Oasis In A City

Let’s begin with a quote from the book “Melbourne’s Garden” published in 1946 to commemorate the centenary of Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens which were founded under the direction of Charles Latrobe, Superintendent of Port Phillip. 

“….for Melbourne’s million and a half The Gardens means only one thing – the hundred acres of landscape that flanks the Yarra on the south, within sight of the heart of the city, yet a sanctuary for peace and meditation.”

As a prelude to my exhibition of paintings “Refuge” which opens at Tacit Galleries on 5th May, I am taking a look at the Gardens both past and present and what they mean to me. I can recall that one of the few times I experienced any inner peace as a child was when I visited these gardens with family – it was as if I had entered another world.

Three factors were thought to have contributed to the success of the gardens; contours, soil and climate.  The hilly terrain was considered unsuitable for housing and these hills drained into a chain of useless marshes next to the Yarra River.  So the Yarra was rerouted and the marshes transformed into an ornamental lake whilst the terrain was landscaped to provide the vistas we enjoy today.  Melbourne’s temperate climate is considered ideal in supporting a vast variety of botanical species – although climate change is having an impact.  Recently a 150 year old white oak near F Gate collapsed from heat stress and this clearly had a distressing impact on the staff of the Gardens.

In 1846 the first superintendent of the gardens John Arthur planted the first elm trees and erected the first fence to keep out the goats, and 50 years later William Guilfoyle planned the vast landscape that has made the gardens famous.  “Botany has become a broader and broader study through the years, and it matters not from which branch of the sciences this knowledge has come, the botanical staff of the gardens has applied each new advance to the purposes of the gardens themselves”.

Next door to the gardens is the National Herbarium which is basically the state’s botanical museum, containing specimens of every native plant found in Victoria and almost every known Australian native plant.  There are also representative botanical collections from around the world.  “A staff of professional botanists is engaged in the work of identification and classification not only for the purposes of the gardens themselves, but also for various government departments, for schools, farmers and the general public.”

The intention of my forthcoming exhibition is to take the viewer on a journey around the Gardens at different times of day and in different weathers.  I have sought to share the recuperative and consoling powers that nature has to offer us.  There have been many times I’ve visited these gardens for psychological recovery from the challenges of everyday life, such as losing one’s job, difficulties in relationships or even working one’s way through art school. 

Modern advertising often specialises in glamourizing the unattainable; that is, places that are rare, remote, costly or famous.  Yet here we have an exotic location right under our noses that we can visit at any time.  And the sun need not be shining to appreciate the mysteries of these gardens.   A visit on a quiet, drizzly day can be an oddly therapeutic experience as you get the feeling that you have the whole gardens to yourself – tearooms and all.  Thus one can absorb the almost surreal beauty of the gardens, the thought that has gone into the landscaping and the far flung vistas.

I found it a challenging experience roaming around the Gardens with my book in hand, trying to identify the locations of photographs from 75 years ago.  Annoyingly, there are no images of the tearooms and Craft Cottage in the book. Such are the transformations that have taken place that some locations are simply unrecognisable, which perhaps highlights the fact that Melbourne’s Botanical Gardens are a work in progress – and probably always will be.

Many thanks to my friend and fellow Gippsland artist Helen Timbury who found the book “Melbourne’s Garden” at an opp shop and bought it for me.

Reference:

“Melbourne’s Garden” by Crosbie Morrison, Melbourne University Press, 1946.   Revised 1957.

The Everywhere Man; Jonathan Miller

A polymath (Greek: πολυμαθής, polymathēs, "having learned much"; Latin: homo universalis, "universal man") is an individual whose knowledge spans a substantial number of subjects, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. WIKIPEDIA

Apparently Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) disliked being referred to as a polymath.  Too bad.  If a 90 minute BBC Arena documentary barely scratches the surface of your achievements, you’re a polymath.  He’s been described as having two brains, which enabled him to effortlessly waft between the worlds of science and the arts.  Medical practitioner, writer, comedy actor, stage designer, opera director, film and TV producer, darling of the chat show circuit (Michael Parkinson interviewed him several times, as did Clive James) and finally a sculptor – he did it all.

