In 2016 a new Liberal senator, a mere stripling of twenty-eight years, had a foolproof idea for getting himself noticed. James Paterson told the media the government should sell Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionist masterpiece, Blue Poles. “Some people feel like they’ve got a real attachment to Blue Poles, and I understand that,” said Paterson, who had come to parliament from the free-market Institute of Public Affairs. “I don’t think it’s a good enough reason for the Australian government to tie up such a significant amount of money in a single painting which is hung in a gallery in Canberra most of the year, and which most Australians won’t ever see face to face in their lifetimes. It’ll only be worth something to taxpayers when we sell it.”
When the controversy over the painting’s purchase broke in 1973 following an August scoop by the Australian Financial Review’s Terry Ingram, its eyewatering $1.4 million price tag was a focus for the critics, among whom Liberal and Country Party politicians were prominent. Forty-three years later, a spiritual heir and successor to those same politicians was arguing that the much-increased monetary worth of the painting — Paterson said it was valued at $350 million for insurance purposes — was a reason for getting rid of it.
Of course, Paterson was engaged in a media gimmick, some relatively harmless buffoonery and performative philistinism of a kind that is part and parcel of right-wing populist politics in the Trump era. In 1973 the stakes were higher. The Labor government of the day, elected in December 1972, treated the arts as integral to its reformist ambition. As journalist Tom McIlroy explains in this new book on Blue Poles and its place in art history and Australian cultural politics, “Whitlam thought culture should be central in a civilised community and insisted that Labor policy recognise the unique place of the arts in society.”
The first half of McIlroy’s Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that Changed a Nation deals mainly with the life and times of Jackson Pollock: from his birth in 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, as the son of a struggling couple — his parents battled with economic vicissitudes and with one another — through to his death in a 1956 car crash. The crash was the result of Pollock’s wild and drunken driving, and in his recklessness he also killed one young female passenger and badly injured another, a woman with whom he had been having an affair.
Along the way, we learn of the influence of Pollock’s first great teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, whose famous mural America Today, painted for the New School for Social Research in New York, is now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (One of the muscular young men in the painting was apparently based on the young Pollock.) Benton had the idea that “poles” could be used in a painting as an aid to structuring the composition and then removed from the final product. “I never made them parts of a composition as did Jack in the Blue Poles painting,” he recalled.
At the time of his death, Pollock had not produced a “major” painting for some time, but he was a celebrity (of the kind that attracted young women as admirers) and widely recognised as one of the giants of modern art and a leader of the New York School of abstract expressionists. The fame and success had come only recently: much of his life as an artist had been lived without the wealth or recognition that he, and his supporters, thought his talent and achievements had earned.
The most important of those supporters was his wife, Lee Krasner. She has since gained some recognition as one of the major figures in American modernism, but at the time Krasner was overshadowed by a demanding, difficult and often drunken husband. McIlroy explores the erasure of women’s contributions from conventional accounts of American modernism; by way of contrast, his story of full of strong female family members, painters and curators.
In death, Pollock’s legend only grew, nurtured by Krasner’s devotion and astuteness. As the New York art scene won the prestige that had once belonged to Paris, the price-tags for Pollock’s paintings rose and comparisons with Picasso proliferated.
Blue Poles, initially known as Number 11, 1952 — for a time, Pollock gave his paintings numbers rather than names — was not usually regarded as Pollock’s greatest painting. When it didn’t sell at its first showing late in 1952 it was rolled up and stored in an unlocked stairwell. After being displayed at another exhibition in the same gallery in early 1954, it was sold to a chemical engineer for $6000.
Three years later a successful businessman and friend of Pollock, Ben Heller, bought it for $32,000, a huge sum at the time. Heller kept it in a Manhattan apartment he had adapted to house what had become of the greatest private art collections in the United States. The Australian art critic, Robert Hughes, once described Blue Poles as “the most expensive room divider” in architectural history, since this was its role in the Heller family’s Central Park West apartment. Heller’s wife discovered him crying on several occasions in the weeks before Blue Poles was due to be shipped to Australia.
