PETER BOOTH

TARRAWARRA MUSEUM - 26^th Nov 2022 – 13^th Mar 2023

NB - Click on images for enlargement

Photography by John Gollings

A career survey of paintings and drawings by the distinguished eighty-two year old offers a useful reminder of the course of recent art history, the vicissitudes of fashion. The show is staged at the Tarrawarra Museum, part of the Tarrawarra vineyards and winery complex in the Yarra Valley, north east of Melbourne and provides an ample and suitably distanced venue in which to reconsider this somewhat eclipsed figure. Curator Anthony Fitzpatrick offers a balanced selection across a long career and lavish hardback catalogue with essays by Kirsty Grant and Fitzpatrick, covering chronology and standard readings of themes. This review takes a different tack.

The artist was accorded a retrospective at the Ian Potter Museum (NGV) in 2003, consolidating a reputation as a leading Neo-Expressionist to the local scene and while the work has subsequently mellowed, it is the artist’s standing within the broad international movement that continues to define his reputation.

Untitled 1995 (1995) 167.5 X 305 cm oil on canvas

Booth was something of a forerunner to the movement, commencing with a series of large nightmare scenes in the late seventies. These come as an abrupt switch from the austere Minimalist abstraction upon which he had hitherto built his name, and understandably create a problem for his gallery, Pinacotheca and following. It is above all, an audacious move, and one he could not know would soon receive unexpected support from developments overseas. There was the precedent of Philip Guston (1913-80), defecting from the ranks of Abstract Expressionism in the late sixties, his late works eventually accepted in the late seventies, true, but crucial differences in age, history, technique and aspiration make it a far from confident appeal.

The artist stresses that he had continued with figurative sketches even while achieving considerable recognition with abstraction (he was included in the prestigious ‘The Field’ exhibition at the NGV in 1968) but the question is really why there should be this split in commitments. Clearly, as a young and ambitious painter, not long out of art school, he was drawn to the latest developments, even though they run counter to his private inclinations and ultimately, abilities. The conflict is one of ambition; between what one wants to be and what one can be. It is a crisis of self-knowledge and it is worth noting since much of Booth’s subsequent imagery can be read as a struggle to characterise just this conflict, to give it pictorial drama.

Minimalism aimed to reduce a picture to its essentials as a two-dimensional sign. It was a rigorous exercise in self-reference bringing with it intense competition among adherents. Efforts centred on colour and shape relations, these pursued to grids, stripes and monochromes, elsewhere with materials and applications under which shape and colour may be duly identified. This second step was sometimes referred to as ‘process’ Minimalism, in which novel concoctions of pigment and application tested the limits of coherence for a colour and basic geometries. It is this attention to process that Booth worked through in the early seventies and in works such as Untitled 1971, in which acrylic pigment is augmented with coarser materials to emphasise surface texture or facture, its effect upon the perception of a uniform black shape, the necessarily broad or loose application in turn modifying a tan/pink border symmetry.

Untitled 1971 (1971) 245 X 184.5 cm acrylic on canvas

Bolder practitioners at this time included Americans Jules Olitski (1922-2007) and Larry Poons (b. 1937), where radical spraying and pouring of pigment render even basic shapes or geometry problematic. Shape depends upon instrument and pigment, might be the Minimalist’s tentative qualification. Yet Booth can never quite go this far. Colour can never quite be divorced from brushwork and drawing, pigment granted more challenging bulk or dissolution. In works like Painting 1975, the artist can disperse a colour field into shards of red, yellow and white but this is to invoke an additional function of drawing to basic geometry and as such retreats from the Minimalist’s reduction of means. The artist can heap on the expanded pigment in a demonstration of abundant resources, but he is smuggling in a need for drawing in excess of mere geometry. It is either a failure of invention or a compromise where the stakes are highest.

Painting 1975 (1975) 274.2 X 167.2 cm acrylic on canvas

It is around this juncture that the artist finally sensed a parting of ways; or at least a dead end to his Minimalism. And it cannot have been an easy realisation. He had worked for over ten years to be at the fore of a movement granted impressive recognition and a promising career, only to realise more dearly held commitments. There is the prospect perhaps of being a kind of Georges Rouault (1871-1958) for stained glass windows, but this is small beer by 1975. Instead the artist withdraws from the public discourse into an intensely private realm.

