Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz – Catalogue raisonné

A work-in-progress, 2024

I began this project officially mid-2023, even though I had started compiling information almost 40 years ago, in 1986, when I was working as a historian nearby to my parents’ house. I always had assumed it would be too difficult, and would be full of holes, but I guess I can only try and do my best. The process also offers an opportunity, with more experience under my belt, and perhaps a little more time than I had as a younger person (although not the energy and stamina), to question the assumptions and processes I adopted in developing previous survey exhibitions, catalogues, monographs, and the biography I had prepared (2001/2013/2018).

My method on this project is to work through all the catalogues I have (unfortunately several are missing), and art reviews that informed my earlier projects. Most of this material is now in the State Library of South Australia, with some in the Art Gallery of South Australia Research Library. There is also material in the Royal SA Society of Arts Archives that I call upon whenever working on this project.

It’s unfortunate that local art auction houses often disregard the original titles of works given by the artist, instead substituting a generic description of the work (eg “Abstract” or “Landscape”). Although this artist did use such titles occasionally, mostly he used poetic titles that related to his ideas or starting points in his abstract works, or some emotion he was trying to convey in a work. This bad curatorial practice obliterates the provenance of a work, and makes it almost impossible for scholars to trace its origin and thereby to date it.

Even though I wonder whether it is possible to achieve anything of great academic rigour in manufacturing this great “gruyere” cheese, I hope at least to correct errors, fill in gaps, and offer suggestions as to what something may actually be, but with a reason for my thinking. Let’s hope there will be more cheese than holes at the end of it. I am working by the decade, and thus far am into the third part, the 1960s, with three more decades to investigate thereafter. It’s already around 1000 entries, and I am not yet half-way finished (as a draft).

Of course, if you own one of his works, or know someone who does, please let me know. I am always interested to find works that I don’t recall, or may have missed as a child; or that were done before my time. It all helps!

People can recognize his art by several signatures – “W. Dutkiewicz” was used on most of his black felt pen drawings, or initials. There are a range of signatures on his paintings — from the full signature “W. Dutkiewicz” to an abbreviated “Dutkie…” or initials. Very occasionally he reversed the initials, so “D.W.”, not “W.D”. Some were dated as part of the signature, some were not. I have elsewhere designated his shift from written-out signatures to initials from c.1954, when he starting using a weather-vane insignia on his large murals and wall panels, which soon condensed down to just initials.

As a general rule of thumb, unless obviously done later (such as with black felt pen, which he did roughly but not always from c.1970-89), they were painted in oils. I have even found some examples of the initials being made with a dry brush, without colour, into drying paint. They are ridiculously difficult to spot sometimes. From time to time, further information was stuck on the rear on a label, but often was written on in chalk, and sometimes black marker pen.

Signatures

I will post a few examples of his painting to show his varying signatures.

Painting signatures

Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz (1918-1999)
Exam fever 1950
oil on balsa panel, dated & signed upper right Private Collection
Photograph: M Kluvanek

Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz (1918-1999)
Congregation 1960
oil on canvas, signed lower right in full (very rare)
Estate of the artist
Photograph: G Hastwell

Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz (1918-1999)
Not titled (abstract) c.1970
oil on board, initialed lower right, Private Collection
Photograph: the owner

Adelaide Art Scene 1939-2000

Margot Osborne’s epic volume on The Adelaide Art Scene: Being Contemporary 1939-2000 has hit the bookstores. It’s a very large volume (of 744 pages!) that focuses on an alternate history of modern art in South Australia, with Margot herself offering an overview of each decade, its developments and key figures, and some of the chapters themselves, and 15 individual specialist contributors who delve in some detail into their subjects. There is also a fascinating “From the Archives” section at the back, showing a number of significant texts from their time that help to build the picture of their eras. How rich and mind-boggling it really was in Adelaide’s artistic “underground” before some of it entered the mainstream – which is no longer just portraits and landscapes as some commentators and curators would have us believe.

The alternate history from the beginning of the modern movement in Adelaide right through to the end of the century steers clear of well trodden paths so we can actually learn something, and understand how significant and unacknowledged so much art in Adelaide was, away from the tame and often staid product that received the benefaction of polite society and small town prejudices.

