Clifton Pugh: Art and Politics in the 1970s – Judith Pugh

Issue 1 | 10 March 200

Judith Pugh is an art dealer and award winning writer. She writes journalism, essays and poetry (some of which has been set to music by the composer Philip Nunn). Her recent memoir Unstill Life (Allen & Unwin) is about social change and politics in the 1970s and it describes the artworld of the time, in which Judith lived with her husband, the celebrated painter Clifton Pugh. To discuss some of her memoir of Clifton Pugh and the Artworld they shared, Judith Pugh addressd The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 10 March 2009.

CLIFTON PUGH: ART AND POLITICS IN THE 1970S

JUDITH PUGH

In 1975, Bernard Smith, the Australian theorist and historian, wrote an almost perfect essay entitled Notes on Élitism and the Arts. The essay was addressing the question of whether, and how, the arts should be subsidised with public funds; and he wrote it because Clifton Pugh was disputing funding models with Nugget Coombes.

I want to begin with this very particular question, and some of the arguments around it, and then to go on to put it in the context of the wider issues with which Clifton Pugh’s work engages, and which engage us now; to allow you to compare and contrast those exciting times with these.

Smith’s essay begins by reminding the reader of the origin of élitism.  Élitism was originally a theological concept: that the gods choose and favour certain individuals. The notion began with the Greeks and was adopted by the Jewish and Christian religions. Smith drily examines the manner in which inspired creativity became a badge of the chosen few.

For the Greeks, poets and musicians were the gods’ chosen artists. During the Renaissance, first painters and architects, then sculptors, were added. Then Castiglione made the argument that aristocratic behaviour, chivalry, I suppose what Jane Austen calls condescension, was itself inherent rather than learned.  Smith goes on to explain that Nietzsche elevated the artist to god status, born with a creativity that is, of itself, moral and that this was the artists’ idea of themselves in nineteenth century Australia.

He points out, however, that élitism first arrived in Australia in a different form. The inspiration of the people building mechanics institutes and galleries, and encouraging art education at that time was art “as an aid to civilization, to morality, to good behaviour in general”.  But, Smith points out, such ideas about the dignity of craft did not prevail in the Australian art world.

He suggests that in that “raw, provincial, mainly pastoral” that was nineteenth century society it may have been a matter of survival that “art for arts sake”, æstheticism became the order of the day for visual artists.  Æstheticism, he argues, contains two forms of élitism. It suited artists to claim that the appropriate audience for their work was of people born with a “good eye” or “natural taste”. He wonderfully calls this “the luck of the gene”. Certainly this is a claim one heard in the 1970s and still hears now.

The other form of élitism Smith called professional élitism; that you had to be a trained artist before you could be a judge of art. This I think is the flaw in the gem that is this essay: these are not two sides of a production/consumption equation. That would be if an inspired trained artist made work that could only be appreciated by an inspired audience. I will return to the question of elitism. But, first, to put Smith’s essay in context.

The Whitlam Government was elected in 1972 with the support of many artists, and, with surprising energy, made the reform of federal arts funding one of its immediate priorities.  When I say surprising, I speak as the person who designed the campaign that gave the appearance of a spontaneous upsurge of support for the ALP from artists of all persuasions: dancers, actors, playwrights, painters, singers, musicians, in every State. And I am the person whose tactics to persuade a reluctant Gough Whitlam to take on the arts portfolio tied him firmly to the arts constituency.

This might seem something of a claim, in these days of massive advertising campaigns and spin. So let me describe a moment in 1974. A couple of weeks before the election called when Billy Snedden threatened to refuse the ALP government Supply, a journalist telephoned me, asking if I had any Whitlam stories, because The Age had seven Snedden stories and it was going to look unbalanced. I had no formal position in the ALP. But the journalist knew me from the 1972 campaign. I rang the assistant secretary of the state branch and asked “Who’s doing your media liaison?” and he replied, “That sounds like a good idea.”

You won’t be surprised that I was doing it that very afternoon.

In 1970, when I met Clifton Pugh, he had agreed to chair a committee to develop an Arts policy for the ALP.  He’d painted right and left, as it were. Harold Holt, the Liberal Prime Minister, had been his friend and subject. Clif had no personal issue with visual art politics at this time; he’d joined the ALP to oppose the Vietnam War. The political economy of the Australian art world was simple. Everyone in it took for granted the interdependence of artist and buyer. Apart from scholarships and a very few prizes, and the assistance on occasion of patrons, that small world was entirely about sales. On occasion there were questions about prizes, favouritism: but there were few controversies. The issue for visual artists was not grants, or residencies, it was purchase; to be taken on by a dealer or to sell from the studio or in a show with a Society of Artists. The prestige of having a picture in a public collection or official exhibition helped, but the focus was on private, or occasional corporate, sales.

