“An afterimage … is an optical illusion that refers to an image continuing to appear in one’s vision after the exposure to the original image has ceased.”1
I don’t usually mix politics and art on this website but today, before the general election this Saturday in Australia, I ask this question: what kind of country do we want in the future? One that cares about human beings of all ages, races, sexualities, socio-economic positions and health – or one that has no vision for the future and which is governed by market greed.
As an immigrant I am forever grateful that I can call Australia home. I arrived in 1986 and got to stay as a permanent resident because of a gay de facto relationship. I was one of the lucky few. But today, dear friends, I feel that something has gone terribly wrong with this country. Looking back nearly 30 years later I wonder what has happened to that progressive country that was an unpolished diamond, a bit rough around the edges but generous and welcoming when I arrived all those years ago. Things seem to have gone backwards, terribly backwards over the last 30 years. It’s almost as though the country of hope and fun that I arrived in is just an afterimage located in my memory, a vision that continues to flicker in the recesses of the mind but is no longer present in actuality.
Today, as with many countries in the Western world which are edging towards the right through a “conservative movement” with clearly defined tenets and agenda, we live in a country governed by the politics of fear. This politics of fear – grounded in rampant capitalism where making a buck takes precedence over the lives of people: its business – and linked to the Christian fundamentalist right and the “re-engagement between church and state” – is, as David Kindon notes, “moving Australia away from the notion of a secular democracy.”2
Australia is now a less generous place than it was 30 years ago, ruled by god-given, government-aligned order. Bugger the pensioners, cut the arts program funding, get rid of public health care, call for plebiscite on gay marriage where the bigots can come out of the woodwork and other people decide whether you are deemed “equal” to them, imprison vulnerable people in state run concentration camps where the government has the right to hurt other people… and the list goes on and on: Border Force as a quasi paramilitary force for our protection, more people in jail than at any time in our history (due to the privatisation of the jails = money, profit), and “new anti-protest laws [In New South Wales which] are the latest example of an alarming and unmistakeable trend. Governments across Australia are eroding some of the vital foundations of our democracy, from protest rights to press freedom, to entrench their own power and that of vested business interests.”3
Further, there is the “privatisation of government assets and services, attacks on public broadcasting services, deregulation of the private sector, and widespread cuts in the public sector.” (Kindon) As ever, the rich get richer, the miners get wealthier, and the poor get screwed. More entitlements were delivered to the wealthy and the corporate sector despite having seen the “end of the age of entitlement” announced by the Treasurer. Those very vested business interests.
This situation is not akin to the concept of “permanent temporariness” used to describe the plight of the Palestine State but is akin to that of a “permanent blindness” of a nation. Middle Australia will not hear what they don’t want to hear, will not see what they don’y want to see. Today, nationalism has become framed in terms of external (and internal) threats. Xenophobia in the recent Brexit poll in the UK is mirrored by simmering racism in this sun blessed country. Otherness, difference, liberal views, alternative thinking and, heaven forbid, being an open and responsible member of the human race (on human rights, on global warming, on not being in wars we have no business being in) are all seen as threatening to the middle-brow status quo. Steady as she goes for “Team Australia” and if you’re not with us, you’re against us.
Yes, let’s stick with this mob for a little while longer…
WAKE UP AUSTRALIA BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Anon. “Afterimage,” on the Wikipedia website [Online] Cited 21/09/2011
2/ David Kindon. “The Political Theology of Conservative Postmodern Democracies: Fascism by Stealth,” on the A Fairer Society website [Online] Cited 29/06/2016. No longer available online
Persons Of Interest – Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) surveillance 1949-1980 Author Frank Hardy in the doorway of the Building Workers Industrial Union, 535 George St, Sydney, August 1955 NAA A9626, 212
Lifejacket and lifebuoy from the MV Tampa 2001 Wallenius Wilhelmsen MV Tampa collection National Museum of Australia
“There was one man from Nauru who sent me a letter that I should have let him die in the Ind … the Indian Ocean, instead of picking him up. Because, the conditions on Nauru were terrible. And that is a terrible thing to tell people, that you should have just let them drown.”
J.W.C. Adam Asylum seekers protesting against detention at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre on 22 April 2011 2011 CC BY-SA 2.5
“And when we call these places of horror in the Pacific ‘concentration camps’, that is an appropriate term, because that is what they are.
And when we accuse the Australian government of selectively torturing brown-skinned people in the way the Nazis chose the Jews and other groups to torture and ultimately eliminate, that is an appropriate thing to do, because we all know, in our heart of hearts, that if these people fleeing oppression were white, English-speaking Christians (white Zimbabweans, say) then their treatment would be completely different.”
Ben Quilty (Australian, b. 1973) Trooper M, after Afghanistan 2012 Oil on linen Collection of the artist
Keast Burke (New Zealand, Australia, 1896-1974) Husbandry 1 c. 1940 Gelatin silver photograph, vintage 30.5 x 35.5cm image/sheet Gift of Iris Burke 1989
If your subject is essentially unrecognisable – a defining characteristic of many of Weston’s photographs – devoid of sentimentality, featuring an explosion of geometry as a form of Western expressionism, able to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm through an absence of human presence and apparent narrative – then your previsualisation must be spot on otherwise you loose clear focus as to just what it is you are trying to communicate. It’s all very well being obsessed with capturing the intricacies and rhythms of form, light and shadow, visual poetry in photography, but if that obsession has no ‘feeling’ outcome then you are doomed to failure.
Imagine (if you can) that master of documentary realism Eugène Atget placing his camera in just the wrong position for one of his photographs. The tripod just a little too low, the position a metre to the left of where it should have been. The resulting image would not feel like an Atget, the angles would not feel right, the mixture of objective and subjective would not be present, the magic of his photographs – recognisably his photographs – would be missing. What Atget does so convincingly is to combine the aesthetic with the documentary or representational. As G.H. Saxon Mills observes in his essay ‘Modern photography’ ‘”modern” photography means photography whose aim is partly or wholly aesthetic, as opposed to photography which is merely documentary or representational.’ Atget proves that both were possible within the same frame.
This is not the case with the photographs by Brett Weston in this posting. Although I have commented elsewhere on this website that, “Brett Weston’s pictures are ageing well – the decorative aesthetic seems to have more currency today than previously when the values of his father were predominant,” and admired the reductive minimalism of his photographs … this is not the case with these ‘significant details’. In this instance they are just representation, poor relations to the photographs of Minor White and Aaron Siskind.
I think that the best of his work is very fine – a sort of celebration of all that had gone before with a layer of super-fineness added. However he made many images that were a bit like a preacher rather than an artist. In some of his portfolios the choice of images is just plain weird, catering to the market rather than taking the chance to make a powerful statement. And photography aficionados remain unconvinced by his work, shying away from collecting it. Perhaps they know, or feel a lack of something, some spirit or other, or a seeming unevenness in the quality of his artistic production.
