Martin Sharp: Taking On The Establishment

Martin Sharp’s art was as singular as his style. He blurred the boundaries of high art and low with images of Dylan, Hendrix and naked flower children that defined an era. Sharp pursued his quixotic dream to realise van Gogh’s Yellow House in Australia. He obsessively championed eccentric singer Tiny Tim and was haunted by Sydney’s Luna Park. Charismatic and paradoxical, he became a recluse whose phone never stopped ringing. Joyce Morgan has written the life of this charismatic, unconventional, unique and surprising personality in Martin Sharp: His Life and Times (Allen & Unwin). On Tuesday 13 June 2017, Joyce Morgan addressed The Sydney Institute to talk about Martin Sharp.

MARTIN SHARP: TAKING ON THE ESTABLISHMENT

JOYCE MORGAN

Sydney artist Martin Sharp learned early the effect of tackling a high-profile figure, a pillar of the Establishment. As a teenager at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, Sharp painted a portrait of school’s most formidable teacher.

He was Sharp’s housemaster and English teacher, Colin Aubrey Bell. “Cheery” Bell, as he was known, was a man of few words. He was scholarly and stern, a figure of considerable authority. For their misdemeanours, Bell would make the boys polish the bookcases in his classroom.

Sharp’s was an impressive portrait. It was so impressive the school’s art master, Justin O’Brien, hung it temporarily on the school’s staircase.  There it caused a stir as staff and students crowded to see it.

It was bold and cheeky. No student had dared depict a teacher before, let alone the school’s most revered.  It portrayed the schoolmaster in his classroom. In the background was a boy polishing a bookcase. Reflecting on it years later, Sharp told me that this was the moment he realised for the first time that his art could have an impact.

Martin Sharp’s art did indeed make an impact – far beyond the cloistered world of his private school. He was Australia’s only internationally recognised Pop Artist, but also a film-maker, lyricist, cartoonist, satirist, an eccentric and a fearless social observer.

He was in his early 20s when the media dubbed him the “White-Ant of Bellevue Hill”. It was an appropriate description. For when Sharp took on the Establishment, he did so as an insider.

Sharp was born in Sydney in 1942 – a war baby. He was raised in one of Sydney’s wealthiest families; pillars of the Establishment. On his mother’s side, the Ritchie family were industrialists. Sharp’s maternal forebears included a member of the NSW Legislative Assembly and a head of the Iron Trades Association.

Their wealth came from railways, the Ritchies made rolling stock and tracks, including Sydney’s red rattlers. Sharp’s grandfather, Stuart Ritchie, sat on board of Commsteel with Essington Lewis. It was Stuart Ritchie bought Wirian, the mansion in Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill, that Sharp inherited and lived in for 30 years until his death in 2013.

On Sharp’s father’s side, was a competing strain. The first Sharp to arrive in Australia, Martin’s great grandfather, William Sharp, was a London printer who became president of the Trades and Labour Council and founder of what became the Australian Labor Party. He held the seat of Redfern.

The politics changed with the next generation. Sharp’s paternal grandfather, Walter Alexander Ramsay Sharp, was a Vaucluse alderman, a supporter the United Australia Party, and a founder of Cranbrook school. He was also a prominent doctor, as was Martin’s father, Henry Sharp, a Sydney dermatologist.

Martin Sharp was never likely to follow his father into medicine, or grandfather into industry. After leaving school he trained in art at the National Art School, then East Sydney Tech, and began making a name as a cartoonist, including for Sydney University’s student magazine Honi Soit, the University of NSW’s Tharunka magazine and for The Bulletin.

In the summer of 1963, Sharp was among a group of students who decided to produce a satirical magazine. It would sell to the public, not be given away free on campuses. That magazine was Oz. It was launched on April Fool’s Day 1963, with a cover that included Sharp’s drawing of the Queen grinning like a Cheshire Cat.

The monarchy, the Church, politicians and the police were among Sharp’s favourite subjects for satire in the monthly magazine, which quickly developed a capacity to outrage.  The times were conservative.  The monarchy unquestioned, Australia was an Anglo country; it  was the Menzies era. But Australia had a young population, a third of the population in 1960 was under 18 years. There was an embryonic youth culture, and some were hungry for change, including Sharp.

Within a few months, the three Oz editors were charged with obscenity. They pleaded guilty and received a small fine. Sharp wasn’t part of this case, but his response was illuminating. He was dismayed that its editors, rather than taking a stand, had buckled.

Less than a year later, Sharp’s cartoons landed him and Oz co-editors Richard Walsh and Richard Neville in court charged with obscenity. And this time, they did fight the charges in what became Australia’s most high-profile obscenity case.

