Going 'all out' Modern, Christopher Heathcote: Melbourne 1956 at the NGV

Director's Foreword
Eric Westbrook
Christopher Heathcote

Melbourne's newspaper headlines had been trading in doom and scandal for weeks. To begin with, the Suez Crisis had pushed the world to the brink of war as British and French troops clashed with the Egyptians. Then there was the uproar over allegations that a Tasmanian academic, Professor Sydney Orr, had made advances towards a 19-year-old undergraduate. Next thing a Vulcan, the RAF's latest jet bomber, intended to take the strategic upper hand in the Cold War, inexplicably crashed in flames on a demonstration flight before London crowds. Then Russia invaded Hungary and forced a nation that had seemed to be shifting towards liberalism, back under authoritarian rule. However, all was overshadowed when the news broke on 28 September 1956: the first atom test in Australia had been successfully conducted at Maralinga; a major milestone on the triumphal road of progress had been passed; Australia had entered the Atomic Age. Coming just six weeks before the Olympic Games, the test seemed a fitting testimony to the nation's aspirations and achievements.

Melbourne, the host city, was already putting its best foot forward. The event was to involve far more than sporting prowess. It was an occasion for national pageantry and celebration, an opportunity for Melbourne to declare its place in the international community. A fresh optimism seemed in the air as Melburnians tried to go 'all out' Modern—a palpable effort was being made to bring the city into the mid-twentieth century. Of course, special decorations had been erected for the event. Spinning Olympic mobiles were suspended along St Kilda Road, the 'Olympic Gateway'. A set of pylons festooned with bunting and flags of the competing nations had been erected in Wellington Parade, and a 60-foot high wire Olympic Torch with a 2-foot gas flame had appeared on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets.

Advances in technology were also affecting the community. Only a month prior to the Games, BOAC in conjunction with Qantas launched an important new flight to London with its Bristol Britannia, the most sophisticated passenger aircraft of the day. Besides seating 100, the aeroplane was the first in the world to be equipped with on–board radar, thereby making night flights over Asia possible, and cutting travel times by twenty-four hours. More significant still, Victoria's first television station, HSV 7 started transmissions a week before the Games on 4 November. Broadcasting for four hours each night, it enabled Melburnians to feast on a diet of imported television programs including Father Knows Best, Robin Hood, Hopalong Cassidy and Jet Jackson.

From the visitor's standpoint, the most visible indicator of the change was probably the smattering of ultra-contemporary buildings that stood out in what was, essentially, a stately colonial city. The 132-foot limit, set in 1890 on the height of building projects, had been revoked and skyscrapers were appearing. Indeed, for the first time since World War II the building industry was not dominated by home construction. History tends to look favourably on the new Olympic Swimming Pool, a venue in which Australia's swimming team would win numerous sporting medals. But at the time, the architect and cultural critic, Robin Boyd, singled out three ultra-contemporary projects as representing a momentous 'turning point' in Australian design. Gilbert Court at 100 Collins Street, the city's first office block in the steel-and-glass international style; Wilson Hall, a bold new auditorium at Melbourne University; and The Legend, a stylish 'Latin-modernist' espresso bar in Bourke Street. There was also Alliance House, a much admired office block in Collins Street, the first building in Victoria with full climate-control air-conditioning; the Royal Children's Hospital project which had been underway since April; and Hosies Hotel, on the corner of Elizabeth and Flinders Streets, which was being redeveloped and endowed with a landmark geometric-abstract mural. (During the year, the state government also announced that it would construct a smart modern building in St Kilda Road for the National Gallery of Victoria—although the project did not begin until 1961.)