Perhaps it is his printing, which is a bit “Kodak meets EW” in the darkroom (even as his father entrusted him with printing some of his negatives). Weston achieved his good results because he was a careful craftsman, not an experimenter. Someone, I forget who, said that you never looked at his work when desperate for sustenance – and I think a lot of “connoisseurs” think that – and in a Brett Weston you can too often argue yourself out of the celebration. There is a certain dourness that is hard to overcome. I challenge you, now, to say one meaningful thing about any of the images presented here. They take you nowhere. They are either too tightly cropped (that lack of true previsualisation / placing the camera in the wrong position / lack of context) or rely on pattern and representation, and only that, to do the heavy lifting.
My feeling about his work is that he saw and felt many great things that he used in his work – but at the final hurdle, his implementation was always handled a little directly, or not a well as might have been… or is sometimes absent. Perhaps it’s just his viewpoint which seems to be too limited in a psychological sense. If Atget had photographed the city without those magnificent tripod positions and understanding of space, then they would have been dead. That’s how BW’s work sometimes feels. Instead of the space feeling larger than the camera can contain, on occasions his photographs feel enclosed and stilted.
Weston said, “There are a million choices for shot. At its simplest, photography is very complex. So I try to keep it simple and focus on things I can master.”
Sometimes, keeping things simple does not result in preternatural outcomes.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the Pasadena Museum of California Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“My father was driven and so am I. You’re ruthless. You brush off your friends and women. He was much kinder than me. I don’t verbalize well and I don’t socialize much. Too time consuming. And I’m not a good salesman of my work. I love people, but they can be a drain. Some are stimulating; some are leeches. So I seek people on my own terms. Most artists are loners. I guess they have to be.”
Brett Weston
“Weston isn’t really a nature photographer… He was obsessed with capturing the intricacies and rhythms of form, light and shadow. Weston is as fascinated by close-ups of the exfoliating bark of a bristlecone pine or the spikes of a Joshua Tree as he is with the visual poetry of peeling paint on the side-panel of a rusted out truck.”
Jeffrey St. Clair. “A Natural Eye,” on the Counter Punch website, May 25, 2012 [Online] Cited 01/10/2021
Although Brett Weston (1911-1993) is best known for his striking scenic photographs, the majority of his work ranges from middle-distance scenes to close-up abstractions. These concentrated images share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s panoramas while emphasising his affinity for “significant details” and the unprecedented attention to form, texture, shadow, and light that he explored throughout his nearly-seventy-year career.
Weston took up photography at the age of fourteen. Although he received basic technical instruction from his father, renowned photographer Edward Weston, Brett’s early efforts owed much to his intuition and innate eye. His elemental talent coupled with an unflagging commitment to his photographic vision – often at the expense of personal relationships and fiscal well-being – carried him from early critical acclaim, through difficult periods, to eventual financial success within his own lifetime.
By the age of twenty-five, Weston’s photographs were included in significant exhibitions both nationally and internationally, but despite early recognition he served as a WPA photographer during the Great Depression and as a Signal Corps photographer during World War II. By necessity, he also worked intermittently in the first half of his career as an industrial and portrait photographer. However, when he achieved prosperity beginning in the 1970s, he devoted himself exclusively to the photography and intercontinental expeditions that fulfilled him. His initial interest in abstracted details continually revealed itself, especially once he began using a new, smaller camera after health problems in the late 1960s forced him to abandon the bulky equipment he had used for over thirty years.
Early and continuing critical success notwithstanding, following Brett’s death, the comparison to his famed father left the younger Weston on the wrong side of a narrowing modern canon of photography. Reaffirming Weston’s legacy and his exceptional contributions to modernist photography, these uncharted, close-up images – more than half of which are on view for the first time – demonstrate the major themes present in Weston’s work: a focus on natural and urban landscapes and the objects therein, the absence of human presence and apparent narrative, and an extraordinary ability to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm.
Introduction text from the exhibition
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Worm Wood, California c. 1937 (printed c. 1970) Silver gelatin print 10 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Although Weston’s wife Cicely provided the couple with a steady income, she became pregnant with the pair’s first (and only) child in 1937, providing Weston impetus to generate additional means of support. Hoping to replicate the financial success of Ansel Adams’s portfolio of limited edition original photographs, Weston produced one of his own. His first portfolio San Francisco (1937) consisted of twelve 8 x 10 original prints. Unlike the photograph Staircase, San Francisco (1928) included in this exhibition, the portfolio photos were panoramic vistas. However, without the robust support of a collector like Albert Bender, who both promoted and purchased enough of Adams’s portfolios to assure commercial success, Weston didn’t profit from his portfolio. He lacked not only the promotional skills and collector base but also refused gallery sales owing to his deep distrust and outrage at their commissions.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Wood 1972 Silver gelatin print 7 1/2 x 8 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
One of the most celebrated and prolific photographers of the twentieth century, Brett Weston (1911-1993) is best known for his striking scenic images, yet the bulk of his work ranges from middle-distance scenes to closeup abstractions. The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is proud to present Brett Weston: Significant Details, the first museum exhibition to focus on Weston’s close-up photography. The works – over half of which are on view for the first time – share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s panoramic photographs while emphasising the “significant details,” the tendency toward abstraction and extremes in tonality that Weston explored through his nearly 60-year career. The exhibition further contextualises Weston within the pivotal Group f/64 and highlights how intuition and a dedication to photography in its purest form guided his practice.
Although the teaching of his father, famed modernist photographer Edward Weston, was invaluable and his influence undeniable, Weston’s practice was largely shaped by instinct and informal training. He took up photography at the age of 14 when, on an extended trip to Mexico with his father, he started photographing the crew of the SS Oaxaca with the elder Weston’s Graflex camera. This trip also coincided with the end of his formal education; he was enrolled at an English-speaking school, but dropped out within two weeks. While in Mexico, Weston became part of the modernist mileu, socialising with and viewing the work of some of the greatest artists of the time, including David Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco.
Weston’s professional entry into the world of photography occurred during a shift from the East Coast Pictorialists and their accentuation of romantic effects to the West Coast photographic movement, which coalesced with Group f/64 and their sharp images that captured daily life. Like the members of Group f/64, which included Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, Brett Weston focused primarily on two types of images: close-ups and the scenic view. However, Weston’s approach was distinct, tending toward highly graphic images, with intense areas of dark and highlights, rather than mid-grey tones used by many, including his father.
By the age of 25, Weston’s work had been included in the landmark international photography exhibition Film und Foto and in a solo exhibition at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. Though he received critical acclaim and his reputation grew, Weston remained dedicated to art for art’s sake and to creating pure, elemental photographs. He was a simple man and used the same equipment for most of his career. However, when health problems forced him to switch to a smaller camera – the Rollei – in 1968, he further experimented with close-up photographs, and his work became even more intent on exploring specific details and abstract qualities. In Torn Leaf, Hawaii (1978, below), for example, the brittle, curling leaf appears monumental on a black ground. It exists as a singular object, not fully contained within the composition, and the size is indeterminable without context.
The uncharted, close-up images that are the focus of Significant Details demonstrate the major themes present in Weston’s work: a play on scale, the absence of the human presence, and a refrain from imposed order. This exhibition features approximately 40 works taken over a period of 55 years, ranging from 1929 to 1984, and brings to the forefront the unprecedented attention to form, texture, shadow, and light that was the distinctive characteristic of Weston’s oeuvre.
