A personal encounter - continued

Bernard Hall, The Sleeping Beauty/A Colour Medley c. 1910-14

Photograph courtesy of Sotheby's Australia

Bernard Hall is represented in all of Australia’s state galleries. The late Dr Joseph Brown, a serious admirer of his work, took pains to ensure that this would be the case. Perhaps he hoped that the time would come when Australians were ready to cast aside the blinkers of nationalism, modernism and feminism and look at these pictures with fresh, unbiased eyes. Regrettably, most of the galleries concerned have proven to be as reluctant to display Hall’s paintings as the historians of the mid-twentieth century were to accord him a place in the record. Old prejudices certainly die hard!

There is a way around this – but it’s not for the faint-hearted. First, search your chosen gallery’s website to get some idea of the paintings held there. Then contact that gallery in advance and ask for an appointment to view Hall’s works. Do this a few weeks before your projected visit and you may be lucky enough to be conducted into the storage area where such pictures hang on sliding racks. The lighting may not be great, but even so, if you take full advantage of the engagement the personal encounter allows, you are unlikely to regret the effort.

If you live in Canberra or you are planning a visit to the nation’s capital, the place to start is the National Gallery of Australia. It is possible that you will find Hall’s large symbolist Quest is on the walls here, and perhaps even the small Flinders Pier, said by some to be the most impressionist of Hall’s paintings. The storage racks, however, are where the real treasures are to be be found.

These include a range of the artist’s early (pre-Melbourne) work – a rich smorgasbord of the styles and influences the Old World brought to bear on its apprentices. A youthful self-portrait showcases the manner of Belgian master, Charles Verlat.  Others indicate Hall’s knowledge of the work of Whistler and Sargent, while several evocative nudes demonstrate the strength of his ties to symbolism, art nouveau,  neo-classicism and the arts and crafts movement.

Bernard and Elsinore Hall in his studio c. 1895
The artist's early self portrait hangs above the cabinet

Among the later works held by the National Gallery, a seemingly hesitant self-portrait from 1930 makes for an interesting comparison with Hall's self-assured representation of his student persona. There are other, more confident portraits and two studio interiors, one of which demonstrates his use of coloured shadow in the impressionist manner. Then there is another, a painting described by Daniel Thomas as ‘deliberately posed to shock’.

The Gallery's Colour Medley is one (probably the fourth) of a series of pictures painted between 1910 and the early 1920s. In each, the artist's intent is established by a colourful array of cushions, scarves and other fabrics swathing the couch on which a nude or semi-nude model has been positioned. In the first of the series (shown above), the model is conventionally and demurely asleep. In the Canberra Gallery’s Colour Medley, however, she is anything but! To use Thomas’s words, she ‘confronts the spectator, silk stockinged legs apart, gown wide open, and wearing on her head a respectable hat’.  Certainly a far cry from the earlier version!

Hall was always fascinated by the interplay of colour, texture and light, and used his Colour Medleys to push his exploration of their combination a stage further in every instance. It appears that he was also interested in the potential to arouse a psychological conflict between the viewer’s attraction to his visual achievement and that person’s response to a confronting representation. Despite his oft-repeated manifesto, that the only purpose of a picture was ‘to decorate a wall’, the intellectual challenge that distinguishes much of his work should never be underestimated.  

Many of the paintings discussed above are reproduced in my biography of the artist and others can be found on the National Gallery’s website.  There is, however, no better way to experience them than in person – something to bear in mind the next time you are likely to be in Canberra.

Do you know this painting?

This is the third  of Hall's Colour Medleys, a painting that has changed hands more than once in recent years but is known to me only as a poor photograph and a handful of entries from the diaries of the artist and his wife.

I would love to be able to see it for myself or at least to add a good image to my growing catalogue of Hall's work. If you are the owner or know of its whereabouts it would be great to hear from you. In return, I would be happy to share the information I already have, including the picture's date and diary references









Links:
http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/l-bernard-hall/
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/l-bernard-hall3a-the-man-the-art-world-forgot/4731920

A personal encounter

Although research always takes time, it was never hard to find the material to challenge the conventional perception of Bernard Hall; at least as far as this concerned his private life, his record as administrator of the National Gallery of Victoria, and his influence as a teacher. An archive of mammoth proportion holds more than enough material to counter the mythology that saw him condemned as aloof, arrogant, overly conservative or insensitive.

More problematic was the reception of his art. In 1978, Daniel Thomas first observed that Hall’s work was ‘conspicuously absent from previous accounts of Australian art’. Thomas attributed this neglect, at least in part, to the artist’s ‘complete lack of interest in nationalist art'. Even so, he expressed his astonishment that the demand for a recognisably Australian art should have had ‘prevented such excellent and interesting paintings . . . from being recognised’. (Daniel Thomas, Outlines of Australian Art: The Joseph Brown Collection, Macmillan, South Melbourne 1980, pp. 34-35)

There is little question that Hall was, as Thomas also said, a superb technician whose work was not only structurally superior to that of his better known colleague, Norman Lindsay, but always ‘far more intense and concrete than Lindsay’s fantasies’.

Be that as it may, the response to any art is personal and while I love Hall’s paintings (well, most of them) I can’t expect the rest of the world to do so unquestioningly – particularly sight unseen.  What I can do, however, is to urge all sceptics to take the time to find and see as many of his pictures as possible before forming – or accepting – any hard and fast opinion. Reproductions, even those  of excellent quality (as they are in my biography) are only a start. Standing in front of the 'real thing' enables a more personal encounter. 

Bernard Hall, The Model and the Picture,
c. 1924, private collection

Melbourne gallery-goers are in a better position than most to do this.  At the National Gallery of Victoria Hall’s neo-classical Sleep and his later and arguably greater Studio Party are often on the walls, along with a selection of lesser-known paintings.  At the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum the dramatically confronting nude, Despair (originally titled Suicide) exemplifies the artist’s consummate draughtsmanship and his breathtaking ability to exploit light and colour for the greatest expressive effect.

And there is, at least until February 2014, a chance to see several paintings only rarely available to the public (including The Model and the Picture). At the State Library of Victoria, in the Keith Murdoch Gallery, an exhibition entitled ‘Free, secular & democratic: building the Public Library 1853–1913’ includes four of these pictures, each one revealing something of the artist’s love for the building in which he spent his working life. Very well worth a visit!

For those in other states, keep watching this space!

To find a bookseller stocking L. Bernard Hall:The man the art world forgot go to http://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/l-bernard-hall/