The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 176

The Age A May 1985 Saturday Extra 13 The big spenders make an artist see red to -m -v- mull msm-'Wrmn'iH .1 If I -Jr Mil VW WuTJJl I JJrr i Jr Vic O'Connor: 'Many people who paint are businessmen, not mvarj lit 1.: I i I 4,1 ,1 5 V-i Biographer Michael Scammell: Enjoyed his 'fencing match' with his questioners from the KGB. Picture by Jane Bown. From suburbia with Solzhenitsyn Michael Davie in London small offerings. He was very flattering, and he said I should go to George Bell's (art school) and that I should put them in the first exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society, which was coming up. "So I did, and they were exhibited, and I went to Bell's, and that was how I got into the contemporary art environment." By this time Ada O'Connor had realised her second youngest child would be an artist; he could not go to Bell's full-time, so she provided the guinea a term for him to go to Saturday afternoon classes, and he went, he says, "for two or three terms" before the money problem again became too difficult.

"Apart from that," he says, "there was some sort of a dispute coming up in" the Contemporary Art Society and George Bell, who was a very determined man, came around and told me how I should vote at this meeting. "I was naive enough to say to George that I thought the other point of view was the right point of view and he never came near me again. It was as simple as that," he laughs. "There was no point in me going there. He was very bitter about it." O'CONNOR says that in spite of incidents like this, there was a passion and a dedication to art in those days, and indeed for many years, which is missing today.

"People like Bell, John Reed, Adrian Lawlor couldn't stand each other. That was partly philosophical, and partly a clash of temperaments. It was partly because of their different attitudes towards painting. "But there was a background of their belief about art. The bitchi-ness (in today's art world) is career.

Art is career-oriented. Many people who paint are businessmen, not artists. "There's a lot of money in art administration. I've got a big lecture in Canberra later this year, and part of the lecture's going to be on how the art administrators are do'ng away with painters and painting. Eventually they'll have a set up where there won't be any artists, there won't be any pictures, there'll just be art administration.

"The Arts Council I knew a bloke in Sydney five or six years ago. He'd gone through the annual grant to the Arts Council he'd had to do an analysis of it and in the visual arts, 1 1 per cent of it had gone to artists or art organisations. All the rest went to administration. "They have an art board in each state, they have the Commonwealth Art Board, and they decide they want to have a conference about something so they bring a couple of people from Perth, and a couple from Adelaide, they put 'em up at the Top of the Town or somewhere, they all have slap-up $50 dinners, and the sky's the limit. Money doesn't matter.

"It's disgraceful." Vic O'Connor came up the hard way. He cannot bear waste. And as always, the man says just what he thinks. "WHEN I WAS young with other painters, all we ever talked about was art or literature in the past 15 or 20 years when you meet them, all they talk about is taxation." Remarks like this do not always go down with other artists as well as they might, but Vic O'Connor does not give a damn. He says he has always said what he believes.

He lives with his second wife Vera in a house with a beautiful garden and a glittering ocean view at the "non-tourist end" of Dromana; and he paints. In August the Victorian Artists' Society will stage an exhibition of his work, but the people who buy O'Connor's paintings are just as likely to come to the house. A number of people collect his paintings: he names two prominent figures in the Melbourne legal profession and estimates each would have "eight or 10" of his works. Vic O'Connor is a Melbourne boy, born and bred. He spent 20 years in Sydney, a city he never got used to, and three years in England and Europe; but he remains loyal to Melbourne and remains, too, a cheerfully unreformed communist.

"I've never changed my politics," he says. "I'd subscribe to all the communist parties if I met anyone collecting money for them." He is 66 now: he is a part of Australian art history, one of the painters, writers and poets who used their work before and during the Second World War "to alert people to the threat to democratic One of their exhibitions, the Anti-Fascist Exhibition of 1943, included works by Noel Counihan, Albert Tucker, Sir Sidney Nolan, YosI Bergner, and John Perceval. Today some of his works are anti-nuclear. But there is less anger and more compassion. He is more likely to paint Yiddish folk tales than themes political.