Press release from the Pasadena Museum of California Art
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Wall, Europe 1971 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
In 1971 Brett returned to Europe for the third time. While there, he captured both abstract images, like this one, and panoramas. Notably, this trip resulted in the photograph of Holland Canal, which Weston grew to hate, despite its commercial success or perhaps because of it, “I’m so sick of the thing but people love it. I could retire on sales of this print alone. I’d hate to tell you how many of these I’ve printed.” Although this scenic print wasn’t the legacy Weston desired for himself, it led to an overall increased attention from collectors interested in his work, including his abstractions.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Cracked Mud, High Sierra, California 1960 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Direct evidence of human presence was rare in Weston’s photos. But here, two playful sets of handprints on the mud provide scale, which would otherwise be indeterminable in the image.
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Electrical Towers, Metal c. 1975 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston: Significant Details
Brett Weston, born in 1911 in Tropico, CA (now Glendale), took up photography at the age of fourteen while on an extended trip to Mexico with his father, famed photographer Edward Weston. In Mexico for just over a year, his time there was pivotal in many ways, not only marking the start of his photography career, but also the end of his formal education. His father allowed him to drop out of the international school after two short weeks and provided the younger Weston with basic instructions in photography. Still, Brett relied heavily on his innate sensibilities toward form and tonality, evident in Tin Roof, Mexico, an early photograph from 1926 featuring a cropped view of a jagged roofline with dramatic dark shadows splitting the image. Weston also benefited from a social education of sorts. Through connections of his father’s mistress, photographer Tina Modotti, Weston became a part of the Mexican modernist milieu, socialising with and viewing the work of some of the greatest artists of the time, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
During his nearly-seventy-year career, Weston’s talent and unique vision developed into two related types of works, panoramic landscapes and abstracted close-ups. The image most associated with Weston was and probably still is Holland Canal from 1971. The photograph of a tree-lined canal with still water reflecting a flawless image of the surrounding landscape is sensual and magnificently balanced. However, the photographer bemoaned his connection to this particular work and its extreme popularity saying, “I’m so sick of the thing, but people love it.” Although this print and other panoramic images, such as Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska (1973), came to typify his work in the public’s mind, the bulk of Weston’s photographs range from middle-distance scenes to close-ups, which became increasingly abstract beginning in the 1950s. Brett Weston: Significant Details focuses on the close-up works that epitomise his unique and unwavering vision. These images share the high-contrast and graphic qualities of Weston’s well-known scenic photographs while emphasising what the photography historian Beaumont Newhall characterised as his affinity for “significant details.” Weston applied this penchant for details to natural and urban environments alike. Another early image, Stairway, Grandview Park, San Francisco from 1928, offers a fragmented view of a San Francisco stairwell. Without context, the unpopulated image’s narrative possibilities are limited; instead, the emphasis is on the orderly, graphic form of the staircase.
From the beginning of his career, Weston’s work was celebrated by institutions and peers. The year following Stairway, Weston’s work was included in the landmark 1929 German photography exhibition Film und Foto, and the early 1930s saw his association with Group f/64, a distinctly West Coast movement of “straight” photographers (as opposed to the East Coast Pictorialist tradition, which was waning at this time) that comprised Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, and others. Brett’s work appeared in their 1932 inaugural exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco. The following year, both San Francisco Stairway and Tin Roofs (presumably the same works discussed in this essay) were included with forty-three other photographs in a solo exhibition at the de Young.
Although Weston saw early success with his work included in major exhibitions, this did not translate into a steady income. Like most artists during the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project – a branch of the Works Progress Administration – employed Weston, first as a sculptor and then later as a photographer. He quit the FAP in December of 1936 after about two and half years because he had no passion for the documentary nature of the work and it impinged upon time for his personal projects, something that he could not bear for long. Throughout the thirties and forties, he worked intermittently – and discontentedly – as a portrait and industrial photographer to stave off poverty and support his daughter who was born in 1938. In complete contrast to the realistic, documentary style of his FAP and commissioned works, an untitled photograph from 1937 is an extreme close-up of paint that is almost organic in appearance, with leaf-like veins in the upper portion of the image. The subject is essentially unrecognisable, which is a defining characteristic of many of Weston’s photographs.
The slim Depression years segued into the tumultuousness of World War II, during which Weston served in the US Army before a much-requested transfer to the US Signal Corps stationed him to work as a photographer in New York. At the end of the war, when Brett returned to Carmel, CA, where the Weston family had made their long-time home, he found his father beginning to show marked symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, which would increasingly debilitate the elder Weston in the last decade of his life. Before Edward’s death in 1958, he enlisted his sons Brett and Cole and a small group of trusted assistants to secure his lasting legacy by making thousands of prints under his supervision. In addition to printing work for his father, during this time, Brett also worked on his Guggenheim fellowship project and his second and third portfolios, White Sands (1949) and New York (1954).
Besides photographing the beaches of Carmel, one of which was dubbed “Weston Beach,” Brett also traveled up and down the California coast countless times over the decades. He repeatedly returned to capture the dunes of Oceano, and these images range from sweeping vistas to striking abstractions. An image from 1952, Dune, Oceano, although not technically a detail, falls into the latter category. The dunes appear wave-like and swirling, and a dark, somewhat-menacing shadow at the centre – similar to the roofline image taken in Mexico – provides graphic force. Jellyfish, California, another beach image, taken in 1967, is a close-up of one of the bulbous marine animals washed ashore. In contrast to the ethereal and weightless appearance jellyfish take underwater, it looks monumental and grotesquely beautiful. The curving form expands beyond the picture’s boundaries and in place of luminescence is a gradation of pure white reflections to jet-black striated patterns on the bell.
Although the tendency to work close-up had always been present in Weston’s work, it became much more pronounced and obvious after health issues necessitated a change in camera equipment. For over thirty years, Weston worked with a large format 8 x 10 camera and preferred contact prints (versus enlarging from smaller negatives). However, a heart attack in 1967 and an ongoing battle with angina forced Weston to switch to a smaller camera because he could no longer manage the bulky equipment. In 1968, he began using the Rollei SL-66 almost exclusively. The camera used roll film that produced small, square negatives and allowed the artist to work close-up with ease. As a result, his work became even more intent on exploring specific elements and abstract qualities. Sand and Kelp from around 1970 is a lyrical example of this. Individual grains of sand are visible and marked by traces of implied movement, both in the dancing shadows of the kelp and the trailing patterns lightly indented into the surface.
While Weston had traveled steadily and as often as he could afford to in his younger years – expeditions that included Europe, Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Baja California, and Mexico – his later years were spent primarily in Hawaii. The tropical climate was beneficial for his health, and the varied terrain provided limitless visual appeal. In 1979, the photographer purchased land there on the slopes of a volcanic mountain. He became especially engrossed with the lava formations and the verdant and spectacular plant life, which he photographed until his death in 1993.