I contributed a chapter on the impact of post-war migrant artists after World War Two. I mention the Marek brothers, the Dutkiewicz brothers, Alexander Sadlo, Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, Anton Holzner, Karin Schepers, Udo Sellbach, and John Olday. Each of these individuals had something to offer and made some kind of significant contribution to the avant-garde, and artistic and social change in Adelaide.

There is a separate Chapter on Ostoja-Kotkowski, written by AGSA assistant curator Maria Zagala (the cover op art image is by Ostoja-Kotkowski). The Chapters concerning post-war modernism formed the basis of Margot’s exhibition Adelaide Mid-century Moderns: Emigres, Mavericks and Progressives at Carrick Hill (2 August – 15 October 2023), which featured two dozen or so artists of the 1950s-60s. A small booklet/catalogue was produced with one of my father Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz’s early paintings, Calligraphy, c.1952, on the cover.

The book is a phenomenal achievement, even if some of my favourite artists don’t get a look in. It’s very driven by progressive ideas in art and the notion of a “contemporary” vision – so more decorative or traditional artists get short shrift. There had to be some research focus on such a broad scope, and I personally value the narrative thrust required – not everyone can be of interest to suit this purpose. The book achieves its objective of showing what an amazing visual culture we have in Adelaide – so under-appreciated locally in many respects, as well as nationally, where it has even been disrespected by art curators, historians, and critics not prepared to learn or find out. This project should redress that to some degree.

Take a walk on the wild side and get this doorstopper under your Christmas tree, and into your libraries.

Below are links to John Neylon’s reviews of the book and exhibition.

From the modern to the contemporary – Adelaide’s evolving art scene

When mods and rockers ruled the Adelaide art scene

Landscape & Memory Exhibition

History Festival 2023, Adelaide

curated by Adam Dutkiewicz & Ken Orchard

Originally Landscape & Memory was conceived as an exhibition to assess and present works derived from nature, from both the Landscape and Still Life genres amply represented in the RSASA Collections, but it quickly struck a chord with a few interested people and led to an expansion of its horizons and a narrowing of its theme to just Landscape. The orientation of the exhibition was a natural divergence from the previous History Festival show, which had a strong focus on Portraiture.

The title for the exhibition borrows from a book by historian Simon Schama, which I read while doing my doctoral thesis at the end of last century. I recalled a little part he had written: “Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.” (Landscape and Memory [1995], p. 7).

This notion approaches the deep love of country that forms the basis of Indigenous cosmology, steeped as it is in the experience and memories of something in the order of two thousand generations. By comparison, Europeans have been in this land for around ten generations, and Western art traditions have been established in the colonial city of Adelaide for fewer than that.

The colonial project, despite the best intentions of some of the early settlers, administrators and politicians, inevitably affected the First Nations peoples through illness and confrontation and, as Ian Mclean observed, in their colonial landscape paintings gradually their presence disappeared over time. He cited Henry James Johnstone’s Evening Shadows (1880) as one of the last of the “narcissistic” landscapes of the Victorian era.

I started thinking about the scale of these cultural time-frames while working on the first volume of A Visual History: the Royal South Australian Society of Arts, 1856 –2016 from late 2015. Western art was first exhibited here in Adelaide in 1845 (an exhibition of works by George French Angas); the Society was formed in 1856, and most of the first European-origin artists had connections with the Society, which existed a generation before the National Gallery of South Australia (now AGSA) and a handful of years before the School of Art.

Artists of the Federation era were quite different from those of the Colonial era, and quite different again after both world wars; and now there are still some similarities in genres and approaches, but there is a lot more besides.

A continuing theme has been tradition and resistance to change, on the one hand, and on the other, progress and modernisation. The latter stemmed from a knowledge of what was happening elsewhere, an inclination to new ideas, and that borrowed from folk art and indigenous cultures as much as it was interested in being perceived to be new. Modernist art, in part, was a reconnection with a deeper history in art, other than the orthodox style that evolved from the rise of scientific objectivity within Humanism.