For many, he will be remembered for starring alongside Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in the satirical comedy series Beyond The Fringe in the early 1960’s.  Others will remember him for his major documentary series covering topics as diverse as anthropology, zoology, atheism and mental illness.

He came from good Jewish stock.  His father was one of the pioneers of child psychiatry and an artist and his mother had her first novel published at 23.  His father carried out research into shell shock victims of the First World War.  He describes his parents as Bloomsbury Jewish intellectuals and there seems to have been little warmth in his upbringing.

From left, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. Beyond the Fringe.

At St Pauls College London, Miller studied biology alongside, and came firm friends with, such future luminaries as Oliver Sachs and Eric Korn.  “Three Jewish boys who were passionate about biology”, says Miller.  He adored the Natural History Museum.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Miller went to Cambridge in 1953 to study medicine. Whilst working as a house surgeon at University College, Miller was asked to take part in a late night review at the Edinburgh Festival (Miller always had a talent for comedy and was a wonderful mimic).  This ultimately led to him starring in Beyond The Fringe.  He was a very physical comedian and would gyrate around the stage. Eric Idle of Monty Python fame admired the mocking of authority in this series and it inspired him to seek a career in comedy.

Miller’s wife Rachel was described as the anchor, the serenity in his hyper manic life and Sachs believes he may not have achieved as much in his life without her.

Inevitably, Miller toured New York with the Beyond the Fringe team in 1962 and took advantage of the opportunity to mingle with New York intellectuals, writers and comedians – eventually writing for the New Yorker.

Upon returning to London, Miller decided to pursue a career in TV and film production as his life began to drift away from medicine.  As an outsider, not someone who had risen through the TV “ladder”, Miller felt he wasn’t bound by the normal conventions of interviewing people and documentary production.  He quickly became a top line director without any formal training and this led him to direct Alice In Wonderland for TV in 1966.  He believed the story to be about the attitudes of Victorian England to the “mystery and sanctity” of childhood.  He dispensed with the animal characters and wanted the production to be a melancholy journey to growing up. 

A scene from Alice In Wonderland with Anne-Marie Mallik as Alice and Peter Cook on the far left.

In 1968 he began a career as a theatre director at the Nottingham Playhouse.  He was highly regarded for never talking down to a young actor thus making him/her feel confident.  He wanted to explore a playful inventiveness in his directing – perhaps a benefit of not having been formally trained.  Later, he directed at the Old Vic at the invitation of Lawrence Olivier.  Miller believes that his training as a doctor – looking for minute details in how people carry themselves and talk when trying to diagnose them – assisted him in his directing career.

Miller didn’t abandon medicine entirely and in 1978 he produced the ground breaking series “The Body In Question” which was an investigation into the human body and the history of medicine.  Miller has been described as the consummate teacher, but a strong stomach was required as some of the footage was confronting. Later, he produced a program on the challenges of Parkinson’s disease.

Oliver Sachs believed that Miller never really left medicine, it’s just that the clinical life couldn’t contain him nor could the theatre/directing life.  In the early 1980’s Miller was directing Shakespeare for the BBC.  In 1979 he was approached by conductor Roger Norrington to direct an opera. Once again the lack of formal training proved no impediment and he has directed more than 60 operas where he is renowned for his innovation.  One performance of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tuti featured a guy talking on a mobile phone.  In 1987 he directed Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado for the English National Opera starring Eric Idle and he dispensed with all references to Japan.  Instead he used the Marx Brothers film Duck Soup as inspiration.

In 1995 Miller relished the paradox of being a Jewish atheist directing Bach’s St Matthew Passion as a theatrical spectacle.

It was inevitable that Miller’s all-encompassing network of interests would include the visual arts.  He developed an interest in abstract sculpture and collage.

I have to confess that it wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that I became aware of Miller via his series “Madness”, screened on the ABC late at night, which presented a social history of mental illness.  Confronting and informative, it was unforgettable television.

His interests fell under 4 main categories; art, science, anthropology and philosophy, and the world is so much the poorer without him.