Weston achieved, within his lifetime, the recognition and financial comforts of a highly esteemed photographer. Even so, following his death, Brett’s reputation was eclipsed in favour of his father, due in part to the notion that there wasn’t room for two Westons in the canon of modernist photography. The 2008 exhibition Out of the Shadow (Oklahoma City Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection) and his biography A Restless Eye (2011) have begun to remedy this situation. Significant Details furthers that work by centring on the uncharted, closeup images that characterise Weston’s innate and distinctive eye. These photographs reveal the major themes present in his oeuvre: a focus on natural and urban landscapes and the objects therein, the absence of human presence and apparent narrative, and an extraordinary ability to extract the microcosm from the macrocosm.
Erin Aitali, Director of Exhibitions and Registrar
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Broken Glass, California 1954 Silver gelatin print 8 x 10 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Torn Leaf, Hawaii 1978 Silver gelatin print 10 3/4 x 12 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Jellyfish, California 1967 Silver gelatin print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Cracked Paint 1937 (printed later) Silver gelatin print 12 1/2 x 10 1/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
Like Broken Glass, California (1954, above), this image of cracked paint is an extreme close-up to the point that the subject is indistinguishable. Instead pure form becomes the focus. This intense focus also characterises Weston’s approach to life; he prioritised his photography above all else, often at the expense of both financial stability and personal relationships (he was married four times and had countless lovers).
In 1937 Weston was living with his first wife, Cicely, in San Francisco who was employed as a violinist in the WPA symphony. Weston had recently quit the WPA because, as he explained in a letter to his father in December 1936, “It has been a good thing in many ways but after 2 1/2 years I feel that I have had enough experience of this kind. I feared it was beginning to tell on me as well as my work. I would rather divorce, starve, anything, than have this happen. The actual work I’ve been doing for the work program has been child’s play but the sacrifice of one’s priceless days… has become too much.”
Brett Weston (American, 1911-1993) Snow 1954 Silver gelatin print 9 1/2 x 7 5/8 inches The Brett Weston Archive Courtesy Christian Keesee Collection, 2016
I loved putting the Florence Henri and the skull together. Too exhausted after a long day at work to say much else!
Marcus
Many thankx to Museum Bellerive for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
In 1930 Stern and Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach founded ringl+pit, a critically acclaimed, prize-winning Berlin based photography and design studio. They used equipment purchased from Peterhans and became well known for innovative work in advertising. The name ringl+pit is from their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen).
Intermittently between April 1930 and March 1933, Stern continued her studies with Peterhans at the Bauhaus photography workshop in Dessau, where she met the Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola. In 1933 the political climate of Nazi Germany led her to emigrate with her brother to England, where Stern set up a new studio, soon to resume her collaboration there with Auerbach.
Stern first traveled to Argentina in the company of her new husband, Horacio Coppola in 1935. The newlyweds mounted an exhibition in Buenos Aires at Sur magazine, which according to the magazine, was the first modern photography exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, she became a citizen of Argentina.
In 1948 Stern began working for Idilio, an illustrated women’s magazine, targeted specifically at lower / lower-middle class women. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stern created Los Sueños as illustrations for the woman’s magazine Idilio and its column “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (Psychoanalysis Will Help You). Readers were encouraged to submit their dreams to be analysed by the ‘experts’ as an aid for its readers to find “self-knowledge and self-aid that would help them succeed in love, family and work”. Each week, one dream would be selected, analysed in depth by the expert, Richard Rest, and then illustrated by Stern through photomontage. Stern created about 150 of these photomontages, of which only 46 survive in negatives. Stern’s photomontages are surreal interpretations of the readers’ dreams that often subtly pushed back on the traditional values and concepts in Idilio magazine by inserting feminist critique of Argentinian gender roles and the psychoanalytic project in her images. The Idilio series has often been compared to Francisco Goya’s Sueños drawings, a series of preliminary drawings for his later body of work, Los Caprichos; they have also been directly compared to Los Caprichos themselves.
Stern provided photographs for the magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959 and continued to teach until 1985.
In 1985, she retired from photography, but lived another 14 years until 1999, dying in Buenos Aires on 24 December at the age of 95.
Avant-garde photographs seem like pictures from a dream world. From new kinds of compositions and perspectives to photomontage, technical experiments, and staged scenes, Real Surreal offers a chance to rediscover the range and multifacetedness of photography between the real and the surreal. The exhibition leads the visitor through the Neues Sehen (New Vision) movement in Germany, Surrealism in France, and the avant-garde in Prague. Thanks to rare original prints from renowned photographers between 1920 and 1950, this exhibition offers a chance to see these works in a new light. In addition to some 220 photographs, a selection of historical photography books and magazines as well as rare artists’ books allow visitors to immerse themselves in this new view of the world. Furthermore, examples of films attest to the fruitful exchanges between avant-garde photography and cinema during this time.
An exhibition in cooperation with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Artistic polymath Herbert Bayer was one of the Bauhaus’s most influential students, teachers, and proponents, advocating the integration of all arts throughout his career. Bayer began his studies as an architect in 1919 in Darmstadt. From 1921 to 1923 he attended the Bauhaus in Weimar, studying mural painting with Vasily Kandinsky and typography, creating the Universal alphabet, a typeface consisting of only lowercase letters that would become the signature font of the Bauhaus. Bayer returned to the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928 (moving in 1926 to Dessau, its second location), working as a teacher of advertising, design, and typography, integrating photographs into graphic compositions.
He began making his own photographs in 1928, after leaving the Bauhaus; however, in his years as a teacher the school was a fertile ground for the New Vision photography passionately promoted by his close colleague László Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy’s students, and his Bauhaus publication Malerei, Photographie, Film (Painting, photography, film). Most of Bayer’s photographs come from the decade 1928-38, when he was based in Berlin working as a commercial artist. They represent his broad approach to art, including graphic views of architecture and carefully crafted montages.
In 1938 Bayer emigrated to the United States with an invitation from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., founding director of The Museum of Modern Art, to apply his theories of display to the installation of the exhibition Bauhaus: 1919-28 (1938) at MoMA. Bayer developed this role through close collaboration with Edward Steichen, head of the young Department of Photography, designing the show Road to Victory (1942), which would set the course for Steichen’s influential approach to photography exhibition. Bayer remained in America working as a graphic designer for the remainder of his career.
Introduction by Mitra Abbaspour, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, 2014 on the MoMA website [Online] Cited 01/10/2021.
Genia Rubin (actually Jewgeni Germanowitsch Rubin, 1906-2001) was a Russian fashion and portrait photographer and painter .
Rubin left Russia in 1927 and initially assisted the cameraman Karl Freund in Berlin. He then studied photography at AGFA IG Farben. In 1929 Rubin went to Paris, where he worked as a still photographer in the Pathé film studios and as a portrait photographer. In 1931 he returned to Berlin, met the photographer Rolf Mahrenholz and opened his own photo studio on Berlin’s splendid boulevard, the Kurfürstendamm. It was soon discovered and launched by Franz Wolfgang Koebner, editor-in-chief of the popular magazines Das Magazin and Elegante Welt. In 1935 Rubin moved back to Paris, where he met Harry Ossip Meerson; after his departure for America Meerrson took over his studio. During this time Rubin photographed fashion for “Femina”, Harper’s Bazaar and Australian “The Home”. After the war he met the English court photographer Baron (Stirling Henry Nahum); until 1956 he worked alternately as a “fashion guest photographer” in “Baron’s Studios” in London and as a Parisian photo correspondent for the Daily Express.
