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Sept/Oct 2010

Bringing the outside in > NSW
May Lane is a very short street in Sydney’s inner west Read More

Cream of the crop > NSW
The Museum of Contemporary Art becomes a hive of activity in preparation for Primavera, Read More

Drawing NOW > VIC
A single black bullet is drawn starkly upon a plain white ground. Read More

Melbourne Art Fair 2010 > VIC
No one could accuse Melbourne Art Fair organisers of treading too lightly. Read More

Social capital
Craig Walsh’s Digital Odyssey is epic Read More

To fair, or not too fair > VIC
Never before has alternative culture been so mainstream. Read More

Weird scenes inside the Art Museum
There’s a scene in the brilliant recent Australian film Animal Kingdom Read More

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Hans Heysen (SA)

By Stephanie Radok

When I meet her for coffee the softly spoken Rebecca Andrews, Assistant Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, has just returned from a field trip to the Flinders Ranges with the South Australian Museum’s Waterhouse Club where she was showing a group of its members the sites where Hans Heysen painted many of his most memorable works. Andrews gave lectures at each location but made sure to leave a mystery site for the party to ponder. Previously a curator at Castlemaine Art Gallery she is now steeped in Heysen material and could be said to be able to see with his eyes after curating the major Heysen exhibition for the Art Gallery of South Australia.
For two years Andrews has been reading Heysen’s wide correspondence and looking at his works, and yet she admits that there are still unexamined corners of his life. Like the details of any encounters he may have had with Aboriginal people in the Flinders Ranges, where he camped almost every year from 1926 to 1949. Heysen’s most striking work, and interestingly it is the watercolour that is outstanding not the oil painting he made of the same image, is called The Land of the Oratunga thus seeming to make reference to the people whose land he is painting and acknowledging their ownership. Yet Oratunga is not the name of an Aboriginal language group or tribe but is, according to the State Library of South Australia, an Aboriginal word meaning ‘unknown’. Thus the painting takes on the status of a tomb to the unknown warrior, a memorial to the unknown, i.e. ‘lost’ tribes to whom it once belonged. The emotional charge in the work is a homage to these people and a reflection on how the land may have shaped them.
“Heysen’s paintings of the Flinders Ranges are definitely the highlights of his career for our eyes," says Andrews. "While his work was considered very anti-modern, when he went to the Flinders Ranges his work became modern. And he was aware of that, writing to Sydney Ure Smith: ‘There are scenes ready made, which seem to say here is the very thing you moderns are trying to paint. Fine big simple forms against clear transparent skies – and a sense of spaciousness everywhere.’ ”

Hans Heysen, Australia 1877 - 1968, Droving into the light 1914-1921,
oil on canvas, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. Gift of Mr W. H. Vincent 1922.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

“Thus,” says Andrews, “there was something coming from the land that influenced what he did. For the first time the landscape was determining the art rather than his art determining the landscape.”
A centenary retrospective exhibition of Heysen’s work was curated for the Art Gallery of South Australia by Ian North in 1977. 2008 is the fortieth anniversary of Heysen’s death and it is eighty years since his Flinders Ranges works were first shown.
“The exhibition is very large,” says Andrews, “Altogether 121 works have been sourced from the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, nearly every state collection and important private collections. While the show will travel the majority of the private works will only be seen in Adelaide.” It was a demanding task for Andrews to choose the best works from the oeuvre of this very prolific artist who gave more than two thousand drawings, oils and watercolours to the Art Gallery of South Australia.
One of the areas she especially focused upon, apart from the Flinders Ranges pieces and Heysen’s middle period tree paintings, is a sense of his early promise in lesser known works made in his student years and sketchbooks from his travels in Europe including watercolours of
Paris and Venice.
In South Australia a Heysen pilgrimage can include a visit to heritage site The Cedars, Heysen’s house, garden and studio, where works by both Hans and Nora Heysen are on show. Then there is the Hahndorf Academy where the annual Heysen Prize for Interpretation of Place previously known as the Heysen Prize for Landscape is held and some of Heysen’s charcoal drawings are always on show. In many ways Heysen’s legacy is an unexamined one, his work is often seen as simple nationalism but maybe really it was about the importance of locality and the appreciation and conservation of nature, and wildness.

Hans Heysen Australia, 1877 - 1968, Sallie (the artist's wife)
1912, charcoal on paper, 37.5 x 27.9 cm. Private collection.

Art Gallery of South Australia

Stephanie Radok is an artist, writer and editor based in Adelaide.