The art of Mary Alice Evatt.

IT IS FASCINATING to think about the inter-relationships of art and politics. In England it was not unusual for politicians to have some knowledge and love of art. In the late twenties, when Anthony Eden entered the House of Commons he not only had famous film-star looks, spoke fluent French and was a good Arabist, hut he was also a purchaser of Cezanne oils. Of course the hereditary peers came from stately homes so that from birth they were acquainted with Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. Some of them, even the most important, could themselves paint, for example Winston Churchill, who was a competent--just--off painter. Jenny Lee, England's first Minister of the Arts--and a very successful one--was a great friend of Henry Moore and had a splendid collection of modern English artists. She even injected a little enthusiasm into her porcine husband, Aneurin Bevan.

How different are things in Australia. Ignorance of artistic merit is, it would seem, a qualification for entry into Australian politics. Imagine, if the effort doesn't kill you, what treasures hang on the walls of Mr Costello or Mr Crean. In England, Neville Chamberlain wrote a letter to one of his sisters, in which he said:

   There are very few and brief moments when I
   feel I can't seem to talk or think of the politics that
   have become my main purpose in life. Indeed,
   my fear is always that this prime intent should
   obliterate my other interests in art or music, or
   books, or flowers, or natural history.

One has the feeling that if Mr Hawke's mind ever slipped off politics it would not land on either art or music.

Sometimes things are even worse, and our politicians are even hostile, not merely indifferent, to the world of art. When, in the second half of 1939, there was shown the first great Exhibition of Contemporary French and British Art in Sydney and Melbourne, Mr R.G. Menzies said of it: "The French paintings on show demonstrate the weakness and corruption which led to the collapse of the French armies."

But, mercifully, there were exceptions. Lord and Lady Casey were one exception. Male Casey had studied under George Bell in Melbourne, and was a supporter of the recently formed Contemporary Art Society. She knew and patronised the work of the Melbourne-based modernists: Nolan, the Boyds, Perceval, Moya Dyring, and (God help me!) Sam Atyeo. She also picked up, from time to time, works by those foreigners who appealed to her, for example Picasso.

There has been no one else on the conservative side of politics. But on the Labor side, there was Mary Alice Evatt, who operated through her agent Dr H.V. Evatt. She was born in 1898, maiden name Sheffer. She was thus twenty-two when she married in November 1920. Her youth end adolescence thus parallelled that of Male Casey, seven years older. And she had many of the same friends: the Heide group of artists, Moya Dyring, and (I am afraid) the inevitable Sam Atyeo. And, like Male Casey, she studied under George Bell.

In Melbourne, in those days, there were two art schools: one run by Max Meldrum and one run by George Bell. They hated each other. At this point of time, it is not altogether easy to see what was the great difference between them. Apparently, the heavy emphasis which George Bell placed on drawing had no counterpart in the Meldrum academy. History has, in any event, come down on George Bell's side. He taught many of Australia's artists, including Drysdale, David Strahan and Purves Smith. The only artists I can think of at the moment who emerged from the Meldrum stables were one great artist, Clarice Becket, and a few minnows like Graham Inson and Robert Haines.

In fact, Mary Alice Evatt was always a great student, at first under George Bell, and then simultaneously under George Bell in Melbourne end Path Fizelle and Grace Crowley in Sydney. Later still she studied under Desiderius Orban, whose Hungarian darkness has nearly ruined one of her paintings here--South Coast 1971. She studied under Andre Lhote in Paris, and under Hans Hoffman in New York. Later she studied under John Coburn and Tom Gleghorn in Canberra.

Eventually, by the time she and her husband died, their collection contained Sidney Nolan, Sali Herman, some Margaret Prestons, Grace Crowleys, Grace Cossington Smiths and Frank Hinder. It also included a major Modigliani which she had purchased from that same Exhibition which so upset Mr Menzies--for 1000 [pounds sterling]. (She also bought a good little Vlaminck for 95[pounds sterling] from the same Exhibition.) The Modigliani later--alas!--had to be sold to pay the butcher's bill.

Dr Evatt, who always posed as a connoisseur of modern art, on one occasion said:

   The [modern] artist turns his back on realistic
   illusion and centres on dynamic and formal
   elements--he asserts and admits that it is of little
   use merely to imitate things: he therefore seeks to
   express them through their significant elements. A
   non-conformance to external objects enabled him
   to select from the object, even to break it up, and
   to reconstruct it into greater significance and
   coherence.

True, the words were spoken by him, but they were almost certainly written by her.

I have mentioned that she studied under Rah Fizelle and Grace Crowley. Both these artists, in turn, had studied in France under Andre Lhote, who was guiding modern art towards a measured cubist-inspired abstractionism. He was a painter devoted to analysis and construction, but with emphasis on the articulation of planes through contour and colour. He became a leader of the cubist movement without ever having got lost in it.