Sharp had contributed at least nine cartoons to the February 1964 issue of Oz that resulted in the court case. These satirised the media, religion and police corruption. One cartoon in particular occupied much legal argument. It was a satirical monologue known as “The Word Flashed Round the Arms”. It told of a group of young drunken yobbos who gatecrashed a party where they committed a number of lewd and violent acts.

Written in the vernacular, today it looks rather tame. But this was a more censorious era. In the post-war years, many books were banned in Australia, including DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and works by Huxley and Balzac. And books were banned not just for their content. Some were banned for their “racy” covers, including a number of works of pulp fiction.

Sharp saw a great deal of Liverpool St courthouse that week in July 1964, where two obscenity cases were in progress. He was the common factor in both. For he also faced charges over a cartoon for Tharunka. Known as “The Gas Lash”, the cartoon was about drunken behaviour – of young students. The Tharunka and Oz cases ran back to back.

Interestingly, it was the Tharunka cartoon that initially made Sharp front page news in The Sydney Morning Herald. Sharp defended his cartoon in a letter to the editor. He wrote: “Either critics are too unperceptive to understand the satire … or have their necks buried so far in the sands as not to understand what their kiddies are up to.”

Central to establishing obscenity was convincing that a publication had a tendency to the deprave morals of readers. The Oz case heard from about 17 defence witnesses over several days, among them prominent figures from the Establishment. They included the Warden of St Paul’s College at Sydney University, Reverend Peter Bennie, artist John Olsen and Miss Betty Archdale, headmistress of Abbotsleigh school. All said the magazine would not deprave the morals of readers and that the cartoons had artistic merit.

Many of these witnesses had said exactly the same in the Tharunka case. It was a dress-rehearsal for Oz. Sharp received a 10 pound fine over Tharunka. A small amount, but Sharp lodged an appeal and won.  But the stakes were much higher for Oz because it circulated to the public, including interstate.

In September 1964, the magistrate in the Oz case gave his verdict. He considered Sharp’s “The Word Flashed Round the Arms” cartoon “filthy and disgusting”. The magistrate, Gerald Locke, made it clear he intended to make an example of Sharp and his co-editors. Sharp was sentenced to four months jail with hard labour. Walsh and Neville were sentenced to six, also with hard labour.

No-one had anticipated such severe sentences. They appealed and assembled an impressive legal team. It included John Kerr, later Governor General, Edward St John and Neville Wran. Many original witnesses made encore appearances. A number of new witnesses also appeared, including academic James McAuley, cartoonist Les Tanner and theatre critic Harry Kippax.

Judge Aaron Levine was persuaded by their arguments and overturned the convictions. He acknowledged in his judgement that times and community standards had changed. He wrote: “We are living in times when great freedom of expression on matters of sex is accepted by the community. Indeed, even a casual glance at the current newspaper topics and advertisement, the nature and types of magazines available and the films shown on television and in the theatres clearly indicate that the community accepts today an open discussion of matters of sex which would never have been tolerated by our Victorian forebears.”

Levine’s judgement was widely welcomed, including by The Bulletin. Years later, Edward St John described the Oz case as “a turning point in the law relating to censorship and obscenity in Australia, because our laws and our courts had adopted a very repressive attitude … from then on, the law didn’t change but the administration of the law became less repressive in relation to what was regarded as permissible and what was not.”

Sharp’s reaction to the verdict was typically barbed. He drew a cartoon for The Sydney Morning Herald of himself, Walsh and Neville with a speech bubble: “Fancy Levine white-washing us. Our careers are ruined.” Sharp knew the value to a cartoonist of being controversial.

Sharp left for London soon after. His final Oz cover before he left alluded to another controversy that had gripped Sydney; the sacking of Jorn Utzon, Opera House architect. Sharp had used Oz to defend Jorn Utzon and skewer the political machinations that led to the departure of the architect from the Sydney Opera House.

The battle over Utzon resonated deeply with Martin, publicly and personally. He was friends with Utzon family, including the architect’s daughter Lin Utzon, then an art student who remained a life-long friend.

When Utzon secretly left Australia the only people who knew about the timing were Sharp and his mother Jo. The well-connected Jo Sharp arranged for the Utzon family to board their Qantas flight and evade the media. Utzon’s sacking and the aftermath of obscenity case prompted Sharp to head overseas.

In London, his targets shifted. Although he did some anti-Vietnam war cartoons, the attitude to Vietnam was vastly different in the UK to Australia. Britain was not involved in the war. His cartoons became fewer as he was transformed in London into an artist associated with the counter-culture.

