Carl Plate - Australian artist 1907-1977

Exhibition: Carl Plate Paintings and Collages SIXTIES + SEVENTIES

2010-07-06T16:29:00.004+10:00

The Damien Minton Gallery

Weds 7 - Sat 24 July 2010

'It is a great honour for the Damien Minton Gallery to announce an exhibition of the pioneering Australian Modernist artist CARL PLATE.

The exhibition will carry on the themes introduced in the exhibition on Carl Plate at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery last year where a life time of collages were displayed for the first time.

Collages and paintings will hang side by side at the Damien Minton Gallery, informing each other and creating a new dialogue which will help reposition Plate as a vital Australian artist.'

Address:

61 - 63 Great Buckingham St

Redfern 2016

Tel: 02 9699 7551

Mob: 0400 099 620

Email: art@damienmintongallery.com.au

Web: damienmintongallery.com.au

Exhibit: Carl Plate, Paintings and Collage from the 1970s

2009-06-08T15:43:00.003+10:00

Exhibition this coming Wednesday:

Carl Plate (1909-1977)
Paintings and Collage from the 1970s
Opening Wednesday 10 June 2009, 6-8PM

10 June 2009 at 6 - 8pm
Eva Breuer Art Dealer
83 Moncur Street
Woollahra

Link to further details on the Eva Breuer website.

Carl Olaf Plate - Biography

2009-05-03T09:49:00.002+10:00

Plate (1909-1977) was born in Perth and studied at the National Art School in Sydney. He then travelled and studied abroad before returning to Sydney in 1940, where he had a remarkable influence on local artists through the establishment of his famous Notanda Gallery in Rowe Street, Sydney. He was a highly gifted painter who moved from figurative abstraction in the 50s to pure abstraction during the 1960s and 70s.

James Gleeson described his work in 1963 as being among the handful of masterpieces of abstract painting in Australia. Elwyn Lynn, an important abstract painter himself as well as critic, described Plate's paintings as bringing an "epic poetry to abstraction."

Plate exhibited widely from 1941-1976, both in Australia and abroad. He has won prizes such as the McCaughey Prize in 1968 and the Aubusson Tapestry Prize in 1967. Plate is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all state galleries, regional galleries in NSW and institutions in London, New York and Paris, and important corporate and private collections in Australia.

- Eva Breuer, 2006

Carl Olaf Plate (1907-1977)
1909 Born, Perth, WA. Moved to Sydney in 1914
1930-34 Studied at East Sydney Technical College
1935 Travelled to USA and Mexico, then settled in London
1935-40 Worked as advertising writer-designer; Studied at Central School of Art and Design and St Martins School of Art; Visited central and eastern Europe
1940 Returned to Sydney with an exhibition of significant British artists, titled 'England Today'
1940 Opened Notanda Gallery, Sydney
1940 Foundation Member Contemporary Art Society
1940 Visited Europe
1956 Member, Society of Artists, NSW
1959 Worked in Paris, London, Greece and Spain
1962 Visited New York
1965 Visited Europe
1968 First appointee to Sydney University Power Bequest Studio at Cite Internationale des Arts, Paris
1970 First appointee Moya Dyring Memorial Studio, Cite des Arts, Paris

Solo Exhibitions
1941 Notanda Gallery, Sydney
1951 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1951 John Martins Gallery, Adelaide
1951 Stanley Coe Gallery, Melbourne
1952 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1952 Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane
1953 Peter Bray Gallery, Brisbane
1954 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1954 Gallery of Contemporary Art, Melbourne
1958 David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney
1958 Newcastle Art Gallery, NSW
1959 Leicester Galleries, London
1960 Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne
1960 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1960 Terry Clune Gallery, Sydney
1961 Knapik Gallery, New York
1961 Terry Clune Gallery, Sydney
1963 Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney
1964 Gallery A, Melbourne
1965 Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney
1967 Lewers Gallery, Emu Plains, NSW
1967 Bonython Gallery, Sydney
1969 Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane
1971 Bonython Gallery, Sydney
1972 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1974 Town Gallery, Brisbane
1974 Art Gallery of NSW, Project 22
1979 Zanders Bond Gallery, Melbourne
1979 David Jones Gallery, Melbourne
1981 Niagara Lane Galleries, Melbourne
1981 Zanders Bond Gallery, Melbourne
1981 David Jones Gallery, Sydney
1984 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
1987 Penrith Regional Gallery, NSW
1987 Painters Gallery, Sydney
1987 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
2006 Eva Breuer Art Dealer

