The picture below is from an article in the SMH about the opening of a new wing at the Newcastle Art Gallery, or NAG, (by Clare Design + Smith and Tzannes).

The caption to the photo identifies the woman as the gallery director, Lauretta Morton. In the article she references their holdings of Olley, Dobell, Williams, Boyd, Gascoigne, Hinder, Olsen, Blackman, Smart, Gleeson, and Tucker. All great painters.

However, the sculptures are not identified. All architects and photographers know that an artwork appearing in an image in a book, newspaper, or online must be attributed. So why are the painters lauded in the text, but the sculpture in the image is unidentified and ignored?

Let's explore a little bit more about sculpture's second-rate status in Australia.

‘The Yellow Peril’

This is ‘Vault’, a 1980 sculpture by the great Ron Robertson-Swan. A competition winner for the first version of Melbourne Square, designed by a very young Denton Corker Marshall.

The public objected to the object, calling it “useful as a skate ramp”, “ugly”, and “ill-suited to the space”. Philistines all, they hated it, calling it the ‘Yellow Peril’, racist and derogatory, without irony.

The council responded, within three months it was relegated, without reference to the artist, to Batman Park, where it languished largely forgotten for 22 years before a reprieve saw it located outside the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, belatedly recognised as a key work of considerable historical importance in Melbourne's public art collection.

More positively, many Melbourne artists have commemorated it, not least by the aforementioned DCM, referencing it in the ‘Melbourne Gateway’, known as the ‘Cheese Stick and Redskins’ (OMG, there we go again) on your way into town.

‘The Shish Kebab’

This Sydney sculpture, the ‘Dobell Memorial', is by Bert Flugelman. Another great sculptor whose works include ‘Cones’, a series of linked cones at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), and ‘The Spheres’, 2 large shiny chrome balls in Adelaide's Rundle Mall. You know his work, just not his name.

This work was christened derisively as ‘The Shish Kebab’. Again, the philistines restlessly advocated, and again the powers that be, this time Mayor Frank Sartor, removed it to a less prominent street corner.

Public sculpture repudiated again.

Bert was also a great teacher, which I can attest to. Not because I learned to sculpt (I can’t), but because his teaching at Sydney University in the 1970s excited my love of sculpture.

Clement Meadmore

Back to sculpture in Newcastle. The one on the left in the first image is ‘Hereabout’, by Clement Meadmore, our greatest ever sculptor.

Well, at least our most successful artistic export. After training as an industrial designer at RMIT and working with limited horizons, Meadmore transferred to the United States in 1963, where he found great fame as one of America's greatest modern sculptors.

In Harry Howard's garden at the NGA is ‘Virginia', one of Meadmore’s giant sculptures. Purchased and shipped from the USA at great cost. You could say it was coming home if you were being uncharitable.

Before fame in the USA, Meadmore was collaborating with architects, integrating sculpture into buildings. One delightfully designed piece was over the main entry of the Townhouse Motel in Canberra, a long modernist building by architect Enrico Taglietti.

The Italians know a thing or two about sculpture in buildings. The press photographer of the day didn’t.

Unfortunately, the building’s gone. Fortunately, the sculpture was retained. Unfortunately, it's poorly displayed. Donated to the NGA, it’s mounted to a wall in an undercroft, hidden by planting in the garden.

An astonishing piece of work: rough-cut and welded steel pieces, beautifully assembled. Here’s its location and some close-ups. Well worth a visit to the NGA garden.

Meadmore started his working life designing chairs. To which he creatively returned in order to supplement his income in the USA, as his sculptures by then were enormous, costly, and unknown.

Meadmore wrote books; one was a definitive study of modern chairs, another was curiously titled ‘How to Make Furniture Without Tools’.

Some years ago, I followed the instructions to make two chairs. They're plywood, cut by a ‘lumber yard’ and assembled using a modified PVA glue called ‘Titebond’. Unsurprisingly comfortable – he knew ergonomics.

They sit in the library; I sit in them to read. They look like this.

What a shame that our greatest 20^thC export to the world centre of mid-century art should be so little known at home. His crime? Making great sculpture.

Had he daubed average paintings, he might be better known. Clement Meadmore’s story deserves to be far better known in Australia, but he has faded into history, overlooked even in a leading gallery.

I wish it weren't so.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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