As he morphed into an artist, he was opposed to the art establishment. He disliked its fickleness and elitism. Sharp rarely exhibited in galleries and never had a regular art dealer. He believed, idealistically, that art belonged to everyone and everywhere, not simply on the walls of galleries. He worked in a way that by-passed the art world. He created posters, record album covers, book covers and for London Oz magazine.

Part of his disdain for the art establishment – the museums and galleries – was that he felt they excluded the figures and imagery that inspired him. He loved comic and cartoon figures, such as Ginger Meggs, Boofhead, Mickey Mouse.  Sharp drew no distinction between high art and low.

This is one reason he became involved with Sydney’s Luna Park.  He received the biggest commission of his life – to paint the face of the funfair. He had become disenchanted with Oz and London and by the early 70s he returned to Australia.

Sharp loved Luna Park. For him it was a Pop Art mecca, where the comic figures he loved were celebrated. He wrote eloquent piece for Quadrant Magazine, in which he described what that fun fair meant to him. Referring to those comic figures he wrote:

“Great as they are, the twinkle in their eye has excluded them from those more formal clubs of the celebrated: the Art Galleries and the Museums and the Libraries. One can’t help but feel this neglect is a serious flaw, a blind spot in society’s assessment of some of its finest cultural blooms. “

But in 1979, while he was still working on the fun fair, there was a fatal fire in the Ghost Train. It took the lives of six schoolboys and one man, the father of two of the boys.

That fire was the turning point in Sharp’s life. In its wake, he became religious and he developed a deep belief in forces of good and evil. He saw the fire in symbolic, apocalyptic terms. His Christianity surprised many people who had painted him as the young godless radical.

Sharp also became convinced the fire was no accident – that it had been deliberately lit and that organised crime was involved.  He spoke out about the fire and it became the subject of his art. His painting Snowjob is an allusion to his conviction that causes of fire had been covered up.

Sharp became reluctant to leave the house.  Some felt this was paranoia, others that he was justified to be wary. He told anyone who would listen that organised crime was involved. He was making powerful and dangerous enemies, not among the Establishment of his early years, but society’s underbelly. He kept an extensive file on crime boss Abe Saffron, with clippings going back to the 1950s.

There were many inquiries into the fire, and Saffron’s alleged connections. Inquires that from Sharp’s point of view were inadequate. In 1989, Sharp spoke to the National Crime Authority. It considered his theory that Saffron – by that time linked to seven other Sydney fires – had coveted Luna Park, with its position on valuable harbourside real estate.

That report was scathing about the original police investigation finding that legitimate avenues of inquiry had not been pursued. But the NCA found no evidence of dishonesty or corruption. The report described Sharp as well-motivated but obsessed and that “as a result his judgment has become clouded, if not warped”. It went on that his theories “while often extreme and eccentric, arose from public dissatisfaction with the original findings, which in this case was not without cause”.

But in 2007 the SMH dropped a page one bombshell. Abe Saffron – by then dead – had been behind the fire, according to Saffron’s niece. We may never know the full story.

While Luna Park haunted Sharp, his connection with another building and battle from his early life had a happier ending: the Sydney Opera House. He always loved the building, and believed Utzon’s treatment was outrageous. For Sharp this was unfinished business.

As the building approached its 25th anniversary in the mid-1990s, attitudes had changed. The nation had embraced the Sydney Opera House. Politically, there was a willingness to re-engage with the elderly Utzon.  But beyond a few symbolic gestures, no one was sure how to do this or how to approach Utzon.

Then chair of the Opera House Trust, Joe Skrzynski, got a phone call out of the blue from Sharp. Sharp told him Lin Utzon was in Australia, staying at his house, and asked if Skrzynski would like to meet her.

They met at Sharp’s home. As a result, Lin Utzon agreed to speak with her father about a way forward. That meeting laid a path that led to a reconciliation and re-engagement. As Lin Utzon told me when I interviewed her for my book: “That first meeting with me and Joe Skrzynski and Martin was when everything started cooking”.

In the latter half of his life, Sharp embraced some of the institutions he once targeted. He accepted an Order of Australia. He admired the Queen, including her sense of duty and service, and believed in the Christian God he had once satirised.

He never entirely embraced the art world. But the art world began to embrace him. The year before he died, his portrait of David Gulpilil was hung in the 2012 Archibald Prize.

Sharp never had a coherent political vision. Not even his close friends knew how he voted. He was, above all, an artist.  His ideas, like his art, were a collage that drew together disparate elements.

He was driven by an unrelenting desire in his art and life to reveal the truth as he saw it. At times that meant challenging powerful forces and orthodox thinking. To the end of his life, Sharp retained a willingness to speak up, no matter the cost.

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