• This essay was written in 1985

ART-NETWORK 57 Winter 1985 Issue 16

Dr David Bromfield Written in 1985

HOWARD TAYLOR

Art Gallery of Western Australia

April 13 to June 2 1985

It has always been difficult for West Australian art to achieve
recognition outside the State. This is partly a matter of perspective,
the West Australian experience is different. Then there is the old problem
of distance which before the Second War tended to prevent many
artists here from being noticed at all. By the 1950's however, there
was something else which prompted Max Harris when visiting the
Perth festival in 1954 to comment on the insulation rather than the
isolation of the West Australian art world, By then distance was no
excuse.

This insular attitude goes some way to explain the failure of post war
modernists in Western Australia such as Guy Grey Smith,
Elise Blumann or Howard Taylor to make any impact outside the state.
It also explains why it is only in the last few years that
these artists have begun to receive recognition for their particular
contribution to the Australian understanding of modernism. West
Australia's modernist prophets were without much honour in their own
country and lacked the international context which would have
given them credibility as cultural missionaries.

While we have a pretty clear sense of the continuing careers of Nolan,
Boyd or Tucker, there is no such clarity about the role of artists
such as Howard Taylor which makes this exhibition a vital revelation.
It shows him as a major figure in Post War Australian art with a
shrewd grasp of the options offered by modernism. He was able to use
constructivism and surrealism in the context of that optimistic
attitude to technology which was central to all modernist belief in
the post war period. Moreover, he was able to develop the technique and
determination necessary to shape this range of examples to the specific
experiences of the West.

Taylor was born in Victoria in 1918 but soon after moved to Perth with
his family. He fell in love with art and flying while still at school
or to be more exact, conceived a passion for a range of experience
which these interests seemed equally able to support.
There was still an aesthetic transparency about aeronautical
engineering in the 1930's when one man could sit down and design the
Spitfire in his backroom. The shaping and gluing of the ribs and
sections of an aircraft's wing or fuselage is a specific appreciable
act of making. The computer controlled welding of a 747 could hardly offer the same poetic involvement, In the thirties, Taylor made several
marvellous model planes which would have been the pride of any hobby
shop. It was the beginning of his courtship of the closeness of
making and doing, an attitude that he was to bring directly to
sculpture as his statement in the catalogue shows: When I first
started making things I had this background of aeroplane structure,
you make a plane and you cover it, that sort of thing.
But I also found in looking at the fragments of trees
around that I became interested not only
in the outer structure of the tree but the inner structure of the
tree. The tree has always fascinated me
as a unit from the roots through the trunks to the branches.

Paul Klee was the first artist to make this "technical" description of
a tree in his Pedagogic Sketchbook in 1926 and Taylor's
modernism is clearly dependent on such sources.
In 1937, his passion for flying led him to join the RAAF. As a result
he was captured in France in 1940 and spent most of the war in
POW camps. He drew and painted with the hobby materials supplied by the Red Cross.
Several of these war time works are in the exhibition. They are strong tonal watercolours with a concern for traditional sculptural values, solid void and volume.

Taylor is a bush modernist. As with Nolan or Boyd, his work can be
seen to be a product of the interaction of a version of international
modernism with the particular material and social experience of
Australia. However, unlike his eastern states contemporaries, Taylor
has never felt the need for a myth of the outback.
For Taylor, the bush is neither the location of the possible birth of
a white Australian identity, nor of a threatening, all pervasive curse,
to which white Australia is bound by its guilty struggle for dominance
over the land and its people. Rather, it is part of a material practice,
giving rise to a unique perception and poetry.
His art lacks the problems, the ideological baggage, which goes with
the well known "Australians" of the fifties. Significantly, he has
always lived where city becomes bushland, which happens very suddenly
in Perth.

