Apportioning gilt.(Elwyn Lynn's Art World by Patricia Anderson)(Book Review)

Elwyn Lynn's Art World, by Patricia Anderson; Pandora, 2002, $49.95 (see next page).

THIS BOOK is a fascinating introduction to taste, fashion, gossip and criticism in the Australian art world during the three decades from 1960 to 1990. The book probably took the shape that it has because Lynn's wife informed the author, after she had spent many hours in conversation with her, that she and her daughter would prefer someone else to write the book. Permission was withheld for the author to reproduce transparencies and photographs with which she had been provided. In her foreword she says, understandably, "it is a difficult business--for the writer and the reader--to describe paintings with no recourse to the images".

The work brought home to me how much has changed in the last forty years. In the sixties and seventies when I visited Sydney I used to take two days to visit the numerous galleries in Darlinghurst and Paddington, particularly in Glenmore Road and the outer reaches of Double Bay. So many of them have disappeared. I remember seeing my first Edwin Tanner at, I think, Gallery A, but it, Holdsworth, Bonython, the Macquarie gallery, Barry Stern and Rudy Komon are no more than names which in the next thirty years will probably be footnotes in a comprehensive art history of the period. Perhaps not quite as ephemeral, but nonetheless of much reduced prominence and popularity today, are many of the artists of those years, such as Thomas Gleghorn, Carl Plate, Lynn himself and Donald Laycock, to name just a few.

The book puts into perspective the victory, for the time being at least, of figurative art over abstraction, hard edge and pop art. In the auction rooms, in the commercial galleries, and indeed, even in the financial pages of the broadsheets, the names of Jeffrey Smart, John Brack, Fred Williams, Howard Arkley, Garry Shead, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan are the ones that command the respect of auctioneer, dealer, amateur and investor.

The book revisits many of the controversies of the period. Blue Poles is, as Patricia Anderson points out, regarded now in the United States and elsewhere as a great masterpiece, for the purchase of which James Mollison should be highly praised. It is perhaps a pity that in her discussion of this topic she does not explore the questions of whether the price paid at the time was over the odds and whether a purchase by a public gallery at a very high price in a blaze of publicity and controversy may itself create, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, an entirely new market for a particular artist.

I would have liked to read a reasoned dissertation on the question of whether curators and directors sometimes fail to apply the rigour in purchasing that the unsubsidised market constituted by collectors, and dare I say it investors, generally applies to their purchases. It would also have been of interest to know something more about what was possibly Mollison's greatest coup, the acquisition of the superb ballet material which the National Gallery holds. However, Patricia Anderson could hardly fairly be blamed for not covering every artistic event during the period in a book about but one leading figure of it. By covering so much ground in the readable way in which she has she does however make you wish for more.

One of the main achievements of the book is the review which it offers of art criticism itself during the period. There are many instances of this. To some readers they might suggest that critics, when confronted with the abstract, take the opportunity to practise their own aesthetic expression about what may have little intrinsic aesthetic appeal itself, no matter how impressive, imposing, daunting, ...