To the Royal Academy for their latest show, Australia. What a joy it is – filled both with old friends and new acquaintances. And a real credit to its curators ‒ Ron Radford and Anne Gray from the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and Kathleen Soriano of the RA in London.
The last major exhibition of Australian art in Britain took
place at the Tate Gallery in 1962 ‒
over half a century ago. Although, as the catalogue shows, it had plenty of fine
paintings, it was treated in a patronising fashion by the London art
establishment, only “rather better than the more woeful prophets might have
predicted,” according to The Times.
That kind of condescension has a long track-record. The
critic RAM Stevenson (Robert Louis’s cousin) recalled the first substantial
showing of Australian work in London in 1886, which included four paintings by
Tom Roberts (including “Coming South”), as “still English, or, to speak more
correctly, showed us fashions of painting that were founded upon the English
trade picture… mechanical drawings and geological, botanical or topographical
diagrams.”
By 1898, on the occasion of the second major Australian exhibition
(at the Grafton Gallery), Stevenson was more enthusiastic: “The cleverest, the
most brilliant, the highest toned work in the show is Mr Streeton’s square
canvas, ‘Early Summer’.”*
The current exhibition, focused on landscape, is filled with
major works, many of which have travelled around the world for the first time.
Let’s see whether it unleashes a wave of patronising comment reminiscent of
1886.
*Was this painting “Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom”, now in the
collection of the Art Gallery of Australia in Adelaide?
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