He spent some years practising law, and recently he has been painting scenes from the courts; like earlier works, particularly pictures of Melbourne's Victoria Market, they are tied into Vic O'Connor's youth. "My father took ill when the family were all young, and my mother brought everyone up. First she started sewing; she painted pictures at night time, like 'Stag at Bay', and 'Collie Dog Sitting in Front of the Fireplace'. She sold 'em for about 30 bob. She did piece work: she made slippers at home for people like Grosby's.

She had a very heavy life. "Eventually she got a little factory. By the time I was 1 1 or 12 my father was starting to recover a bit and we ended up, we had a couple of slipper stalls at the Victoria Market. I used to work there, from when I was about nine to about 13'2. I used to go round after school." Vic O'Connor was nearly 14 when the slipper factory went broke.

Ada O'Connor, as well as spending days at the National Gallery with young Vic, had managed a Heather Kennedy to pay for the education of his older brother Alf; Alf was working as a solicitor when the factory went bad. Mrs O'Connor moved the family to Mount Evelyn, to a small shack on a piece of land she had bought for Alf. "She bought animals with the last 10 quid she had," Vic says. He began to paint at 15. He was "tantalised" by the mountains visible from the shack; he began using pen and ink.

He copied every magazine illustration he saw. His work was not bad for a kid, he says: he won prizes at school. But Ada's idea was that he should be articled to his brother; and although after two years or so, he says, "I couldn't stand he continued in it, and at night he read poetry and painted. "I liked some aspects of law I enjoyed the courtroom work and the contact with people. But my brother's office was a madhouse.

My father worked for him by then, and they used to fight like mad. The business was always in an uproar. "By the time I was 21 my brother had had a breakdown, and I was as near as you could get to one." He calmed his nerves by staying in town instead of returning to "the country" with the others each night. He was absorbed by the problems of making his figures move, making his landscapes move: he returned to the markets at three and four in the mornings, sketching and painting. In the evenings he went to the library, and for a cheap meal to Gibby's, a Collins Street basement cafe.

He had become friendly with Gino Nivvi, an Italian who owned a secondhand bookshop and had been friends with some of the leading Italian artists, including Sever-ini and de Chirico. IN GIBBY'S one night he was invited home to dinner by "a very pleasant, urbane sort of He lived in Bourke Street. He said Look, I've got a Swiss lady, I want her to marry me but she won't. She lives in Collins Street and she's coming over to dinner on Tuesday night, will you come?" To me, coming from the country, this was incredible to meet a man who actually lived in the city, entertaining a Swiss woman! It was the height of sophistication "This was how I became involved with the art world, because this chap lived next door to David Strachan, who was a well-known artist at the time; at some stage he introduced me to Strachan, and Strachan eventually showed me his paintings. After I got to know him a bit, I very shyly told him that I'd done a bit of painting myself.

I'd done some drawings, and I had done some Iinocuts by then; so he said he wanted to see them, and eventually I took in the very few News and Mail and publicly complained about a system whose functionaries tried to sell his work to foreigners behind his back. Here was an early contact between Scammell and Solzhenitsyn, which burgeoned after Solzhenitsyn's expulsion, when Scammell was in New York revising the American translation of 'The Gulag Archipelago'. SCAMMELL, however, is now cut off from the subject of his biography. Solzhenitsyn helped him at first, especially during Scammell's stay in Vermont. Thereafter Scammell wrote to Solzhenitsyn asking questions, but the replies dried up.

Solzhenitsyn does not like the book, Scammell understands. You are 100 per cent for him, or you are an enemy. His blockbuster behind him, Scammell now proposes to escape from "the Russian at least temporarily. His next book will analyse "cultural warfare" between East and West particularly the story of how the CIA secretly financed Western intellectuals in the 1950s The Americans were imitating methods that the Soviets had pioneered in the 1930s through the Anti-Fascist Writers Association. The American effort has muddied the waters.

