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{{data.paywallPrompt.callToAction}}This was published 7 years ago
John Olsen retrospective: mildly entertaining at best
The more John Olsens that you put into a room, the uglier it becomes. One Olsen on its own might have a charming decorative appeal, a cheerful pitter-patter made of contrasty lines and forms. But when you put many of them side by side, the ebullient energy of the one negates the scruffy verve of the other; and their chaotic tumble ends up looking drab.
The Olsen retrospective at the NGV is densely packed, in one room presenting a salon hang. In the room tricked out with T.S. Eliot's poetry, the paintings look like old dusty cobwebs, neither lively nor luminous but messy and dull.
An exhibition of landscape works by renowned artist John Olsen is on at the NGV until February 12. Joe Armao
Olsen's work spans almost seven decades, during which he has remained remarkably consistent. His signature style is to paint figurative scenes in a semi-abstract way, with episodic nodes along pathways, spread out in lyrical compositions over a gently modulated ground.
At their best, Olsen's pictures are lyrical and evocative, suggesting merry narratives and bright topographies. Some are endearing, like the pictures from which the title of The You Beaut Country derives. They make you think of the layout of Sydney, a town that spills out of its coastline with brash exuberance, with its copious inlets and hilly turns and twists, its balmy air and heady skies.
Summer in the you beaut country, 1962. John Olsen/National Gallery of Victoria
The elements that made Olsen's art appealing to a couple of generations – the bouncy, decorative mixture of symbolism and abstraction – are also the qualities that limit the meaning and aesthetic sustain of the works in the current period.
Like Fred Williams, Olsen exploited a fertile field between avant-garde formalism and nationalist landscape. His tumultuous panoramas spread out in convulsive swings and encounters, making us think of streets, places and ratbags, the nooks and monstrosities that surge and eddy with random impulse; but at the same time, this hubbub of a life teeming in its crannies is also pure painting, nothing but marks of painterly spontaneity that read as an abstract gestural language on a flat surface.
About 1960, the times were right to make formalism while the sun shines. As candid image-making receded, the spirit of modernity encouraged an aesthetic of reconciling contraries, plotting an Aristotelian golden mean between the excesses and dearth of key pictorial properties.
To have virtue as modern painting, a picture sought to be something harmless between the graphic and the painterly, the decorative and the messy, the straggly and the centred, the complex and the co-ordinated, the bright and the muted. Painters were desperate to be interesting but were equally keen for their paintings to be about nothing in particular and everything in general.
John Olsen's Journey into the you beaut country no.1 (1961).
In this environment of strategic blotches, carefully avoiding traditional imagery and also the extremes of abstraction, it became difficult to judge what is a good picture and what is pomposity. The same powers of intuition that might have led to lyric intensity in one passage collapse in the next; because the underlying symbolic rationale is fragile.
The reason that Olsen's paintings interfere with one another's presence is that each lacks an idea that the formal treatment might satisfy. They are receptacles of scratches and streaks that do not look after their impulse. They fail to contain their noise.
The worst paintings are those from the 1970s when Olsen addressed the sweeping vastness of the outback. Examples such as Lake Cooper in Flood from 1975 lack the vitality of the dense environments that animated him.
This pitch for the expansiveness of the Australian landscape ended in cliches that have little topographical or atmospheric credibility. They describe things that you can do with paint – uninteresting things – but describe little of the place or ecology, stories or songlines that go with the land.
...the paintings look like old dusty cobwebs, neither lively nor luminous but messy and dull.
The best paintings with their tangle of tentacles are only mildly entertaining. They have little profundity. If they possess metaphoric or symbolic dimensions, they proffer a brief delight, because the qualities or realities they stand for are unchallenging.
While mostly happy and life affirming, Olsen's work has a complacent, incurious core. His vitalism is quaintly enchanting but with few sustaining resonances. His best aesthetic is a Matisse of mattress springs, a pictorial coil of clumps and strands that clogs the visual with fatiguing levity.
John Olsen's The You Beaut Country is on at NGV Australia, Federation Square, until February 12.