Group Exhibitions
1956 Contemporary Australian Painting, Pacific Ports
1959 Matson Line exhibition of Australian Art, Pacific Ports
1961 9 Sydney, David Jones Gallery, Sydney
1961 9 Sydney, Gallery A, Melbourne
1961 Australian Contemporary Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil
1961 Australian Art, Burr Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
1962 Commonwealth Art Today, Commonwealth Institute, London
1962 Australian Painting, Tate Gallery, London
1963 Twelve, Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney
1963 Australian Art, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
1964-65 Australian Painting Today, Australian States and Europe
1966 Aspects of Australian Paintings, Auckland City Art Gallery
1967 Australian Painting, Expo 67, Montreal, Canada
1968 Australian Painting, India and Pakistan

Awards
1951 Mosman Watercolour Prize
1951 Kuringai Prize (Print and Watercolour)
1956 Carillon City Festival Art Prize, Bathurst (Watercolour)
1959 Sydney Easter Show Rural Bank Prize
1959 Perth Prize (Contemporary)
1960 Tamworth Festival Art Prize
1963 Rockdale (NSW) Contemporary Prize. Waratah Festival, Sydney (Contemporary). Young Cherry Festival 'Figure'.
1964 RH Taffs Prize, Contemporary Art Society Georges Invitation, Melbourne (Second)
1967 Aubusson-Wool Board Prize for paintings to be woven into tapestries
1968 McCaughey Prize (for the best picture by an Australian artist exhibited temporarily or permanently in the Art Gallery of NSW)
1970 City of Liverpool Prize (NSW)

Collections
Australian National Gallery, Canberra
State Galleries of NSW, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania
Cities of Newcastle, Tamworth, Bathurst, Liverpool, municipalities of Mosman, Penrith
McClelland Gallery, Victoria
Australian Embassy, Washington DC, USA
Reserve Bank of Australia
Mertz Collection, USA
BHP, Melbourne
University of Melbourne
Australian National University, Canberra
Cornell University USA
Private collections in Australia and overseas

Sources:
'Adolph and Carl Plate' catalogue, The Lewers Bequest and Penrith Regional Gallery, Oct 16 – Jan 11, 1987
'Carl Plate', Niagara Galleries catalogue, 1987

Carl Plate: Collage 1938 - 1976

2009-05-03T09:20:00.008+10:00

From March to May 2009, the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre hosted the exhibit Carl Plate - Collage 1938 to 1976.

'Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre is proud to present an exhibition of works by Carl Plate (1909 – 1977), one of Australia's earliest collage artists. This landmark exhibition features 80 vivid works from 1938 to 1976 providing a rare glimpse into the collage making that was central to his art practice.' Read more.

To read articles written in the accompanying program, click here.

To visit the website of the Hazelhurst Gallery, click here.

Here is a selection of artworks featured.

Rows 1975
magazine paper collage on card
17.9 x 23.4

Wig 74 1975
magazine paper collage on card
20.2 x 28

Untitled c1975
collage on magazine paper
13.4 x 13.4

Untitled c1971
mixed media collage on magazine paper
12.8 x 17.5

Untitled c1960
mixed media collage on magazine paper
8.4 x 12

Untitled 1975
magazine paper collage on magazine paper
28 x 16

Untitled 1975-6
magazine paper collage on magazine paper
15.8 x 19

Untitled 1974-5
magazine paper collage on paper
30.5 x 21.9

Untitled 1973
mixed media collage on magazine paper
13.5 x 15

Untitled 1973
mixed media collage on magazine paper
16 x 21.6

Untitled 1967
mixed media collage on magazine paper
15.5 x 11.2

Two Sides 1972-5
mixed media collage on magazine paper
9.8 x 11.8

Tough Stretch c1975
magazine paper collage on card
20 x 34 (variable)

