Slow Reveal cover, image: Modern Muse II by Dagmar Cyrulla
My new book, Slow Reveal – The Nude in Australian Art, will be released in early December 2024. Even I am amazed that it took six years. But that was because I initially chose the wrong publisher. A lot of time was lost before I realised that the book would never come out unless that arrangement was terminated.
Terminated it was, with the help of my intellectual property rights lawyer, Michael Frankel. He also encouraged me to look at self-publishing. And, as luck would have it, I came across Ian Britain’s book on the early years of artist, Donald Friend. Christopher Allen reviewed it comprehensively in The Australian providing the back story of how Britain had encountered a combination of indifference and even hostility from Australian publishers.
Like Britain, I had approached twenty carefully targeted Australian publishers who mostly ignored the book. A few said it didn’t fit their list, despite the fact that I had done my due diligence. And one, an academic publisher, provided a lengthy sermon on how I should have written the book to accommodate the prevailing woke ideology.
Britain and I had encountered the same prevailing ‘killing off by silence’ tactic which is currently suffocating our intellectual life. Friend is persona non grata because of his supposed paedophilia, while the nude in art is apparently somehow an extension of the pornography industry.
But Britain led me to his publisher, the Yarra and Hunter Arts Press, run by the dynamic Gavin Fry. Out of the Sargasso Sea of my UK publisher and into Gavin’s Gulf Stream! The journey has been rapid and hugely enjoyable. And my book is a much better book thanks to Gavin’s input.
How it all Started
The seeds of the book lie in a visit my wife, Charmaine, and I made to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery back in 2018. They were presenting a survey of the work of Thomas Bock, an artist I knew next to nothing about.
Bock was transported to Tasmania, arriving in 1824. Hewas a trained engraver and was immediately put to work on government publications. But he quickly set up his private practice, painting portraits of the local gentry and aboriginal people as well as scenes from around Hobart town.
But what struck me were six nude pencil sketches of Bock’s then de facto wife, Mary Anne, done around 1842. Even in my ignorance, I knew that these drawings were surely the very first nudes to be done in colonial Australia.
Thomas Bock, Reclining Nude, c.1840s. Pencil heightened with white on paper
So, I set off to research the matter. Along the way I discovered Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a well-established artist in London before he, too, was transported to Tasmania in 1835. TMAG mounted a survey of Wainewright in 2021, exhibiting two watercolour nudes from the 1840s, seemingly the only nudes done by Wainewright in Tasmania.
My research suggested these modest pictures by Bock and Wainewright were the first nudes ever done in Australia. More than that, they were almost certainly the only ones done in Australia until the mid-1870s. For a preview of Slow Reveal: Birth of Vernus – Australia’s First Nude. Artist Profile 52.
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, Lothaire of Bourgogne discovers the amour of his wife with the High Constable and thereby procures his own Death, watercolour on paper.
Hence, the title of my book.
What’s the Book About?
The book tells the story of the nude in Australian art from 1842 to the present day.
But some intriguing questions arose in researching the book. And some equally intriguing discoveries – such as the cultural richness of Tasmania in those early years.
Why did it take so long for the nude to become part of art activity in Australia? And when it did, how did it relate to precedents elsewhere? What, if any, relationship does it have with Australia’s beach culture and cult of physical exposure? How do we explain what is almost a preponderance of female Australian artists exploring the mostly female nude? And how does the nude as a genre provide insights into how we look at art?
Janet Cumbrae Stewart, The Breton Oil Bottle, 1922. Pastel.
These are some of the questions and issues I deal with in the book, assisted by 147 full-colour illustrations. I look at the history of the nude in Australia from 1842 to the present day in the context of the history of the nude generally, in the socio-cultural context in Australia and internationally and in the context of the history of ideas in art. The book deals with painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography.
Dagmar Cyrulla, I am woman, 2017. Oil on linen.