But it was Russell who found the true treasure island – Belle Île, off the west coast of France. Satisfying his search for fulfilment, he discovered an overflowing chest of brilliant pigments: love, family, and creative companionship in the continual flow of visiting artists. His great friend Van Gogh had struggled to achieve his dream of an art colony in Arles, failing miserably at his first and only attempt through irreconcilably violent conflict with Gauguin in the Yellow House. On the other hand, such a colony grew organically on Belle Île as a reflection of the Australian’s sympathetic and empathetic approach to all with whom he came in contact. Gauguin was the only exception. His disgraceful, syphilis-spreading attitude towards women was never to be countenanced.

More Fauve than Impressionist, Fishing Boats, Goulphar, 1900, a view of Belle Île from the sea, shows Russell at his creative peak. Searching for honesty and humanity, he lays open his entire life for all to see: it’s a painted autobiography.

As Russell viewed the sea, he noticed the fishing boats’ red sails had a strong visual impact with their powerful, brilliant, raw scarlet reflections. During his teenage voyages, Russell made his first tentative attempts at drawing and painting, mentally committing to art as his future. The sunsets and sunrises, doubled in power by their uninterrupted reflections, reminiscent of an Australian bushfire, must have made an indelible imprint on the emerging artist. With his never-dying love for boats, boat-building, and the sea, Fishing Boats, Goulphar shows how deep into his soul he reaches to paint.

Finding the perfect colours to express how he felt about nature was a dominating obsession with Russell, as repeated many times in the letters he wrote to his old travelling mate, Tom Roberts, back in Australia. Russell had painted side by side with Monet on Belle Île, mastering the Impressionist technique so expertly that Monet was compelled in a letter to a companion to say: ‘That friendly Australian chap’s paintings are better than mine. ‘

But Impressionism wasn’t enough. Likewise, the scientific approach of Seurat and Pissaro, with its colour spectrum theories of dots and dashes, left him cold. He needed something more direct, more brilliant to tell his story. The only way out was to grind his own pigments in an inner search for accurate colour and a new approach. How perfectly he tells it in paint, on the cliffs at Belle Île: echoing that gold and green pure light dancing and flickering through the rich wet tropical leaves. The bright red and orange tropical flowers that he’d discovered when sailing through the Coral Sea to the Orient – such a harmonious backdrop to the sunset sails.

Then unexpectedly, right through the centre of the cliffs, he places a deep, dark gorge leading down to the water, menacing with its sense of evil and foreboding. The heavy blues and greens express tension against the contrasting landscape and sea. It’s a warning: ‘Attempt to leave your island home and friends, head back to sea… you may be heading to your death.’ All that Russell desired was anchored at the top of that cliff: his home, wife Marianne, nine children and his extended family of creative friends. He’d been denied family as a boy when his dominating father sent him from Sydney to boarding school at Goulburn, 200 kilometres from home. Later, as a teenager, sent to sea on a shipboard apprenticeship. He knew loneliness but had the personality to overcome it, making friends wherever he went, no more so than in the art world where many leading British, French, American and Australian artists spent time at Belle Île. Some came to learn how to paint under his guidance, like Matisse, and others sought comfort, like Rodin during his most depressing period, when the establishment had shunned his sculpture of Balzac. Russell praised it and immediately commissioned a bust of Marianne.

Fishing Boats, Goulphar, marks a turning point in art history and cements Russell as a creative and leading innovator. As he said to Matisse: ‘A new way of painting will evolve on the shoulders of Impressionism.’ Russell found it using broad areas of colour in a poetic expression of mood. And it was only five years later, in 1905, that Matisse headed the exhibition that first gave the Fauves their name – the so-called ‘Wild beasts’, for their use of broad raw colour areas to achieve the same end as Russell.

Unfortunately for John Peter Russell, his insistence on not competing with his fellow artists through exhibitions led to his outstanding achievements being partly undiscovered and sadly undervalued. He should be placed at the top of the art tree with his great friends Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse and Rodin.

John Peter Russell
Fishing boats, Goulphar, 1900
Oil on canvas
Art Gallery of Ballarat

It was the end of 1975 and the leading American Super Realists, Chuck Close and Janet Fish, had just exhibited at Tolarno Galleries in St Kilda with my then dealer Georges Mora. Georges had already sold one of my Super Realist (photorealist) paintings through a leading gallery in New York. I said to my wife: ‘Let’s just get over there and mix it.’

In September 1976, with Judy and my two children, Jamie 4 and Jacqui 6, I spent the first night at the so-called famous Chelsea Hotel. Yes, there was a huge Brett Whitely in the foyer and the Rolling stones had stayed there, as did anyone hip and famous at the time. But one night was enough: what a sleazy dump. The corridors were lined with people out to it on heroin, our room had saucers with rat bait in the corner, and some drug-crazed maniac screamed and banged at our locked door all night threatening to kill us. We got out at six in the morning and headed downtown to Soho.

