Recently I browsed through the most recent edition of The Encyclopedia of Australian Art, and to my horror found an entry for my late father (Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz) that seemed to indicate he had given up painting ca.1956. This of course is completely untrue, as he painted many fine series and spectacular paintings almost up until the time of his death in 1999. His most fruitful years were 1950-1976, but he painted some wonderful pictures in the last twenty-five years of his life.
Alan McCulloch, author of the original edition of Encyclopedia (Hutchinson of London, 1968), was a respected reviewer for the Melbourne Herald then, and had first noticed Wlad’s art in 1954. He was sufficiently impressed to insist subsequently on including Wlad’s painting Shapes in Space (below) in colour, one of only 42 such images. It was an indication of how highly Wlad was regarded then, but since, through myths such as the one above, and his virtual invisibility induced by staying in Adelaide, he has slipped into obscurity. It’s a tragedy, as he was one of the most interesting painters of his era.
A similar entry has been made previously in a similar publication I cannot now recall, but this one really ranckled because I recall on several occasions in the past approaching a range of publishers and authors to provide correct information. Of course writing encyclopediac volumes is an incredibly difficult task, but after making an effort to correct the record, one would expect the researchers to find the information, if not to actually find the correct information in the first place.
Such blunders and poor recording of our actual history became immediately apparent to me when I researched my PhD topic on post-war migrant artists. In fact, South Australian art generally has suffered from a “tyranny of distance” and from being apart from the centre. Our artists historically have been marginalised and have found it difficult to penetrate the centre, with only several obvious exceptions - most of whom lived out of the state for considerable time or came from elsewhere. It certainly was a problem for artists of my father’s vintage - I recall Ian North’s comments in his book on Dorrit Black that once she moved back to Adelaide from Sydney she became invisible.
These problems explain the placement of these artists in the national history and their value in the market. An additional problem for post-war migrant artists was that many of them had difficult “foreign” names and they were then seen as disingenuous if they did not Anglisize their names or in some way indicate that they had shed the skin of their past. We tend to forget now that Australia was then operating under an apartheid system in which people were classified by the whiteness of their skin and their “otherness” had significant impact on their acceptance in society. People who “spoke funny” were less likely to succeed, and as part of the Australian trait of cutting people down to size, as much as the institutionalized processes of racism, their credentials were discarded and not accredited unless they were retrained or re-educated here.
It is not surprising, then, that some of the best artists of this period have not been taken seriously to date by contemporary curators and historians. I would argue, and have in my thesis, that this shadow world of Australian modernism is in fact more interesting than what was promoted as the most important work at the time, which, to my eyes, has dated poorly.
So, I urge you to not take everything you read in the tomes of Australian art as gospel and not to run with the pack. If you want the truth, not mythologies of artistic fashions, buy Moon Arrow’s books and make up your own minds.
