Norman Lindsay: Artist on a long dusty road

Some artists do it tough, some have it made tough for them. Norman Lindsay was one of the greats of Australian art, He spent most of his life under the baleful glare of moralists and morons. He probably got as much flak as Cezanne and Gauguin combined.

Lindsay was one of the first of a generation of Australian artists which didn’t pay lip service to Europe. They were ahead of their time, and their time didn’t like it much. This was the late Victorian era, the British Empire at its most grandiose, and “colonial” art was a mere curiosity. Precocious artists were not in great demand. The times had other ideas. Lindsay’s generation was the one which created Australia as a nation, and soon enough a local media with its own thoughts was festering away. This was the birth of a culture, and Lindsay and his contemporaries had a lot to do with creating it. Foreigners often roam Australia looking for a culture they recognize. It’s not where they expect it to be, and they just don’t know where to look. Australia doesn’t have thousands of years’ worth of ruins to call a culture, or the hypocritical history of generations of suffering artists which are posthumously nationalized and called a “heritage”. The culture is in the place itself, and it was born as a result of the shift in identity from “European” to “Australian”. One of the magazines which first portrayed Australia as anything other than a hot, dusty version of England was The Bulletin, which included in its contributors Banjo Patterson, who wrote Waltzing Matilda, and Henry Lawson, a standout poet and writer of exclusively Australian stories. The founder of The Bulletin was J.F. Archibald, who remains to this day the epitome of the best elements of Australian journalism and editorial integrity. He once chased out of his office a man who’d come to horsewhip him with a pair of editorial scissors. Archibald took a look at some of Lindsay’s earliest drawings, ink sketches, and sent the adolescent artist the vast amount of five pounds (compared to a shilling or so) and an invitation to come to Sydney and work for The Bulletin. This would be the modern equivalent of an unknown artist going to work for Newsweek on the same basis. Fortunately he wrote a lot about this period, and a very amusing, humanistic view of the time is to be found in his book Bohemians of The Bulletin, a series of sketches of some of the well known people he knew, set against Sydney’s past. There’s even a drawing of Sydney with an array of people from all over the world and a background which is a forest of sailing ship masts. Lindsay thrived under Archibald’s humane oversight, and his art developed and expanded, even while the 40 years or more of pen and ink continued to erupt like lava from a satirically inclined Vesuvius. His painting in particular developed, painting models and the nudes for which moralists throughout the land were to eternally hound him. The Australian term for moralist is “wowser”, and as a term defining a generally despised collection of killjoys, it remains in force. A more illiterate, ignorant group of alleged mammals would be hard to find, even with so many of the species working in modern media today. That bad. Any concept of art was lost in the implied immorality of Lindsay’s nudes and bacchanal scenes. This is where the myth of Lindsay as some form of artistic satyr began, in the orgies in other people’s minds. At the time, it was a form of neo-Puritanism which had simply decided that it was the only moral authority. However grotesque, the criticism didn’t help in a conservative nation which was still largely rural, and about as well educated. Not that Lindsay seems to have been too smitten with the error of his ways. He produced a torrent of works on those themes. Some of his most flamboyant work, in fact, emphasizes exactly those ideas. Huge cascades of human figures, nudes, crash down on the viewer from the paintings. Technically, it’s tough enough art without the added minefield of a supply of turgid little souls feverishly writing articles condemning it. There’s a form of visual luxury in the paintings that few artists would attempt, knowing how much work was involved in doing them. Lindsay started as a pen and ink man, and that probably gave him the stamina to deal with paintings involving a particularly thankless amount of brush work. His color’s worth a good long look, too, for its handling of the light perspectives. To paint bright light scenes can be infuriatingly difficult. If you’ve seen the various old masters who’ve managed to trip over their own lighting at one time or another, you’ll know what I mean. The other problem is to avoid the Raphaelite effect of static light. The pre-Raphaelites went mad with color, and good luck to them, but sometimes it just doesn’t work as lighting. Lindsay had the unenviable artistic problem of dealing with an “unascribed” light source, and the risk is creating something that looks very like a cartoon, or a mass of inconsistencies. Lindsay as a writer is an overlooked talent in many ways, despite the success of Age of Consent (predates Lolita by several years) and The Magic Pudding, which is an all time favorite kids’ book. He’s a very insightful and thoughtful writer, and doesn’t let himself get in the way of stories about himself. No minor triumph for any writer. One of his books was banned of course, probably for referring to the idea of there being two sexes. He’s a very good storyteller, too, one of the great forgotten arts of literature, and he could give lessons to some. The biographies contain a lot of things about life at the time which history has managed to overlook, too. I only recognize them myself because my father was born in 1910, and told me a bit about them. He met Lindsay, too. It was a very small art community in Australia, then. Now, it’s a jungle. Lindsay’s generation achieved that, too. His entourage of critical idiots remained with him, although their effect seems to have been non-existent regarding the content of his work. He took up sculpture, and although his place at Springwood probably doesn’t have a pyramid, a sort of bush version of the Valley Of The Kings may wouldn’t have been entirely out of place. His work from this period is extensive, it would need a catalogue, rather than an article. (Despite the sheer amount of material he produced, he also managed in the course of this new odyssey to produce a book called Norman Lindsay’s Cats, including some very feline characters. A book no cat lover should live without.) Lindsay’s great legacy, to me, is his humor. It’s always there, in the oceans of ink work, in the paintings, and in the books. It’s a good, dry, kindly sort of humor which is simply in another league and another world from the imbecile ignorance he encountered. I was hoping to get some original material from the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, but not to be. The copyright owners refused permission for reproduction of images from the web site, probably for a good reason, but I am trying to convert the North American heathen here. So the Wiki site’s the main source, being undisputed domain. You will also see why I didn’t attempt a biography. It was a very long, very dusty road. It’s difficult to structure a life story around mere chronology with this level of artistic output. It’s also pretty irrelevant in some ways. Lindsay was a bit more than “brief” about his personal life; he was stone silent in many ways, and I sense that’s the way he preferred it. Note: Lindsay worked in a time when there was no such thing as political correctness, or anything resembling it. Some of the material is direct from the culture of the time. Wiki refers to this as “right wing”, but in practice Australia was worried about being on the doorstep of Asia, and decidedly Euro-centric in its allegiances despite the new nationalism. The Yellow Peril was seen as an actual threat, and the White Australia policy was in full drone. Norman Lindsay Art Gallery and Museum. It really is worth a good look, contains the best set of references, and you can see why I wanted to get something from it for the article.