A book review

For a recent issue of the Professional Historians Australia publication Pharos I reviewed Reading the Rooms, an intriguing book about the pictures collection in the State Library of NSW. If you find yourself wondering why a state library has a dedicated gallery for paintings, and a collection of over 168,000 prints, drawings and watercolours, you’re not alone. The Library chooses to emphasise stories rather than aesthetic qualities in its collection of images, and this interesting challenge made for a satisfying review.

Choosing a collection of images for their narrative content and meaning (how significant they are to the history of Sydney, for example,) rather than how well they’ve been executed or who the artist is or was, reminds me of the pictures on my own walls. I don’t have a lot of wall space, but it is filled with photographs by my brother, paintings and prints—both original and in copies—by family or artists we like. Like the State Library New South Wales (SLNSW) I have an organising principle, a vision. It interests me the type of aesthetic world we construct inside our homes. How influenced is it by ideas from outside? Which trends do we follow? In my case a fairly random aesthetic, generously called eclectic, reigns resulting from a combination of financial and spatial considerations.

Shortly after completing my book review I had the opportunity to visit the SLNSW and read the rooms for myself. The walls are packed. I love a salon hang and it’s a making a comeback in these (hopefully) post-minimalist days, if the the abc_arts video popping up on my feed is any indication. The walls are also bright. One orange, one blue and one purple. Thematically this is important to the history represented, highlighting geographic or temporal relationships; for example the first room (purple) shows the development of Sydney from the 1790s.

In room 3 (orange) I found a work memorable and intriguing. I wanted it for my own walls. Elizabeth Riddell with black cat (1946) is low down on the wall, (perhaps the curators thought the black cat would appeal to younger visitors) and surrounded by portraits of artists, writers and poets: a lively portrait of filmmaker Margaret Fink by Judy Cassab (1987), a gaunt portrait of writer Douglas Stewart by Margaret Coen (1941), and a mopey portrait of Randolph Hughes Esq by Edward H Wolfe (1916). All are connected in some way by the arts and, given the times in which they lived, war. (In the case of Randolf Hughes it was Nazism, yikes.)

Poet and cat

Elizabeth Riddell was a New Zealand-born journalist and poet. In the painting she embraces a black cat while leaning against a balcony post. She looks past the viewer but the cat’s big green eyes are squarely on us. Riddell’s tightly pinned hair, striped top, and light blue wide-leg trousers are mid-century, androginous and beachy, with the water in the background setting this portrait firmly in a Sydney scene. The location is further established, for me, by Riddell’s tanned skin which glows in the afternoon light. These elements strongly suggest ‘Sydney’ to me, something about being above the water but close to it.

Riddell had only recently returned to Australia after World War II and this portrait is a marker of that time of readjustment. In 1946 when Collings painted Riddell’s portrait, she was 36 and might have been recalling the triumph of opening and running the Daily Mirror's New York bureau during the war. As an older woman she said in an interview ‘it was a very good war for some people’. When you were not horrified, if you weren’t being killed, you could dance all night. And there were men everywhere.

While writing and publishing poetry, she made a career as a journalist (‘you don’t live on poetry’) becoming the Australian newspaper’s first Walkley winner. She and her husband rented this flat in Parsley Bay, Vaucluse, with her cat Celestina.

Her first book of poems, The Untrammelled was published in 1940. A critic remarked in 1948 that her work has:

a rich and colorful imagery and the sparkle of epigram...It is with some surprise that one realises, among the tropic landscapes or in the sunlight of wit, that almost all the poems are concerned, one way or another, with death.

They were referring, among others, to the poem ‘Lifesaver’ about a youth drowning on an Australian beach, returned to shore by lifesavers. I wonder if she witnessed the scene from her balcony?

While she doesn’t look at the viewer who stands where the artist stood, Elizabeth and Dahl were friends and professional colleagues. The Library’s website also mentions Dahl’s husband was a friend too, conjuring an image of the two couples together on a balcony in Parsley Bay enjoying the afternoon sun with the ocean breeze at their back. Though these types of details are not depicted, I think Riddell’s relaxed lean on the balcony post tells us she knew the painter and could let her mind wander while Collings painted.

The image has a photographic quality, not least because the second subject, Celestina, probably would not have suffered ‘sitting’ for very long. She used to sit on the rocks beneath the house at the water's edge, according to the Library.

Industrial artist

Dahl Collings was born Dulcie May Wilmott, in 1909. Dahl was a term of affection used by her husband and it stuck. Dahl and Geoffrey worked collaboratively and they were influenced by European modernism which they witnessed first hand, particularly the work of two influential Hungarian-born multi-disciplinary artists: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes.

Dahl became a pioneer in introducing modern design principles to Sydney’s industry. She designed the costumes for the films the Overlanders (1946) and Eureka Stockade (1949).

In a review of Collings’s first exhibition in Sydney in June 1939 she and her husband are described by a generous critic as industrial artists. Industrial art referred to the materials and techniques used, in this case it was the camera lens, oils, etcher’s plate, pencils, knitting needles, cloth, stencils, airbrush, scraper. Today this practice is simply called design, but I think the term industrial art bridges the divide between art, craft, and design, and recognises that the material world created by human hands is also the product of someone’s imagination.

The critic referred to materials and techniques as the ‘agencies used by the artists to exploit their ideas’. It’s not just a brush or a pencil, in the modern spirit it is an extension of the hand. I recall Le Corbusier said a house was a machine for living in. (I like to think I live inside a gallery or a library.)

What I love about the newspaper database Trove, and the project of looking at past criticism, is the sentence-length gems you find reflecting Australian identity back across time. In the same review (pasted below) the critic captures the cringe we still experience about our art and identity:

The work is essentially calm, never wasteful of means. Above all, it is Australian in a better sense than that which suggests that Australia is mainly sheep, gum trees, or surfers.

We all yearn to be recognised for more than the stereotypes or well-known characteristics about us, and maybe none more so than Australian creators. To be Australian in a better sense than the actions of our governments, for example. To be recognised for ideas and subjects beyond a pale and stale national mythology. It’s a different Australian dream.

I do wish there were images from this exhibition. Images of Dahl’s work are difficult to find which makes celebrating her pioneering efforts difficult.

Paintings from the collection, on display at the State Library of NSW, is well worth a visit and if you have the time and muscles to read Reading the Rooms (it’s a heavy one), you’ll be rewarded with many interconnecting stories about some truly interesting Australians in Sydney.

This is a post from Slow Looking, a newsletter about art and history. Subscribe at https://nikitavanderbyl.substack.com/