Bulleen, Victoria: Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1983 ISBN 095938233X
Those few of you who read my reviews may have come across my review of Hey Days by Alister Kershaw, who describes Adrian Lawlor as the leading light of the Modernist movement in Melbourne in the 1930s, and an amazing individual to be around and listen to.
This slim book - written to accompany an exhibition of Lawlor's paintings held at the Heide Gallery in Melbourne in 1983 - is I think the only book that has been written about him. As a minor artist in what was in the 1930s an artistic backwater, I guess that's not too surpising. Fry does well to cover the multi-faceted artistic life of this mostly self-educated man.
Lawlor emigrated to Australia from England just before World War I, and after his service in that war, came back in 1919 to Melbourne and his wife, never to leave these shores again: in fact apart from brief sojourns to Sydney, he stayed in Melbourne for the rest of his life. This did not stop him from being - from the 1920s onward - a vocal member of the small group of people who were trying to bring the Australian arts into the twentieth century. While not a disciple of Norman Lindsay in the way so many others were, he was a contributor to that seminal arts journal The Vision, before deciding that the best way to promote modern art was to paint it. This decision, taken in 1929, let to the most productive and public period of Lawlor's life. His output of paintings was astonishing, in the hundreds per year, although not all were great. As Fry points out, "The bulk of his work...is of an experimental nature, and in consequence is often insufficiently developed, both technically and stylistically, to be considered as painting of the first quality. Adrian Lawlor's painting is best seen as an intellectual discussion about art: it it explains his understanding of modern European art, and very clearly illustrates the difficulties faced by Australian artists in their efforts to catch up with overseas trends and their struggles against a conservative art world and an apathetic public."
During this time he was also involved in the controversies around modern art, and often made the letters pages of many Melbourne mastheads. It was perhaps in lecturing and polemic that Lawlor truly excelled, and the book he produced as an outcome of the controversy over the creation of an Australian Academy of Art - Arquebus - is perhaps his greatest contribution to the progress of art in this country. A grab bag of letters and short written pieces, joined by a kind-of-commentary, it is both scathing, witty and educative, if now somewhat dated. Lawlor's premise, that modern art is the inheritor of the great Western art tradition, is argued forcefully and (at least in Lawlor's eyes) successfully.
Lawlor's painting career came to an end in 1940, soon after the famous Herald exhibition of modern art came to Melbourne. This was the first chance for Lawlor to see many of the paintings he had written so much about, and his lectures given at the exhibition were influential at the time. His last solo exhibition was given shortly after, and he seems to have come to the realisation that he would never scale the heights attained by his heroes, and so gave painting away. This was not long after his house at Warrandyte was burned down in the 1939 bushfires, when he lost much of his work.
The 1940s were a time for Lawlor to not only get back into print, but also onto radio, presenting a regular art show on the ABC, along with some other specials. This is also the time when he developed a strong friendship with the young Alister Kershaw, who in some ways became like a son to Lawlor, and was one of the few professional acquaintances he allowed into his home life. He also contributed to journals such as The Comment and Angry Penguins. Ironically, given his earlier activities, he found himself denigrating the coming art, a process which started during his time in the Contemporary Art Society, where the rise of the Social Realist and Marxist influenced painters brought him no joy. Lawlor always believed in art as the highest intellectual activity, and thought that any realist art was basically a waste of time. His view of a higher sensibility led to some to accuse him of fascistic tendencies, but he eschewed any political thoughts, to the extent of not exercising his right to vote.
It's unclear whether Lawlor saw the irony in the change from avant-garde to old-schooler, for he now entered into the fallow last period of his life. His last major effort was his novel Horned Capon, the publication of which was protracted and bitter, due to no fault of Lawlor's. The novel debuted to mixed reviews, and in the end only 350 copies were printed. As a novel it took some cues from D. H. Lawrence, with a group of artist characters (chiefly a painter and poet), espousing their views on art. With it's florid language and lack of action it was very much a novel of the mind, and (Lawlor thought) ahead of it's time. Whatever the truth may be, it basically sank without a trace. At about the same time Horned Capon was published, he lost his broadcasting job at the ABC. Not long after his wife died (he had been her carer for some time beforehand) he remarried disastrously (the union only lasting two months), and had to resort to manual labour to keep his head above water. Eventually he sold his house in Warrandyte and rented a small flat in St. Kilda to be near his sister. "So depressed and withdrawn had he become that he would reply to chance greetings from old friends in the street with the bitter retort 'Don't speak to me, I'm dead.'
This short work by Gavin Fry gives an insight into a minor, but important, character in Melbourne's avant-garde of the 1930s, who is mostly forgotten now, apart from a few paintings hanging in Australian galleries.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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