References;

BBC Arena

The Conversation - Jonathan Miller, The Man With Two Brains

Tragedy Of 50 Years Of Failure

The current Covid 19 pandemic is likely to exacerbate the disturbing increase in rates of depression and anxiety in the community.  The not-for-profit charity Mind Medicine Australia, which is seeking to establish safe and effective psychedelic-assisted treatments for mental illness in Australia, has produced some alarming statistics on mental illness in this country.  The thrust of MMA’s argument is that 50 years of mainstream medication since the banning of psychedelics has completely failed the vast majority of sufferers of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addictions.

As a result of lobbying by MMA, the Therapeutic Goods Administration is seeking submissions from the public on a proposal to amend the scheduling of substances including psychedelics so they can be made available for therapeutic treatment. (The closing date for submissions was 28th September 2020).

What needs to be understood here is that psychedelics were banned in the US in 1970 by the Nixon Administration for political reasons.  It was part of Nixon’s strategy to kill off the anti-Vietnam war movement, thus years of research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, such as psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA was flushed down the toilet.  Most other countries followed suit.

I would argue that the failure of the mental health system in general and mainstream medication in particular has manifested itself in the increased suicide rate and the emergence of, among other things, the media psychiatrist.  This brings me to the 1991 series “Madness” presented by the remarkable Jonathan Miller who died last November, which explores the history and treatment of mental illness. 

In one episode, titled “The Talking Cure”, Miller looks at the history of psychoanalysis.  It begins with Miller driving along a huge freeway in the US whilst listening on his car radio to the ‘psychiatrist turned agony uncle’ David Viscott taking calls from the distressed, the lonely, the depressed and anxious.  Miller tells us that Viscott was one of the brightest young psychiatrists of his generation, but he decided to reach a much wider audience.

David Viscott

There is something perverse about listening to a distressed pot smoking young mother of 3 who also takes 2 quaaludes a day (a barbiturate) giving an account of her life, with these accounts interspersed with joyful advertising. Miller believes that Sigmund Freud’s patients would have been horrified at the thought of broadcasting their private agonies to a huge anonymous audience. 

We need to go back to the beginning.  Freud discovered that in order to effectively treat the disordered patients who presented themselves in his consulting rooms, they needed access their unconscious mind by going through a process of autobiographical reconstruction.  He recognised the way in which some patients would give a self-deceiving account of their past, which was largely due to a repressive process in the mind preventing access to its unconscious contents, which may contain pain or certain urges that are in conflict with the moral order of the social world.  Freud discovered that the repressive process didn’t annihilate those contents.  Instead, it was likely that those unconscious urges would surface in a disguised form such as slips of the tongue, or in dreams.

Freud believed that if in the course of a person’s development he/she fails to reconcile certain instinctive urges in the unconscious with the increasingly demanding social world, these unresolved conflicts can arrest a person’s development and manifest themselves as psychological illness.

Jonathan Miller

Only recently has there been a revival in interest in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, with the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore and the Imperial College in London leading the charge. Studies have shown how intensive treatments in psychedelics in a controlled environment can give patients access to their biographies and allow the processing of them once and for all.  Psychedelics can open up new opportunities to patients and give them an entirely new perspective on life.  Just 3 treatments over a 2 week period is usually all that is required.  Results are very encouraging.

But in the absence of psychedelic treatments and other alternatives, plus the high cost of mental health care (Viscott charged $1500 for a 2 hour private session) many sufferers may have felt they had no option but to avail themselves of Viscott’s on air ‘services’. 

I will certainly be making a submission to the TGA. I’ve suffered depression all my life, there is a history of suicide in my family and I’ve had enough.

Just as an aside. After reaching its peak in the early 1990’s, Viscott’s career and life quickly disintegrated.  His method was to gently probe intimate details out of his clients before hitting them with a sledge hammer.  It was undifferentiated, tough love shrink radio.  But then his ratings declined along with his health.  His marriage failed and new projects came to nothing.  He died alone in 1996, aged 58.

References;

Los Angeles Times

“Madness” - BBC TV

Calm In A Crisis

At times like these when we are reeling from the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic, not to mention last summer’s bushfires, we can become so pumped up with anxiety and dread that we can forget to keep an appointment with someone very important - our inner selves.

We might have intimations of it whilst driving on a quiet freeway or when contemplating a sunset or dawn.  I can remember when I was a kid the beautiful aroma of eucalypt forests that would waft across the suburbs of Melbourne first thing on a hot summer’s day, before the traffic pollution and rising heat obliterated it. 

