was accepted. From then on work by Peter Medlen and John Dallwitz, among others, started appearing regularly on the walls, and by the mid-70s group and then solo photography exhibitions appeared quite regularly. In the 1980s we had a photography-specific gallery in Adelaide, and the RSASA was holding group exhibitions of contemporary photography again. In the 1990s photography became very mainstream, and was very common in spaces like CASSA and EAF, and the University art museums — now digital means interdisciplinary; boundaries are broken down and multimedia is everywhere. It’s back to the future in a way!
Are you able to indicate this inter–relationship in the modernist period in Adelaide — say from the 1940’s to the 1970s? I ask because there appeared to be a flourishing interaction between the visual arts (including photography) theatre, music and cinema in Adelaide. Secondly, did this Adelaide modernist culture see photography as a form of art as opposed to it being a specific medium as adopted by and developed by American style modernist formalism? Photography as a form of art would question and reject the assumption that what was called photography displays the unity of a particular medium.
My father ran his own theatre company, based loosely on his training on Stanislavkian method in Poland (Lvov) — he produced several plays with significant actors and writers who later worked for Crawfords in Melbourne — he even acted in several of those TV dramas. Wlad had run a theatrical troupe in post-war Germany that toured Polish DP camps in Bavaria. He met Gabrielle Munter in Murnau in June 1945 and was shown the 137 Kandinsky works she had hidden from the Nazis. He brought that intelligence and his experience of modernism in Krakow and Paris (1937) to Adelaide and it underpinned his creative life as a painter. He was first recognised here for his stage designs in 1950. He did several through the 1950s but Ostoja took the baton. Wlad and Ludwik Dutkiewicz both taught at the School of Art and involved themselves in the administration of the RSASA and CAS. Dalman was Dutch, arrived around 1960; he ran his own photographic studio — he worked for professional theatre and dance companies as they established after the first Festival of Arts, as most of the activities before then were amateur – he regarded his most important photo series as his portraits of Marcel Marceau, but he did work in other areas as well (shown in the first book). Medlen tried to run a commercial studio but had the temperament of a bohemian painter – he wanted to do experimental work but there was no respect for it in 1960s’ Adelaide (only in Melbourne), so he did mostly portraits – his most recognised work is a series of portraits of Hans Heysen and other contemporary artists. Ostoja’s photographic practice was a little underground, apart from what he presented in slides at the Sound & Image performances. He made an enormous impact on stage design here, starting with the amateurs in the 1950s. He was used for Festival productions of science fiction and Patrick White plays, operas and ballets.
I want now to turn to how this abstraction was understood in Adelaide modernism. I haven’t read Brian Claridge’s texts on how the Adelaide modernists understood abstraction. However, I have a sense that abstraction was understood differently by them to how the American modernists understood it (eg., self–expression of the artist’s feelings) as well as the Sydney geometric abstraction. Abstraction appeared to be more objective, a loose representation of everyday social life. Was it an abstraction from everyday life in this sense, or was it more a representation of a visual, spiritual world behind our everyday world. Can you spell out how Adelaide modernist abstraction was different?
Claridge was a very interesting man, and his wife was an important contributor too. Nancy was a classical pianist who wrote about art and design in the weekend press; she also helped artist and art critic Ivor Francis run his art journal. Brian’s father was the prominent Adelaide architect Philip Claridge. Brian was an architect too, very well educated, and loved modern art; he wrote about modern architecture and eventually became an academic in the field. He was a Vice President of the CASSA and from time to time Acting President. He helped theorise my father’s ideas on visual art, which stemmed from Wlad’s encounter with Munter and Kandinsky’s Blaue Reiter (pre-Bauhaus) ideas. Wlad was seeking a method that could help keep him working creatively, independent of inspiration; he devised a method that I described as “Organic Constructivism”, which derived from curved lines and automatist surrealism, combining expressive or gestural line and colour to build planes of overlapping colours, into which were introduced degrees of texture — or negating obvious forms to construct more compelling compositions. These ideas were seen in early mural and large colour-music panels by the artist from 1954. They were soon employed in 3D for sculptures for the 6th Australian Architectural Convention Exhibition at Botanic Park in 1956. Brian indicated these ideas had been influential on artists in other fields as well as visual art in Adelaide; and Nancy wrote about Wlad’s “cosmic theory of light and line” in her interior design column in an article that spoke of all the murals recently painted in private homes in Adelaide.
Theorising modern art was quite common overseas, especially in early-20th C Europe, but it was not common here by then — so it’s very unusual and in a way a manifesto for this broader group of creatives, and imparted a method for the synthesis Wlad was looking for in his abstraction — he saw geometric or hard-edge abstraction as uninteresting and an intellectual dead-end. The Sydney Constructivists worked with Platonic forms initially and gradually broke them down; they had a similar agent to Claridge working with them, Eleanore Lange, who theorised their art in the 1940s. Ludwik’s approach was imbued with mysticism and the “fourth dimension” – not time or space-time, but an integrity of form; he tried to work quickly and to complete his paintings in one session, or the feeling was lost (perhaps because he could only work on weekends and holidays). All those early 20th C Theosophical paraphernalia crept into his ideas, and those of Davidson and Ostoja too. But Ostoja was a mechanic, a technician and scientist, so his approach was guided by seeking new horizons for art — he felt he had left oil painting in Ab-Ex style behind after about 5 years. Most of the 2D art he produced in the 1960s and 70s was Op art, or colour-field painting, or photo-images of electronic and laser designs; Alex Sadlo had influenced him and set up these investigations in Adelaide from c.1954. He had emerged from a Czech tradition of post-impressionism and Orphism, and his earliest experiments with Futurism and optical painting marginally predate those of international luminaries like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely. So, all in all, so it was really progressive here, and greatly underappreciated.