A seminar on the unfamiliar work of Australian artist Sir Lionel Lindsay.
Lionel Lindsay, watercolour study of The Casbah Gate, Algiers, 1929.
This is a project of retrieval: the unfamiliar body of work by Australian artist Sir Lionel Lindsay, made during a three-month trip to Algeria and Tunisia in 1929. To date, some twenty watercolours, six drypoint etchings and dozens of notebook sketches have surfaced. Lindsay’s journey across the Med was motivated by a desire to see the land of ‘the Arabs’, whose legacy in Spain he much admired, and second, to meet ‘the painter of The Snake Charmer’ – Lindsay’s favourite work at the Art Gallery of NSW, by the French Orientalist and convert to Islam, Nasr’Eddine Dinet. The task of tracking and situating Lindsay’s imagery using vintage picture-postcards and guidebooks is enjoyable empirical art history.
But there are problems: how to square this work, in an anachronistic realist style (partly dependent on photography) in an era of avant-garde experiment? How to deal with the conservative prejudices of the artist? When Lindsay met Dinet in the oasis of Bou-Saada they agreed on the “modern stupidity”, and the aesthetic ‘crimes’ of Matisse and Picasso. Lindsay probably masked his virulent antisemitic view – that Modern art was the result of conspiracy of Jewish dealers, critics and foreign artists – that had won him applause at a 1927 Royal Academy dinner in London. The controversial bigot of the 1942 book Addled Art was in gestation. At what cost do we retrieve Sir Lionel as Orientalist from the dustbins of art history?
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Roger Benjamin
Roger Benjamin (Professor of Art History, U of Sydney) has written and lectured on Matisse throughout his career, beginning with his Bryn Mawr PhD (Matisse’s ‘Notes of a Painter’: Criticism, Theory and Context, Ann Arbor 1987). He co-curated QAG’s touring retrospective Matisse of 1995 before turning to questions of European Orientalism. His most recent publication on the Frenchman was “Matisse at the Senya el Hashti” in The Art Bulletin for 2019.