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The Max
Gael Newton circa 1993
This is a revised version of a draft sent to a magazine around 1993. I have kept the intent of the original piece in which I was writing about Max Dupain, an artist and friend that I admired. Max Dupain was born 22 April 1911 and died 27 July 1992.
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| Shattered Intimacy, Max Dupain 1936 |
As a young curator trying to slot Max Dupain’s life and long career into conventional art historical order for his upcoming 1980 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I would come to his Artarmon studio for lunch armed with a list of questions. He would listen and fill my glass with crisp white wine as I eruditely explained his work to him.
Occasionally he would put his head in his hands, and ask 'What will it all matter in 500 years!' Another of his challenges was, 'What's The Answer then?’
I have never worked out what The Question was. And so it was that my visits to the studio usually ended with me a little sozzled and Max briskly ready for a bout of serious printing in what was, by commercial standards, an austere darkroom.
Dupain disputed that photography as an art would ever reach the heights of his favourite composers such as Beethoven.
But he was obsessed with the power of photography that in the unique moment of exposure even when recording elaborate surrealist tableaux of his own making, opened a portal to another dimension. |
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 Photo of Max Dupain
by Athol Shmith 1977
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Photography it seemed could reveal forms and relationship and pin them down for eternity. Perhaps he was a Platonist seeing beyond the unstable and messy world of nature to a realm of pure fixed forms.
Max Dupain was a strikingly handsome man but quite chaste and uncomfortable with people at large. His early life was surrounded by bodies especially as his father George ran a pioneering modern gymnasium in Sydney called The Dupain Institute of Modern Physical Culture (it opened in 1900).
For men of George Dupain’s generation, the classical Hellenic ideal of physical beauty, allied to a modern regimes of body culture was a pathway to rational sanity, moral and physical health. All that Victorian inhibition about sex and the body was to be aired out and demystified. What some also saw behind the ideal of Greek beauty was a pagan sexual paradise free of guilt and inhibition.
Fitness was thus a parental obligation and personal given for Max Dupain. He was in the rowing team at Sydney Grammar and in later life rowed his solo scull in the waters at the foot of his Castlecrag home. It was the perfect ’sport ' to match his own dynamic elegance. I could never imagine him in blood sports or teams.
The iconic status of Dupain’s 1938 Sunbaker and his many studies of fine bodied male surfers like Pool at Newport 1952, might suggest he supported the rollicking Chesty Bond model of Australian manhood. This is not so. He had no sympathy with jingoism or eugenics. Many figures in Dupain’s images are alone even in a crowd.
Outside physical health, Max Dupain ventured along a different route to his father. In 1935 he became one of the first artists in Australia to be gripped by Surrealism. In a number of images in this vein he turned orderly classicism on its head and embraced the irrational and the subconscious.
He did this when he was a fresh 24 year old who had newly launched into business as a photographer in Sydney. Lighting for him became mysterious and revelatory. The Surrealists also reflected Vitalist literary theories of the time in which man's vitality and connection to nature and the senses was seen as being sapped by modern life.
One enduing Surrealist inspired motif in Dupain’s work from the 1930s on was the use of miniature replicas of Greek classical sculptures of Venus de Milo, Aphrodite, Apollo Belvedere and the Discobolos that were used for the logo of his father’s gym. Dupain owned these by the 1930s and although these were broken over time he used them in a number of his images.
The Surrealists were much given to the racked and tortured female form and classical motifs and curious tableaux of seemingly unconnected objects and figures. Dupain's 1937 Homage to DH Lawrence has the head of his Venus figurine sinking into the sand beside a D.H. Lawrence’s book of poems and a metal wheel in another image Shattered Intimacy of 1936 the Apollo figurine lies broken at the bottom of the menaced by tentacles.
Surrealism also stimulated Dupain to take on nude studies. Totally accepted in the traditional fine arts, the genre was more or less unknown in Australian art photography. Leading art publisher Syd Ure Smith showcased Dupain’s earliest nudes in 1935 in his fine art journal Art in Australia. The nudes were unlike anything seen in public before and they made all past painted academic nudes seem effete.
Dupain also set up outdoor tableaux. He created a series of family nudes at the opposite end to the nudist camp images that might have appeared in the magazines advocating nudism that his father wrote for. In one image he has as a kind of modern expulsion scene, where a man and woman are cast down on the desert sands.
Some of Dupain’s nudes are were full bodied odalisques, others half human, some scary, often anonymous but always with great physical presence.
After World War II, Dupain dropped the overt surrealism of the 1930s and 40s while continuing with images using his miniature Greek figures and imbued with surrealist spirit.
In the last decade of his life, he made a series of still life studies some of which paid direct homage to surrealism.
He was also confronting his own mortality with the photograph of luminous almost ghostly flowers at night on his own property at Castlecrag. They seemed like omens. In the garden sex gives life and brings death. |
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Mosterio Deliciosa, Max Dupain 1970 |
Late in life Max Dupain was honoured as a national treasure. He was awarded a companion order of Australia for his services to the visual arts in the honours list for Australia Day 1992. Every other week there seemed to be a new profile published. Dupain was not an unknown spurned artist in a garret. He was a professional photographer and his images had been there for all to see in magazines and books since the mid-thirties. The late life acclaim however, was all quite extraordinary.
Max Dupain and I hugely enjoyed our lunchtime games. I got a monograph and a retrospective out and we had a friendship - and a secret. There were undercurrents to his work. I knew that he knew that I thought a lot of his work was about the sexes. He would refer people to talk to me if they 'wanted to know about all that'.
Sadly, he was too ill to attend the affectionate public lecture I gave on whether he was a sexy classicist or a classical sexist. I never got to send him the paper that examined his remarkable masterwork Shattered Intimacy 1936, one of the finest surrealist inspired art works made in Australia.
After all, what would it all matter in 500 years? Except that Max clearly printed so many of his works for posterity and it did matter. That was the Max Dupain I knew, respected and admired.
A link to special page on Max Dupain
more of Gael Newton's essays
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