IF ONE LOOKS at the paintings and drawings here assembled, one can, I think, put all this in perspective. A glance at the work of Mary Alice Evatt's contemporaries will demonstrate that she was not, like Roland Wakelin, an outstanding artist. One can also dismiss her landscapes as fairly superficial. Of still-lifes there are none. But the strength of the show is in the portraits, where one can see quite precisely the influence of Crowley and of Fizelle, and behind them the influence of Andre Lhote. No realistic illusion--lots of dynamic and formal elements. Volume, space, line and colour are all given primacy. There is the obvious effort of cubism, with a slight genuflexion towards abstractionism. The two best are, in my opinion, Number 1, Woman in Green Sitting in Red Chair, and Number 11, the portrait of her mother. The two figure drawings of nude women, Numbers 22 and 23, are very classical and, surprisingly, rather like (but not as good as) similar drawings by Rupert Bunny--Andre Lhote must have been absent the day they were done.

Her painting Footballers is interesting. The great danger of pure cubism is that it can easily become static. Hence the passion of the cubists for sport, which can inject some rhythm into the paintings.

She obviously taught her husband to appreciate art. But she also, inadvertently, did him a grave disservice: she introduced him to Sam Atyeo, who was born in 1910 and died eighty years later. A Melburnian maverick, he was a notable philanderer, and had affairs with both Sunday Reed and Joy Hester. In 1942 he married the charming Moya Dyring, who endured him for a few years.

Always with an eye to the main chance, in 1942 Atyeo abandoned the art scene (where he had been responsible for a few second-rate surrealist paintings) and attached himself permanently to Dr Evatt, who employed him (if you please) as a "personal assistant". What exactly he "assisted" Dr Evatt to do is anyone's guess. He had no knowledge of international affairs or of parliamentary procedures. So for eight years, at the taxpayers' considerable expense, he travelled round the world as Dr Evatt's playmate, drinking, womanising, insulting people, and generally displaying a pornographically loutish manner. An example of Atyeo's behaviour at its most charming is afforded by the following extract from John Reed's letters (this one is to Max Harris, February 1944).

   Had a surprising and disturbing experience in the
   week-end. I went to answer the phone on Saturday
   night and an unknown voice spoke asking
   aggressively for me and did I know who was
   speaking. I didn't know at all but his reference to
   earlier incidents in our lives made it impossible
   that he should be anyone but Sam Atyeo, about
   whom we must have spoken to you more than
   once--A vital young painter, the first of the
   moderns and our intimate and violent friend (and
   sometime enemy) for many years who went to
   Europe and ceased (some said) to be a painter and
   bought a farm in the south of France and then fled
   to the West Indies and finally to New York and
   Washington where Evatt has given him a job.

   And it was Sam all fight, drunk because he
   would not have the courage toting if he had been
   sober: and so he came out and landed in the family
   circle, Sun and myself, Nolan and Sinclair, loud-voiced
   and declaiming, shitting, fucking, crapping,
   cocksucking, pricking straight from America for
   [Evatt] on a secret mission, incognito and not
   supposed to show himself to a soul and off hack
   the next day. And we learnt all the strange
   Odyssey of his last nine years. All the famous
   figures of our world in Paris, all the brutalities of
   France [sic] in Spain, the personally measured 13"
   tools of the West Indies Negroes, the utter and
   complete fascisms of the U.S. State Department,
   the beauty of Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton
   and the broadcasting of Snozzle Durante.

   With paintings all around him he hardly
   noticed them in crap, shit: moments of laughter
   such as we don't often have and moments of anger
   culminating at 3 o' clock in the morning when he
   called us all bastards and strode out of the house.

   Nolan says he lost half a stone in weight that
   night and by this time was in a condition of white
   heat and marched after Sam telling him if the
   didn't come back he would carry him back--Sam
   who isn't used to being talked to like that and had
   thought Nolan an "aesthetic". Finally between love
   and despair the night ended as Sam fell asleep.

   He is plunged into the world of intrigue and
   world politics, disorientated and knowing only his
   own despair and hatred of fascism. He says it is
   only tiff after the war but there is no after the war
   for him and he will not paint again. I told him he
   was killing himself and it is time, but I think he is
   unable to do anything else: he is fascinated as the
   moth with the candle and won't see that there is
   slow vital creative work for him to do here--in the
   realm of politics if not in the of art. Evatt in his
   evil genius is using him for his own purposes,
   indifferent to the death of his creative faculties.

Menzies had the good sense to terminate his appointment in 1950.

Mary Alice Evatt was appointed a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1943 by her brother-in-law Clive Evatt. The appointment caused a commotion in conservative circles, when it was held to be a pure act of nepotism without any justification. An act of nepotism it obviously was. But it was also fully justified. She would have known more about the world of contemporary art than any of her fellow trustees, and she was a breath of flesh air. She also made many gifts to the Gallery. By far the finest of them is a splendid sculpture of a woman's head by the Franco-Russian artist Ossip Zadkine. It seems an entirely appropriate gift; from the Gallery's point of view because it possessed nothing like that and would have to wait 200 years to do so; and from her point of view because it is the sculptural equivalent of Lhote's paintings--protocubist, semi-abstract, wonderful line and volume. We also have to be grateful that she did not donate any of the works of her mate Sam Atyeo.

After her death, that was the end of any connection between art and the H.V. Evatt family. But the torch passed to the Clive Evatt family, where Clive Jnr has turned out to be a considerable force in the art world: quirky, rich, intelligent, well-informed, owning an enormous and very valuable collection of his own. Perhaps he learned a lot from his aunt.

Justice R.P. Meagher of the New South Wales Court of Appeals gave this address at the

S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney in July during the exhibition of the works of Mary Alice Evatt.