Author Alain de Botton argues that we should bring a little perspective back to our needlessly tense and preciously brief lives.  I think the operative words here are “preciously brief”, and this brings me to a regular theme of his at the School of Life – the concept of a higher consciousness.  For much of our lives we have no choice but to live in a state of lower consciousness – we must in order to attend to practical everyday matters.  But taken to an extreme, this can lead to us over reacting to insults, blaming others and developing an exalted sense of who we are, our beliefs, and our place in the world.

Alone In The Marches, oil on canvas, 71 cm x 100 cm

Achieving a higher state of consciousness involves loosening our hold over our own egos and rising to a less biased perspective of the world.  Our mind moves beyond self-interest and cravings and we are able to relate more to our natural environment, wind, cloud, trees or even the aroma of a distant forest.  We may even start to have a little more compassion for our fellow human beings.  Periods of higher consciousness can be desperately short lived, but the idea is to harvest their insights for the panicky periods when we need them most.  This is not easy to achieve and I am still working on it.

Art has a role to play here as you will see from the following;

Jacob Van Ruisdael, ‘Wheat Fields’, ca 1670, oil on canvas

A man with a traveller’s pack approaches a woman and child in a cultivated landscape.  There is a glimpse of boats at sea on the far left.  But it’s clear the viewers’ eye is directed to the dominant sky which takes us to another level of consciousness, and thus the encounter below is rendered insignificant.

Caspar David Friedrich, ‘Monk By The Sea’, 1809, oil on canvas

This painting was daring in its originality when exhibited at the Berlin Academy in 1810.  It’s not strictly a landscape or a seascape, so what is it?  Friedrich once said a painter should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself.  This could involve making a conversion from the material world into the spiritual world.  At a time when most artists were producing images of an idealized or corporeal world, Friedrich presented viewers with a void.  Or is it?  The presence of a figure who appears to confront the unknowable void before him adds a poignancy to the work and gives it an emotional power.  Critic Robert Rosenblum argues this painting prefigures the work of Turner and Rothko who sought to escape from the material world by distilling the mysteries of nature and spirit in veils of atmospheric colour.

Antoine Chintreuil, ‘Expanse’, 1869, oil on canvas

As the realities of the industrial revolution began to hit home, with grueling and often dangerous factory work replacing traditional farm labour, there grew a demand for images of a disappearing rural Arcadia.  People were flocking to the cities to find work and just survive.

Many artists of the mid-19th century began to focus on nature’s awesome immensity as, perhaps, a form of meditation including Antoine Chintreuil with this painting that made quite an impact at the Paris Salon of 1869.  There is a rural setting in the foreground but this is reduced to insignificance by the vast horizon and the sky above.  The scene is peaceful and the sunrise “suggests a benevolent deity presiding over the verdant land below.” ROSENBLUM

‘Arctic Summer’, oil on canvas, 77 cm x 92 cm

Places like these really do exist and we need to acknowledge them.  They can bring a context to our own existence in the overall scheme of things.  Our relationship with the natural world is a contract.  If we respect the laws of nature, we will reap the benefits.  If not, we will be punished - as is becoming increasingly apparent.

‘Hopetoun Lawn’, oil on canvas on board, 61 cm x 72 cm

When I paint a scene I try to imagine being there, how I am feeling in that scene – perhaps serene or a little melancholy but not anxious.  It helps me create a mood so that these scenes are intended to be more than just a record of what’s there.  I guess you could argue that I’m trying to access a state of higher consciousness.

References;

Alain De Botton - The School Of Life

Robert Rosenblum - Paintings In The Musee D’orsay

Robert Rosenblum & H. W. Janson - Art Of The Nineteenth Century, Painting and Sculpture

A Canine Conundrum

If you are a dog lover and you are wondering how to fill in your time during the current coronavirus pandemic, well I’m afraid viewing the 1999 documentary Puppy Love presented by art historian Waldemar Januszczak is not the answer.