1970s Australia was still a post-war society, in the sense that most of the men who controlled it: politicians, industrialists, academics, the officials of clubs and societies, sporting associations, of hospitals and unions and hotels and small businesses and banks, had seen service during World War II.  At the beginning of the decade ex-servicemen also dominated the art world: as officials of public galleries, or collectors, artists or dealers. But the art world was that part of society most susceptible to change, so already some women were prominent, European refugees were influential, and hierarchies not rigid. At the time most Australians sought spiritual sustenance through the large number of churches rather than the small number of art galleries.

I talk about “art world”. I think Bernard Smith is right about the central ideas that drove the market in the 1970s and, yes, he was right that trained artists filtered and graded work into categories, and, by giving advice to dealers, to collectors and to each other, managed the perceptions of the value and the price of work. But the art world was rather more democratic and fluid than that would suppose. For one thing you could be in and of it, and neither make nor buy art.

It was a liminal place, where artists mixed with musicians, writers, actors academics and businessmen, where ideas were freely debated, and where connections were horizontal, across race and despite class. It was louche, a place where divorce was accepted and adulterous liaisons tolerated, and homosexuality, and even casual dressing. The end of bohemia, those years were before art became a “mainstream” activity.

At the time, politicians, federal politicians, were central to the art world. Since 1911, when Prime Minister Andrew Fisher set up the Historic Memorials Committee and that committee appointed and met regularly with the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, artists had influenced the official image the nation presented to the world and to itself.

The Commonwealth Art Advisory Board always consisted entirely of professional, trained artists.

In the 1960s and to the early 1970s, the Board commissioned or bought all work for embassies, high commissions and other official buildings, chose sculptors and sculpture for Canberra, managed numbers of international travelling exhibitions touring Australia, even chose the Prime Minister’s Christmas card. It was one of the biggest “players” in the art market, (internationally as well as nationally) and was respected within the art world. Cliff Last, Fred Williams, James Gleeson, and Len French were on the Board. They joined Bill Dargie, knighted, as was Daryl Lindsay, for the work he had done to build a national collection and toward a National Gallery. With Douglas Pratt, Robert Campbell and Sir Russel Drysdale, under the long staid chairmanship of Will Ashton, the board had driven the plan for a National Collection adopted during Sir Robert Menzies’ years in government. Prime Ministers Holt, Gorton and McMahon had increased the Board’s funding and continued its executive powers.

Because the Board was so respected, no-one in the visual arts really disputed the status quo. In so many ways it was a time before theory, except of course the Marxist dialectic, the opposition of capital and worker; and to be an artist is, in capitalism, to be a manufacturer. Of course social realist artists thought the state should support artists (and everyone else) on a wage, but they too had exhibitions with work for sale. Always an irony, watching a social realist at his opening.

Thus Clif had been reluctant when Clyde Holding, Victorian Parliamentary ALP leader, asked if he would chair the policy committee.  But Clyde was insistent: he was hearing from actors and playwrights, composers and musicians, who wanted a policy that would develop an Australian voice.

Clif was also worried because politics is compromise; he had made a life where he could do what he wanted, when he wanted.  Clyde replied that the committee consisted of all of the ALP members who even thought about the arts, with the same views. No-one in the ALP at the State level would interfere so the policy they developed would become Federal ALP Policy. Clif agreed to take the chair.

If Australian visual artists didn’t think much beyond the status quo, many in the performing arts did. Their industry funding was not controlled by professionals, but by the Chairman of the Reserve Bank: H.C. “Nugget” Coombes.  Members of Clif’s committee were hostile to the Elizabethan Theatre Trust and to Coombes, whose Federal Arts Council controlled all national subsidies except to literature and the visual arts and composers.

Bernard Smith made the point that the idea of art as uplifting and educational was displaced in the visual art market by the notion of æstheticism; but it seems to me that such ideas formed Coombes’ approach to funding the Arts. This was consistent with the function of the Australian Broadcasting Commission of the time; and the ABC and the Trust co-funded projects, so Coombes’ official subsidies were perceived to be skewed to “high” culture. When the recipients of his Council’s grants engaged at all with the experience of ordinary people it was almost always to educate or improve them, rarely to develop local voice. The Elizabethan Theatre Trust, of which Coombes was also chair, was the sole channel through which tax deductible donations to the performing arts could be made at the time; a donor could not even specify that the donation be for a specific project or theatre company. Apart from The One Day of the Year and The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, subsidised theatres mostly staged British, and, rarely, some European or American drama.

