It begins with an image of innocence. Posed against a blank wall, his eyes bright, his palette glistening, the protagonist of Violet Teague's The Boy with the Palette, 1911, is the same age as his unfurling century-and the painter of his own destiny. It ends half a dozen rooms later in a cacophony of Aboriginal activism and aids. In the 270 images in between, we are walked through the dusk of empire, the Depression, war, suburbia. "Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901-2001," which opened at Canberra's National Gallery of Australia in December, is about a nation's coming of age. But it's also about a gallery's: the NGA was first conceived at the time of Federation a century ago.
Given that the threat of war was a catalyst for Australia's nationhood, it's appropriate that scenes of battle dominate the show. Conflict played its part, too, behind the scenes. Called in at the 11th hour to curate the show as the gallery's controversial new head of Australian art, combative former art critic John McDonald found some galleries and collectors unwilling to lend crucial works. Meanwhile, unprepared for the stacks of paperwork the job entailed, McDonald found his relationship with the gallery under strain. "It came down to administration or `Federation,'" says McDonald, who resigned from his post in October.
"Federation" it is. While the F-word conjures up everything tasteful and decorous, the exhibition is anything but. It's a riotous carnival of art and history, as loud and rambunctious as its curator and the century he surveys. Iconic and unknown works, indigenous and non-indigenous, high and low art all cavort under its big top, which takes in Melbourne, Townsville, Newcastle, Perth, Darwin and Launceston in a national tour.
Conspicuously absent are such seminal works as Frederick McCubbin's The Pioneer, 1904 (the painting was considered too large to travel), Tom Robert's epic Opening of the First Parliament, 1901-03 (bolted to the walls of Parliament House in Canberra) and Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles (which remains on permanent display in the NGA). But "Federation" compensates by providing a fresh visual feast. George Lambert's newly restored The Old Dress, 1906, ravishes the eye 93 years after it was last hung in the country. Previously confined to Rupert Murdoch's Los Angeles gym, John Olsen's Sydney Sun, 1965, razzle-dazzles, while Keith Looby's Resurrection, 1964-making its public-gallery debut-overawes with its Vatican-sized angst.
But "federation" is more than the sum of its sometimes fabulous parts. This is Australian history through art, rather than the history of Australian art. With this in mind, McDonald has grouped the show into seven themes ("Beginnings," "The Land," "Cities and Suburbs," "Boom and Bust," "Patriotic Duty," "At Ease," "Encounters") which illustrate the nation's story through prints, drawings, paintings, photographs and the decorative arts-there's even a car door. His thesis is both straightforward and slippery: "To show that history is a vital part of whatever is going on in art and how it looks," he says.
With painter Lambert's marvelously comic Weighing the Fleece, 1921, we get not so much a nation riding on the sheep's back as suspended on a wool scale. In Arthur Streeton's Land of the Golden Fleece, 1926, that pastoral idyll is offset by a sense of dark foreboding; a few years later, the Depression will strike. Through the eyes of the Angry Penguin artists, we see the warping of the Australian psyche under the stresses of war. And post-World War II, the dance of industry in Arthur Boyd's Bruegelesque The Mining Town, 1946-47, gradually gives way to the Day-Glo daze of suburbia in Howard Arkley's House and Garden, Western Suburbs, Melbourne, 1988. How indigenous art and history fits into this nationalistic mix is never really resolved, though Australia's rediscovery of Aboriginal culture is a feature of the show. In Rover Thomas' Cyclone Tracy, 1991, there is the thrill of an ancient tradition responding to contemporary events. Art's ability to both mirror and reimagine history is made manifest.
With a dozen NGA curators involved and a hang masterminded by computer, "Federation" sometimes feels like a show designed by committee. Where McDonald's hand comes through most strongly is with his championing of the artistic underdog, the unfashionable and forgotten. The works of Jeff Carter, self-proclaimed "photographer to the poor and unknown," sit alongside those of his more hallowed contemporaries, while in place of John Brack's iconic barmaid (a private collector was reluctant to lend The Bar, 1954), McDonald hangs the gladiolus-wielding "Betty" of James Fardoulys, a former taxi driver who began painting at the age of 60. And gracing the catalog's cover is Miss Collins, 1924, by that fastidious fuddy-duddy W.B. McInnes ("In Australia we have not been bitten by Cubism or Futurism or other isms and I am glad"). McDonald likes these fusty, dyed-in-the-wool types.
There are some deft curatorial touches. In his pensive c. 1902 self-portrait in Paris, Ambrose Patterson looks over his shoulder at the Gibson girl in Lambert's The Old Dress, thought to be the London-based Australian artist Thea Proctor; here are the first anxious flexings of expatriate wings. Margaret Preston's Flying Over the Shoalhaven River, 1942, inspired by both Aboriginal and Eastern art, chimes nicely with Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri's 1972 Papunya work, Water Dreaming, suggesting a federation of creative spirits inspired by the land. And Tracey Moffatt's The Movie Star: David Gulpilil on Bondi Beach, 1985, winks mischievously at Max Dupain's Sunbaker, 1937, challenging the iconic status of the latter photograph, which depicts a holidaying Englishman.
But "Federation" is primarily concerned with the broader brushstrokes. So what kind of picture of Australia emerges? For NGA director Brian Kennedy, an Irishman, the lasting impressions are mixed: "extraordinary complexity, the lack of resolution, the relative youth, the beauty, the use of artistic antennae to truly describe a society," he says. McDonald wanted to end the show with irony: painter Juan Davila's satiric ode to 1999's failed republican vote in the figure of a starved lap dog; instead we get a photo of Cathy Freeman entwined in the Aboriginal flag. It's an artistic compromise which also runs through the exhibition's final room, "Encounters."
Here, images of migration, political protest, religion and contemporary art are thrown together in a kind of curatorial free-for-all. On one wall, Carol Jerrems' portrait of '70s free love, Vale Street, sits alongside Norman Lindsay's Pollice Verso, 1904, and Boyd's Persecuted Lovers, 1957-58, overhung by Nigel Thomson's painted collage of the murdered schoolboy Graeme Thorne with its newspaper slogan battered! (the spectator, too, may suffer the same sensation). On another wall, William Yang's photo chronicle of a friend's death from aids abuts jokey posters by the surfwear company Mambo. With a little more consideration and space, "Encounters" could have been a meaningful bridge from the past to the present instead of a jumble sale.
Still, "Federation" is a show sprawling and democratic enough to allow for some healthy dissent. In this respect, its spirit is best captured by Grace Cossington Smith's small jewel of a painting, Reinforcements: Troops Marching, c. 1917. In an image of razor-sharp ambivalence, a crowd of civilians hold handkerchiefs aloft to a passing parade of soldiers; in the foreground a baby cries. "Federation," too, offers much to celebrate, and a small note of lament.