McIlroy tells his story very capably in a well-crafted and thoroughly absorbing account of one of the ways Australia and Australians became modern. This is not the first attempt to explore the Blue Poles saga at book length in such terms — the late Lindsay Barrett did so in a well-regarded 2001 publication, The Prime Minister’s Christmas Card: Blue Poles and Cultural Politics in the Whitlam Era, using a postmodernist theoretical framing.
McIlroy sticks to narration: still, I felt there were places where a step or two back from the detail might have been valuable. In retrospect, one of the oddest features of the controversy is that at its heart it was a reaction against a style of art that, at least by 1973, was not especially “radical,” either aesthetically or politically. Blue Poles itself was more than twenty years old and, as we now know thanks to work on the cultural cold war by Frances Stonor Saunders and other historians, CIA funding had contributed to the international promotion of abstract expressionist art as an alternative to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union and its Western acolytes and admirers. That fact might add a layer of irony to a government of the left, such as Whitlam’s, having taken on so much water over the purchase of the painting: the cold warriors in the conservative federal opposition should perhaps have been its staunchest defenders but that would have required more intellectual subtlety and less political opportunism than any of them were capable of.
It’s also striking, although not remarked on by the author, that so many of the stated objections to the purchase of the painting framed their case in terms of cultural nationalism and support for Australian art. Was this just an insular provincialism, a backward-looking gumnut nationalism best seen off the premises? Or was it the latest expression of the old dilemma of being at the edge of things: if you take on the aesthetics and ideas of the metropole as your own, how can you ever cease being colonial, derivative and second-rate? How can a creative artist move beyond what one of our greatest modernists, Patrick White, dismissed as the “dreary, dun-coloured” stuff of realism?
Whitlamism did seek to provide an answer to that question; Australian maturity demanded that Australians be familiar with international standards, with the best work being done around the world, whether in health policy, urban development or in drops of brightly coloured paint on massive canvasses. If Australians were to make the most of their own country, they needed to understand how other people — the world’s best and brightest — had made the best of theirs.
That applied as readily to the creative arts as to any other field of endeavour — and it is James Mollison who, in this connection, takes on something like a heroic role in McIlroy’s narrative. Here was a case of the hour calling forth the man. His whole being, since he was teenager hanging around the National Gallery in Melbourne, had been devoted to art. Appointed by Whitlam’s predecessor as prime minister, William McMahon — reputedly on the recommendation of his wife Sonia — Mollison was allowed remarkable freedom and resources to build a national collection for the Australian National Gallery, as it was then called, even while it waited for its own building (which would come in 1982).
Mollison was a curator to his boot-heels, but he defied many people’s image of what that might entail. He liked Brahms, he said, but also the Rolling Stones and Number 96, the risqué late-night TV soap. McMahon liked the fact that he never got “excited” or started “to shriek,” that he wasn’t “an extrovert” and was “perfectly normal.” There are allusions here, I assume, to Mollison’s homosexuality, which otherwise seems to have provoked tiptoeing mercifully more subtle than McMahon’s jejune effort.
Importantly, Mollison was not to confine himself to collecting Australian art, or even that of Australia’s region. He was to build an international collection and, in particular, to buy pieces that would help tell the story of modern art in the twentieth century. He did not want a collection that so vast in scale that most of it would need to be kept in storage. It would be far better, he said, to collect selectively and strategically so that the best art would be on display, the bottom of the iceberg and not only its tip.
Even while it could not have happened without Whitlam’s support, Mollison’s drive, diplomacy and judgement were critical in the purchase of Blue Poles. Given how intimately connected his name is with both the painting and the controversy, it is startling to be reminded by McIlroy that Mollison later admitted he did not like Blue Poles. And where Whitlam seemed to enjoy crossing swords with critics of the purchase, even provocatively including the image on his and Margaret’s Christmas card for 1973, Mollison was a private man who disliked the attention the public debate drew towards him personally and professionally.
