Opening Australian Art History: The Case of Henry Dearing

Abstract

The paintings and drawings of Henry Dearing came to the attention of the art world in 1944 when the artist’s depictions of country life appeared in the Australian literary journal “Angry Penguins”. Since that time, there have been several exhibitions and scholarly examinations of Dearing’s art. However, ingrained attitudes of artists, curators, and writers have obscured the works’ deeper significance, artificially restricted the scope of Australian art history, and ignored the broader questions posed by Dearing’s work about the categories habitually applied to discussions of modern art. Dearing’s works, many of which feature the itinerant labourer and trick cyclist Alfred Tipper, were interpreted during the 1940s by members of the Angry Penguins circle — including Albert Tucker and John Reed — as inherently primitive, innocent, and natural. In this way, Dearing’s work was excluded from any meaningful comparison with the work of contemporary, professional artists. In 2015, the art historian Nancy Underhill argued that Dearing’s works were a hoax perpetrated by the artist Sidney Nolan, thereby disconnecting the works from their origin in the lived experience of itinerant labour in rural Australia. In opposition to this double exclusion, I argue that Dearing’s depictions of labour are a profound artistic commentary on the opportunities and hazards of rural life in 20th-century Australia. Furthermore, I show that by celebrating the activities of Tipper, a skilled individual making a splash in an unusual profession, Dearing’s works were closer to the aspirations of the Angry Penguins artists than has previously been allowed.

Presenters

Anthony White
Associate Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Details

Presentation Type

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session

Theme

Arts Histories and Theories

KEYWORDS

Art History; Labour History; Social History; Artistic Professionalisation; Modernism

Digital Media

Videos

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