Painting 1977 (1977) 182.5 X 304 cm oil on canvas [NOT IN SHOW – NGV collection]

Understandably his mood may have been somewhat dark, his prospects bleak, friends scarce, but having made a commitment to drawing, drawing them looks strangely crude or clumsy. For one schooled in traditional drawing and claiming inspiration from William Blake (1757-1827), drawing, when given prominence is surprisingly perfunctory. There are of course, any number of Expressionist precedents upon which to draw (sic) but plainly the artist was in no mood to announce other allegiances. His drawing allows perspective, a modicum of modelling or tone but with figures soon settles for something that nods to the comic strips of Robert Crumb (b.1943), perhaps channelling someone like James Ensor (1860-1949).

Painting 1981 (1981) 170.2 X 213.4 cm oil on canvas

More distinctive than line is the intense, mottled fill to shapes, applied with palette knife or spatula, in short directional strokes. This treatment is so divorced from outline that it unmistakably gives proceedings an anxious, obsessive tenor. There is no room for broader handling, relaxation, suggestion, motion or ambiguity. Everything is nailed down in a heavy coat of fuss. The fill compensates for the lack of distinction to drawing by scrupulously animating every shape, slathering on a commitment not so different from the artist’s Minimalist phase. Like later Australian artist Ben Quilty (b.1973), Booth needs to lay it on thick, if only to convince himself of sincerity, confidence. But the exercise and the drawing only alert the viewer to an underlying lack of options, no amount of paint can disguise.

Painting 1981 (1981) 197.5 X 304.5 cm oil on canvas

Within Booth’s private world it is quickly apparent that it is a deeply hostile, possibly apocalyptic place. The landscape, while not a wilderness, is often deserted, aflame or in ruins. It was soon noted that the pictures literally have no place for women or indeed passion or sexuality, for domestic life or even interiors. And this discreetly flags a more public forum. A man joins a leering crowd or stands apart, vulnerable and victimised. There are monsters born of the association and notably chrysalis in which a man may emerge transformed or renewed. But proceedings are for the most part predatory, malevolent. In a work such as Painting Two (1984) the land is subjected to some sort of airborne attack from part-insect, part-UFOs. Even nature is somehow engineered as an alien pestilence.

Painting Two (1984) 198 X 305 cm oil on canvas

Across Booth’s work of the eighties and nineties one can hardly miss the theme of threatening conformity against a bleak situation, the man mutated or transformed and at the mercy of unworldly elements. And one cannot help but link the artist’s earlier struggle with an inner self and brave departure from orthodoxy. As noted, later work softens the theme somewhat with landscapes such as Painting 2014 in which a careful composition of barren trees in snow attains a decorative, storybook-like innocence. But these are really afterwords or footnotes to the artist’s output.

Painting 2014 (2014) 188 X 219 cm oil on canvas

His peak lies, as with the Neo Expressionist movement in general, in the late seventies and into the eighties. It is misleading to think of art history as a tidy sequence of movements or styles of course, since such perception is only available with a certain amount of hindsight or in longer history. At the time, any number of rival approaches bid for attention and either attract followers or not and if not, slowly fall by the wayside. To complicate matters, Neo Expressionism arises in distinct national variants. The German version, Die Wilden, is characterised by blunt parody or satire, comic allegory of social and historical issues, often pursued on a grand scale. The Italian version, The Transavanguardia favours bodily metaphor for transcendent and psychological states in stark isolation, a faith in primitive or intuitive depiction tinged with irony regarding the original movement. The German version is closer to the spirit of punk rock, while the Italian version is closer to hippy introspection, perhaps to a John Martyn or Nico. French and British versions emphasise other features. Australian counterparts forego any irony in resorting to a familiar rhetoric, are closer to AC-DC than The Sex Pistols.

Neo Expressionism arises as a riposte to claims from Conceptual Art and Minimalism that figurative painting has no future in fine art; that its function now lies in common print forms or illustration. To this, Neo Expressionism ascribes a crude or prompt metaphorical function to the figurative – counter to standard practices, urging impulse, a defiance of taste or accepted style. Neo- Ex is ‘bad’, blunt but brief. In spite of the name, the movement was hardly a revival. Here the primitive owes less to exotic cultures than to outsider idioms. Successive developments expand means to pre-Modernist styles, to a thoroughgoing eclecticism in some cases and pursued more elaborate literary and mythical allusion. In short, the primitive invited the sophisticated. But eventually this breadth of reference is rejected as too arch or ideological and a kind of cultural fragmentation is preferred sometime into the first decades of the new century. What is interesting in looking back at someone like Peter Booth in 2022 is how that faith in a very private world has been exchanged for one in a social or collective identity, and not so much for a self-contained world as just a privileged niche in marketing clichés.