| The story of the rise and fall, and rise
again, of Australian painter, Andrew Sibley, is the subject of this
absorbing book by a leading Australian art historian. Hailed for his
intense figurative paintings in the early 1960s, Sibley had sell-out
shows in Australia, and was included in a prestigious museum survey,
Recent Australian Painting held in London in 1961. But when taste shifted
towards more readily pleasing figurative and abstract art, he was dumped
a few years later by the art cognoscenti. He quietly kept going -- teaching,
and consolidating his art, which became tougher, more confronting and
profound, until in the mid-1980s his brand of expressionistic figurative
art again became fashionable. The book’s selection of works spanning
more than five decades shows that Sibley’s style and methods have
altered over time, but his subjects have never changed; he is obsessed
with the human condition -- vulnerable and alienated. He once remarked:
"My people are non-idyllic. They are victims of constitutional
and environmental factors."
Was Sibley himself also a "victim"?
Buffeted not so much by fate, as by a fickle, myopic art world?
Author Grishin, a Melbourne-trained historian,
suggests as much in his text. His tone is measured, but he keeps alive
a perennial cultural rivalry between Australia’s leading art
cities, Melbourne and Sydney, by neatly taking every opportunity to
belabour the Sydney critics whom he perceives as having twice wronged
Sibley; first in the mid-1960s, and again in the mid-70s.
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