‘The visible coming to the aid of the non-visible’

‘The visible coming to the aid of the non-visible’1: The collage of Carl Plate

Carl Plate worked as an artist from the 1930s to the 1970s, a period in which it was not always easy for artists to show their work, and when, to a significant extent, they depended on the various art societies for opportunities to exhibit. Nonetheless, between 1951 and 1968 Plate held 24 one-person exhibitions.2 And not just in any gallery either, Plate held exhibitions at the best addresses in Australian art after the war.3 They were not, however, the only vehicles he used to present his work. In the 1940s and 1950s Plate was a pillar of the New South Wales branch of the Contemporary Art Society, prominent as both a board member and as an exhibitor with this crucial engine of modernism in Australia. He participated in the chief group exhibitions of the time, including Contemporary Australian Painting, which toured the Pacific in 1956; the Matson Line Exhibition of Australian Art, which did likewise in 1959; Recent Australian Painting, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1961; and in the same year Australian Contemporary Art shown at the São Paulo Biennale. In 1962 Plate’s work was seen in London as part of Commonwealth Art Today at the Commonwealth Institute and he contributed to Australian Painting at the Tate Gallery. Later in the 1960s, he was part of exhibitions of Australian art that toured South-East Asia, Europe, North America, Pakistan and India. As well, Plate won many prizes at a time when prize-winning mattered.

Carl Plate, then, was one of Australia’s most distinguished and accomplished mid-century artists. Born in Perth in 1909, he was the son of the artist Adolf Plate and the brother of painter and sculptor Margo Lewers. The galleries he showed in, the exhibitions he was part of, and the artists he was hung beside were the bright lights of their day. They were the artists and exhibitions that found expression in Bernard Smith’s Australian Painting 1788-1960. Carl Plate, of course, was part of that history; indeed, in many ways Plate was an important driver in creating such histories, and he matured as an artist in Sydney at a time when Australian art history itself first became established. This, however, is still to leave out Plate’s achievements in collage, which must be seen in relation to his painting, but which also stand in their own right. In fact, we can’t fully understand Plate’s painting without reference to his collage made simultaneously, or his later post-painting collage; Plate’s 1970s collage throws retrospective light on all his work, in both collage and painting.

Collage has held a central place in the accounts of the art of the 20th century, along with photography, film, video and printmaking. In Australia, art-historical and critical attention to the formal platforms of the art of the last century has been negligent, even for the dominant mediums of painting and sculpture, much less a ‘minor’ one like collage. Moreover, it is rare for any art institution in Australia to account even generally for the 20th century, much less examine the history of a single formal category over such a period. Smith’s Australian Painting 1788-1960 (1962) is where we might begin to understand the story of some of these other media, but Smith makes no reference at all to the place of collage in Australian art. It is an omission Robert Hughes repeats in his The Art of Australia published in 1966; it is repeated too in Andrew Sayers’ Australian Art published in 2001. These exclusions affect not only, for instance, the place of sculpture in the histories of Australian art – although that was rectified by the publication of Graeme Sturgeon’s The Development of Australian Sculpture in 1975 – but even more so other media. This is ironic given the explosion of these media in Australia since at least the mid-1960s. If, when Smith published Australian Painting 1788-1960, it could be said that the history of Australian painting and art were more or less the same thing, in less than a decade this was certainly not the case. This is doubly ironic given the fact that painting, from at least the late 19th century on, is the story of ‘the expanded field’ of painting. After all, innovations always occur in the relationship of painting to another medium. It was painters who were responsible for the invention of collage as an avant-garde format, and it was they who developed its vocabulary and extended its language over the century.

