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Guest Curator: Christopher Heathcote
Editor: Rhonda Noble, La Trobe University
Photographs: Lindsay Howe, La Trobe University
Digital Compilation: Jason Hellwege, Mark Kosten
(C)1993 The Dunmoochin Foundation
Clif's long association with La Trobe University makes it appropriate that the collection is now housed there on permanent loan.
An exhibition of a personal collection is rare. An exhibition of the idiosyncratic collection of an artist such as Clifton Pugh is an event of some significance.
The Dunmoochin Foundation wishes to thank La Trobe University for its stewardship and care of the collection. We are particularly grateful to Rhonda Noble for her work in the curating and conservation of the Clifton Pugh bequest.
Rick Amor
for the Trustees of The Dunmoochin Foundation
October 1993
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Generally people know of the Dunmoochin commune but have not had the opportunity to view a wide range of art produced there and to learn of the major role that Dunmoochin played in Australian contemporary art history.
Christopher Heathcote was selected as the guest curator of this exhibition because of his intense interest in, and knowledge of, Australian art and, in particular, the art and social development of artists in Melbourne, as analysed in his doctoral thesis. I commend Christopher's insightful essay to you.
Rhonda Noble
Curator of Art Works
La Trobe University
October 1993
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Mention the term 'collection', and the art historian's mind usually turns to the acquisitions policies of public museums, or the interests of major patrons. What one tends to overlook, however, is the less prestigious collection of the individual artist. All artists have private collections. Some possess only a few contemporary objects, others have extensive collections that rival the historical holdings of public galleries. Obviously, few artists' collections are assembled as a conscious unity, nor do they reflect firm collecting policies. Unlike the professional curator, artists rarely wish to pursue 'good' historical pieces, or to fill supposed gaps in their coverage. Instead, they will acquire objects for much more 'idiosyncratic' and 'unprofessional' reasons: because they believe a work to demonstrate a level of imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, expressiveness, or similar quality. In other words, rather than constructing a comprehensive survey, they acquire works of art of individual interest.
The collection of Clifton Pugh is a case in point. From the standpoint of the curator, or the art historian used to dealing with the collections of major patrons or public galleries, it initially seems a rhymeless miscellany. The size of the collection - it runs to several hundred works - means that an odd mixture is probably to be expected. Yet a tonalist piece by Jorgensen shares wall space with a brushy expression by Molvig, a naive landscape by Byrne and a lewd nude by Pugh himself. There is no immediate symmetry to this juxtaposition, no clear pattern at work. However, many stories start to unfold if we consider the artist's perspective.
What most strikes me about the Clifton Pugh collection is the way it reflects the painter's personality and life. Clearly, we can trace the evolution of Pugh's oeuvre in this collection. There are stories of his inventiveness and innovation, of encounters with nature and the landscape from First Hut at Dunmoochin to Glory be to God for Dappled Things. There are also tales of his ambition and opportunism, of dull portraits and pictorial potboilers (as John Olsen once remarked, Pugh "produced some of the best and worst paintings in Australian art history"). Then there are his less known but persistent interests in heroism, self-sacrifice and political commitment, issues culminating in The Penitents, a Blake Prize entry, and the Assassination series. We even find here narratives of his romantic involvements, as in Marlene and Judith Nude, his libidinal entanglements, Untitled Nude, and his encounter with personal mortality, Hospital Suite.
For an art historian, some of the most pronounced threads weaving through these pictures involve Pugh's associations with other artists. The collection includes works by his co-exhibitors from the 1950's (Donald Laycock, John Howley, Charles Blackman, John Brack), fellow members of the Rudy Komon Gallery stable (Fred Williams, Leonard French, Jon Molvig), and residents of Dunmoochin (Rick Amor, John Olsen). Each of their pictures tells not only its own story, but testifies to Pugh's friendships, many pieces having been swapped after drawing sessions or exhibitions.
Such paintings can therefore be read as markers indicating Pugh's place in the social history of art in postwar Melbourne. For example, the small Eltham landscape by Justus Jorgensen - the founder of the Monsalvat colony - was painted when Pugh was employed by the artist as a gardener. The self-portrait by Blackman was executed when he and Pugh were fellow council members of the Contemporary Art Society. The battered geometric abstract by Laycock comes from the period when Pugh, Laycock, Howley and Lawrence Daws - the jazzy young turks of 1950s contemporary art - first broke on to the local gallery scene. The schoolground watercolour by Brack is a study for a piece exhibited in the Antipodeans exhibition of August 1959, when Pugh, Brack, Blackman, Arthur and David Boyd, John Perceval, Bob Dickerson and Bernard Smith made a stand against abstract art. The figure by Williams was executed during a life drawing session with Pugh, and the gouache by Olsen was executed in the paddocks near Pugh's home at a time when the artist stayed at Dunmoochin.
For the critic, the central plot that seems to unravel through these works involves the Australian landscape. Pugh was first and foremost a landscapist, and the strengths of his collection lie primarily in its selection of local landscape painting since 1940. Landscape and Modernism were inseparable for Pugh, indeed, his commitment to the contemporary movement dates from an encounter with such images. The transforming moment came in the late 1940's, a period when he was learning to paint in a detached tonalist style under William Dargie at Melbourne's National Gallery Painting School. One afternoon, as the student was doing the rounds of the commercial galleries, he entered the Velazquez Gallery in Bourke Street:
I walked in as a tonal Dargie student, by accident, and I saw those Nolan landscapes, the first Ned Kelly show. I stayed there until I was turfed out. I just sat there and looked at them. It was beyond my comprehension, I'd never seen anything like it before, beyond what I was learning, not with anything to do with what l'd seen or experienced or had any visual relationship, except it was telling me about my landscape, my landscape, mine. [1]
What Pugh discerned in Nolan's Kelly series was not a modish, updated means of depiction, or a new "Nationalist" cliche; as he explained,
I wasn't worried about Ned Kelly or those shapes, but the shapes across it somehow or other tell you more about the landscape, a two-dimensional object against a third dimensional long distance, something to do with the Australian light, something to do with Australia. [2]
The Kelly series represented a new way of conceptualising, of understanding the land in a fuller sense. Nolan's paintings suggested a way to articulate the relationship of figure to environment in the Australian context - as two dimensional entities in a three dimensional realm.