Because of it the Soviets can now assert for home consumption, with more plausibility than would otherwise be the case, that Solzhenitsyn was always a paid agent of the CIA and wrote to their instructions. I asked Scammell how, in that case, the Soviet authorities explained the fact that Solzhenitsyn was once a candidate for the Lenin Peace Prize. "They don't!" he said, laughing. SOLZHENITSYN by Michael Scammell (Hutchinson; MASSAGE CERTIFICATE COURSES MAY INTAKE Then came National Service. He had a passion for motor bikes, heard from a reporter that dispatch riders in Army intelligence rode them, joined that branch and was asked if he wanted to learn Russian.

He demurred. He was accordingly ordered to learn Russian, on the same high-powered Cambridge course as Michael Frayn, later of the 'Guardian' and the 'Observer', and nowasuccessful playwright, Alan Bennett, another successful playwright Joe Melia, the actor, and John Drummond, late director of the Edinburgh Festival. He soon mastered Russian; went to Nottingham University to read languages and got a first (and won a 'Daily Mirror' prize for editing the best university newspaper); taught English in Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croat having been his third language at Nottingham; applied to three American universities and was offered jobs at all three; chose Columbia in New York; started translating; and was living in digs when chance again took a hand. His elderly emigre landlady asked him to dinner; and her cousin turned out to be married to Vladimir Nabokov who asked him to collaborate in translating two Nabokov novels, which he did. Since then, Scammell has translated Tolstoy, Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' (advertised as "the first American Solzhenitsyn and Marchenko.

He also found a "sinecure" in the overseas service of the BBC. Meantime he had become interested in dissidents and samizdat the literature suppressed by the Soviet Government that is clandestinely printed and circulated. IN 1971 HE answered an advertisement and became director of ERIC CLEMATIS COTTAGE in Woking 10 minutes from the station, an hour from Waterloo, in the heart of Surrey commuterland is the last place you would expect to find associated with Solzhenitsyn, the famous novelist. The man who lives here knows as much about Solzhenitsyn as anyone. His biography of the great man has already been highly praised in the United States, where it was published before Christmas, and comes out in Australia next week.

The 'New York Review of Books' describes it as a "great biography" that "may well be one of the great books of our The book not only pieces together Solzhenitsyn's tumultuous life story, but tackles what the biographer, Michael Scammell, calls "the question of the which is whether communism is a temporary aberration of European culture, like Nazism, or the start of the general collapse of civilisation into barbarism. From Clematis Cottage, Scammell in 1977 went off to stay for a week with Solzhenitsyn on the 50 acres he acquired in Vermont after his expulsion from Russia in 1974. The visit took place, like most visits there, in strictest secrecy. The estate is surrounded by a chain-link fence, and a TV eye keeps watch at the electronically operated gate. During Scammell's visit, the main house was occupied by nine people wife, children, helpers but the Nobel Prize winner spent most of his time in a little summerhouse beside a pond, with a bed, a hotplate and an old refrigerator, rising at five or six am, swimming in the pond, and writing.

Clematis Cottage is a bit different. It was built in 1860 by the head gardener of the celebrated Jack-man nurseries, which bred the common Clematis Jackmanii with the great purple flowers: hence the name. Now it is a Victorian island engulfed by modern commuter estates. bruce morrow rVJ liL the newly formed Writers and Scholars International, set up by Stephen Spender and other Western intellectuals in response to appeals from inside to help oppressed and silenced writers. It was Scammell's own idea to launch 'Index on Censorship', the highly respected magazine he edited until 1980.

('Index is now in financial trouble, having lost its grant from the Arts Council.) It has been a picaresque (his word) career, making him constantly aware of the "cruel dilemma" facing all those who seek to study and visit the Soviet Union. "Naturally, you want to keep your finger on the pulse. But the price extracted by the Soviet Russians is rather heavy." You are expected, in return for access, to keep your mouth shut and to avoid connections with Russian emigres. Scammell himself has been excluded from the USSR since 1973. He went there at the height of dissident activity and was trailed by the KGB.

On his way out, 16 pages of notes were found that he had hidden in a packet of English tea. He was stripped, searched and interrogated for four hours by the KGB. In a perverse way, he enjoyed the fencing match with his questioners. At one point they surprisingly offered to sell him a Solzhenitsyn manuscript He said he could not afford it. But, they replied, his publishers could pay.