It was not until 1990 that any important work on the subject of collage appeared. Arthur McIntyre’s Contemporary Australian Collage and its Origins, published nearly twenty years ago, is still the only book on the subject. Its emphasis is very much on what was then ‘contemporary’ collage and much less on its ‘origins’, reflecting both McIntyre’s own work as a collage artist and his context. He begins his account by writing that ‘[d]uring the 1940s and 1950s very few artists in Australia were using collage techniques’,4 in effect pointing out the belated appearance of collage in an Australian context. The real history in McIntyre’s book is done by Andrew Sayers. His account, ‘The Modern Collage in Australia’, attempts a brief survey of collage in Australia in the 20th century. Sayers finds its roots in the commercial art fields, drawing a line from Hera Roberts’ covers for Sydney Ure Smith’s Home in the early 1930s, through George Finey, Douglas Annand and on to Geoff and Dahl Collings. He observes that collage was used as a compositional tool by Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, Frank Hinder, Rah Fizelle and Eric Wilson, but noted that ‘they did not make collages as finished exhibited works’.5 The first Australian artist to do this, Sayers suggests, was Sidney Nolan, whose Max Ernst-influenced surrealistic collages begun in 1938 are now well known; it is likely these or other collages were exhibited in Nolan’s first one-person exhibition in his studio in Melbourne in 1940. Nolan abandoned the medium, perhaps in early 1941,6 as he turned away from the international lingua franca of collage and towards the ‘Australianist’ paintings that have placed him at the forefront of our art histories ever since. Sayers then reminds us that James Gleeson made a collage in 1939 but that in his early corpus ‘there were few other collages’.7 In the realm of Surrealism, Sayers likewise points out the work of Oswald Hall, who produced a number of collages in the 1940s, and Robert Klippel, who began making collages in Sydney in 1952. Sayers acutely observes of Klippel, who had warmed himself by the dying embers of Surrealism in France, that ‘[i]t is perhaps surprising, however, that Klippel did not begin to make collage in 1947-50 when he was in Paris’.8 Sayers then touches briefly on Elwyn Lynn’s essay ‘Collage’, calling it ‘a glance over the use of the medium in Australia’,9 and moves on to discuss collage in relation to the work of the Annandale Imitation Realists, to Pop art in Australia, and to the ‘present’ the book then occupied, that of 1990.

It is Elwyn Lynn’s essay ‘Collage’, however, that is the earliest account of collage in Australia. Published in 1962 in the Contemporary Art Society’s magazine Broadsheet, ‘Collage’ was written by an artist as well as by a critic. Lynn had then been editor for more than five years, and the magazine often published small accounts by him on topical art matters. Lynn was one of the earliest artists in Australia to introduce collage elements into his work and he exhibited them from at least 1959. In ‘Collage’ he sketches the medium’s history from its pioneers Braque and Picasso, through Schwitters and Dada, Arp and Surrealism, and on to Motherwell, Rauschenberg and Pop. Then Lynn turns his art-historical eye to the experience of Australian artists. In a sense he was writing and acknowledging his own precursors and announced the three artists he considered pioneers of collage in Australia. ‘Sydney’, he writes, ‘has had its collagists; Carl Plate has long practised it, the late Mary Webb showed Matisse like cut-outs when she returned to Sydney; and Nolan in 1938-9 used cloth, wood, and diagrams of knitting machines’.10 Thus Lynn places Carl Plate amongst the three artists who initiated the Australian tradition of collage. It is curious, then, that Sayers’ only mention in his account of Plate and Webb is in the context of their appearance in Lynn’s essay. Beyond this, Sayers makes no further mention of Plate and manages to misunderstand the nature of Webb’s contribution. Mary Webb was, in fact, the first Australian artist to consistently present collage as part of both her one-person exhibitions and in the context of group shows in which she participated. Webb did so from her first exhibition in Paris in 1950 through to her last in 1958, and she did so under the watchful eye of Herta Wescher, the 20th century’s leading historian of the medium.