Rubin had started to paint in Paris at this time. Through his acquaintance with André Breton, for example, he came into contact with contemporary painting in Paris and was among other things. In 1947 he took part in the international surrealist exhibition at the Maeght Gallery .
In 1957 Rubin stopped photographing fashion and took pictures of parks, gardens, palaces and art objects in France, England and Italy for “Maison et Jardin” (“House and Garden”, Condé-Nast ). From 1959 he devoted himself again to modern painting, also as a collector.
“… Olga Solarics (1896-1969) and her husband Adorjan von Wlassics (1893-1946) ran the Manasse’ Foto-Salon in Vienna from 1922-1938. Olga seems to have been the one interested in the photographic nude. She (or they) exhibited at the 1st International Salon of Nude Photography in Paris in 1933…”
“… Studio Manasse, which flourished in the 1930s in Vienna, captured more than just portrait photography bursting with erotic charge; it immortalised the fluid state of beauty and the ‘new woman’: confident in her own sexuality as she struggled to redefine her position in the modern world. Each picture offers a conflict of concepts, as provocative poses are presented in such traditional roles that the cynicism intended renders them humorously absurd. Adorjan and Olga Wlassics, a husband-and-wife team, founded Studio Manasse in the early 1920s. The first Manasse illustrations appeared in magazines in 1924, a booming industry at the time, as the movie industry skyrocketed and publications aimed to satisfy a public obsessed with glimpses into the world of glamour. Attracting some of the leading ladies of the time from film, theatre, opera, and vaudeville, Studio Manasse created masterpieces, employing all the techniques of makeup, retouching, and overpainting to keep their subjects happy while upholding an uncompromised artistic vision. Moulded bodies were dreams with alabaster or marble-like skin; backgrounds were staged so that the photographer could control each environment. And as their art found a home, the Wlassics found themselves able to afford a style of life similar to those reflected in their photographs. Their clients ran the gamut, from the advertising agencies to private buyers. When the Wlassics opened a new studio in Berlin, their business in Vienna was managed more and more by associates, until 1937, when the firm’s name was sold to another photographer. Adorjan passed away just 10 years later; Olga remarried and died in 1969… “
Text from the Historical Ziegfeld Group website Nd [Online] Cited 20/06/2016, No longer available online
A magnificent installation from one of the world’s great photographers.
Why this artist is not having sell out retrospectives at MoMA New York, Centre Georges Pompidou Paris or the Tate in London is beyond me. Is it because of continuing cultural cringe, or the fact that he’s not as well known in Europe and America?
Their loss is our gain.
The darkened room contains only eight images beautifully lit to create a wondrous, enveloping atmosphere. Henson’s night photographs emit light as though a result of the excitation of atoms by energy – the energy of the mind transferred to the light of place. A luminescence of thought is imaged in the photograph through the emission of light … produced not so much by physiological or electromagnetic processes as much as by a culturally informed mind that seems to bring forth its own light. And behold there is light.
As that eminent photographer Minor White used to opine when asked for technical information on his photographs in the back of popular American photography monthlies: for technical information the camera was creatively used.
For me, these are not images of ethereal malevolence or Australian anxiety about our environment and the ominous ordinary. They do not possess that feeling at all. These pictures are about an understanding and contemplation of light and place, a process which is in balance one with the other. Yes, the transient nature of earthly existence but more than that. The soft details of flowers in the grass, or the spatter of rain on water, not noticed until you really look at the image; or the shadow of a truck on a bridge underpass. In my mind I know where this is, in Gipps Street, Abbottsford near the train bridge… or so I believe in my imagination. All of these photographs have a feeling of a subtle vibration of energy in the universe. There is no malevolence here.
My only criticism of this, the first photographic exhibition at Castlemaine Art Gallery, is that there is not enough of it. There needed to be more of the work. It just felt a little light on. Another gallery was needed to make the installation experience fully enveloping. Having said that, congratulations must go to the artist and to gallery who are putting on some amazing exhibitions in the heart of regional Victoria.
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #9 2005/2006 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm (sheet) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #9 2005/2006 (detail) 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm (sheet) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #21 2005-2006 (detail) 2005-2006 CL SH541 N2 Type C photograph 127 x 180cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled 1999-2000 1999-2000 Type C photograph 103.8 x 154.0cm (image) 126.8 x 179.9cm (sheet) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased with funds from the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists, 2005 (2005.501) Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
“Our current exhibition, Bill Henson: Landscapes captures the haunting convergence of opposites; two worlds, darkness and light.
These dreamlike pictures pursue the Romantic project by engulfing the viewer in the urban or semi-rural sublime. Through these landscapes, we are immersed in a realm which offers an otherworldly view of the transient nature of earthly existence. The inky depths of the encroaching natural environment suggest a dark abyss, an ethereal malevolence that relates to both the artistic conventions of Renaissance landscape painting and, a uniquely Australian anxiety about our environment and the ominous ordinary.”
Text from the Castlemaine Art Gallery Facebook page
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #28 (detail) 1998 Type C photograph 104 × 154cm
Bill Henson (Australian, b. 1955) Untitled #48 (detail) 1998/1999/2000 Type C photograph 127 × 180cm
Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum 14 Lyttleton Street (PO Box 248) Castlemaine, Vic 3450 Australia Phone: (03) 5472 2292 Email:info@castlemainegallery.com
I finally got around to scanning some more of my black and white archive, this time further photographs from a trip to England in 1994 forming a new sequence. The photographs picture my now ageing mother (these were taken over 20 years ago), an English fair, medieval tiles and Highgate Cemetery, among other subjects.
The image of my mother plays off against a land that is noting an absence – maybe an absence of a certain type of yang force… even the “strong draught horse” seems to come from another time.
My friend and mentor Ian Lobb said of the sequence: “Wow – that is really good Marcus”. Praise I value highly indeed.
The photographs form a sequence and should be viewed horizontally. Please click on the long small image below to see them in this format, and then click again to enlarge the images.
Unfortunately, WordPress only allows vertical presentations of images in this blog format that I am using – but I have still presented them for you to see in the posting below in horizontal form.
Please click on the first image below to see the spacing of the sequence, and click again to enlarge the sequence.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) England 1994 Second sequence
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Maman 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bridge, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with graves 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) IOTA, 1893, Napoli, Cantanese Domenico, age 14 with gravestones 1994 Gelatin silver print
December 20th 1893, a mounted messenger galloped into Boscastle with news that a large ship was driving ashore, but by 4 pm the 1000-ton iron barque IOTA of Naples had crashed under the great Lye rock off Bossiney Cove. Her crew leapt for the rocks, but two fell and were crushed under the barque’s bilges, while Domenico Cantanese, aged fourteen, was swept away… Only the body of the young cabin boy was recovered from the sea, he’s buried in the windswept graveyard of St Materiana Church Tintagel, where a wooden cross and a lifebuoy bearing his name and ‘Iota, Napoli, 1893’ still marks his grave.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Esther 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Three crosses four graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Death’s pathway 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Descending 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Landscape, Chatsworth House 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two graves, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Five angels 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Medieval tiles 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Covered figure with flowers 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) An English fair 1994 Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tree, Highgate Cemetery 1994 Gelatin silver print
Installation view of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
You only have five days left to catch what I consider to be one of the best exhibitions I have seen this year in Melbourne.