I have recycled some of these words from a catalogue essay I wrote for Handover, an exhibition curated by Bev Southcott in 2017 concerned with passing on knowledge and skills over generations. I think it rankled with her how quickly artists of earlier eras and their creative contributions had been forgotten, and wanted to bring some of them both back into the light.

It might be the case that when it comes to artists, the amount of money in the community inputs into the degree of their recognition, and therefore their status in our cultural memory. How else can we explain the disappearance of so many artists in Adelaide’s cultural memory, when such a process does not occur in the larger cities? It’s such a shame that future generations here will have little or no connection to many fine artists of our past, because there has not been enough commitment and investment to ensure ongoing respect and recognition.

The RSASA Collection is doing its best to rectify that, through its collection focus, and in the exhibitions it presents. The Collection is growing at a steady pace, enhanced from time to time by substantial bequests and gifts from collectors and artists. An inventory I did in the early 1990s indicated only 52 works, after an administration a decade or so before I was President turned over most of the WK Gold Bequest (1895), it was said, to the AGSA. I need to research the Minutes to work out what this entailed, and to locate an inventory of the initial bequest in 1895. At one point we believe works were loaned out to generate income, then forgotten about as personalities and methods changed internally; so some were lost. We have located a few that once belonged in the RSASA Collection, and also some that had won prizes in the 19th century in public institutions here and interstate.

For this exhibition I was also able to borrow some works from the State Library, and several significant private collections. I am grateful for the help of artist Ken Orchard, who curated the showing with me and did a lot of the grunt work, Dr Christine Nicholls, Lesley Attema, Robert Landt, and the volunteer staff at the Society, especially Collections Officer Doris Unger and Bev Bills, for help in developing this exhibition as part of the History Festival 2023.

Edward DAVIES (1852−1927)
Lockleys [at sunset], c.1906
oil on canvas, 30 x 47 cm
Private Collection

Alexander Sadlo – 2nd edition

Alexander Sádlo worked in several media, ranging from painting in oils and other media to enamels, jewellery and ceramics. Particular interests were translating into paint movement of the human figure and three-dimensional illusions in abstract forms.
In much of the latter style of work he operated close to the Optical Art produced by luminaries such as Briget Riley, Victor Vasarely and Yaacov Agam. He had a preference for using carefully articulated and graded coloured stripes in many of these paintings, a device he also employed in many of his realistic and semi-abstract compositions.
In terms of Australian art, he was a pioneer of Op Art, and his presence in Adelaide and at the Contemporary Art Society had an osmotic effect on a later generation of painters who emerged from the South Australian School of Art and are now credited with bringing Hard-edge, Colour Field and Op Art to the fore in Australia.
In the 1960s he was also one of the first artists in Australia to produce collages that commented on and documented the period. This work coincided with a heightening of the palette in his paintings, which absorbed some of the stylistic inclinations of contemporary fashions, design and Pop Art.
From 1972, Alex lived in England with his wife, Gaynor. He represented Britain in International competitions in Limoges, France; Tokyo, Japan (where he was a prize winner); and Austria. In 2006 he held a survey in Západočeská Gallery, the state gallery in Plzen, in the western part of the Czech Republic. He died after a brief illness at home in Eastbourne in December 2021, and a posthumous survey was held at Devonshire Collective’s gallery VOLT, in early 2022.

This is a revised, updated, and expanded edition in hardback, produced through blurb.com in 2023. It has 152 pages, 194 illustrations (100 full-page colour), and dust-jacket. It is also available as an economical PDF. Gaynor has also produced a hardback edition for the UK. I have placed several copies at the RSASA in Adelaide for those interested.

https://www.blurb.co.uk/b/11481434-alexander-sadlo

Francis Roy Thompson’s lost painting

Francis Roy Thompson (1896-1966)
No title (Landscape)
oil on canvas, unsigned, 37 x 44 cm
Photo courtesy of Elder Fine Art (composite with original frame)