Wescher published her encyclopaedic account Collage in 1968, and in it she places collage in the history of the 20th century avant-garde.11 This book was the first of two intended volumes. The first was to cover the period up to World War II, the second intended to consider the period after, but the project was cut short following the author’s death. In it, and this is uncited in any account of Australian art so far as I am aware, Wescher points to another two Australians who had made contributions to collage. She had seen the work of James Cant and Eric Smith, perhaps in various surrealist exhibitions in London, and she was concerned to note their contributions.12 Neither artist, however, went on to work substantially in the medium again. Besides those already mentioned, and in the context of the fullest possible account of collage in Australia in the 20th century, it would be important to remember the mid-century collage work by Guelda Pyke, Rosamond McCulloch and Leonard Hessing, then later by Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, one of the first video artists in the world, Tony Tuckson, Gareth Sansom and Robert Jacks. It is Wescher who best suggests how we might begin to understand the work of these artists, most of whom made collage after the war:

Collage enjoyed a new heyday after the World War II, when artists everywhere embraced abstraction in painting. The effect was to bring about yet another transformation in collage itself. The first generation of abstractionists had turned to it as means of establishing clear relationships between lines, forms, and colours in order to guarantee objective validity for their pictorial conceptions, but the postwar generation cared more about using the abstract idiom to reflect their individual subjective moods, impressions, and experiences, without worrying too much about definitive formulations. In place of precise, delimited forms, the concern now was all for indeterminate textures and the manner of applying paint, and these uncommitted means, behind which the artist could preserve his anonymity, were susceptible of being enriched in manifold ways with the aid of collage. Pasted papers and other substances gave the ‘message’ a material solidity that made its voice more forceful.13

This is how we must understand Carl Plate and all those artists working immediately after the war in collage, such as Webb, Crowley and Klippel. They are part of the second generation of collage, the post-war artists who related abstract painting to collage and sought the ‘indeterminate’ in order to reflect individual subjectivity. For these artists, collage stood equally beside their painting and, as Wescher put it, together they brought about ‘yet another transformation in collage itself’. • When Bernard Smith updated his own history in 1971 he discussed Carl Plate in the sub-chapter ‘Abstract Expressionism’, and thus categorised his work. In a paragraph that began ‘[t]he abstract expressionists, though drawn strongly by the pull of landscape and environment … were also drawn by the compelling desire to make their paintings a personal encounter with the inner self’,14 Smith gave this category definition. He described Plate’s work as ‘plac[ing] an emphasis upon the landscape of mind, “to expose a glint of the unknown”, to make the non-visual visual’.15 Smith’s rhetoric here, an invocation of the sublime, had been supplied for him by Plate in 1964 in an exchange of correspondence following Smith’s response to his show at Gallery A in Melbourne. Smith reviewed his exhibition in the The Age, and in a letter in reply, Plate was concerned to remind him that ‘[a] London reviewer said in 1959: “he brings the visual to the aid of the non-visual”’.16 This was terminology that Smith evidently felt comfortable repeating when it came time to apportioning Plate his place in his update.

And it is just this expression that is at stake in Plate’s finest achievements, his collage from the 1970s. This work came as the culmination of more than 30 years’ work with the medium, work which had begun at the end of the 1930s following Plate’s time studying in England, initially at St. Martins School of Art, and then in particular with Bernard Meninsky at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts. Meninsky was an important teacher for many Australian artists between the wars, and around his studies in London Plate managed to travel extensively throughout the 1930s.17 Plate had studied in Sydney at the East Sydney Technical College (1930-34), where ‘he had been sent copies of the magazine Minotaure, which introduced “the new world of Dada and Surrealism”, for which he felt he had an “immediate affinity”’.18 This predisposition was further flamed by his visit to the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Burlington Galleries in London in 1936. Plate’s earliest known collage dates from just two years after this experience; a postcard on which he replaced the usual photographic image with a collage. Delightfully intimate, Plate’s first collages presage his later work.

It is a feature of Plate’s collage that the imagery he draws on originates in his daily life, and the periods in which he concentrated on this format overlapped with the transitional space of travel. Thus there are clusters of collages grouped by the particular source materials at hand and the particular decisions relating to the process of collage that Plate enacted at the time. He preferred to travel overseas by ship, in part because it allowed him extended periods in which he could develop his work. Likewise Plate’s source material is drawn from his everyday life, from magazines he subscribed to and from the surplus papers he saved from the bin. In the 1940s he sourced many of his black and white images from Lilliput, and then later relied on Paris Match (to which he subscribed), fashion magazines, Women’s Weekly, travel brochures, company reports, and any paper simply at hand.