A curious title given that for 50 minutes, Januszczak snarls his way through a canine critique and it’s not clear which he despises more, dogs or their owners.  He visits a dog show which he regards as incorrigibly eccentric and he considers breeding practices to be the canine equivalent of eugenics practised by the Nazis.  “We breed them until their heads look like misshapen Halloween pumpkins (often to the detriment of their health), we cut their bollocks off, we send them to a doggy psychiatrist and still most of them won’t do what we want them to do.  The message appears to be that we love dogs, but not for themselves, it’s for the prestige they can bestow upon their owners.

We witness dogs defecating. He is particularly annoyed at dog owners who treat his local park as a public toilet, and he scoops up some dog shit with a spoon and takes it to a laboratory for analysis.  We are presented with a list of nasty diseases it can cause and yes, dog shit can make your baby go blind.

He visits the proud owner of the world’s heaviest dog, a 130 kg British Mastiff.  We see the certificate the owner received from the Guinness Book of Records – with flies crawling across it.  We are told that averaged across the entire population, the British spend 50p per dog per day on dog food, 50p a day would keep a family of 3 alive in Angola.

He speaks with a clinical psychologist who has some unflattering opinions about dog owners, but you’ll have to watch the program to find out what they are.

He interviews a RSPCA inspector who admits to be driven to tears at home after witnessing instances of cruelty against dogs.  There was the famous case of the celebrated Kennel Club judge Jennifer Bosson, who was sentenced to 4 months jail and banned from keeping dogs for life after being convicted of cruelty.

He visits a Korean restaurant and eats dog meat (yuk!).  Needless to say, it is heavily spiced.  This staggers me somewhat because it’s my understanding that dog meat contains vast quantities of vitamin A.  When the Australian Antarctic explorer Douglas Mawson lost all his supplies down a crevasse, he was left with nothing to eat but his huskies.  The vitamin A almost killed him.  And which part of the dog do the Koreans cook, you may be wondering?  All of it.

Dog show eccentricity?

We witness a castration (ouch!) and Januszczak describes the practice as pest control. 

To the strains of Elvis Presley singing ‘Old Shep’ we visit a dog cemetery and witness a funeral.  Januszczak talks to a grieving owner who said she couldn’t stand the thought of her pooch being buried at home. Which is fair enough, but the exercise is expensive.  For some reason, watching this segment took me way back in time to the demise of my beloved cat from childhood.  Shortly after I got married I found out that it had been “put down” by a vet after being savaged in a possum fight.  She was quite old by then and afterwards – well she was left with the vet.  To be disposed of, I guess.  This has always bothered me so I won’t be too sarcastic about the concept of pet cemeteries.

K-9 from Dr Who. The perfect substitute?

At the end of the program, there is some consolation for dog owners when we see footage of dogs being trained in rescue work in Korea.  Strangely, there is no mention in the program of the incessant barking which has always been my bone of contention (pun intended) with dogs.  Then again seeing-eye dogs don’t rate a mention, nor does the consolation dogs can provide to the elderly.

Gustave Courbet, Nude Woman With Dog, 1868

But if at the end of my days all I have is a dog, then I think I’d rather die alone.

Puppy Love is available on Vimeo On Demand

Art In Tough Economic Times

The Morrison Government’s recent decision to roll the Department of Communication and the Arts into a new super Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications has drawn widespread condemnation from the arts community.  For a start, there is no mention of the arts in this new super department.  There is no reference to its arts responsibilities at all.

The arts haven’t always been treated with such callous disregard during tough economic times.  We only have to look back to what happened during the great depression in the United States to find a more enlightened attitude.

The Works Progress Administration was established by Franklin D Roosevelt shortly after he was elected US President in 1932.  It was part of his New Deal which involved massive programs to provide employment for the millions who were out of work.  The WPA provided programs to struggling writers and artists. 

Artists were commissioned to paint murals in post offices, town halls and railroad stations across the country.  And whilst this may have produced a lot of idealized kitsch, it did keep a lot of artists alive.  One such artist was Jack Levine. “Prior to the depression, many American artists were traveling to the left bank in Paris and were enjoying this hedonistic lifestyle until the money ran out, then they all returned to the US.  Many artists became very political and I became politicized out of my own poverty.  I didn’t have a dime.  I became very bitter and nobody wanted my work, so I went on the New Deal for a while and it felt as if someone had thrown me a life saver.”

