This review by Wallace Thornton in the SMH 5 October 1966, includes a reference to the contemporary Art Society 28th annual exhibition. This exhibition contained works of a group of hard edged painters included my work Orbital composed of four silkscreen sheets pasted onto board approximately 1.2 x 2 m in size. The original silkscreen work no longer exists but a replica was painted onto canvas in Paris in 1967.
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review by Wallace Thornton CAS exhibition 1966
by Wallace Thornton
Look back at yesterday's innovators
exhibition of works by Balson, Crowley, Fizelle and Hinder at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is historical in character.
These four artists had the distinction of being the avant-garde pace-setters of the thirties — the artists who sought their expression in directions new to Australia.
Apart from Roy De Mestre, Australian painters up to that time had been generally involved in a conventional academism or impressionism, but three of these four artists (Balson travelled later) brought back from abroad their variations of cubism and, with Grace Crowley, abstraction.
Fizelle studied in Paris under Andre Lhote and if the cubism he gained was kept a reticent vehicle of expression it nevertheless brought a clarification of forms and a use of restrained, subtle colour harmonies that acted like fresh, cold water on the usual stuffy, ponderous art familiar here in the early thirties.
Frank Hinder brought back from America an
abstracted scheme of
cubism more involved and highly coloured in the main than Fizelle's. Hinder's art, despite the accentuated colour, has a coldness of character and, principally because of the colour, lacks a positive coherence of theme and statement.
It is Ralson and Crowley who impress most as painters. Grace Crowley ordered shapes and colours into telling abstracted ensembles until, in her paintings of the fifties, "Painting (1951)" and "Abstract 1952)," she achieved most impressive realisations of her abstracted concept.
Ralph Balson was the most painterly of the quartet. He experimented more than the others and in his later years reacted to the painting discoveries of artists like Pollock, but through it all he preserved a characteristic architectural order that remained his own.' He was a man of spirit and made an important contribution to Australian painting.
If these four artists had few followers and were denied influence by the advent of abstract expressionism in this country, they were courageous innovators and today, with the coming of the hard-edged style, their contributions to painting here have a new significance.
This exhibition will be opened by Mrs. H. V. Evatt
at 4.30 p.m., today.
Like with like
THE committee's decision to hang like with like takes some of the impact from an otherwise satisfactory 28th annual exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society at Farmers' Blaxland Galleries.
If the presentation inhibits excitement, there are nevertheless many canvases with vigour, striking
chroma or carefully and
rewardingly modulated
textural composition.
The hard-edged painters have spread themselves in a bold frontal display along one wall and here stripes or patterns of colour glow in off-beat association or, as with Paramor, Peart, Wicks and Jordon, resolve deep-hued harmonies. David Aspden and Sydney Ball confidently state the best cases for stimulatingly striped colour.
Growing colour is used in shrieking discomfort by Ostoja-Kotkowski and G. Christmann, but Grey-Smith and R. Jackson use colour in a more complex, painterly manner to explore the spacial values in the figurative themes.
Judy Cassab appears much more confident of abstraction in her sombre "Diptych 2." Salkauskas sweeps his familiar gestures with large-handed confidence, but in the modulated school Elwyn Lynn is outstanding in “Atlatis.”
The exhibition will be opened by Mr. B. Capela at 1.15 p.m. today when the R. H. Tafff’s $1,000 prize will be announced.
Published in the Sydney Morning Herald 5 October 1966