At first, Plate combined painterly elements together with readymade papers, but by the 1970s he had moved to a purer form of collage based solely on cutting and pasting, an imagery which drew not at all on his painting. Instead, it relied on readymade paper and a sensibility hued over years in localities from Sydney to St. Petersburg and on oceans near and far.

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In the 1940s Carl Plate’s collage was the outcome of his experience until then. The influence of surrealism overlapped with his expressed political concerns. In the midst of war, Plate’s anti-fascist polemical work is also playful, and Plate’s humour thickens our experience of the work. Pre-figuring Pop art, Plate also celebrated paper and its many applications for their own sake and the pleasure he took in his work is evident today.

Plate’s collage in the 1950s, on the other hand, seems less obviously surrealistic. Instead it is much more painterly, and might even be said to be painting another way. Often they combine a readymade paper support, which was then painted on, with stuck down painted paper. Is it a painting? Is it collage? Collage has always asked categorical questions. Most of Plate’s collages from the 1950s are exhibited or dated after 1955, that is, after Contemporary French Painting, which toured Australia in 1953. This exhibition, the first in this country of contemporary French painting, was influential on Plate’s generation of artists in Australia. As an artist with a particular interest in France, it is surprising then that Plate’s collage of the late 1950s, of 1958 for instance, feel like another version of Pop art, only abstract. From this time on Plate’s work is almost entirely non-figurative.

In the 1960s, Plate continued to explore the painterly problems he had announced in his work of the 1950s, but he now also began a new, more pure collage. He developed a line of work in which he confined himself to the cut up and the stuck down. We can see Plate extending his painterly collage in works from 1961 and 1965, for instance, where he complicated his work by experimenting with pierced surfaces and negative spaces. But Plate also removed paint entirely, in particular in his work from 1960 and in his shaped collages from 1965.

In the early 1970s Plate’s collage matured. In this decade he brought collage to a new place and he did so outside the critical eyes of Australia’s newly emerged art-historical class. In the age of conceptual art and the dematerialisation of the object, Plate’s strength was his commitment to a medium that he had first explored more than three decades earlier. Not solely occupied with the material concerns raised by his collage, his work at this time must be read as part of the general cultural climate and as an extension of his anti-fascist politics which had been on display in 1940s. In the early 1970s his work again gave expression to his politics, but he now used a more colourful, pop-ist sensibility. It is noticeable that at this time Plate used colour printed matter sourced from magazines and advertising, and the paper collages from around this period represent a break from his painting. By the mid-1970s Plate’s collage has become the primary format for his art, disconnected from his painting.

Plate’s collages from 1972-73 were perhaps the works that unhitched the two mediums from each other. These works were again the basis for his paintings, as Plate returned to collage to source his imagery. Nevertheless we are struck by the fact that the paintings Plate completed based entirely on these collages look so un-collage like. It is as if the collage need not have been, so apparently ‘painterly’ is the painting. It is as if Plate has affected a kind of dissolution of the respective media.

Plate’s collages from 1974-76, on the other hand, continue to explore the problems he announced in the early 1970s. Often signed and dated, these works can be thought of as Plate’s last stand-alone statements in collage and are perhaps his greatest achievements as an artist. Flowing down twin streams in the mid-1970s, Plate produced two sets of work; we might think of them as his strip collages and his static collages. Against their combination of numerous individual elements Plate’s strip collage effect a singularity, a seamlessness made up of a hundred cuts. They might remind us of Jean-Luc Godard’s jump cut, said to have affected the cinematic equivalent of Cubism. Plate produced this series of work more or less in the proportion of a cinema screen, or in terms of painting he adopted the horizontal ‘landscape’ format. They are at once singular, even gestalt, and at the same time faceted, fragmented and disjointed. The impression the work gives is at once speedy and slow, but the process of course had been laborious. It is one of the strip collages’ most remarkable qualities that Plate was able to create such a dynamic image with so mechanical a means.