It is easy, in retrospect, to dismiss much of the hostility the acquisition of Blue Poles provoked as the work of an assortment of ignoramuses, populists and philistines. There were the inevitable claims that one’s children, or grandchildren, or mates on the turps, could have done better. Tabloid editorials ridiculed it. That well-known art afficionado Paul Hogan thought Pollock “must have been full” when he produced the painting. “Only a poseur and a goose could go for this,” he added. And Country Party leader Doug Anthony’s complaint that he “could not comprehend” the merits of spending such a sum on a painting for a Canberra art gallery is a reminder that some of his predecessors, in the very same party, had raised rather similar objections to the Sydney Opera House.
It is always harder to make a case for spending on culture than spending on potatoes. All the same, proponents of the sale undoubtedly exaggerated the significance of Blue Poles — not just in twentieth-century art, but even in Pollock’s own oeuvre. Mollison had a little earlier been offered another of Pollock’s paintings, Mural on Indian Red Ground, for half a million. As McIlroy contends, if that idea had not fallen over, the Blue Poles controversy would never have happened — a sliding door moment in Australian cultural history.
And the money involved was as eye-watering as the critics said, and at a time when the economy was entering choppy waters. It was the largest sum that had ever been paid for an American painting. McIlroy sketches the context well: it was easy to fit Blue Poles into a wider narrative about the Whitlam’s government’s profligacy.
That would be cleverly satirised on The Gillies Report in its marvellous 1983 sketch, Il Dismissale. Gough, played by Max Gillies, was Julius Caesar:
GOUGH/CAESAR: The arts have had increased funding. How do you like Blue Poles?
CHORUS OF ROMANS: Who’ll pay for that, we’re wondering?
GOUGH/CAESAR: Rex said he’d ask Khemlani.
Neither Whitlam’s resources minister Rex Connor nor the shadowy finance broker Tirath Khemlani were involved in the Blue Poles purchase, but it was natural for the controversy to be swept up into a generalised impression of scandal, extravagance and chaos that would culminate in the Loans Affair of 1974–75.
Yet, for all the messiness, Blue Poles did represent something of a landmark in cultural history and cultural policy. James Paterson’s outpourings in 2016 seemed so foolish because, in arguing that government should get out of supporting the arts (and sport) alongside his suggestion of selling off Blue Poles, he presented as a zealot and extremist. It was not only that the role of government support for the arts, and sport, was now more or less taken for granted. It was also that the creative arts, more generally, are widely accepted as definers of national identity.
Meanwhile, Blue Poles itself has been absorbed into the country’s national identity, its sense of itself. (Many years ago, I had a student in an Australian history exam tell me that Pollock was a famous painter of the Heidelberg School.) It is, when one thinks on it, a rather remarkable thing for a piece of modernist American art produced with an experimental drip technique by a mentally unwell and seriously alcoholic avant-garde artist living in a coastal hamlet outside New York City to assume this kind of status in some other place’s national imaginary.
But it also tells us something about modern Australia. We were in the 1970s, and to some extent we remain, an Anglophone country, increasingly Americanised, seeking a cosmopolitan national identity to mark us off from the old Mother Country, Britain. We have pursued an urbanity and sophistication missing in many of the older ways of conceiving of the nation, which tend to emphasise convicts, bushrangers, shearers, Anzacs and lifesavers. Here, courtesy of the New York School, was something American, to be sure, but also new, modern and international. And it was also not overly refined; still a bit rough around the edges. Just like us — or how we liked to imagine ourselves. And still do.
It was as if the nation had been given a year in a finishing school. We had “culture up to our arseholes,” as Sir Les Patterson would so delicately put it.
“If you think what Jackson did,” Ben Heller said of his friend, “he’s made a museum. In this case a nation’s life.” It was an astute judgement from a man who loved Blue Poles. Australians have come to share that love. •
Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting that Changed a Nation
By Tom McIlroy | Hachette Australia. | $34.99 | 280 pages
