It is always a pleasure to revisit regional galleries, and a stop-over at the Benalla Art Gallery is always a must on a trip along the Hume. Its collection is centred around the Ledger Gift of late 19th and early to mid 20th Century Australian art, and the Bennett Bequest, which allows the gallery to acquire works by modern and contemporary Australian artists.
The highlights of the permanent collection, usually on display in the front gallery, included such works as William Piguenit’s Mt Wellington at Sunrise with sweet little pink clouds; a beautifully atmospheric Louis Buvelot of The Barwon; sparkling pieces by Ethel Carrick Fox and Emanuel Phillips Fox; Arthur Streeton’s fresh study for The Golden Summers (the final version of which is at the National Gallery of Australia); several French landscapes by Rupert Bunny; a large-scale Clara Southern; and several good landscapes by Grace Cossington-Smith.
Australian Moderns are represented by a striking and menacing Charles Blackman of Flinders Street Station of 1950; and a cheerful and playful 1950s John Perceval of Children Playing at Aspendale among others.
Contemporary Australian artists are represented in the gallery’s collection by Ivan Durrant’s Judy Garland in Green of 1974; a vast Tim Storrier of Incendiary Structure; and a striking painting by Leonard French, which greets visitors at the entrance. Although the gallery has significant works by Juan Davila and Howard Arkley, these were not on display; sadly missing from display was also the monumental The Arc by Rick Amor, commemorating the destruction caused by 2002 bush fires around Benalla.
Through the energetic networking and fundraising efforts of its indefatigable director, Simon Klose, the gallery has also attracted a number of high-profile gifts under the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Tax Incentive for the Arts Scheme, which were on display in its annual Recent Acquisitions 2008 exhibition. The exhibition was notable for a significant number of paintings by Aboriginal Artists, such as sisters Angelina, Poly, and Kathleen Ngal, Cowboy Loy Pwerl, and numerous others.
The highlight of the current installation is an exhibition of paintings by the late John Lennox (1940-1996). His paintings, many featuring the nude, are executed with a high degree of naturalism mixing the quality of old masters with the unmistakeable contemporary objectivity. They have an arresting and disturbing multiplicity of meanings, erotic, dark and menacing.
For example, his Drum Man 1, 2 & 3 could be read either as a contemporary take on Diogenes, a Greek philosopher, who made a virtue of extreme poverty and lived in a tub; or a disturbingly realistic and unforgiving contemporary depiction of a homeless derelict, who made his home in an oil drum.
The Red Phone, which is slung across the back of many nudes in his paintings could either stand for phone sex, or a call for help from a suicide victim which was never made. Lennox’s Madonna Contemplating Nude and Man in Pipe are re-writing art history, with images derived from sources as diverse as Cimabue and Australian Heidelberg School. The introduction of a hung-up upside-down nude is rather disturbing, and can be read either as a depiction of a scene from an art drawing class or a scene of torture.
The obsession with death and suicides continues through paintings like Man at Water’s Edge, which shows an ambiguous figure of a naked man in the shallows of a river either bathing of contemplating suicide; Ophelia, which shows the body of a contemporary sister of the ill-fated Shakespearean heroine floating alongside a naked body of (who we may presume to be) her Hamlet; or in a series of multi-figure compositions that combine the post-impressionism of Bonnard and Vuillard, fin-de-siècle backgrounds of Gustav Klimt, and the contemporary graffiti.
John Lennox is not an artist who immediately springs to mind in the wider context of Australian art, but given the painterly quality and the psychological depth of his works, he is undoubtedly ought to be regarded as one of Australia’s most outstanding artists. Regional and tertiary galleries are fortunate in their ability to provide much-needed exhibitions for artists whose oeuvre may have been overlooked by the national or state collections.
PS: On a slightly lighter note, the Gallery Café at the Benalla Art Gallery is a definite must. I’ve tasted many of its delicious morsels over the years: it caters for everything from small sweet and savoury snacks, to fully cooked meals; and the quality of their coffee was approved with flying colours by my friend the committed coffee snob.
© Eugene Barilo von Reisberg, 2009
Tags: Art, Australian Art, Australian Painting, Benalla, Benalla Art Gallery, Contemporary Art, Contemporary Painting, International Art, John Lennox, National Gallery of Victoria, Painting
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