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Australia's Anxiety Again: Remembering the art of Gordon Bennett

Vale Gordon Bennett 9 October 1955 - 3 June 2014 

Terry Smith
Eyeline 82
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I rarely write at length about the work of particular artists. There are many reasons for this, some obvious (as an art historian and theorist, my subjects usually exceed individuals, but of course could not exist without them), but some are obscure even to me. When I have done so, it is because the work—as it evolves over time, and as it engages its times—becomes something larger and more significant than markers of one artist’s professional career. More than impacting upon the development of art, I respond to it because it is shaping debate about a definitive issue, or, more deeply, because it offers a compelling figure of what it is to be alive in the world now. 

So, I had little hesitation when, in 1999, Liz Ann Macgregor asked me to write an essay on the art of Gordon Bennett for the catalogue of an exhibition she was organising for the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, of which she was then the director. By then, I had been tracking Gordon’s work for a decade. I vividly recall the first work of his that I saw. It was during a period when I was writing the three chapters updating Bernard Smith’s classic history Australian Painting, which had concluded at 1970. My job was to bring the story up to 1990 for the third edition to be published by Oxford University Press in 1991. I had persuaded Bernard that the front cover image should be Arthur Boyd’s profoundly anti-nationalistic Australian Scapegoat of 1987. But we were divided about the back cover image, an important choice in those days, as books had loose, wrap-around covers. On a visit to Brisbane, when urged to... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Gordon Bennett, Im Wald (Divided Unity), 1995. Acrylic on canvas, 220 x 312cm. Private collection, Brisbane. Photograph Sam Charlton. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

Gordon Bennett, Im Wald (Divided Unity), 1995. Acrylic on canvas, 220 x 312cm. Private collection, Brisbane. Photograph Sam Charlton. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

Gordon Bennett, The Small Brown House, from the Bounty Hunter series, 1991. Watercolour on paper, one of six panels each 37 x 27cm. Collection: The Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, Brisbane. Photograph Phillip Andrews. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.

Gordon Bennett, The Small Brown House, from the Bounty Hunter series, 1991. Watercolour on paper, one of six panels each 37 x 27cm. Collection: The Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, Brisbane. Photograph Phillip Andrews. © The Estate of Gordon Bennett.