If ever there was a man deserving of a large retrospective, it is Jan Senbergs. This wondrous, intelligent, immersive exhibition by this iconic Australian artist is a joy. Particularly so as you witness the gestation of the artist, the journey from very first exhibition to latest work.
Witness is a particularly apt metaphor for Senbergs – he is a witness to the world who uses his imagination to create, as he says, “maybe something architectonic or machine-like, but not quite: and ambiguous … I was trying to create something irrational, something out of the imagination but belonging to the world.” He belongs to the world but creates things not of the world as we know it. It is a twisted world n/visioned in multiple forms. Twisted labyrinthine structures – mechanistic, naturalistic, humanistic – swirling around in his head, put down as marks on paper, synthetic polymer paint on canvas.
Mark making is important to this man. He maps mechanistic and biomorphic elements, always intelligently informed by sources as diverse as “literature, history, architecture and non-Western art, and finds imagery within obscure technical journals, ancient mythology and illustrated encyclopaedias.” His influences are various – German Expressionism, Max Beckmann, Neo-Expressionist painting of the early 1980s, Brutalism, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pop Art and the writing of American postmodernist author Donald Bartheme – to name but a few. And his perspective is unique, as John Olsen insightfully observes, “not often on the vanishing point, but … more related to the spatial orientation in Chinese or Islamic art. This kind of perspective gives weight to an object; the sensation is abrupt and very blunt, ideally related to his vision.”
Standing in front of the huge six painting wall of Senbergs’ Antarctic paintings you feel the power of that (topographical? analytical? cut-away) vision. I dare you not to.
There are downsides. When they do appear in his paintings, his literal figures and landscapes (such as people, boats and bays), are weak. But that’s not what this artist is about. His screen print work of the mid to late 1970s lead him into a formally stylistic dead end. But he was an intelligent enough artist to recognise it as such and returned to mark making: “But it was a period when I was getting too confident. It was time to leave it alone, go back to the mark.” And his popularist map paintings of Sydney and Melbourne, painted in a brighter colour palette, don’t have the depth of feeling and response to the world that other works possess.
His limited colour palette – all blacks and subdued colours in the early enamel work; green and browns in the 1970s work; greys, blacks and beiges in the early 1980s; blues and greens with splashes of colour for the Antarctic and mining paintings; through to the more colourful map paintings of the 1990s and the recent oranges of the bushfire paintings – has always given weight to the object, weight to his constructed upside-down world, weight to his vision of a place where anything might happen. And frequently does.
Irrational, perhaps (but the irrational can only exist if there is the rational). Something out of the imagination but belonging to the world, indubitably. A world that is neither dysfunctional in vision nor balance.
“I was always interested in painting buildings and things and I tried to make them half human, trying to put figures into them, in the end they blended together as one, the figures, the buildings and the people.”
Jan Senbergs, 1965
“I was always trying to invent new forms, different forms, shapes which were recognisable – maybe something architectonic or machine-like, but not quite: and ambiguous … I was trying to create something irrational, something out of the imagination but belonging to the world.”
Jan Senbergs, 2008
Alan Kilner Jan Senbergs, Melbourne c. 1959 Image courtesy Jan Senbergs
This is the first comprehensive retrospective of renowned Melbourne artist Jan Senbergs. Throughout his long career, Senbergs’ work has been characterised by a fundamental humanist vision, a finely-honed sense of the absurd, and a rigorous studio practice spanning printmaking, drawing and painting. He is considered to be amongst Australia’s leading painters and his large-scale expressive drawings are highly regarded. More recently Senbergs has created labyrinthine views of cities, employing aerial perspectives to present a bird’s eye view of humankind’s endeavours. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and prints from his first exhibition in 1960 until the present day, borrowed from public and private collections around Australia.
Jan Senbergs is one of Australia’s most distinctive artists. He is both an acute observer and a creator of fantastical imagery. Since his first exhibition in 1960, Senbergs’s work has undergone many transformations of style, technique and subject, yet there have also been recurring themes and motifs. Elements from his very first works have reappeared, reworked and reinterpreted, throughout his career.
Senbergs’s artistic imagination has been fed by many sources, including his love of literature and poetry; his interest in no-Western artistic traditions and the work of outsider artists; journeys to distant locales as well as familiar places close to home. The artist has often referred to himself as a ‘visual scavenger’ of images – photographs, scientific diagrams, maps – which he transforms and incorporates into his own work. Above all, Senbergs’s art reflects his essential humanism, humour and wide-ranging curiosity.
Literature has always been an important source of imagery for Senbergs. This work, one of his earliest, is based upon an episode in The Trial (1925) by Czech writer Franz Kafka. In the painting two figures cower beneath ‘the whipper’, who metes out a brutal punishment to them. This work was included in Senbergs’s second solo exhibition at the Argus Gallery, Melbourne, in 1962.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Two heads 1961 Enamel paint on composition board Private collection, Melbourne
“I was always interested in painting buildings and things and I tried to make them half-human, trying to put the figures into them; in the end they blended together as one, the figures and the buildings and the people.”
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) The night parade (installation views) 1966 Enamel paint on composition board Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery Gift of the artist, 1977 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
At the time of its creation, this was Senbergs’s largest and most ambitious painting to date, and it formed the centrepiece of his 1966 exhibition at Georges Gallery in Melbourne. The triptych format recalls the work of German Expressionist painter Max Beckmann, one of Senbergs’s earliest and ongoing artistic heroes. In his review of the exhibition, critic Allan McCulloch wrote: “Instead of simply looking at abstract pictures we have the feeling of standing on the perimeter of a vast industrial landscape in which hills and slag heaps, factories and cities are relentlessly pushed and jostled by an omni-present parade of silent watchers. The huge triptych “The night parade’ … illustrates the point.”
On his return to Melbourne in late 1967, Senbergs’ work changed dramatically. He ceased painting with enamel on Masonite composition boards, and instead started working with oil or acrylic on canvas and began to incorporate screen printed elements into his paintings. Of his year in Europe he later recalled, “I got a lot out of it, it completely made me revise and rethink a whole lot of things regarding my painting, my work, my attitudes and so on … I felt very refreshed and confident when I came back.”
By the mid 1960s Senbergs’ imagery was becoming increasingly sculptural, merging mechanistic and biomorphic elements, in part stimulated by his interest in the work of Scottish Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. Senbergs entered what he refers to as his ‘axle-grease’ period, when his colours became darker and more sombre, which he considered would enhance form in his work.