I have spent most of my life working with visual artists, but in Sydney, in the mid 1990s, I ran a small publicly funded chamber opera company which commissioned and produced Australian Music Theatre. It took me some time to understand the sense of panic and confusion I had in this most interesting job. My culture is that of the visual arts. Paintings are material objects. If you don’t sell a picture, you still have it, and in the course of time as your reputation grows, the ones you still have increase in value.

There is an understandable sense of urgency in the theatre, theatre is bums on seats, an event, it happens in time, it’s a different risk from making paintings or sculpture. A production fails, you will have sets, costumes and a script, but you have to start again. The actors on the policy committee didn’t want to do Shakespeare or Rattigan; they wanted investment in playwrights and theatre companies producing local work about local subjects.

The policy developed by the committee was to establish an arms-length funding body, run by art form committees of professionals and to import the visual arts model to the other arts. It was using public money to fund seasons for local drama, not first nights for old favourites. It was also about community arts, and not about élitism; and this too was to be a critical factor in Clif’s later disputes with Nugget Coombes.

The policy in place, the question arose: how to ensure the ALP was elected, and, if that happened, that the arts policy was implemented. There would be more urgent items on the agenda of an ALP Government. The arts budget is infinitesimal compared to social security or education, but it is vulnerable to the argument that it is soft, useless by comparison with these vote winning and weighty matters. While Clif painted Whitlam’s portrait I had the opportunity to persuade Whitlam to take on the Arts ministry, so as to ensure its budget was protected in ministerial bargaining.

Whitlam refused, repeatedly, over some weeks. But I had devised a plan. My plan would make the ALP look connected to the culture, even, possibly, hip. The issues that attracted artists to the party were much the same as those attracting the broad electorate in 1972: sentiment against conscription and the Vietnam War, the parlous state of government schools, the idea of Medicare, the under-resourced sprawl of the outer suburbs, and yes, even then, environmental issues. We had a good grounded Arts policy. I could organise supporters in the arts community to come out gradually and support the ALP.

Whitlam, instead of the shadow minister, would announce one section of the Arts policy. On hearing the announcement, an artist would turn to the journalist and photographer conveniently located at their elbow, and say that this commitment meant that they would vote for the ALP. Whitlam would see the support build. Once he agreed to be Arts minister I would organise this support for each other policy; artists would align themselves with Medicare or environmental issues and so on.

I asked Whitlam to let me try the strategy. He didn’t believe it would work, but to stop me arguing for it, he made the deal. If I could make it worth his while, he would agree to be Minister for the Arts. The strategy had an astonishing effect: it was as if popular culture became one with the aspirations and hopes of the post war generation, and focussed on the ALP. Whitlam saw the point, and agreed to take the Arts portfolio.

I want to make this point again. It was a very carefully organised plan, it was a deal. It never occurred to us that Coombes would continue to have any part in the Arts after the 1972 election; there would have been no Arts campaign for the ALP.

In the records of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board before 1972 you can see Nugget Coombes coming. Letters arrive from the Arts Council, with requests for figures: asking what is spent on the work of which artist or project. Bill Dargie, the honorary Chairman, begins to be drawn into meetings “of the Chairman of Commonwealth Agencies” where the first item on the agenda is to “clarify the responsibilities of the various Commonwealth agencies operating in support of the Arts in Australia” and has beforehand to produce a paper setting out the functions and activities of the Visual Arts Board. But the records show that Coombes could not get past the magisterial Prime Minister’s department, and all his forays into management of the visual arts were repulsed.

If you make a deal in politics it is well to know who else is dealing with your partner.  Soon after the election, to the horror of the directors, playwrights and actors who’d stood up to support him, (some risking their careers on television and radio), and without discussing it with me or anyone involved with the strategy, Whitlam announced that Nugget Coombes would be chair of the re-formed Australia Council. And to our horror, that Clif would be on it.

My culture is the visual arts, Whitlam’s was politics. He later wrote that Clif wanted the Australia Council chair: far from the truth, Clif wanted to paint. It has slipped Gough’s mind that Clif was appalled that he was expected to be on the Council and initially refused. Clif agreed to attend a few council meetings for the look of it, in order to reassure his committee members that their work had not been in vain. He was sure there would be professionals on the boards, and that there would be a Community Arts Board. This had been spelled out in the policy for which I’d done the deal.