A few years ago this work was credited at auction in Sydney as by my father, Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz, but it is not by him but his good friend and colleague, the painter Francis Roy Thompson (1896-1966). It appears to be the missing Francis Roy Thompson from my father’s estate. In the auction it was described as a gift from my father to friend Brenda Badge in Dulwich, Adelaide. I realised it was missing first in 1993, when I was curating a retrospective exhibition at the Royal SA Society of Arts. We did not know what happened to it, and assumed it must have been stolen, but we had forgotten that Wlad used to give things away to friends and people he was grateful to. We are relieved to finally unlock the mystery of what happened to it. Thompson was a great friend and mentor to my father until his death in 1966. He used to paint together with Jacqueline Hick and Roy in the latter’s loft studio at the rear of the former Chloe’s restaurant, in Kent Town, which was close by the other two artists’ homes. Jackie painted them together in the studio in 1955, with a big bottle of claret handy.

Cover for catalogue, Francis Roy Thompson curated by Adam Dutkiewicz
RSASA Gallery, 1993

Visitors to the recent exhibition at Carrick Hill, Adelaide Mid-Century Moderns: Émigrés, mavericks and progressives (2 August – 15 October 2023) may recall seeing all three artists, and a few others, in the film Painting South Australia 1950-1955, which was showing during the exhibition. Roy was also featured in a second film on the 6th Australian Architectural Exhibition (6AACE) in Adelaide in June 1956, with his enormous bold abstract outdoor mural shown in a prominent sequence.

The film was directed by recent arrival in Adelaide Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, who had been previously living in Melbourne since immigrating, and had most recently been working in Leigh Creek. Ostoja was also featured in the recent exhibition at Carrick Hill.

The lost painting by Francis Roy was also offered for sale at Elder Fine Art – from where I obtained a much better photograph of the work – who described it as a “Multi Coloured Expressionist Landscape”. There is a suggestion lower left that it may be signed under the lip of the frame. It would be great if the owner of this work saw this blog entry and sent a photograph of the work out of its frame, and with any annotations visible. No-one in the family today recalls the work or its title, so we suspect Wlad gave it away when we were children.

I did email the auction house who offered the work most recently in Sydney, in order to correct the record, but was ignored.

There is a terrific abstract work by Francis Roy, similar to the vast mural in the 6AACE, in the collection of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. It arrived from the Bequest of Malcolm & Margaret Carbins in 2012. It was only last year, in accessioning this work for the Collections database, that I discovered the actual title of the work. The couple had a small but excellent collection of the work of Malcolm’s artistic peers in Adelaide, including my father, Jacqueline Hick, Alex Sadlo, and James Cant. I photographed some of these when helping clear the studio in 2010. The Carbins owned two works by Thompson, the other an expressionistic landscape that was more typical of the artist’s style in the mid-1950s.

Francis Roy Thompson (1896-1966)
Rendezvous, c. 1959
oil on canvas, c.1959, oil on board, 74 x 90 cm
RSASA Collection, Bequest of M & M Carbins 2012
Photograph: Adam Dutkiewicz

I was working on a book on the Francis Roy when I heard Carrick Hill was preparing an exhibition for 2014, so happily we combined and the outcome was a splendid exhibition and book (not sure if it’s still available at RSASA, but is available online as a beautiful hardback edition and pdf from blurb.com).

The then director of Carrick Hill told me that Francis Roy Thompson: Painter of Grace & Rebellion was the most successful exhibition they had held up to that point.

I notice now that most of the works shown in both retrospective exhibitions have been released into the secondary market, including the painting I used on the cover of the 1993 catalogue.

Francis Roy Thompson (1896-1966)
Old Water Mill, c.1945, Cressy, Tasmania
oil on oil on board, 37 x 45 cm
Private collection
Photograph courtesy Bonhams

Alex Sadlo survey exhibitions

Eastbourne, United Kingdom

Alex Sadlo: Figures in Movement

Gallery 42, South Street, Eastbourne, Sussex, UK

3-18 February 2024

I remember former Art Gallery of South Australia director Daniel Thomas once referred to Adelaide’s visual art of the 1950s as “Slavic Space-Age Modernism”. And yet most Australians would hardly know that there were any artists of note in Adelaide then, unless they had read Margot Osborne’s recent epic account, The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming Contemporary 1939-2000, published in 2023. The Slavic modernists were ahead of their time in Adelaide, and tried desperately to bring the city’s culture up to speed through their art. But it was a bit of a proverbial head and brick wall situation — they met considerable resistance, with conservative politicians and the general public resentful of intellect, imported ideas and culture, so their art was often regarded as undermining national or local identity, and as “alien”. This was a time when creative artists and other intelligentsia were fleeing the state to make a living, and the only acceptable artists to the establishment and its incurious citizens were genre painters who were terrified of creativity and experimentation.