Another WPA artist was Vincent Campanella “artists were able to see themselves as part of the working class and they saw themselves as free to be what they wanted to be under the WPA, painters who were free to paint the common life.  They were free to share opinions, share thoughts, share peoples financial difficulties, freedom to dedicate yourself and say I am a painter who is a human being and my fellow human beings are my subjects.”

Campanella’s portrait of Thomas Hart Benton

Corporations also encouraged public art at this time.  New York’s Rockefeller Centre is full of it.  There is a sample of it on the Associated Press Building by Isamu Noguchi. 

Isamu Noguchi

The famous photographer Lewis Hine worked as chief photographer for the WPA’s National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment.  During the depression he produced images of “worker as hero” to use Robert Hughes’ terminology including images of construction workers on the Empire State Building.

Lewis Hine Construction workers on the Empire State Building

Contrast all this to the Morrison Government’s attitude to the arts. The government denies that the arts has been downgraded by this decision, but the outgoing Secretary of the Departments of Communications and the Arts, Mike Mrdak disagrees.  In an email sent to his staff on the day the new super department was announced, Mrdak (pictured below) made his feelings plain.  "We were not permitted any opportunity to provide advice on the machinery of government changes, nor were our views ever sought on any proposal to abolish the department or to changes to our structure and operations."

Many bureaucrats are concerned a departmental secretary managing the competing demands of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications may never prioritise a Cabinet submission from Arts.

Needless to say this move by the Morrison Government has been labelled philistine, and it ignores recent studies showing the link between involvement in the arts and good mental health.  But to me, the argument goes beyond this.  It ignores the many thousands involved in the manufacture of artist’s materials, and their retailers.  And then there are the thousands of galleries across the country and their staff they employ, the performing arts, theatres and writers.  It’s an entire creative industry potentially being trashed by a government fixated on mining and infrastructure.  A 2017 report from the Department of Communications and the Arts stated that the “creative industries” contributed 6.4% to the nations GDP.

But what else would you expect from a third rate advertising man who got kicked out of Tourism Australia.  So we made him Prime Minister instead.

REFERENCES

ABC News Online

“American Visions”, Robert Hughes, ABC TV

“Big Sky, Big Dreams, Big Art, Made In The USA” , Waldemar Januszczak

A Real Artist Murdered By A Failed One

The failed artist is, of course, Adolf Hitler who showed his contempt for the arts establishment by holding his “Exhibition of Degenerate Art” in 1937.  This was payback time, his revenge on all those who had the temerity to reject him as an art student.

Friedl Dicker devoted her life to art and art education – even in a Nazi concentration camp she used art to offer the children “a little bit of normality.”

She was born in Vienna in 1898 and her mother died when she was four.  She was raised alone by her father who was an assistant in a stationary store and it was in here she found all the material she needed to give full reign to her imagination.  When she was in her mid-teens she studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and earned money on the side at the theatre, where she organised props, made costumes, performed on stage and wrote plays.

Dicker eventually studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and found like minded students who shared her interest in the functions of objects.  She produced marionettes for a state fair in Weimar which drew and captivated children.  She also studied textiles and the lithographic process and when her favourite painter Paul Klee arrived at the Bauhaus, she attended his lectures on the nature of art and the childlike imagination.

Friedl Dicker, Design for a recital evening at the Bauhaus

Dicker became involved in a theatre troupe along with Franz Singer with whom she had a long-standing relationship which continued even after Singer got married.  She fell pregnant to him several times, but at Singer’s insistence, she had several abortions. 

In 1923 the two of them founded the 'Werkstätten Bildender Kunst' (Workshops for visual art), which produced toys, jewellery, textiles and bookbindings, graphic designs and theatre sets.  Thus they travelled regularly between several European cities.  They later set up an architecture office and won several awards.  Their relationship ended when Singer’s son died.

Friedl Brandeis, Begonias At The Window, 1936, Tempera on paper

In 1931 Friedl Dicker opened up a new chapter in her life when she ran courses for kindergarten teachers.  The focus was on art and sensitizing adults to recognise the children’s personalities and artistic abilities, and to encourage the children to concentrate on a creative process.