For some reason…probably because if the State funds local voice it may find itself funding dissent, or at the very least, satire, the idea of practitioners in control of arts funding boards is anathema to bureaucrats.   As Coombes in the early 1970s organised a meeting to discuss the setting up of an enquiry into the crafts in Australia and I quote from the minutes – “It was the view of the meeting that special crafts interests should not be represented on the Committee.” An advertisement inviting membership of an arts body will invite expressions of interest from individuals “with an interest in the arts”. The mode is for community representation; I’m all for it, in moderation. But I look for the day when the Meat and Livestock Corporation, or the CSIRO, or the Reserve Bank, or Australia Post or Telstra look for board members with an “interest”, rather than professional expertise and experience in their industries, in addition to the usual suspects in law and accounting.

My experience of artists of all persuasions is that, by virtue of the satisfaction their work provides, they are focused, committed, practical, efficient and tight on a quid when it comes to administration. They plan carefully, deliver on time (how could you not for an exhibition or an opening night). They don’t need to be pretentious. The measure of their success is not by the clothes they wear or the cars they drive or where they live, but the judgement of their peers and of history. This may or may not mean material success, and they have to have a long term view.

As I recall those dramatic times I remember a particular event. The playwright David Williamson and Clif were both appointed to the Australia Council by Gough Whitlam. The Williamsons were our neighbours and David and Clif were constantly complaining about Jean Battersby, the Council’s executive officer. Thinking perhaps it was a question of personality, that if they all sat down to a quiet meal they might find common ground, I invited her to dinner.

David and his wife arrived in their new Peugot. They had built a big comfortable mud brick house nearby; Clif owned, I think, five houses at the time, David had a play in the West End and Clif a London exhibition coming up. I’d made sure the food was delicious and that Clif had his best wine forward. As the others looked at Clif’s latest pictures I asked Jean what I could do to bridge the gap. Between her and these two rich independent men internationally recognised at the height of their professions. And she told me that artists were incapable of managing their own affairs and it would really help if Clif and David could be made to see it.

Clif fought angrily for the appointment of arts professionals to the Council and Boards, and for the Community arts, and, frustrated, resigned in 1975. You might wonder why a “name painter” as the phrase was then would bother with the community arts. Egged on by Coombes, Whitlam kept talking about excellence in the arts. Bernard Smith makes the point: that talking about excellence and offering it to everyone may appear democratic, but it re-enforces the notion of an elite: “If one makes grants to artists who have already achieved what is already regarded as excellent, how can it be argued that funding is necessary to achieve excellence?”

Bernard suggested that if excellence is the aim, we need to develop a democratic mode. He suggested we look at sport, pointing out that Australian achievements in sport came from the ubiquity of cricket, tennis and swimming in the community, while cultivating and encouraging the best. That we began with a broad democratic base: élitism fails, he concludes, “because it insists on a narrow base; its apex fails to reach the limits of the possible”.

My subject is art and politics in the 1970s: for Clif and me art was long, and politics, in the party politics sense, short. Our involvement with the ALP ended in 1975. However, when I turn to reflect on Clif’s art, his work, before 1970 and in the remaining years of that decade, I am surprised how much that work resonates with wider political issues we grapple with today and with current issues of art politics.

Because he won the 1971 Archibald Prize with Sir John McEwen, and the 1972 prize with Gough Whitlam, and then began to promote the Arts policy, he is often regarded as a painter of politicians. He made friends with and painted a number of other ALP figures, but portraits were only part of his practice. They are particularly interesting because he had a capacity to record what he saw and let the viewer make a judgement. This was true too of his self-portraits, and those of his family and his wives. He was implacably honest in paint; we see ourselves and his attitude to himself and to us, unreserved.

I hesitate to call the non-portrait paintings landscapes, because that implies distance, and scene. Landscape in Australia is the fauna as well as the View, the Vista, but until Clif’s pictures, natural history was not drawn into Australian art, as it were. He is better described as an expressionist who lived in the bush and explored the desert and the outback of Australia.

His early reputation was made from a series of exhibitions which were not discussed in political terms, probably because in Australia at the time political meant party political, or ideological. In retrospect one can see that the paintings were canvassing what were then radical ideas as well as exploring form and technique. But they were admired as original paintings, brilliantly executed; the event depicted might be mentioned, but not its deeper meaning.

