Title

Art Education and Printmaking in the 1950s in South Australia.

Author

Sellbach, Udo

Details

Paper presented at The Second Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1992

Publication date

1992

Type

Conference paper

Full text

Art Education and Printmaking in the 1950s in South Australia
by Udo Sellbach

Tate Adams has taken me back where I was going to start, in those fabulous 50s and 60s when this part of the world was, as he said, a cultural desert. When I went to South Australia for the first time there was not an expresso bar to be found - there was nothing to do over the weekend. But the most disturbing aspect of that time was the social negligence, the cultural negligence, the negligence by all those in authority, the complete lack of understanding.

It wasn't as if one met an audience and said, 'look here is something that you might like to look at or try' and 'this is where it comes from and this is where it might lead to' and start some kind of discourse, some form of interest. This lack of interest was amazing and it struck me like a thunderbolt.

Coming as I did in 1955 from Germany and landing in Melbourne, I was probably lucky, because within a fairly short time, within a week or two, I met Dr Ursula Hoff who was the keeper of prints in the National Gallery of Victoria. I had come to Australia with approximately 100 prints or so under my arm, partly my work, and partly that of other German artists.

Just a couple of years prior to migrating I had established the first custom printery in Cologne, Germany, for one of the leading contemporary galleries 'Herspeigel'. As printer over those couple of years I had contact with quite a number of important artists in Germany and Italy. Now I came with these prints, and the only way I could introduce myself was to unroll them on the floor somewhere and hope that some people would take interest. Dr Hoff took an immediate interest and introduced me to Professor Burke, Joe Burke, who held the chair of Fine Art at Melbourne University. The only associated establishment in Australia in those days that dealt with the history of art. Anyhow he very kindly ............. then and helped me with some kind of reference.

And I then went to, (this is all in 1955) Victor Greenhaugh at the Royal Melbourne Institute of technology. He looked at everything and was very excited and he said, 'look there is a future in this but we are not quite ready yet, we are on the way, it will come but I canst force this and it might take some years'. So I asked, 'what other art schools are there here in Melbourne'? and he said 'there's something called the Prahran School of Art and something known as Swinburne'. I found out where they were and visited them. I found, and I forget in which of these two establishments, I found one or two very small hand litho presses, no proper equipment, no facilities, nothing resembling a print studio at all.

I became desperate and I thought well [I have to try], they took me out for lunch and I hoped things would go well but I wasn't getting anywhere - I couldn't know it was impossible. In any case I should have to meet with the gentleman from the education department first, which I then did in the afternoon and some of them looked over my shoulder and looked at the prints too and then they said, 'so you want to teach here' and I said, 'yes, if that is possible' and they said 'well where is your certificate'? and I said 'what do you mean'? and they said 'well your teaching certificate' and I said 'look I've just come from seven years including post graduate study in Cologne from a very major institution, I am what you might call a master printer, I'm an artist, I'm a master printer'. 'Oh, no no no that doesn't do, but we will help you, you can come and learn from us to teach whilst we allow you to do a few hours of teaching yourself'. And I said 'thank you very much' and I left.

Now this was nearly the end of 1955 and I was just about prepared to go back to Germany when someone bought my attention an advertisement for an art master at St Peter's College in Adelaide, in the junior school. The senior school was under the direction of John Bannon (the father of the recent premier), an interested person, an artist who was interested in printmaking who later became a print publisher. I got the job so that's where my Adelaide experience begins.

I spent four years there. During the years 1957-58 we established in Affiny, the senior school art centre, one of the first print workshops in this country. We had a motorised litho press which the Lands Department let us have. They also gave the school a few dozen stones because they were going to print from metal plates from then on. We had etching equipment.