Pugh stayed only a few months at the gallery school after this change. The prescribed idiom seemed too false and untrue, and he began to search for a different way of painting. The key to understanding Pugh's landscapes, and also the views by other artists in this exhibition, lies in his subsequent approach to nature. He did not value images of landscape as merely seen by the eye, instead it had to be the focus for a set of beliefs. When we delve into the landscape imagery manifested in the Pugh collection - including Sam Byrne, Douglas Wright, Daryl Hill, John Olsen, Eric Stewart, Frank Hodgkinson - we encounter not just different aspects of the Australian landscape, from thick bush to scrubby mulga country to the parched outback, but ways of experiencing the landscape and the relationship of mankind to it.
These leanings are as much the material for historical inquiry, as the pictures Pugh composed. I once asked him whether he had been influenced by the English NeoRomantics painters and New Apocalypt poets, adding that I perceived a debt to the ideas of now neglected figures like Craxton, Sutherland, Nash, McBride, Dylan Thomas, possibly even Bacon in many of his works. The painter took a sharp breath, and fixed me with an inquisitive stare: "Which old mate have you been talking to?", he muttered, then begrudgingly admitted an early admiration for their idiom. As in such artists' works, Pugh's landscape is not an inert backdrop for human affairs, let alone a vehicle for picturesque decoration. On the contrary, it is always a moving, creeping thing, and we enter into a disquieting elemental vocabulary of stone, thorn, sapling, bone and seed. Nature is strangely animated; it is, as he once wrote, "raw and untamed, and yet infinitely beautiful: nature; a personality, a force, a lover, a killer". [3]
Pugh painted in and from the Australian landscape from the mid-1940s until his death. Yet he did not consider plein-airism to constitute the apogee of a landscapist's art. He edited and manipulated material executed in the field, using it as a source for ambitious studio compositions. Pugh then modified it into his distinctive semiexpressionist pictorial vocabulary which featured earth colours, jagged shadows, biomorphic shapes, spikey elongated figures and an ovoid compositional format. A typical painting by Pugh reduced modelling to a minimum, transforming its subject (animal, insect, human figure) into a flattened emblem. As to meanings of his oeuvre, there were moments of Iyricism and unbridled wonder, as we find in the frieze-like Glory be to God for Dappled Things, and the image of beauty sprouting out of primal clay in Wattle and Red Rocks. But Pugh's art often told a story of the malevolent forces active behind a harsh Australian bush, underpinned with suggestions of sex and violence. He repeatedly painted jagged animal carcasses and harshly sensual native creatures situated in an arid grey-brown landscape. From the predatory Spider and Beetle of 1959 to the more elegiac Emus on the Ridge of 1990, the artist's paintings outline the survival of the fittest, inflecting it with a sense of menace.
Unlike most artists, Clifton Pugh's affections for nature were not limited to the easel. They resulted in his moving to and helping reshape the Cottles Bridge area, north of Hurstbridge. In 1951 he built a mud-brick hut on former farmland and started Dunmoochin. While it was loosely based on the Monsalvat artists' colony at Eltham, Dunmoochin was to initiate a new direction in Australian life, fostering values that would one day transform the nation. Montsalvat had been ruled by Justus Jorgensen in an absolutist manner, but Pugh's Dunmoochin was a co-operative based on friendship and a respect for others' views. Where the title "Monsalvat" referred to a Burgundian village, "Dunmoochin" was a pun in the best Australian strine (the word indicated that the artists had "done with moochin around"). If the Monsalvat ideal was mediaeval, Dunmoochin looked to the relaxed mateship of the Heidelberg School artists' camps for its purpose. Likewise if Montsalvat represented a transplanted European ideal, the Dunmoochin lifestyle articulated a set of distinctly Australian nonurban values which emphasised the intrinsic worth of the natural environment in which the community lived. Indeed, where the residents of Montsalvat tore up wattle, hakea and gum, replacing them with pines and exotic plants, the Dunmoochinites allowed the bush to regenerate, grubbing out imported weeds and campaigning for the elimination of feral pests. (The roots of the Australian conservation movement weave firmly through the loose, dry soils of Dunmoochin.)
These many threads converge, I suspect, on the landscape images Clifton Pugh valued and collected. Notably, he had no patience for vain "Nationalist" cliche. None of the landscapes in this exhibition are subordinated to empty ideology or idle propaganda. Nor do we find here the dull mechanical compositions or populist stereotypes that were manufactured by the exhibition-load by the most respected, but imaginatively deficient, landscapists of the time (Drysdale and Whiteley, for instance). Instead, what Pugh seems to have sought out are epiphanies, moments charged with meaning. This vividness of feeling is obdurately there in Henri Bastin's glimpse of Australia Felix with the usually secretive plains revealing all their fecund splendour, in Douglas Roberts's hallucinatory and Apocalyptic view of the droughtstricken land mutating into beings writhing in their death throes, in the Olsen, the Byrne and the other works Pugh gathered around him. What they bring to our attention is the complexity of the Australian environment, and, especially, the experience of landscape perceived as nature.
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