At the same time as Plate worked on his strip collage, he also worked on his static collage. These we can think of as a kind of collapse of the image, a kind of morphing and bending of imagery, the image re-orientated and disentangled from its context on the page of some magazine. Instead Plate recombines images so that a kind of stillness comes over his surfaces, a passivity which allows the viewer time to meander around the image. In time we see … well nothing; nothing can be made of them and instead we become conscious of the way our head is slowly wobbling on our neck. These works incline us to move around them, and our eyes and minds become at once restless and calm. When our head settles, we have a feeling of pleasure engendered by Plate’s ability at once to disorient us, to take us away from the source of the image, and to return us happily to a new place, a new world even; Plate’s world. Any original image has become unrecognisable, and in this work Plate recombined and reorientated his sources and evinced a fantastic post-pop new image order.

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It was painting that brought Carl Plate to prominence and gained him his reputation; but it was collage that was his finest achievement, in particular his final work done in the 1970s. Indeed, it is collage that is the real secret of Plate’s painting, and it is collage that is the real backbone of Plate’s career. It appeared of little interest to anyone, especially to the general art historians, but also those specifically concerned with collage, during Plate’s own lifetime. It would have to wait for another kind of Australian art history for Plate’s collage, and even for Notanda Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society, to find its proper place. Likewise, if an artist today such as Daniel Crooks can be thought in relation to Carl Plate because they share an interest in the vertical slice, it would be only in the light of another art history, one that crosses media and that crosses countries. We might think of this as a history of UnAustralian art.

A.D.S. Donaldson


1. Michael Shepherd, ‘Exploration’, Art News and Review, London, 10th October 1959. Carl Plate Archive, Sydney.
2. In chronological order they were in Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, Newcastle, London, New York and Canberra.
3. Plate held his first exhibition at his own Notanda Gallery, then at the Macquarie Galleries, John Martins Gallery, Peter Bray Gallery, Johnstone Gallery, the Gallery of Contemporary Art, David Jones Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, Terry Clune Gallery, Hungry Horse Gallery, Gallery A and the Bonython Gallery.
4. A rthur McIntyre, ‘The Age of Collage: Origins and Influences: Part II’, Contemporary Australian Collage and its Origins, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1990, p. 23.
5. A ndrew Sayers, ‘The Modern Collage in Australia’, Contemporary Australian Collage and its Origins, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1990, p. 30.
6. I am treating Nolan’s collages prepared for the production of Cocteau’s Orphée in Sydney in 1948 as part of his work in stage design.
7. S ayers, p. 32. Gleeson is quoted by McIntyre, in the catalogue for the exhibition The Age of Collage at the Holdsworth Gallery in Sydney in 1987, as having said of his collage that ‘it wasn’t till 1977 and my series “Hommage to Max Ernst” that I really became involved’. The Age of Collage, ex. cat., Holdsworth Contemporary Galleries, Sydney, 1987, p. 4.
8. S ayers, p. 33. Klippel was in fact in Paris from late 1948 or early 1949, until June 1950.
9. Ibid.
10. Elwyn Lynn, ‘Collage’, Broadsheet, Contemporary Art Society, Sydney, 1962, pp. 6-7.
11. Herta Wescher, Collage, Abrams Inc., New York, 1968.
12. Wescher, p. 246. The full margin note by Wescher is, ‘[o]nly extensive specialised research might track down the collages known to have been done in 1936-37 by N. Dawson, Humphrey Jennings, Edith Rimington, and by the Australians James Cant and Eric Smith’. She mentions these artists in the context of collage and surrealism in London in the 1930s, a context Wescher notes that Len Lye also contributed to.
13. Wescher, p. 306.
14. Smith, p. 357.
15. Ibid.
16. Carl Plate, letter to Bernard Smith, 11.6.1964. Carl Plate Archive, Sydney. In reviewing Plate’s London exhibition the critic Michael Shepherd in fact used the expression, ‘the visible coming to the aid of the non-visible’. See endnote 1.
17. See Biographical Notes for details of Plate’s travels on the way to, and during his time in London. 18. Anne Watson, ‘The Paintings’, Carl Plate Project 22, ex.cat., Art Gallery of N.S.W., Sydney, 1977, unpaginated.