It gave me a very good taste for what could be done, and should be done and shortly was to be done. By the end of my time as a teacher at St Peters in 1959 my work become known to Paul Beadle, who was head of the South Australian School of Art for a brief time, and Ron Appleyard at the Art Gallery of South Australia; and a lectureship was created at the art school. In fact I believe, and maybe someone scholarly can check that out for me, it was the very first lectureship in Australia for art. You know one was normally a teacher or instructor in the TAFE system. Anyhow that was 1960. And so from the beginning of that year, from the day the first students arrived and over the next twelve months we created what I think was the most exciting printing studio that had ever existed in this country.

Having to start off working in the large exhibition building on North Terrace we had plenty of space; carpenters constructed strong benches to carry the stones, workstations were created for students, and the various presses installed. These came partly from the Lands Department, and partly from other sources, such as the old etching press that Jacqueline Hick, an artist who had been doing prints since the early 1940s, was using. By the end of that first year we had a printery in which all the techniques of printmaking were practised - silkscreen, lithography, woodcuts and linocuts, and monotype printing could be done. There was a dark room for photographic applications.

At the end of that year we had an exhibition in consultation and conjunction with the Art Gallery of South Australia who lent some artist prints to us and we provided some other equipment, stones and so on. We went public so to speak, not only with the students work but also with the processes themselves, that is with printmaking as printmaking. Let me just read to you what Geoffrey Dutton the writer, poet - then writing articles for the, South Australian Advertiser. It says:
‘In the drab humpy where we see fit to house the South Australian School of Art there is one of the liveliest and most promised packed exhibitions to see in this town for a long time. They are showing more than 120 examples of prints made by a dozen different techniques. They all add up to an astonishing growth when you consider that the graphic studio was opened only in February of this year. The skilled technique and the originality of his own work already well known in Adelaide and it is just these two qualities which he and the other teachers at the art school seem to have been able to pass on to the students giving them scope for originality and at the same time a sure foundation of technical knowledge. Barbara Hanrahan's work is outstanding and apart from anything else shows how a creative mind responds to new methods from the earlier lithographs which I in fact enlarged with drawings, to the stronger and bolder works of larger prints. Meryl [?] and Peter Ferguson also present a vigorous diversity of prints. But as linocuts have a subtle and vibrant surface that is far removed from the awful …chunky crudity that is so often associated with the medium. The most striking thing about this whole exhibition is the sense it gives you, the new and living potentialities of the graphic arts. The exhibition at the School of Art has been very well mounted together with prints and original plates from the National Gallery both by Australian and European artists so the visitor can see how a Hartung or Chagall or a Picasso has tackled the mediums which the students here are learning. Altogether this is a great pleasure to find for a wonderful exhibition in the exhibition building. And last but not least these prints are practically being given away, most of them costing from ten shillings to a couple of guineas.’

And there are other reviews in a like vein.

I want now to briefly indicate to you what kind of atmosphere that existed in the 50s, what lack of responsiveness there was and what lack of understanding there was - things that we all now take for granted. Even the word 'printmaking' wasn't really a common word. One knew there were etchings, lithographs and wood and linocuts of course. And in that sense printmaking and the evolution of printmaking is really a thing of the 60s.

There are a few preconditions that were required to make that change possible. Let me try to summarise them for you. I think that as printmakers looking back at our origins, our beginnings in Australia anyhow, it's very important to see the conceptual basis from which we have come, rather than just simply the technology or the artistry itself. Printmaking, as I would call it, became printmaking because the separateness of the media that had been used, either for centuries or for hundreds of years, or for a brief period of time like as in screenprinting were combined. These separate media, these different technologies, began in the 60s to be seen as belonging together - as forming a common ground, a generic thing, they were bound together. Until then you might have found an etching press in the studio of a painter or at an art school in a painting studio, in a corner somewhere. You would find the lithography press, if there was one, in the Department of Illustration or Graphic Design because lithography was seen as a commercial art technique. Of course you would never find an artist who was a lithographer. It was not until the 50s and 60s that this happened.

