Art from Down Under

The U.S. art world, itself a mere 300-year-old moppet in the history of art, last week met and ogled a baby brother. The baby brother was Australian art, a bouncing 150-year-old. The meeting took place on the ground floor of Washington's pink marble National Gallery, where a thousand curious visitors assembled for the opening of the first comprehensive exhibition of work by Australian painters ever shown in the U.S.

Like U.S. artists in general, to whom they have a strong family resemblance, the Australians were short on abstractions and surrealist nightmares, showed a preference for plain pictures of the barren mountains, weedy gum trees, drab sheep barns and sprawling Victorian mansions of their native landscape. Like U.S. artists they were good water-colorists. Like U.S. Middle and Far Western artists of a generation ago, the Australians had learned most of their tricks from the 19th-Century French Barbizon landscapists, showed that they had been too busy pioneering to develop a distinct tradition of their own. The Australia they painted looked like Texas--a Texas with blue eucalyptus and mauve acacia trees, sun-bleached to pastel colors.

Paintings of Australia's history were reminiscent of U.S. pioneering days--particularly Tom Roberts' famed Bailed Up, a holdup in bushranging days; Roper's Gold Diggers, with American and British flags flying side by side in the gold fields to which adventurers rushed in 1851.

Resemblance to U.S. art ended in one group which turned out to be the hit of the show; eleven primitive charcoal and clay drawings on eucalyptus bark, done, not by Australia's high-brow artists, but by the paint-and-feather-clad, boomerang-throwing natives of the Australian bush. Showing animals, hunting scenes and spirits, these queer, childlike pictures were as unrealistic and imaginative as the screwball drawings of famed German Expressionist Paul Klee (TIME, Oct. 21). Some showed kangaroos and kookaburra birds drawn with their internal organs visible X-ray-wise through the skin. One, depicting a spirit, looked (see cut) like a child's conception of the late Jean Harlow carrying an umbrella and a fan. To paint them, Australia's aboriginal artists had used brushes made from the chewed ends of reeds, blowing masticated colors, made of earth and powdered talc, through them. Result was an art as uninhibited and dramatic as a good job of headhunting.

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