He works as a bush artist in the same spirit as the bush engineer,
making the techniques of his art appropriate to place.
His double self portrait of 1949 to 1950 made shortly after his return
to Australia shows his determination to make a practical
modernism. He stands with his arm raised to his eye encircling its
brightness with finger and thumb. This image of the artist as material
visionary was first used by Joshua Reynolds founder of the Royal
Academy in his self portrait. Taylor fully understood the grafting of
modernism on to the peculiar characterisation that the British had
given the artist as his reference to Reynolds proves. But he was to add
Australian energy and practicality to this gentle Anglo-Saxon avantgardism.
The painting shows that he knew the problems of cubism. Even some of
its details, such as hair, are reminiscent of Picasso and Gris.
The current problems of the picture plane and cubist space are faced
up to in the fragile double framing of the portrait. This a
considerably more subtle understanding of these matters than anyone
else in Australia had managed by 1950 - However, the open neck
shirt and leather belted trousers are the unlooked for signs of the
pioneer, the engineer constructor, a role that was to dominate Taylor's
later career.

In the 1950's, though, he was mainly a painter inspired by the
compromise of English landscape painting and surrealism achieved by
Paul Nash. He made a long series of paintings in elaborate mix of egg
tempera and other media. These paintings are extraordinarily
disciplined, their surfaces are unique in their subtlety and control
of each element of colour to give an atmosphere similar in its
stillness to a Poussin. Nash too was interested in an intense stillness in his
landscapes but he always looked to mystery, to folk lore, or the marks
of ancient lives on the landscape in runes, field patterns or barrows.
Lacking the history, Taylor manages to get surface and light alone to
carry the same intense sense of the human. Pine Trees 1953 is a
marvellous painting from this group, typically it shows figures
beside a lake beneath the pines, a mother, child and man spreading a
blanket; a boy rescuing a ball floating in the still surface of the lake.
It was probably the desire to experience the human action as even more
closely bound to the work which led Taylor to become a sculptor by the end of the fifties.

He wanted the closest thing possible to a totem for the practical, not an
illustration for a myth or a symbol.
In 1950 Elise Blumann made some paintings of the blackboy*, treating
the subject as a mysterious survivor from an ancient phase of
evolution. When Taylor studied the blackboy he saw a structure; a
series of geometrical planes fantastic enough in themselves.
If one leaves aside the question of which of these polarities of
modernism most denies the spurious "authenticity" of the outback, it
becomes clear that Taylor's viewpoint is found much less frequently
amongst Australian modernists; his only counterparts being Frank
and Margel Hinder.

I have always disliked the large monumental sculpture The Black Stump
in St Georges Terrace, Perth. It appears as a corporate
constructivist stonehenge, made more inaccessible by the use of mosaic
surfaces. However, with the opportunity to see the egg tempera
paintings, stumps and ash of 1951, the work, although still far from a
credible monument, is successful as an image of the practical,
constructive imagination. That very imagination allows Taylor to
transgress the idea of truth to materials and cause the difficulties
that I had in reading the work.

The same problem is met in Tree forms 1971, a group of carved tree
trunks. At first it is impossible to accept that sections of the
work have been treated with household enamel. But this is a practical
aesthetic where misgivings about improvisation of materials have
as little relevance as the misgivings of Rolls Royce about farmers
using their limousines to move sheep.

Some of Taylor's most fascinating works are his small models and
sculptural maquettes. At first they appear as Australian versions of
the object fascination of the surrealists, in particular the "found
objects" of Henry Moore. Yet this is to miss their literalness, their
practicality just as many people still miss the point of Duchamp's
coffee grinder. One such object from 1956 uses a small steel ball to
strike a musical sequence from a cage of pitched steel rods. The whole
thing is mounted on an old bed spring. It is the kind of object
parents might make for their children. Other small objects made of
plastic foam wood or metal all have the same model like fascination;
constructed, rather than found.

One of the most exciting series Taylor undertook were the paintings
and sculpture with the title Flight. The paintings Flight of the
Magpie 1956 or Flight from the same year immediately recall Picabia's
use of technical forms, In Flight, a series of concentric
circles in silver foil suggests a rapid movement forward of the
picture plane towards the spectator while a superimposed bird image,
reminiscent of a Brancusi, moves sideways across them. These movements
are found again in the elaborate maquettes in which similar
three dimensional circles recall jet propulsion lab photos.
Taylor's legible practicality is an important contribution to
Australian modernism. It is a pity the exhibition is not to tour. A
start should be made in undoing West Australian insulation as soon as possible.

*The common name for a native plant

Image accompanying text :

Howard Taylor, Double Self-Portrait 1949-1950
Oil on composition board
Collection of Howard Taylor