I know this awfully well because when I was a student in Cologne, studying lithography immediately after the war in the burnt out hull of the art school, the lithography teacher was a tradesman. He served simply to look after the technical aspects of printing. And you would go to him, sent there by your fine art department, and you asked could you have a stone and after a while you would be given a stone and then having been given that stone you were allowed to draw on it. You were told what you could draw, how you could draw and then told to come back a week later by which time the master, the printer, the tradesman had made a print. Then you had a look at it and maybe made some alterations to it, that was your part of it, and then you went away again. Lithography was very much under the thumb of the tradespeople themselves. The unionised inbred almost but certainly self protective area of printmaking.

Now this was not printmaking in our terms, this was a service to artists - but artists were not allowed to actually learn the process. If they did wish to learn the craft it was made very awkward or difficult for them. My lithography teacher, a printing tradesman, was already very old in 1948. One day he had a stroke and he could not come back to work again. So two or three of the students (including myself), taught ourselves - we used those weeks to learn the basic craft of lithography, and of course never looked back. I then personally followed that through as my main activity in printmaking.

So what I'm trying to say about the 60s and the evolution of printmaking, is that in the 60s a few things came together which really made it possible for us to see printmaking as something that could stand there in partnership with painting and sculpture, the traditional accepted forms. It could stand there and attract its own students and have its own program, but what it needed on the technological side was more than one process. It needed for all of these processes to be brought together. And this of course is what Tate Adams had done and at RMIT in Melbourne in the 60s, and what I did at the same time in Adelaide - unbeknownst to him (we didn't know each other at the time). We each created the first assembly of all the various printmaking processes, either in one room or two rooms side by side, which ever way it was made possible. We tried to put together all the tools that would make a printmakers shop workable and at the same time introduced methods of working which would establish standards of production and standards in the handling of materials. Like Tate, I can only say it was one of the most exciting periods of my life.

On the very first night when I opened the doors, Barbara Hanrahan was one of the first students who came in, and others followed. It was an incredible beehive of activity. It was as if there had been a thirst out there, a hunger for something which suddenly could be satisfied. It attracted all the good talent that was the great thing. All the talented students that were around wanted to participate in this new, exciting course. It took a year or two for the system to acknowledge this, for the system to say, 'okay, now this is fine art and this is no longer illustration' or 'this is not graphic design, this is fine art and this is a fully fledged course, this is a subject in its own right'. It didn't take very long for this to come through. And so from then on in fact we did have printmaking.

But let me add a couple more pre-requisites. Apart from the technological side, (which I think is one of the fundamentals), there was another one - this was to have artists involved. Tate told you about Fred Williams and others working in Melbourne, and I think this was the great contribution that was made early on at the RMIT. They opened their doors to artists and so put this new medium, this new combination of printmaking techniques in the spotlight. They had the best artists, whether they were recognised or not, working with prints from the outset. I think that was awfully important.

Another thing that helped make printmaking a recognised separate entity, (printmaking rather than a collection of things like etchings, lithographs and linocuts) was institutional support. There were of course the art schools, RMIT and South Australian School of Art who were the first ones to acknowledge this. But then the large public galleries did also, that is the curators - Ron Appleyard at the Art gallery of South Australia, Daniel Thomas at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and, of course, Ursula Hoff at the National Gallery Of Victoria. Printmaking needed their involvement, it needed them as much as anything else to provide a institutionalised forum of respectability and for the works to find a home.

Another factor in all of this, a final thing maybe, was the education of the public. The setting up of the workshops, and the enthusiasm and support of teachers, artists, students and institutions contributed to this education, as did the Print Council of Australia which was established in 1965. So this evolution of printmaking, of which I can only just touch on, is a terrific story. I'm not a scholar, but someone here in this audience should record this story before it's too late. Try to write that story, not only in an anecdotal form, but in the way which acknowledges the cultural transformations which took place in the visual arts. Printmaking had a definite role in these changes - yet 30 years ago it wasn't even thought of.

© Udo Sellbach, 1992
Paper presented at The Second Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 19892