reassessment of the Heidelberg School was the exhibition, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond (NGV, 1985), which included key works such as Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889), which had not been seen in public since 1924. It dispelled the illusion that the artists of the Heidelberg School only painted “pastoral Australia under a midday sun with a bright ‘Impressionist’ palette”, presenting instead a diversity of responses to Impressionism by Australian artists including urban imagery and portraiture (Galbally 1985, 9). In the accompanying catalogue, Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw demonstrate that the impact of French Impressionism on the Heidelberg School was quite minimal and that plein-air French artists of the 1860s and 70s, including Jean Francois Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage, and their subsequent English interpreters, were more significant inspirations (Galbally 1985, 9–10).
Golden Summers’ emphasis on the group’s “urban-based sensitivity to and nostalgia for Australia’s pioneering history” was concomitantly explored by Leigh Astbury in City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (1985) (Galbally 1985, 10). Astbury demonstrates that the artists of the Heidelberg School were ultimately “city bushmen” whose embrace of the bush as a form of nationalist sentiment was matched by their bohemian lifestyles that revolved around city studios, art teaching, and portrait commissions. His views built upon Ian Burn’s “‘Beating about the Bush’: The Landscapes of the Heidelberg School” (1980), which points out that the bush, a place of hard work for real selectors, farm laborers and pastoralists, was instead experienced as a pleasurable respite from the city by artists who belonged to an “educated urban capitalist class”. (Burn 1980, 20–21, 35). In reality, this idyllic arcadia was well-trafficked suburban bushland easily accessible by the extension of Melbourne’s railway system in the 1880s, as demonstrated by Helen Topliss in The Artists’ Camps: Plein Air Painting in Melbourne 1885–1898 (1984).
These revelations renewed the interrogation of the relationship between what was perceived as the distinctive “Australian” style of the Heidelberg School and the international Impressionist movement. In the essay, “The Sunny South: Australian Impressionism” (1990), Virginia Spate suggests that the radical departure from tonal plein-airism in works such as Roberts’ Allegro con brio: Bourke Street west (c. 1885–1886, reworked 1890) and Streeton’s Golden Summer, Eaglemont (1889) constituted a distinct modification from French Impressionism (Spate 1990, 120). Spate contends that Australian Impressionism was marked by a fundamental duality, in which artists sought to be true to their perception of effects of light while at the same time investing this light, especially its sunny, golden nature, with symbolic resonance associated with the optimistic vision of Australia as a new land of health and abundance (Spate 1990, 117).11 In Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (2003) and the subsequent AGNSW retrospective of this artist, the least nationalist member of the Heidelberg School, Ann Galbally provides an extended focus on his fin-de-siecle silk paintings and British and European oeuvre. In contrast to previous readings of such work as decorative and marginal, Galbally portrays Conder as a cosmopolitan aesthete more in tune with his international contemporaries than Roberts, McCubbin, or Streeton (Peers 2005, 193).
Other reevaluations of the Heidelberg School focused on the contribution of women artists who made excursions to the artists’ camps in Box Hill and Eaglemont, including Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern. In the 1992 exhibition, Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era, Victoria Hammond and Juliette Peers acknowledged the critical role of women in shaping the history of the period which witnessed the rise and decline of the first wave of the women’s movement, and presented women’s interpretation of the landscape.12 Women, “identified with the home, family, morality and conventionality,” played a marginal role in the myths created by the urban male artists and radical nationalists of the 1890s, representing, as Peers observes in the catalogue, “the constraining values from which the bohemian fancied himself liberated” (Peers 1992, 28).
A rebranding of the Heidelberg School was attempted in the Australian Impressionism exhibition (NGV, 2007), which focused on the work of Jane Sutherland in addition to the four major artists associated with the school, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, and Charles Conder in an effort to destabilize this artistic pantheon.13 The exhibition also attempted to replace the term “Heidelberg School”, coined by critic Sidney Dickinson in 1891 and used in the twentieth-century writings of William Moore and Bernard Smith as a general identifier of the nationalist phase of landscape art in Melbourne and Sydney in the late nineteenth century, with “Australian Impressionism.” In his catalogue essay, Gerard Vaughan claims that the term “Impressionism” “came to be readily associated with the new international style of plein-airism which developed in the 1870s and 1880s around artists like Jules Bastien-Lepage” (Vaughan 2007, 16). David Hansen qualifies this association in his essay, “National Naturalism”, in which he argues that in the bush settings of their national pictures, Roberts, McCubbin, and Streeton were following the rising artistic mode of naturalism, which combined academic drawing and modeling with a plein air atmosphere and the contemporary subject matter of Impressionism and Aestheticism, in Europe and Britain.
More recently, Ann Galbally has argued that the drive to rename members of the Heidelberg School “Australian Impressionists” is unsustainable due to the emphasis they placed on developing new landscape paradigms and a genre of national imagery culled from popular black-and-white illustrations over their technical experimentation with color (Galbally 2011, 73). Following Hansen, she suggests that the Heidelberg School artists engaged in a high-keyed naturalism that contributed to a vision of “aesthetic nationalism” that combined landscape with an interest in heroicizing the life of the bush settler spurred by nostalgia (Galbally 2011, 75, 79). The duality of this aesthetic nationalism is demonstrated through Roberts’ Shearing the Rams (1890), a “powerful fusion of mythic subject matter with a Realist aesthetic” which celebrates masculine labor and the pastoral promise of Australia, while also recalling the past through the shearers’ use of outdated shearing technology (Galbally 2011, 80).
Reassessments of Australian Modernism
Beyond re-envisioning the discourse of nineteenth-century Australian art, the history of Australian modernism has been subjected to a great deal of analysis since the late twentieth century. By the 1980s, modernism, according to Terry Smith, had “eclipsed all of the other concerns” of a revisionist art history (Smith 2011c, 13). A number of recurrent themes are apparent in such discourse. A majority of these are articulated in Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967 (2006), edited by Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad. Denying a “straightforward aesthetic narrative thread - whether realist, nationalist, social realist, surrealist, abstractionist or anti-modernist” to convey the reception of modernism in Australia, the editors rebuke Bernard Smith’s “time-lag” theory, arguing that their selection of documents presents “an often up-to-date engagement with the latest overseas trends and developments” (Stephen et al. 2006, 6, 12).
The origins of Australian modernism in commercialism are explored in Mary Eagle’s “Modernism in Sydney in the 1920s” (1978). Eagle argues for the recognition of the role of the applied arts, including design, advertising, and fashion, in a growing consumer market in influencing the development of modernist painting in Australia, citing Home magazine as a prime example through its blending of art and design. In “Making the Image of Modern Australia” (1993), Anne-Marie Willis stresses that modernity was first experienced through the middle-class household and the department store with artists contributing to this process through styling products as illustrators for advertisements. Willis suggests that the forces of consumption and the mass media in Australia replaced the need for artistic radicalization (Smith 2002b, 37.14 Meanwhile, Humphrey McQueen, a social historian, promotes the specific local qualities of Australian modernism, arguing that it emerged from a set of homegrown conditions rather than arriving from overseas in The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944 (1979). In this Marxist history, McQueen rejects earlier art historical