When I was travelling in 1990 I visited two Museums devoted to the work of Hungarian-born op artist Victor Vasarely in the south of France. I know he also has a significant Museum in his country of origin, in Budapest. It always struck me how the French made so much of their artists, and now museums dedicated solely to so many of their migrant artists, such as Brancusi, as well as native-borns, are springing up all over the country in some quite obscure towns. They are all now part of an art trail that is a huge draw-card for international tourists. Such things are slow burns, and not “major events”, so may not resonate with today’s politicians and their short-term thinking.

The Alex Sadlo survey exhibition Figures in Movement at Gallery 42 is the second major exhibition in the town where he spent the last years of his life. It’s a wonderful response and recognition of what he created, and what he offered to their local community. The first was Stereoscopic, at Devonshire Collective’s VOLT gallery in 2022; and now Gallery 42 has taken the baton. It’s also a reflection of the commitment of his widow, Gaynor, to spread his fame and to secure recognition for his art. As part of that commitment, she and I produced a second revised, updated, and expanded hardback edition of the monograph we first released in 2007 for the artist’s 80th birthday. There was much to add in different media, and to show work not previously available at the time of the first edition. Many works were photographed or rephotographed for the second edition to ensure the best possible production values.

Gaynor has also embarked on a project of rendering a number of her late husband’s hitherto unrealized ceramic designs into finished pieces, hand-painting the final treatment onto the sometime extremely difficult 3D forms she devised following his sketches; and some of these are also showing at Gallery 42 (example below, reproduced with permission).

Below is an example of Alex’s painting from 1956 — Bust in 3D — which was published twice in black and white in Ivor’s Art Review in Adelaide in c.1958, so a few local art historians or curators might recognize the image. It was first shown in the Contemporary Art Society of South Australia’s Cornell Prize exhibition in 1957 (Photo credit – Jolly Thompson). This was a remarkably eccentric, colourful, and nonconformist work for the time in Adelaide, and viewers can certainly glean how much such work implanted new ideas and new directions for art. It was several years before artists such as Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, Udo Sellbach, Dave and John Dallwitz, Syd Ball, Margaret Worth, and Alun Leach-Jones starting producing hard-edge and optical work that was later recognised at The Field exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria in 1968.

A number of the paintings on show at Gallery 42 were produced in Adelaide, as the artist lived here from 1950-72. All of them can be seen in the monograph, which is on sale at the exhibition and available in Adelaide at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts Gallery in Adelaide.

Alexander Sadlo: Experimental Journey (2023, UK hardback edition with dust-jacket, 144 pp)

Sadlo was one of several progressive Adelaide modernists who contributed enormously to the shifting aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s in Australian art. His presence in Adelaide had an immediate as well as osmotic influence on the development of mid-century modernist styles and developments, across a range of media (painting to ceramics to enameling and jewellery). His remarkable fusion of personal style, pioneering ideas, technical experimentation, and a commitment to craft constitutes an important foundation stone.

Malcolm Carbins: Silent Depths

Malcolm Carbins: Silent Depths exhibition catalogue

Silent Depths: An exhibition of artworks by Malcolm Carbins (1921–2002)
RSASA Gallery, 18 March – 2 April 2022

Malcolm Carbins was born in Kapunda, probably at his grandparents’ and Aunty Annie’s house in Havelock Street, on 5 March 1921. He died on 23 February 2002, aged eighty-one years. He was the only child of Emily and Arthur Carbins. Malcolm’s parents were then most likely living in the Riverland on a property given to Arthur as an ex-servicemen returned from World War One. As a young boy Malcolm contracted rheumatic fever and was bedridden for several months. He requested drawing materials from his parents, who thought that was a good distraction as he needed something to fill in the time.