Luckily for us, Australian painter Bob Jacks, the resident frontman at the famous Broome Street Bar, had secured us a gigantic, ex-factory-floor loft in SoHo. It was about a five-kilometre walk carrying two suitcases, dodging doggie doodoo, with two bewildered children in hand. We were stopped at least twenty times by locals staring at my wife and children and wanting to touch their hair. Everybody in New York had black hair, so with red hair they could have been from outer space. But to me it was this land, this New York, that was completely alien.

The cityscape was so foreign. I couldn’t believe how dull, how grey, the sky and light was, even on a day the home crowd considered full of brilliant sunlight. The place was devoid of nature: tall buildings, dark shadowy windswept streets full of litter and cast-offs, steam pouring out of dirty roadways and shopfronts with advertising and neon all over them. It was almost impossible to cross a road without being skittled by a yellow-dinted taxi or flashy chrome-polished Pontiac, Buick or Cadillac. The only open spaces were a carpark or a cyclone-fenced, bitumen’d, graffiti-covered basketball court. But the noise dominated: the continual bipping of horns and those non-stop sirens – police, ambulance and fire trucks – blasting all day and night. I’d often wake in the middle of the night thinking the whole city was on fire.

Settling in to SoHo was a breeze as Janet Fish, who had stayed with us in Melbourne, arranged a dinner party at her loft to welcome us. Guests included Chuck Close who lived above her, a couple of writers and a puppeteer who performed for our kids. One puppet was a ventriloquist doll with its own ventriloquist doll sitting on its lap – what a great concept.

SoHo was the centre of the universe for art in the Seventies, and what a great place it was. Seeing Debbie Harry or John and Yoko walking the streets was quite normal. Every street block had an art gallery on every corner; even going to four openings a night, seven nights a week, which we did for six months, we still couldn’t see it all. It wasn’t unusual to finish up at a party at some random artist’s studio at least two nights a week. It was at one such soirée that Warhol swapped me a pair of his sunglasses for a pair of R.M.Williams boots. I was never quite sure whether the Warhol gathering was a party, a celebration, or if we were just part of an art happening he was filming.

The first galleries we visited were Louis Meisel Gallery in Prince Street and OK Harris in West Broadway, both jam-packed full of Super Realist paintings. They were all there: Robert Cottingham, Don Eddy, Ralph Goings, Richard McLean, and at least 10 others, except for Janet Fish and Chuck Close, who exhibited uptown. It was like walking into the Sistine Chapel the day after Michelangelo finished painting his ceiling. I was totally knocked out; instantly, I understood the enormity of Super Realism. I’d walked through their city for a few days now, but not being a New Yorker I saw the world through fresh virgin eyes, the eyes they were offering the viewers – the joy of observation. There was a detachment, a non-involvement with the melancholy or morality of the subject; the paintings were a clear statement of seeing the real world for what it was and what it had become, without preaching. They had found a new way to the truth; painters before had attempted in some way or other to achieve realism, but with judgement and nuance. Art had lost, or maybe never had a way to see the real world.

Up to this time art had culminated in Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field and Hard-edge Abstraction. Art had become its own subject, and a highly valued and traded commodity. America and Australia were in a deep mess over the Vietnam War and the public was becoming restless over the censored information and news footage they were being fed. It became glaringly obvious there was a need for truth when leaked photographs and film footage revealed the real horror of war: a look at where our greed, exploitation and modern consumerism had led us. Someone had to freeze the world in its tracks and take a good hard look. That’s what the Super Realists did.

The insistence on photographs as a source material guaranteed that the artists accepted what was in front of them as something worth looking at. Yes, they were banal in a sense – street scenes, shopfronts, neon signs, cars and bumper bars – but there’s no doubt there was something new and questioning about the focus on the objects around us at a particular moment in time.

Look at Richard Estes’s work: his glass shopfronts bombarded us with so many reflections, and distortions of reflections on those reflections, that the shops almost became ghosts of other shops. It takes a lot of concentration and changing of focus to see this truthful situation if you’re standing in front of a shop. You’re inclined to just look at the goods in the window. But how amazing, how telling of the world around us is Estes’ window? He makes no attempt to glorify or condemn the world in his window, but to me, the result gives a new optimism as it opens up the real world around us.

For all the great art in New York, it was the Museum of Natural History on West Broadway that had the greatest influence on me. Feasting on amazement and awe, I visited and photographed diorama after diorama for at least six weeks – talk about Super Realism! The backdrops and sculpted foregrounds were so convincing, their stuffed animals placed so eerily in such a natural way, that it was hard to convince myself I wasn’t on the spot, in some jungle or African plain. I’m telling you, the illusion was staggering. Somehow these animal-filled environments behind shop-like glass windows fitted so well with the current art movement.

