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4 - The Bad Conscience of Impressionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Ian McLean
Ian McLean
Affiliation:
University of Tasmania
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Summary

The difficulties in appreciating the contradictions and ambiguities of Australian impressionism are due primarily to their close association with nationalist aspirations. Impressionism, it is said, threw off the shackles of colonialism and its picturesque and grotesque aesthetics, to produce a radical new vision of landscape suited to an independent modern Australia. This view was originally the marketing propaganda of the impressionists themselves. In 1916 Frederick McCubbin argued that Australian artists before the impressionists ‘were all imbued with the spirit of Europe.’ Their art:

belonged to lands of humid skies, of deciduous trees and low toned landscapes; countries so vitally different from our land of strident sunshine, clear skies and dry atmosphere.

All these pioneer pictures leave us cold, they inspire us with no love and with very little interest, beyond the spectacular. They might belong to any country, so little are they Australian.

McCubbin selected Arthur Streeton's The Purple Noon's Transparent Might (1896) as the exemplary Australian painting:

In this picture the glorious brilliancy of the noonday sun flooding the landscape with its white light, seems to bleach the local colour with its dominating strength …

One cannot imagine anything more typically Australian than this poem of light and heat. It brings home to us forcibly such a sense of boundless regions of pastures flecked with sheep and cattle, of the long rolling planes of the Never-Never, the bush-crowned hills, the purple seas of our continent.

Type
Chapter
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White Aborigines
Identity Politics in Australian Art
 , pp. 52 - 73
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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