From that time Malcolm expressed an interest in becoming an artist. This meant his parents would have to pay for his education at a time of great hardship in Australia, post-World War One. Both his parents found this a difficult concept and definitely wanted him to become professional in a more reliable field of work. In an attempt to dissuade Malcolm, his father took him to the National Gallery of South Australia (NGSA, now AGSA) to meet the Director, Louis McCubbin, hoping he would tell Malcolm, after viewing his portfolio, that he was not talented enough to study fine arts. Instead, and fortunately for Malcolm, McCubbin told Arthur that Malcolm should be trained and recommended the School of Fine Arts in North Adelaide, which was run by Frederick Millward Grey (1899–1957). So Carbins studied under F Milward Grey’s system, which concentrated then on drawing from the antique model. During those years he cited as influences Augustus John and George Lambert.

Carbins served during World War Two as a signalman in New Guinea, with the 2nd Australian Imperial Forces, but was infected with tropical diseases, suffering from malaria and rheumatic fever. On returning from active service he studied for one more year under F Milward Grey. The small pension received from the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme (CRTS) made it possible for Malcolm to go to study at the East Sydney Technical College (ESTC). He was determined not to repeat the narrow studies he had experienced under F Milward Grey and his exposure to a broader programme in Sydney opened
his eyes to modernism in Europe. The principal was the well-known British modernist painter Frank Medworth (1892–1947). Discernible influences on his work from that time included Paul Cézanne, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, Russell Drysdale, William Dobell, James Cant and Dora Chapman.

During his time of some three and half years in Sydney he worked as a newspaper cartoonist and, around 1947, travelled with Australia’s biggest circus, Wirth’s, drawing many of the clowns and circus performers. This kind of work became a mainstay of his practice there, and he first received recognition for it when he exhibited locally. He moved back to Adelaide, and by 1954–56 his painting style had gravitated towards the abstract.

Carbins held his first solo exhibition at Wentworth Galleries in Rundle Street, Adelaide, in 1961, and again achieved instant success, with the NGSA purchasing Landscape at Night. He held five solo exhibitions over the next decade, which reflected his status as a mature painter. In the 1970s the local lighthouse at Marino Rocks (built in 1962) became a favourite subject for his art, and in the 1980s he worked in more plastic, abstract forms.

The artist remains relatively obscure, even in Adelaide; however, his low profile fits the pattern for many modern artists of that era in South Australia, who were recognized in their day by being acquired by major national and state gallery collections and promoted in important survey and touring exhibitions, but through a peculiar confluence of factors their careers did not sustain momentum. By comparison, the once obscure inter-war South Australian landscape painter Horace Trennery was celebrated in 2009 through a retrospective exhibition and related publication by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Creative post-war artists have generally not received such recognition in Adelaide, with the exception of a set who were involved with the formation of the Contemporary Art Society of SA in the 1940s, and most recently the Czech migrant brothers Dusan and Voitre Marek. There is still much work to be done, to build on the the foundations laid by curators, art historians, and researchers like Jane Hylton, Elle Freak, and Dr Adam Dutkiewicz, who has produced a dozen monographs under the imprint Moon Arrow Press (2006–2021) and several publications for the RSASA since 2016.

In preparing the 2009 retrospective exhibition the prominent themes in Carbins’ mature output emerged clearly. In organizing the colour pages for the monograph titled Malcolm Carbins: Silent Depths, examples of these recurring themes were laid out in proximity over mostly double-page spreads, so the viewer could see how the artist explored his various subjects. This second survey exhibition follows the themes identified in the book, and also leans on the title of the monograph, which was taken from a small work Adam found in the artist’s studio and purchased from the 2008 exhibition. The Society hopes that on this occasion a new audience will be introduced to the artist, and that people will be compelled by the attractive pricing to purchase works for their homes, offices, and collections, to help the Society to raise funds to secure its future.