Scammell said it was against Soviet law to take unauthorised manuscripts out of the country. The sales talk died. Word of his experiences leaked out. "Woking Man Shadowed by KGB" said a local newspaper. Solzhenitsyn heard the news, though probably not from the 'Woking WtCfCttjbCR, 7 OftY LBSURE GUIDE 11-6 Fri.

GALLON 529 2924 Ian Training courses Massage Included: acupressure, Part-time Also available: Massage, R.S.I. Introduction Director. Melbourne Suite 11. 564 St. Scammell lives here with his wife.

Erika, three children (another lives in London), a cat and a dog, but at the foot of the garden, he, like Solzhenitsyn, has provided himself with a rustic summerhouse, which contains a big desk, shelves of books (two metres of them written by or translated from Russian by himself) and, belatedly, since he wrote his whole fat biography in longhand, a word-processor. No signs are visible here of a collapse of our civilisation into barbarism, though a local man told me that Woking station was a centre of glue-sniffing and the scene of a recent stabbing and youth riot. SCAMMELL belongs to a fraternity created by the cold war. Its members try to keep abreast of events in the Soviet Union, particularly among the intelligentsia. They are not quite historians, and not quite journalists.

They are in close touch with emigres, but cut off from their primary sources. They usually are the first to hear about developments among the intelligentsia that the Soviet authorities do not want known abroad. Their network links up a few universities (London, Oxford, Bristol, Glasgow), unattached people like Scammell, and external services of the BBC. Scammell joined this fraternity by chance. He describes himself as "working class and all a beneficiary of the Education Act of 1944, born in a New Forest village where his father was a plumber.

He left school at 16, yearned to be a journalist, applied unsuccessfully to 40 newspapers and spent two years as an office boy on the 'Southern Daily Echo' in Southampton. presents nicholas day artist 'birds of ausiralia" may 5th 28th taitunng original pities from iv wcenib, reiedsfd masierpK. plus collection, of pamttnqs leading exhibition potter from main ridge sue musker weaver meet nicholas day, bruce morrow sue musker Sunday 5th may from 2.30pm retitshmcms will M-ned gjlltn. hnurb UHi-ddv to sundry 11am in 5pm itai ii nan. sim-i-i, i.rfMiimyion hoi tow irw tjaiaen paini (depone: (059) 75 3915 OOUAH MENTONE-MORDIALLOC ART GROUP EXHIBITION TO BE OPENED BY JEAN GRAY ON SUNDAY 5th MAY AT 3.00 pm.

ALL WELCOME 5-12th May 10.00-3.00 pm STUDIO: REAR P.O. MENTONE. SPINNING and WEAVING IIANDWEAVERS and SPINNERS GUILD OF VICTORIA 31-33 Victoria Street, Melbourne 3N Tel. (621711 Monday to Friday 11 am-3 pm. Second term classes include Spinning: Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced.

Weaving: Rug and Beginning 4 Shaft. For further information please phone or send stamped self addressed envelope to the above address. FRAMING leading to a certificate in Relaxation practical massage, anatomy and physiology, professional skills. evenings and weekends. short introductory courses in Sensitive Acupressure.

Sports Massage, relief from to Anatomy. Ralph Hadden, B.A., CAc, N.D. School of Tactile Therapies Kilda Melbourne. 3004. Phone: 529 3611 2-6 Sun.

riCKCC- fi nm Friilav GALLERY LNG ORIGINALS 110 Punt Rd. Windsor ARTISTS SUPPLIES We are celebrating all next week with huge reductions on all framing. Some imported timber frames down to half price. Aluminium frames, mouldings, framing accessories, unframed and framed prints and custom framing all heavily reduced. n.

Stephens Victoria Collggg rhhAkllA 124 COMMERCIAL RD. Mwi'HT f.r.lNlfll'H One-off and limiied edition CAULFIELD ARTS CENTRE 441 Inkerman Rd. Nth. Caulfield. 3162 Ph: 524 3277 Hours: 1-6 weekends 10-5 weekdays Closed May 5th Exhibition continues until April 17th ARTISTS SUPPLIES mMIHWUI.

