Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne
Collection of the late Sir Warwick and Lady Fairfax, Sydney

EXHIBITED
Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, May 1940

LITERATURE
'The Art of Adrian Lawlor' in Art in Australia, series 3, no. 80, August 1940, pp. 18, 19 (illus.) as Banner of Blood, Painted on receiving a Poem from Alister Kershaw as now in the possession of Warwick Fairfax, Esq

In the mid 1930s, John Fairfax & Sons Ltd acquired both The Home magazine and Art in Australia, which had established itself as the leading publication for modern and Australian art. The following is an excerpt from a review published anonymously in the August 1940 edition.

'Although he held his first one-man show little more than ten years ago, Adrian Lawlor has a rightful place amongst the pioneers of the modern movement in Australia.

In those days, he was far from unknown as a writer with a vital and highly personal style, who had contributed to leading Australian journals. His exhibition of paintings early in 1930 marked him as an artist who had something to say, and who was determined to say it in his own way.

The exhibition burst like a high explosive shell in the midst of Melbourne's slumbering art world. Here was an artist who believed that a painting, in order to be a work of art, must be something more than a coloured photograph, a sentimental likeness of a suburban street, or "Portrait of Alderman So-and-so in robes of office." Lawlor dared to place himself on the platform with European artists and critics, who considered that the post-impressionists and the men of his own day - Picasso, Braque, Matisse - produced art, while the painters of Highland cattle and "The Deathbed" did not.

He was attacked from all sides by painters and members of the general public, who rushed into print through the daily press with long and wordy letters. Lawlor countered each onslaught, defending his own work and championing the cause of the contemporary movement.

Since then he has been to the forefront in all those "anti-modern versus modern" controversies which seem to occur and reoccur with clock-like precision in Melbourne.

His annual one-man shows have continued to disturb Melbourne's leaders of academic thought, and his exhibitions are eagerly awaited by those who expect an artist to be creative and stimulating with his brushes...

Passing from these formal paintings, we can select another group of related works which is probably of more intrinsic worth than all of the others, in that it exemplifies more particularly and more deeply the personal vision of the artist. These pictures are "Banner of Blood", "Symphonic Poem" (No 21), "A Melodrama" and "Theatre" (No 62). Though uneven in execution, and in the extent to which they carry this special inspiration, each of these paintings can be related through the air of haunting unreality and mystery which pervades them. The blood-like paint used (except in "Theatre") is possibly responsible for a certain feeling of uneasiness which they evoke, but their emotional appeal in undoubted, even though their aesthetic analysis may be involved. This does not negate the value of the paintings, but rather assures us once more that the artist has something welling up in him which cannot fail to be a valuable contribution to Australian art.'