1931
I should say that [Arthur] Streeton has seen and thought of more and finer things in our landscape than any other painter, and that what he has not elected to use would provide material for plenty of first-rate pictures. And what he sees and thinks of and feels he implements beyond any right to expect that we may entertain.
Painting explicitly his work is full of implication. By his hand the conscious and the unconscious are welded. Mystery with him does not demand twilight; viewless midday also holds it. Invisible magic flutes tell us what is there though we cannot see it.
Is this far fetched? Well, let it seem to be; but it is a poor art which bears no hints of unseen things. For me, Streeton’s major canvasses have in them music akin to great overtures; golden, morning stuff, melodious and Grecian. To me they point to the way in which life should be lived in Australia, with the maximum of flocks and the minimum of factories. But we have to be like the rest of the world, feeling out of it if we cannot blow as many get-to-work whistles, punch as many bundy-clocks, and show as much smoke and squalor as places that cannot escape such curses.
I am for the Streetonian view, for his pictures to me are like the description of Australia I should expect from Theocritus set to music by Mozart.
Out upon your clatter and dirt as necessary to development! How did Aristotle manage to survive without the talkies? Or blind Homer without earphones? Or Shakespeare without a tin Lizzie?
If we so choose we can yet be the elect of the world, the last of the pastoralists, the thoroughbred Aryans in all their nobility.
Let others if they are bent upon it mass produce themselves into robotry; thinking and looking like mechanical monkeys chained to organs whose tunes are furnished by rivetting machines.
We do not need to do these things. We have the pastoral land, and if we do not realise it sufficiently well, we have Streeton’s pictures to stress the miraculousness of it. That is it; ours is the world’s Pastoral and all it implies of herds and flocks and vines and hives, orchards, olives and grain. Are smokestacks prettier or healthier than groves or do they give rise to finer deeper emotions? Hardly.
On dissection of one’s thoughts on Streeton’s work I should think one’s appreciation would disclose itself as gratitude for being shown something which one ought to have seen, but which one didn’t, until it was made apparent by one who saw better, more beautifully, further into the matter and who had the skill, won to by great pains, to reveal to us a fair proportion of what he saw and felt.
Art in Australia: Arthur Streeton Number,
3rd Series, Number 40, Sydney, 1931