5 Interesting Paintings at the National Gallery of Australia

Born in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five sons, Jackson Pollock’s childhood was disrupted by the family’s constant moving in search of work. His youth was spent in search of an artistic vocation that he found increasingly elusive and frustrating. Plagued by insecurities, his moods swung between wild, alcohol-fueled, attention-seeking and shy, inarticulate, desperate. His first solo show was in 1943. His marriage to the artist Lee Krasner in 1945, and their move to a house in the countryside, prompted a new type of painting—his so-called “drip paintings.” These paintings made Pollock’s name, and the commercial value of his paintings rose.

However, as the first drip paintings were shown at the Betty Parsons Gallery, postwar euphoria was replaced by the emerging specter of the Cold War. With this new mood came a resistance to what was perceived as European-inflected Modernism, and voices in Congress claimed there was a link between abstraction and communism. Pollock’s technique was ridiculed by Time magazine, which named him “Jack the Dripper.” His desire for a greater financial return on his work led him to change dealers, and in 1952 he moved to the nearby Sidney Janis Gallery. The major new work on exhibition was Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952. This marked a new intensity in Pollock’s painting with its range of marks, drips, pours, and splodges of paint in enamel, aluminum paint, and glass. The colors also broke free from Pollock’s previously restrained palette. This is a painting that is celebratory in its excess. (Roger Wilson)

Australian landscape painting surged in the 1850s, as the gold rush attracted European artists to Australia. Austrian-born painter Eugène von Guérard arrived in Australia in 1852, shortly after the death of British-born John Glover, widely considered the father of Australian landscape painting. Like Glover, von Guérard had been greatly impressed by the works of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, but he had become a devotee of high German Romanticism, exemplified by Caspar David Friedrich. By 1863, von Guérard had become the foremost landscape painter in the colonies.

Typically Romantic, he depicts the mountain view as an untouched wilderness, a theme commonly favored by painters wishing to rebel against 19th-century urbanization. A cluster of figures in the foreground appears small and insignificant against the awesome backdrop, while careful contrasts of light and shade emphasize the sublime drama of nature. They also hint at von Guérard’s earlier association with a group of German artists called the Nazarenes, keen proponents of medieval draftsmanship who believed that nature could bring man closer to God. From 1870, von Guérard spent 11 years teaching at the School of Painting in the National Gallery of Victoria before migrating to England. Von Guérard’s art and writings have a special historical significance today, documenting the way in which gold mining and urbanization transformed the Australian landscape. (Susan Flockhart)

Arthur Boyd was one of Australia’s best-loved artists but hated to be described as such, preferring instead “painter” or “tradesman.” Born in Murrumbeena, Victoria, Boyd grew up in an artistic family. However, his parents’ marriage was troubled, and his father faced financial ruin after his studio burned down. Boyd lived and traveled with his grandfather, the artist Arthur Merric Boyd, who nurtured his grandson’s talent. Confronted by brutality and racism in World War II, Boyd produced a series of Expressionist works featuring maimed soldiers and the dispossessed.

Back in his homeland, Boyd was distressed to discover how badly Aboriginal peoples were treated; he highlighted their experiences in several paintings known as the Bride series. In the late 1950s, Boyd moved to London, England, where he created his celebrated Nebuchadnezzar series as a response to the Vietnam War. In the last 25 years of his life, Boyd and his wife divided their time between Italy, England, and Australia.

In the early 1970s, Boyd created a series of paintings featuring figures languishing in the Australian landscape. Paintings in the Studio: “Figure Supporting Back Legs” and “Interior with Black Rabbit” shows a naked artist being held up by his back legs, clutching paintbrushes in one hand and a pile of gold in the other. The artist later explained, “You really don’t want to hang on to possessions. You want to hang on to concepts. Concepts involve the future whereas possessions don’t.” Boyd donated more than three thousand of his paintings, drawings, and other work to the National Gallery of Australia. (Aruna Vasudevan)

Born in Scotland, Ian Fairweather began to draw in earnest while he was a prisoner of war in World War I. During that time he also taught himself Chinese and became interested in East Asian life. In the 1930s he began working with Australian artists, eventually settling in the country after years of traveling around China, Bali, and other countries in Asia. He spent many years living as a recluse on Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. His interest in calligraphy and the Chinese written language informed his art, and he moved from producing tonal figures to a more linear style and restrained use of color. In the 1950s, Fairweather began to produce larger works, and he moved from using thick gouache on poor materials to synthetic polymer paint, often mixed with gouache.

At the end of the 1950s Fairweather sent 36 abstract paintings to the Macquarie Gallery, which were very well received. These pieces led to Monastery, which won the John McCaughey Prize; and Epiphany, which Fairweather often said was his best work, painted the following year. Many consider Monastery, which was bought by the National Gallery of Australia, to be a masterpiece. It shows Cubist influences and portrays Fairweather’s interest in calligraphy. At the time, the Australian artist James Gleeson said that Monastery was “an extraordinary, fascinating hybrid from the pictorial traditions of Europe and the calligraphy of China.” Monastery helped cement Fairweather’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest artists. (Aruna Vasudevan)

As well as being a curator and deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for 16 years, Australian Abstract Expressionist Tony Tuckson was a prolific artist, producing more than 400 canvases and more than 10,000 drawings. Despite this, he only held his first exhibition in 1970, just three years before his death.

Over the course of his artistic career, Tuckson became increasingly interested in, and influenced by, Abstract Expressionism. White over Red on Blue is one of the artist’s later paintings, and this large canvas seems a roughly produced work. Tuckson applies layers of synthetic polymer paint on composition board, building up layer upon layer of blue and reddish-brown pigment (reminiscent of the Australian earth) before slapping broad strokes of white paint across and down his canvas. The dripping of the white paint down the canvas is in keeping with Abstract Expressionistic style, but overall Tuckson’s work is more controlled and contained in this painting than in some earlier works. The viewer is confronted with the rough texture of the paint in White over Red on Blue, the immediate contrast between dark and light on the canvas, and also the sheer impressive size of the painting.

Tuckson helped to bring Aboriginal and Melanesian art into major art collections in Australia. He also collected grave posts of Aboriginal peoples, which were often painted in clay and ocher. Some claim that White over Red on Blue is reminiscent of these posts and draws on Aboriginal culture. (Aruna Vasudevan)