Dicker became an active member of the Communist Party and when Hitler came to power in 1933, the party went underground.  Dicker’s studio was searched and when forged identity papers were found, she was jailed.  On the testimony of Singer, she was later released and then fled to Prague.  It was here where she married Pavel Brandeis in 1936 whilst working on renovating homes and developing textile designs.

Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Friedl’s friends pleaded with her to emigrate but she refused to leave her husband who by now could not get a visa.  Meanwhile the art dealer Paul Weingraf was exhibiting some of Friedl’s paintings in the Arcadia Gallery in London.

Friedl Brandeis, View Of Theresienstadt, 1944 , Pastel

In 1942 she and Pavel were transported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where she became a carer in one of the girls’ homes.  She taught them painting and drawing with the intention of publishing (after the war) her own study on art therapy for children.  Theatre became part of the lessons and the students painted stage sets and dressed up in costumes.  With her work as a carer and Pavel’s work as a carpenter, they began to decorate the children’s’ homes thus making life a little more bearable in a bleak environment.

Display at the Museum Of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 2004

In the autumn of 1944, Friedl and Pavel Brandeis were transported by rail to Auschwitz concentration camp.  Shortly before leaving, Friedl packed a suitcase full of the children’s drawings and they were hidden before being delivered to the Jewish community in Prague in August 1945.  Pavel survived Auschwitz.  Friedl didn’t.  She died on 9th October 1944, childless and just one day after arriving at Auschwitz.

Source: American PBS

Bauhaus100.com

The Highs And Lows Of The Archibald

Visiting the Archibald Prize is akin to viewing a weather map.  But if droughts are caused by an excess of ‘Highs’ and not enough ‘Lows’, some recent Archibald’s would have had me reaching for the life jackets.  This most prestigious of art awards has been courting controversy since at least 1943 with William Dobell’s winning portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith.  So incensed were 2 Sydney artists with the decision, they took the matter to the Supreme Court alleging the portrait was a caricature. 

Dobell has been described by some art historians as a timid rabbit who suddenly found the spotlight rudely thrust upon him.  Interviewed many years later, Dobell said he became so distressed over the episode that he developed severe dermatitis as well as temporarily losing the sight of one eye and the use of one leg.  He said he could never forgive those responsible.  Dobell won the case, but he shied away from portraiture for a while before making a triumphant return to the Archibald in 1948 with his winning a portrait of Margaret Ollie.  He won again in 1959.  The Smith portrait was later almost totally destroyed by fire before being sent to the UK for the “less-than-successful” restoration seen above.

Dobell died in 1970 and given the events around the Smith painting, one wonders what he would have made of Adam Cullen’s winning portrait of actor David Wenham in 2000. About all that can be said of it is that it meets the three key criteria for winning the Archibald these days; it’s big, the subject is well known and it’s topical as Wenham was starring alongside Sigrid Thornton in the ABC TV series Seachange at the time.

To me, one of the more memorable recent winners was Craig Ruddy’s 2004 portrait of actor David Gulpilil.  This image does the work no favours at all.  I saw it in the flesh and it was a stunner. 

And so to the 2019 prize currently on show at Tarrawarra and Anh Do’s entry left me even more convinced he would make a very good plasterer of feature walls.  In recent years I have found the Archibald a rather cold and alienating experience.  Perhaps it’s a sign of the times and some of the works in this award fit that description, but not all.

There’s Tsering Hannaford’s studied portrait of Adelaide philanthropist Mrs. Singh, superbly executed but perhaps too conventional?

Jude Rae’s portrait of actor Sarah Peirse performing the role of Miss Docker in Patrick White’s “A Cheery Soul” is emotive and powerful.

There’s Katherine Edney’s exquisite little “Self Portrait With Ariel”.  She was 37 weeks pregnant with her first child at the time.

Last year, Jun Chen was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Li Cunxin, the Chinese-Australian former ballet dancer who is now artistic director of Queensland Ballet.  The title ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’ is also the title of Cunxin’s autobiography that was later made into a film.  There is something ethereal about this painting, almost as if the figure is not really there.

And the winner is………..Tony Costa with his portrait of fellow artist Lindy Lee.  Viewed at close range this work is unconvincing, but step back at least 10 metres and there is a real presence about it.  The figure appears to be floating in space.

The Archibald continues at the Tarrawarra Museum of Art until 5th November.