Adam Dutkiewicz (RSASA Historian) & Bev Bills OAM (RSASA Director)
assisted by Doris Unger (Collections Manager)

Historical Documents vol. 2, 1873-1899

Front cover, Historical Documents of the RSASA, 1873-1899. Image: Edmund Gouldsmith, The Cathedral, Adelaide (1885)
image courtesy of Smith & Singer, Melbourne, Australia
(Public Domain)

The second volume of material pertaining to the Royal South Australian Society of Arts in the 19th century relies again on the Society’s archives and collections, and the digitised newspaper service on Trove. The document compiles the digital and actual records that have been located to date of the last 27 years of the century. This era spanned a period of relative inactivity of the Society, through competing colonial interests, drought, then economic depression. Also, during that time it was focused on administering the School of Design (later the South Australian School of Art), and founding the National Gallery of South Australia (later Art Gallery of South Australia), and it was unable to exhibit in its own rooms, due to lack of space. The Society was ultimately reinvigorated under the pro-term Presidency of Harry Pelling Gill in 1892, followed by the Chief Justice and Deputy Governor, Sir Samuel Way.

The Society is always interested to receive original copies of Reports, catalogues, early volumes of its journal Kalori, images of paintings and any other material relating to the the early years of the Society (then known as the South Australian Society of Arts) and its artists.

The articles include “Early Colonial Art and Artists” (1898), written by the Society’s first historian, Mary A Overbury and a fin-de-siécle review of art in the colony “Some South Australian Artists, Past and Present” (1899) published in the Adelaide Observer. There are also “The Cyclist and the Artist” by Alfred Scott Broad (Evening Journal) and a review of an exhibition by SA artists in London in 1898. Artists’ profiles include Thomas W Seyers (with report on lecture); Ernest Decimus Stocks (from GE Loyau); Henry James Johnstone; James Menpes & Son, the young Mortimer; Carl August Leberecht Saupé; Louis Tannert; the Schools of Art and the School of Design; Rosa Fiveash; Edmund Gouldsmith; Ernest William Christmas; and the Adelaide Art Circle, a group of a dozen artists and administrators who became crucial to the rehabilitation of the Society in the 1890s leading up to the building of its new rooms and current gallery in 1907.

Re Collection

Cover of Re Collection catalogue, History Festival 2022.
A working document for the final exhibition selection.

Over the last few years, as an extension of my projects as RSASA Historian, I have worked with the Collections Manager, Doris Unger, who has been maintaining the RSASA Collection, accessioning donations and revising what’s been done in previous decades, and adding information into the Collection’s database. I recalled things I saw in boxes or found while digging in the Archives that needed to be incorporated into the collection of artworks, and most of this has been done over the last year. With so much material being recovered, and new works coming into the RSASA Collection at a steady pace, it occurred to the Director, Bev Bills OAM, that History Month would provide a perfect opportunity to showcase this part of the Society’s activities to the public.

The last comprehensive showing of its Collection material only was in 2015, when 80 works were shown in Unwrapped: The RSASA Collection; and prior to that a smaller display in Selected Works from the Society’s Collection, in 2006. Before that a number of works and documents were displayed to celebrate the 140th anniversary in 1996, as part of a broader exhibition with borrowed works. The 2016 exhibition Proud to be 160  featured about three dozen works from the RSASA Collection among works from members, and private and museum collections. Earlier in 2022 the Society presented a second solo exhibition of the Malcolm Carbins’ works it holds, and from time to time supplements other exhibitions with more tightly focused presentations, such as for Life drawing (next year is the 100th anniversary of our Sketch Club).

In the previous few History Festivals we have presented an exhibition on Doreen and John Goodchild, an artistic couple who were very active in Adelaide from the 1920s, and especially attached to the RSASA as John was President 1937– 40. That exhibition was held in 2019; 2020’s was cancelled due to Covid and presented last year as Trailblazers, an exhibition on pioneers and artists of the first 20 years or so in the colony’s history. Associated with that exhibition, and largely because of the extra time leading up to its eventual presentation, the Society published Early Settler Artists of South Australia, 1836  –1856. These projects added information to the History Project that resulted in two volumes of A Visual History, published in 2016/2018.