91 lIO MARTIN STREET GALLERY ANNUAL SALE Begins 10 am Saturday May 4 PAINTINGS FRAMES POTTERY FROM ONLY SIO 1 17 Martin Slreel. Cardenvale DRAWING "I've Always Wanted to Draw" A drawing course specially planned for the beginner. A 10 session program conducted by Colin Johnson commencing Thursday May 30, from 6.00 8.00 p.m. For details telephone 285 3358. ffl Department of Art Victoria College Burwood VISUAL ARTSCOMMUNITY ARTS FREE A forum to question the notion of 'standards' in community based visual arts.

Speakers: Gwenda Wiseman Artist in the community, for the Builders' Labourers Federation. Rialto Mural. Ric McCrackan Director, Footscray Community Arts Centre. Robin Hecks, Author of 'Community Arts Officer Sydney Review' for the Community Arts Board. Australia Council.

Vivienne Binns Community Artist. Sydney. Chair: Alison Fraser Co-ordinator, Artists in the Community Training Programme. THURSDAY 9TH MAY 8 P.M. at GEORGE PATON GALLERY 2nd Floor.

UNION HOUSE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE, PARKVILLE. For further information contact 341 6961 or 63 8801. Co-ordinated by the George Paton Gallery and the Artist in the Community Training Programme, Victorian Ministry for the Arts. The George Paton Gallery is funded by Melbourne University Union and receives assistance from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. ew '-t; Valine ORAL HISTORY ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALIA Biennial conference To be held at the University of Melbourne.

7th June (evening) to 9th June. For registration forms and programs: Ring 341 5963 (History Department Office) PHOTOGRAPHY Full-time: An exciting, intensive course of practical career training. Limited places early enrolment advisable. Part-time: Evening courses. or color, beginner to advanced.

Excellent facilities, skilled tuition, enjoyable small groups. Student work on display visitors welcome. MELBOURNE SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY 477 Glenhuntly Rd, Elsternwick. Ph. 528 4735, 528 3870.

Public Seminar on Arts Funding in Victoria A Public Seminar will be held on Sunday, 5 May at Storey Hall. RMIT. Swanston Street, Melbourne. The Seminar will look at aspects of arts funding in Victoria and issues related to the location, structure and accessibility of the Australia Council. The Seminar is being assisted by the Australia Council and is in response to a recent request from members of the Victorian arts community.

All interested people are invited to attend. Some papers will be available in advance of the Seminar. These can be collected at one of the following venues from Wednesday, 1 May. Victoria State Opera. Fringe Network, Church Theatre, St.

Martins Theatre, Footscray Community Arts Centre. Seminar details Venue: Storey Hall and Union House, RMIT 360 Swanston Street. Melbourne Date: Sunday. May 1985 Time: 10 a.m. 5 p.m.

Registration from 9.30 a.m.. Storey Hall For further information Contact: Jane Thynne (03) 266 8049 OR Rob Adams (02) 923 3426 OR toll free BOOK AND PRINT AUCTION Comprehensive Australian Art Reference Library, Australiana. Original Prints and Graphics. City of Caulfield Arts Centre 441 Inkerman Road, Caulfield. May 20 May 21 Catalogue $10 KENNETH HINCE BOOK AUCTIONS 140 Greville Street, Prahran.

Phone 515231. You are invited to lan's annual exhibition at the Ian Stephens Gauiry 29 Moonga Road Toorak 3142 Ph: 20 4388 opening at 2 pm today Gallery Hours: Saturday 2-6 pm. Sunday 11-6 pm. Balmoral Art Galleries presents exhibition and sale of romantic oil paintings by internationally famous Spanish artist JORGE AGUILAR-AGON Duration: 31 May. Open 7 days a week including public holidays: 10 pm Ph.

(052)98517. T. J. HEARD. DIRECTOR ST CHRISTOPHER'S SYNDAL ANNUAL ART SHOW July 5.

6. 7 ENTRIES INVITED For Entry Forms: Phone: 233 7362. 2321572. BALMORAL GALLERIES I 1 -MAGAZINE EVERY TUESDAY AT YOUR NEWSAGENT (008) 22 6912 0494S feS3(tCr tfl8BeS ir3jjfe'.