He travelled around Australia in the early 1960s, and painted a series of pictures on the theme of St Francis; his St Francis walks among Aborigines clothed in hessian; outcasts in poverty.  He travelled to Mexico. The Penitents pictures are of savage holy week ceremonies, bleeding figures scoured by cacti; mindless self destructive religious devotion.

The anti-War movement brought Clif into active politics, but his long term focus was the issue of protecting the indigenous environment. An unlikely military experience set the path for this political stance that he would consistently elaborate through his work and public persona.  Captain Jock Marshall, an ornithologist, recruited crack shots with artistic talent as forward scouts in the New Guinea jungle.  In the morning, they spied for the army. In the afternoons, for science, they drew the Bird of Paradise.

When ex-Captain Jock Marshall was appointed Professor of Zoology at Monash University, he and Clif renewed their friendship. Marshall and his colleagues began to teach the artist about the science of the environment, the degradation of natural resources by pollution from cities, by farming, mining and recreational practices, and the spread of settlement. Scientific research confirmed Clif’s own observations.  His paintings were already exploring the fragile relationships he observed in the bush and desert: of flora, fauna, and the natural environment. His paintings reflected his observations of the effect of exotic imports on indigenous creatures, or on the environment itself.

In the mid 1970’s Clif painted a series of pictures inspired by Ivan Smith’s radio play Death of A Wombat, which was being published as a book, and he followed it up with another show, based on Smith’s Dingo King. The Age promoted both books. The drama of Death of a Wombat resonated with the public; it is about a sudden devastating bushfire after drought. I think through these exhibitions and their huge publicity Clif gave Australians a way of looking at the bush and the desert and their creatures that helped bed down the environment movement.

He also took part in several television documentaries, taking the crews on location in the desert and the bush. Remembering that colour television arrived with the Whitlam Government, (incidentally rendering its excitement vivid), these documentaries brought his images and their inspiration into people’s homes, and his work was in great demand.

However, he had another political statement to make in this regard. The least prolific of his contemporaries, he kept his prices low in comparison to theirs. He wanted ordinary people to buy the work, for their enjoyment, not for investment. It was about communicating ideas, not making money. He did make money, a lot, but he kept the price of the work within normal bounds. He wanted to make enough to live on, provide for his sons and to endow Dunmoochin in perpetuity for the benefit of the environment and creative artists.

He lived for a further ten years after I left. He bequeathed a large and valuable area of land, his house, and a series of studio dwellings in perpetuity, for artists to rent cheap living and studio space in a unique environmentally sensitive area, and he set up a foundation to support that complex.

Curiously these principles and his endowment have contributed to a diminution of his reputation. Art politics today is more and more about text and less and less about image, because curators are no longer mostly artists and artists are less and less on the boards of institutions. His work does not come on the market, it stays in families.

Bernard Smith talks of elitism; Clif struggled against the idea of himself as especially chosen, being apart and against the marketing of his work in this way. He did not target sales to institutions, nor seek the approval and support of academics; and as there is not a great body of work in any institution they don’t see his work in order to evaluate it, so it is difficult for it to form the basis of a paper, a book or a career. Now that writing about art, evaluating it, is no longer by trained artists but by art historians and curators, reputations are filtered through different values, and artists are elevated for different reasons. Clif never intended to be useful to curators in that sense. He did not care about “making the history books”, he thought history could “take care of itself”.

There is also another element that keeps Clif’s work in an historical rain shadow. We see now the globalisation of the environment movement itself; and its expression in economic and management language as “Climate Change”. But for Australians, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and whether it affects climate, is not the only issue.

Clif’s narrative remains uncomfortable, because it makes us face the detail, the reality of what we do to the natural environment. Already in 2009 we’ve seen images of fire and flood and drought that force us to consider how to live here in harmony with the space beyond our cities and towns. Clif’s paintings are about the delicacy of the Australian bush and the life cycles within it; their balance. They are about the destruction of that fragile environment by the intrusion of settlement, both historic and by continuing pastoral, urban and industrial expansion. They are a visual accompaniment to the complaints of indigenous people and they pose the same questions; how do we adapt and change without losing what is precious? Their allegorical references to the larger issues of human behaviour pose uncomfortable questions about the way we deal with each other.

We have to find answers to these questions, and I wonder if, as we do find our way to a balance, Clif’s pictures will come back into view, bringing the most important idea of all – that commitment and creativity and facing the truth are what make a great picture.