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at right, Column and still objects 1 (1968) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Column and still objects 1 (detail) 1968 The Edith Cowan University Art Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Mr Timothy James Bernadt
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Black garden (detail) 1972 Synthetic polymer paint, oil screenprint on canvas plywood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973
In 1972 Senbergs exhibition sixteen new paintings at Melbourne’s Gallery A, including Black garden, in which he created ambiguous cityscapes from surrealistic combinations of screen printed fragments of images. With their absurdist sensibility and disjointed fragmentary images, these paintings emulate the writing of American postmodernist author Donald Bartheme, whose short stories Senbergs admired greatly and whom he credits with being a major influence upon him.
The paintings Senbergs created in 1973 in response to his selection to represent Australia at the 12th São Paolo Biennial in Brazil were larger and more imposing than his 1972 paintings, and often incorporated an image of a ramp to suggest entry into the forms. With their realistic modelling of architectural forms set against a horizon line, these works evoke the real world, yet remain defiantly resistant to interpretation.
“The printing technique was very important to me because I was a kind of scavenger of odd sorts of images. I mean a lot of those sort of shapes and forms were things that one saw perhaps in an old engraving book, a little detail of a section of some background somewhere and I’d look into it and see certain sorts of forms there … I was a collector, a scavenger. I used to go to libraries and collect these images and I’d buy a lot of books.”
~ Jan Senbergs
“When I was doing these prints and as I was coming to a conclusion to them, I also realised I was handling it in a more sophisticated way. The prints were becoming more refined, more in control … But it was a period when I was getting too confident. It was time to leave it alone, go back to the mark.”
~ Jan Senbergs 2008
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photos: Marcus Bunyan
While living in Canberra, on his walk home Senbergs would see Parliament House: “I’d see this white glowing dreadnought in the distance … that’s the way it appeared, sort of floating, just this whiteness because it was lit up … This form fascinated me. But also, and on another level, I was there in ’75 when all the political things happened and [after that] it didn’t have that sort of purity and whiteness that it appeared to have beforehand. In a way that gave me more liberty to change the imagery of the building.”
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Observatory of hard edges (detail) 1976 Synthetic polymer paint, oil screen print on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1976
This is one of Senbergs’ most architectonic images; its massing of asymmetrical forms, pronounced geometry and pale colours bring to mind the contemporaneous style of Brutalist architecture.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024)
Port piers and overpass (top left) 1979 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Port structure (bottom left) 1979 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Station Pier (top right) 1980 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Port signals (bottom right) 1980 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“Yesterday I visited Jan Senbergs at his studio in Port Melbourne … I was greatly impressed by what I saw: he has moved away from a photo image to observation, perhaps with [Max] Beckmann as his distant father. His line is slow and sullen and he creates a feeling of junk-heap menace … His perspective is not often on the vanishing point, but is more related to the spatial orientation in Chinese or Islamic art. This kind of perspective gives weight to an object; the sensation is abrupt and very blunt, ideally related to his vision.”
Installation view of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia with Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 at right Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 (installation view) 1982 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Purchase with funds presented by Renison Goldfields Consolidated, 1983 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Sticht’s view to the smelters 1 (detail) 1982 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Purchase with funds presented by Renison Goldfields Consolidated, 1983
Robert Carl Sticht was an American metallurgist who in 1897 became general manager of the copper mine at Mount Lyell on the remote and rugged west coast of Tasmania. There he introduced a new technique of smelting which released large amounts of deadly sulphur into the air, one of the principal agents of destruction of the natural environment of the region.
In the Copperopolis – Mt Lyell series, Senbergs moved away from the smooth surfaces and clearly articulated forms of his Port Liardet paintings to a more gestural, painterly mode, in accord with the style of Neo-Expressionist painting of the early 1980s.
Predrag Cancar/NGV Photographic Services Jan Senbergs in his studio 2015
From the vast expanses of Antarctica to labyrinthine Melbourne cityscapes, more than five decades of artist Jan Senbergs’ prolific oeuvre will be revealed in the major retrospective Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination.
The exhibition, Senbergs’ first-ever comprehensive survey, will feature over 120 works including large-scale paintings, drawings and prints which depict sprawling aerial views of Australian cities, dystopic industrial landscapes, raging bushfires in the Victorian Otways, the remote deserts of north-Western Australia and more. The exhibition spans Senbergs’ first exhibition in 1960 through to the present day, representing all periods of his career. Recognised for his sheer visual inventiveness and sitting outside any defined artistic trend, Senbergs draws inspiration from a remarkably diverse range of influences; literature, history, architecture and non-Western art, and finds imagery within obscure technical journals, ancient mythology and illustrated encyclopaedias.
Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV, said, “As one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, Jan Senbergs is an extraordinary inventor of his own visual language, at once simple and bold. From lush landscapes to barren urban spaces, his body of work signifies an artist who has continually experimented with shape, form and motif, and one who to this day continues to push his art in new and unexpected directions. The NGV is pleased to present the first major retrospective of Jan Senbergs’ work and offer visitors the opportunity to experience the full spectrum and constant evolution of his career.”
Senbergs, born in 1939 in Latvia, moved to Melbourne in 1950 following the end of World War II. Among other honours, he represented Australia at the prestigious 12th São Paolo Biennial in 1973 and was appointed to the Visiting Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University in 1989, the first artist to hold this illustrious post. Observation – Imagination will include key works from Senbergs’ most important and critically acclaimed series including his 1973 São Paolo Biennial paintings, the Copperopolis – Mt Lyell mining landscape series, 1983, and his immense multi-panelled studio drawings of 1993-1995.
Senbergs’ Antarctica series is considered one of the most significant artistic responses to the continent. In 1987, Senbergs spent six weeks with the Australian Antarctic Division, travelling with fellow artists Bea Maddock and John Caldwell, on an annual resupply mission. Observation – Imagination will include key works such as his epic landscapes Mawson and Davis. The exhibition will also present Senbergs’ epic, 4.6 metre long Pulaski Skyway painting, which reflects the post-industrial landscape of the five and a half kilometre freeway that crosses the wasteland of western New Jersey from Newark to Jersey City. In this, Senbergs found a metaphor for the American experience and its splendour and decay.
More recently Senbergs has produced intricate labyrinthine views of cities, combining memory and imagination, and the exhibition will include map-like images of Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Wollongong and Port Kembla. The exhibition will also feature works from Senbergs’ recent 2014 Victorian bushfire series, which burst with visual drama and chromatic brilliance. Senbergs often refers to himself as a scavenger and collector of imagery taken from a wide variety of sources, and Observation – Imagination will include an enormous showcase, created by the artist, filled with cut-outs, photographs and personal artefacts that reference the people, places and artworks which have fuelled his visual imagination.
Press release from the National Gallery of Victoria
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing in the top image, Blue angel of Wittenoom at top left (1988, below); and Otway night at bottom right (1994, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
The blue angel in the painting refers to the dangers of asbestos in the mining town of Wittenoom.
Wittenoom is a ghost town 1,106 kilometres (687 mi) north-north-east of Perth in the Hamersley Range in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The area around Wittenoom was mainly pastoral until the 1930s when mining began in the area. By 1939, major mining had begun in Yampire Gorge, which was subsequently closed in 1943 when mining began in Wittenoom Gorge. In 1947 a company town was built, and by the 1950s it was Pilbara’s largest town. During the 1950s and early 1960s Wittenoom was Australia’s only supplier of blue asbestos. The town was shut down in 1966 due to unprofitability and growing health concerns from asbestos mining in the area.