Back in Melbourne in 1977 I built my own diorama, a butcher’s shop. Quality Meats is a free-standing shop where the sculpted meat in the window looks so life-like, or should I say, death-like, that even I’m convinced it’s the real thing. It’s not a patch on the vastness of a real butcher’s shop; nevertheless its honesty in realism compels the viewer to contemplate, and whatever they contemplate is up to them.

Super Realism didn’t just have its distrusters, it was openly condemned for years as scorn raged on its painters for daring to copy photographs and call it art. It was an affront to all the art learning, criticism and practice that had preceded it. We all know and understand how hideous the condemning of Impressionism, back in its heyday, appears today. When Matisse painted The Joy of Life in 1906 it was a leading Impressionist and member of the Avant-garde, Paul Signac, who himself complained the loudest. Signac said Matisse had ‘gone to the dogs’. He called Matisse’s use of colour disgusting and said it was ‘reminiscent of shopfronts of the merchants of paints, varnishes and household goods’. Yet when Picasso painted Les demoiselles d’Avignon, it was Matisse, in turn, who was outraged, claiming that Picasso had painted it to ridicule the Modern Movement. It’s now 40-plus years since the beginning of Super Realism and the world is finally catching up to its significance as an art movement.

Article Hero image:
Don Eddy, Untitled, 1971, Acrylic on Canvas, 121.9 x 167.6 cm
Photo © museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien

It’s not necessary to know how the artist arrived at the work, or what was in their mind. Your job as a viewer is just to look – allow the image to wash over you. In my mind the first impact is the most important, where your unfettered emotions work the strongest. It’s the purest connection between you and the artist. So never think a learned art critic is any better equipped than you or anyone else at taking in the artist’s emotion and message.

Talking of first impact, let me tell you about the two paintings by Albert Tucker I saw on my last two visits to Heide Art Gallery.

Last Friday I was taken aback by Albert Tucker’s confronting painting Apocalyptic Horse, 1956. It exploded with powerful emotion. What a shock –– which immediately drenched me in horror and sorrow. The head of this dead horse, burnt dry by the sun and time on a sky mimicking yellow desert; embalmed in its own leather skin. Shrunken into almost a skeleton with cavernous empty pits for eyes and grotesque teeth barely staying in the skull.

I know this horse must have died from lack of food or water and was part of the perils of an Australian outback drought. Tucker is so skilful with his trademark deeply gouged furrows and wrinkled skin, as to leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that what was once a beautiful shiny – skin’d steed, had met with disaster, and time had worn it away even more.

Apocalyptic Horse reminded me so much of Tucker’s portrait (of) Sunday Reed,1984 I saw at Heide a couple of months ago. The same shock, horror, sadness and disaster.

Why is every portrait of Sunday Reed so ravaged with time, so savage and mean-looking, especially when compared to the dozens he painted of friends: Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Danila Vasilieff etc. At first glance, that first impact makes her appear in the throes of death, only just alive, and decaying in her own skin. Like the horse, her teeth too, are twisted, loose: protruding skeleton-like from receding gums, her flesh also deeply furrowed, withered and dried over time.

Tucker emphasises the mood with his treatment of her arm and wrist: it’s not human. It’s the bone of a dead horse or cow, covered in stretched dried leather.

The similarities between these two paintings is no accident. One explanation could stem from Tucker’s deep and lasting friendship with Sidney Nolan, and Nolan’s falling out with the Reeds.

Tucker and Nolan collaborated on exhibitions and spent a lot of time supporting each other away from Australia – in fact, Apocalyptic Horse was inspired by a photograph of a dead horse taken by Sidney Nolan in 1952 called Brian the Stockman at Wave Hill Mounting Dead Horse, and given to Tucker by Nolan in London. They were both original members of the Heide group in the 1940s along with Tucker’s then wife, Joy Hester. I have read and been informed by many friends of Albert Tucker how upset he was when the Reeds refused to give Nolan back his Ned Kelly series. Part of the Reed’s claim was that Sunday had a hand in creating them, and that they had supported Sidney Nolan during that time. Possibly Tucker is expressing his disdain for Sunday Reed’s degradation of generosity and maybe even of moral values over time.

What also convinces me this could have been Tucker’s approach is his treatment of the fireplace. It hasn’t got a warm satisfying yellow flame glow, but more a deep red menacing hellish appearance. And like a trophy sitting on the mantlepiece, Tucker has placed one of his Modern Evil sculptures.

Of course, others may see his portrait of Sunday Reed in a completely different light than mine, but she certainly doesn’t appear as a warm-hearted generous supporter of artists, as she no doubt was in her younger years …before the ravages of time, and whatever else occurred.

Hero Image (Top):
Albert Tucker, Apocalyptic Horse, 1956
62 x 81cm, Oil on hardboard
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Purchased 1982
© Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation
Courtesy of Sotheby’s Australia

APOCALYPTIC HORSE
Until 15 September 2019
Heide III: Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery

Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Rd, Bulleen, Victoria
Tel 03 9850 1500
heide.com.au