Title

The new Streeton's old power.

Author

Young, Blamire.

Source

Herald (Melbourne) 3 January 1840 - 5 October 1990.

Details

3 April 1929, page 22.

Publication date

3 April 1929

Type

Exhibition review

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

The New Streeton’s Old Power
Glamor of Australia’s Intricate Greys.

The opening of a Streeton exhibition at the Galleries of the Fine Arts Society tomorrow brings with it memories of other fine collections that have delighted us consistently. For we have watched our foremost landscape artist pass through the phases of his development with unflagging interest.

His admirers will refer to this exhibition or to that giving their estimate of the artistic excellence that each attained but they are often unaware that it is not only the record of the artist’s pictorial pulse that they are tracing but the history of their own powers of response to emotional suggestion as well.

Just as surely as an artist moves along the curve of his technical proficiency and his imaginative power so does his public follow the ups and downs of national enthusiasm.

It may happen that the artist arrives at one of his summits of creation at the moment that his public has reached a high-water mark of artistic understanding. In that case both artist and public are fortunate and the even is long remembered as a great and happy occasion.

The Guild Hall exhibition is generally referred to as the most successful that Arthur Streeton ever held, and something of the synchronising we have just considered too place at that date.

HIS NATIVE GREYS
It was the time when the artist had returned to Australia and was experiencing afresh the glamour of Australian distances and the subtle coloring of scorched slopes. His eye was surfeited with the sap-ground greens of English elms, and hungry for the intricate greys of his native land. He reached these greys by the masterly road of broken color, marshalling them with unerring skill in the splendour of the receding planes.

And his public? Melbourne had just awakened to the possibilities of Australian landscape. Her enthusiasm was as yet undimmed, and she was eager to assimilate the matured vision of her prodigal son. Picture collecting was a new and thrilling pastime, and everything conspired to give distinction to the exhibition.

Since that happy period, time and circumstance have had their way with both artist and public. There has been since then in inevitable hardening of the emotional arteries in both cases. Skill such as Streeton’s fingers held could not possibly find complete outlet in landscape alone. Other fields must be explored, and so arose what we may call the more empirical Streeton.

Naturally still-life offered the most comprehensive opportunity for this accomplished hand, and there are certain sound judges of these things who held that in years to come a Streeton still-life of the latter period will be held in as great, if not in greater, esteem than the landscapes of the middle period.

QUALITIES UNDERMINISHED
But with Streeton it is unprofitable to talk too academically of periods. With him, as other artists, periods overlap, and often leap along intervals to reappear with their original qualities undiminished.

So in the exhibition there are canvases that reach the best of the past standards and display the buoyancy and exhilaration associated with his name. In No. 10 “Over the Valley,” there is to be found the rare sense of earth formation that gives to the scene the complete satisfaction belonging to the contemplation of a estrual law. We are overlooking from a great height a deep and narrow valley which runs diagonally across the field of view and finds its way to the plain beyond with all the inevitable appropriateness of a real water-shed.

Cloud shadows beautifully transparent pattern is with an imaginative ingenuity and mastery that I have seldom seen equalled by anybody. It is very questionable weather Streeton ever created a more perfectly satisfactory landscape than this in any of his so called periods and to anybody who does not possess a Streeton and desires to do so I confidently point to this one.

No. 29, “Clouds of Summer,” gives as the same valley again from a lower point of view and is very good but comes a little by comparison with the other version.

A TOUCH OF TEARS
There are several flower-pieces, and the best of them is Rhododendrons, which grew to such perfection a Olinda Streeton’s home. The elusive coloring of these delightful flowers challenges the artist on the side of his ability that is the most definitely decorative . There is no assertion of form in these blooms they depend for their appeal on nuances of color, tender merging of amber into pearl, pearl into rose, rose into grey and over all a vell of wistfulness with perhaps a touch of tears.

The roses are less successful, with more of the gardener in their handling than the epicure.

In some of these pictures Arthur Streeton shows unimpaired his faculty of finding the right treatment for a difficult object. Once the treatment is discovered the difficulties disappear as if by magic. No. 24, “Annear’s Bridge,” is a good example of this.

At all times Melbourne proves itself difficult for the artist, but the solution of this particular problem is remarkable. It will be noted how the late afternoon sunlight is used to illumine the central feature and how the long shadows neutralise all inconvenient passages that would have been impossible to render when the sun was higher.

In this way we pass without a jolt from the staccato treatment of the bridge itself over a pleasantly ? middle distance to the ? and illumined greys of Mt. Macedon on the far horizon.

I must find space for one more selection – No. 19 “Thunderclouds.” This landscape has a rainbow. It hangs in vibrant color, across the base of the cloud and forms the happiest attempt possible to catch the uncatchable.

As a rule people dislike rainbows in pictures but this is different.

[The Herald (Melbourne). 3 April 1929, p.22.]

 

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Last Updated

14 Oct 2020