Today, six residents still live in the town, which receives no government services. In December 2006, the Government of Western Australia announced that the town’s official status would be removed, and in June 2007, Jon Ford, the Minister for Regional Development, announced that the townsite had officially been degazetted. The town’s name was removed from official maps and road signs and the Shire of Ashburton is able to close roads that lead to contaminated areas.
The Wittenoom steering committee met in April 2013 to finalise closure of the town, limit access to the area and raise awareness of the risks. Details of how that would be achieved were to be determined but it would likely necessitate removing the town’s remaining residents, converting freehold land to crown land, demolishing houses and closing or rerouting roads. by 2015 six residents remained.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Otway night (detail) 1994 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchase with assistance from Ruth Komon, 1994
After purchasing a holiday house at Aireys Inlet, Senbergs became interested in the history of Victoria’s west coast and the story of escaped convict William Buckley, ‘the wild white man’ who lived with the local Wathaurung people from 1803 until 1835 before being integrated back into colonial society.
Jan Senbergs (born Latvia 1939, arrived Australia 1950, died Melbourne 2024) Mawson (detail) 1987 Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Private collection, Melbourne
“As in previous settlements in history, in Antarctica we are again squatting on the edge of yet another continent and bringing our cultural baggage with us. Already there is a sense of history there: architectural, social and visual.”
~ Jan Senbergs, 2002
Installation views of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing in the bottom image at top left, Bea Maddock being lifted onto the Icebird – Heard Island (1987, below); at top middle, Antarctic night (1989, below); at bottom left, Mawson; and at bottom middle, Platcha (1987, below) Photos: Marcus Bunyan
Senbergs was one of three artists invited by the Australian Antractic Division to take part in the resupply Voyage Six to Antarctica as observers. Leaving Hobart in early January 1987, during their six‐week journey the artists visited Heard Island, Scullin Monolith, Law Base, Davis, Mawson and the Russian base at Mirny. This painting depicts fellow artist Bea Maddock who broke her leg while disembarking at Heard Island and needed to be winched back on board. Unfortunately, she was incapacitated for the remainder of the trip.
“In a “cut-away” view, [Antarctic night] shows the interior of a winterer’s hut with its wall covered in a “tapestry” of pin-up images – from the earliest “pin‐up”, the Venus of Willendorf, to the Playboy centrefolds of the 1950s and 1960s … The more you saw of it, the more it seemed like an Antarctic Pop Art movement.”
Installation view of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of New Guinea sheilas triptych (centre row) and New Guinea male triptych (bottom row) both 1993 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Detail view of New Guinea sheilas triptych (centre row) and New Guinea male triptych (bottom row) both 1993 Pastel on paper Courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne Photo: Marcus Bunyan
“I enjoy the freedom of drawing, the directness of what I call my “Long Arm Drawing” with a black pastel or an oil stick, where there’s no room for corrections or embellishments – dancing in front of a sheet of paper, keeping a spontaneous line, and if you hesitate, it shows. It’s “unforgiving” drawing and if you’re out of form you lose, and sheets of paper end up in the bin. Like an athlete or a dancer, you’ve got to put in the hours to make the confident mark.”
“[The] map-like images of the city that I’ve developed – of Melbourne, Sydney, Wollongong, Barcelona – they come out of a fascination with map-making, particularly early map-making … I started to look for an imagined way of painting and drawing actual places like Melbourne or Sydney: not exactly what you see in front of you but what you know to be there … It’s like those early maps, imaginary maps where people were drawing what they knew, not what they saw or measured.”
Figures and heads made from mechanistic and architectural elements was one of Senbergs’s earliest subjects. He returned to this motif recently in several monumental paintings, including Paolozzi’s city, 2010, and The elated city, 2009.
In the history of painting, a capriccio refers to an architectural fantasy where buildings and other architectural elements and places come together in imaginary settings. Senbergs’ Melbourne capriccio offers the viewer the pleasure of a bird’s-eye view of familiar landmarks, seen through a rich blend of memory and imagination.
As a young artist in the 1960s, Senbergs greatly admired Scottish Pop artist Edouardo Paolozzi’s strange fusions of machine and organic forms, and explored similar ideas in his own paintings and screen prints. In Paolozzi’s city Senbergs has created a fantastical head out of buildings and roads, and pays homage to one of his first artistic heroes.
“One of the rarest qualities in contemporary painting is wit … Jan Senberg’s ‘Geelong capriccio’ is in every way a painting of wit, its single and absurd proposition as to what the world would look like if Geelong had become the capital and the site of Melbourne remained open paddocks … It seems to be a very Antipodean painting: the upside-down world, which Europe imagined Australia to be, a place where anything might happen.”
Installation view of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at top, Extended Melbourne labyrinth (2013, above); at left, Geelong capriccio (if Geelong were settled instead of Melbourne) (2010, above); at right Melbourne capriccio 3 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation views of the opening room of the exhibition Jan Senbergs: Observation – Imagination at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia showing at left in both images, The elated city followed by Paolozzi’s city Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In contrast to the enclosed, almost claustrophobic spaces of the studio interiors, by the end of the 1990s Senbergs had embarked upon a new series of map-like paintings, sprawling bird’s-eye view of cities, which continue to occupy him to the present day. Initially inspired by seeing Melbourne from a high-rise building, these works reflect the artist’s long fascination with early and non-Western map-making traditions. Like these maps, Senbergs’ views are not scientifically measured recordings; rather they are imaginative constructions of place based on observation and memory.
At the same time Senbergs began his most extensive group of landscapes, painting the rugged terrain of the Victorian west coast, an area that he knew well. While some of these works depict untouched wilderness, others include roads and townships and employ multiple perspectives to convey the experience of travelling through the landscape. Senbergs’ recent Heat – Fire – Smoke series is a response to the 2014 bushfires in Victoria, a new subject for the artist, in which he reflects on the cycle of destruction and regeneration. (Wall text from the exhibition)
“In January 2014 in Melbourne we had four days of forty-plus degrees of intense heat – with bushfires raging in the countryside casting a pall of acrid smoke over the extended city and all around ominous skies that seemed to portend an inferno that would be all engulfing. That oppressive atmosphere and that sense of threat at the edges of the extended city seemed as if an overwhelming and merciless force was at the gates and ready to break down the barricades.”
~ Jan Senbergs, 2015
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia Federation Square Corner of Russell and Flinders Streets, Melbourne
Andrew Follows (Australian, d. 2019) Two 1930s Chevrolet hotrods 2016 From the series Carmania 2 Digital photograph
Australian vernacular
Hats off to my photographer friend Andrew Follows for another stunning set of Australian automobile photographs.
These photographs were taken at a fund raising display for brain injury in Epping, Melbourne, Australia.
Great job Andrew… with a little digital clean, retouch and colour balance from me!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. Don’t forget Andrew is a vision impaired photographer, with only 10% vision in one eye and no vision at all in the other eye. All the more remarkable…
** Please make sure you enlarge these images to see them to best advantage. **
Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive 
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