Clearly, modernisation was in the air. Buildings in the central business district were spruced up and repainted in pastel shades; the Melbourne City Council systematically stripped the Victorian lacework and verandas from stores along main streets; signs in foreign languages and temporary sporting sculptures were installed in prominent positions. Seeking more than just a facelift, some stores went to considerable efforts to update. Setting the pace was Foys, on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets, which in the months leading up to the Olympics installed a continuously running plate-glass window, cantilevered verandas and, wonder-of-wonders, escalators throughout. Considerable public attention was also being directed towards the Olympic Village. There was much excitement about the 850 houses and flats that had been hastily constructed in West Heidelberg, especially the extensive 'mod cons' with which they were equipped. 2 The flats might have been closed to the public, but people were able to inspect the latest in domestic decor at the 'Olympics Festival of Colour', held across the city's home improvement centres (including the showrooms of major paint makers, Taubmans and Dulux). It featured the latest vogue in interior design, including stylishly curling chairs, slim plywood coffee tables, anodised aluminium light fittings, geometric-abstract draperies, terrazzo tiles, potted Monsteras on wiry tripods, and plum- or olive-coloured feature walls in eleven mock-up interiors prepared by leading designers. And if visitors wanted to see more, then more they would get in the architecture and design sections of the official Arts Festival held during the Olympics. Presented in spacious modern halls at Royal Melbourne Technical College and Melbourne University, the exhibition brought together the very best in Australian contemporary architecture (models and photographs of 190 projects), industrial and furniture design (works by twenty-one designers), and graphic art (pieces by twenty-nine designers).

Surprisingly, art did not figure very highly in the urge to be modern. There may have been a striking semi-abstract mural of scientific man reaching to the cosmos by Douglas Annand inside Melbourne University's Wilson Hall and a sequence of biomorphic sculptures by Tom Bass on the Hall's western face, but contemporary art seems to have been overlooked by those hankering to go modern. Vanguard art was notable for its absence from the official exhibition held at the National Gallery of Victoria. 3 Indeed, while the modern artist John Brack had exhibited his controversial Racecourse paintings at Peter Bray Gallery in Bourke Street (Melbourne's main private gallery) in October 1956, this gallery was to show only a display of aesthetically safe pottery during the Olympics. Despite being excluded from the festivities, however, Melbourne's rebellious bohemians were not about to bow out quietly.

Rallying together in the mercurial Contemporary Art Society (CAS), the vanguardists had resolved to open their own venue, the Gallery of Contemporary Art (GCA) (the city's first artist-run 'alternative' gallery). They rented an old warehouse off Flinders Street in Tavistock Place (behind Fletcher Jones), painted the walls, installed fluorescent lights, built a stylish geometric-abstract entrance, and launched the first of many contemporary exhibitions in June 1956. The GCA's aim, under the guidance of the CAS president Georges Mora and the gallery's director John Reed, was piously vanguard: to support and defend the shock of the Modernist new. It may have then seemed outrageous, but history has looked favourably on the artists included in those early GCA group shows held in the lead-up to, and during, the Olympic Games—figures such as Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Lawrence Daws, Robert Dickerson, Joy Hester, John Howley, Julius Kane, Roger Kemp, Erica McGilchrist, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Ian Sime and Edwin Tanner.

Was it serendipity, or was some kind of zeitgeist acting on the community? Within days of the CAS launching its gallery in the city, an equally modest—and in time even more influential—exhibition space opened in Collingwood: Australian Galleries, a commercial venue set up by the local business people, Tam and Anne Purves. Through their efforts, modern art ceased to be deemed 'unsellable'. While shying away from the radical edge of abstraction, they also had an ambition to stimulate an interest in neglected contemporary artists, such as Arthur Boyd and Arnold Shore. Using a combination of 'by invitation' functions, social networking and old-fashioned salesmanship, they set about developing a market for quality modernist art. (Notably, they initially displayed paintings in conjunction with contemporary furniture by leading designers, including Grant Featherston and Clement Meadmore.) Tam and Anne Purves decided to make a considerable splash during the Olympic Games, scheduling a solo exhibition of recently completed Williamstown landscapes by the expressionist painter, John Perceval, for that important fortnight in mid-November.

Australians may remember the Olympic Games of 1956 chiefly for the medal count, but the crucial changes that took place that season transpired not in the sporting field or swimming pool. The Games seemed primarily to have provoked a transformation in outlook and values across Australia in general and in the host city, in particular. One of the great shifts in cultural history had occurred—Melbourne had started outwardly to embrace the Modernist new.

Notes:
1. Dr Christopher Heathcote is the author of A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art 1946-1968, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1995.
2. Fearing that the Olympic Village would not be completed on time, a scheme had been floated in the media that visiting athletes might be boarded in the homes of everyday Melburnians.
3. Sport in Art, a show of modern American art with a sporting theme arranged by the US government, had been planned for the NGV, but was abruptly cancelled by the US Information Service when several exhibitors were discovered to have communist leanings.