So, there have been several historical exhibitions showing aspects of the Society’s collection over the last two decades, since the Society’s rooms were first refurbished at the beginning of the century. The focus on this exhibition has been to show some of the best of the Collection, and some of the newer material that has come in but not been seen yet. There has also developed a strong theme in the Collection of portraits of artists in paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculpture. This emerging theme is presented as an exhibition within an exhibition, as a means to introduce these artists to the members and public, as many of them have become obscured or are not familiar to modern viewers.

As I worked on the catalogue over a period of months, it enabled me to refine what images should be presented. The final outcome depended on a visual inspection after work was unpacked, and repairs or remounting or reframing were made as required, as works long packaged to protect them in storage were able to be better assessed and photographed. Some of them had not been accessioned. Finally, the hang, too, informed the ultimate selection in terms of the curation of the exhibition, and it amounted to about 1/2 of the work in the catalogue, which is estimated to be around 1/2 of the total material held.

Of particular note are the conté and photographic portraits of artists from the 1960s made by the then editor of Kalori, Betty Jew, and a series of strong photographic portraits of key modern artists by Peter Medlen. There are several large paintings that won various prizes at the Society from the 1920s to the 1970s. There are a few photographs from the RSASA Archives, too, which have not been framed but have been presented in reproduction on walls added in to the gallery. These reproductions show works that won prizes in the 19th century, some work that was not suitable to show at present or had not yet been repaired or framed, or due to constrictions of space.

It was hoped the selection offered a glimpse at the range of media, in both 2D and 3D, and the quality contained within the broader Collection, and informed and provided interest and pleasure to members and gallery visitors.

Cover, Malcolm Carbins: Silent Depths exhibition catalogue
Image: Macolm Carbins, Take Two (1961)

Early Settler Artists of South Australia, 1836-1856

Cover image: after William LIGHT, A view of the country and of the temporary erections near the site for the proposed town of
Adelaide c.1837,
SLSA, B-10079 (Public Domain)

Early Settler Artists of South Australia 1836-1856 is a spin-off research project from the Trailblazers exhibition, a collaboration between the RSASA and the Pioneers’ Association of South Australia, mounted for History Festival 2021. Work for this document was undertaken by Adam Dutkiewicz as part of the exhibition preparations and around his work on the Historical Documents of the RSASA two-volume project, the second of which is nearing completion (at the time of this post). The first volume covered the years 1856-1872, the second 1873-c.1900.

Connections between the earliest settlers and the South Australian Society of Arts are quite easy to find. The professional or amateur artists who emerged from the early settler families produced art during the 20 years until the Society was established in 1856, but only some of them maintained memberships and continued to exhibit with it. Some of them stayed only briefly in the colony, or moved interstate to the goldfields or overseas, seeking greater opportunities.

There were a number of the founders who felt a responsibility to develop a cultural life in the new province, and visual art was a central facet of that intention, so people like George Fife Angas (whose eldest son George French Angas [1822–1886, arr. 1844] exhibited with the Society even after he left the colony in 1845–60), maintained an interest in the Society by serving on its committee.

The environment first encountered on the Adelaide Plains is hardly visible today, even in the small pockets that have been kept as conservation reserves to preserve flora and fauna. Bruce Pascoe’s recent popular book Dark Emu (first published 2014) has sparked controversy but provided an idea of what the land across the continent looked like in places while it was governed by an Indigenous regime. His text was to some extent inspired by reading Bill Gammage’s earlier book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia (2011). The sketches and paintings, and soon the photographs, of the site of Adelaide and the extensive lands beyond the capital city of Adelaide, now enable us, to some extent, to decode what the environment looked like when those settlers arrived, and to see how they transformed it.

The artists of note and covered in some detail include: William Light, Samuel Thomas Gill, Frederick Robert Nixon, Edward Andrew Opie, John Bishop Hitchins, Mary Hindmarsh, George Milner Stephen, William Wyatt, Robert George Thomas, Frances Amelia Skipper, John Michael Skipper, Martha Berkeley, Theresa Walker, Robert Hall, George Hamilton, William Anderson Cawthorne, George Cole, and John Michael Crossland.

The document can be downloaded here: https://rsasarts.com.au/about-rsasa (go to the third logo button on the bottom of the page and click on).