Spectators 1958
mixed media collage on newspaper
6 x 8.4

PMC No 36 1975
magazine paper collage on paper
23.3 x 21.1

Drop 1971-2
mixed media collage on magazine paper
18.7 x 21.5

Do it Yourself 1971
mixed media collage on magazine paper
15 x 21.9

Eva Breuer exhibition 2009

2009-05-02T23:57:00.000+10:00

In June 2009 the Eva Breuer gallery will host an exhibition of Carl Plate's works works entitled: Paintings and Collage from the 1970s.
Opening Wednesday 10 June 2009, 6-8PM

Address:
83 Moncur St
Woollahra NSW 2025
Telphone: (02) 9362 0297
Email: art@evabreuerartdealer.com.au
Website: www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au

See a selection of the paintings to be exhibited here.
See a selection of the collages to be exhibited here.

Links

2009-05-02T21:51:00.006+10:00

Carl Plate - Collage 1938 to 1976
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre is proud to present an exhibition of works by Carl Plate (1909 – 1977), one of Australia's earliest collage artists. This landmark exhibition features 80 vivid works from 1938 to 1976 providing a rare glimpse into the collage making that was central to his art practice.

Link to the 2009 exhibit at the Hazelhurst Gallery available here.

An Artist's Wife: Life with Carl Plate
19 June 2008
ABC Radio National

'I advise no girl to marry an artist who hasn't been an artist herself... otherwise you cannot credit the focus an artist has on his own work. You've got to accept this, otherwise there'll be nothing but confusion and resentment.'

Verbatim story available here.

Carl Plate biography
Extensive biography of Plate and family available here.

John McDonald, Driven to Distraction
Article from the Sydney Morning Herald, January 6-7 2007
Available here.

Penrith Regional Gallery
www.penrithregionalgallery.org

Eva Breuer Gallery
www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au

Art Gallery of New South Wales
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au

Preface

2009-05-02T21:47:00.001+10:00

In 1958 I arrived at the Art Gallery of New South Wales to be its first curator. Sydney’s best place for art books, the Notanda, was owned by the same Carl Plate whose 1950s colour-cubist paintings in the Art Gallery of New South Wales stood out among Australia’s best modern art. Soon, visiting Carl and Jocelyn’s house hidden on the Woronora River, one sensed ancient pagan metamorphosis among the rocks and trees, saw abstract transformations of nature in the studio, and was startled to encounter a drawing by the modern master Paul Klee. Fifty years later Plate’s work has held up far better than most of his contemporaries, and its particular character still seems highly localised in timeless beach and bush landscape. These hitherto unseen surrealist collages are a delightful surprise, but I hope they are a foretaste of something more. It’s time we saw a full reassessment of Carl Plate’s wonder-filled art. He freshens Sydney’s spirit of place.

Daniel Thomas

Taken from the catalog CARL PLATE, Collage, 1938-1976

An introduction to Carl Plate's collages

2009-05-02T21:39:00.005+10:00

Introduction
Carl Plate (1909-1977) was one of Australia’s pioneering advocates for modernism. An influential artist and widely travelled art world figure, he lived and worked in the bush at Woronora River near Sydney, from 1945 until 1977. He advocated for modern art in post-war Sydney through his Notanda Gallery (1940-1974), active membership of the Contemporary Art Society and his own art practice. The vivid works in this collection reveal Plate’s ongoing commitment to collage, which ran parallel with his better-known painting.

Typical of his generation, Plate sought to study overseas, and travelled to Europe via Mexico, Cuba and the USA in 1935. He talked about having seen almost no images of modern art before leaving Australia, with the exception of an exhibition brought to Australia in 1933 by Clarice Zander (his future mother-in-law).1 ‘They were the first paintings that looked like something other than gum trees that I’d ever seen.’2

‘Adopted’ by the Australian Librarian at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Arthur Wheen (a relation of sculptor Gerald Lewers, Carl’s brother-in-law), Plate was introduced to artists and writers at the centre of change in Britain between the wars: Herbert Read, Henry Moore and T.S. Eliot. They were finding new forms to express a rapidly-changing world. A visit to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London completely altered Plate’s worldview. His pencilled notes and drawings in the catalogue refer to, among others, Hans Arp, Paul Klee, Joan Miro (he wrote ‘lots of fun’, and named his first daughter after him) and Dali’s Aphrodisiac Jacket (‘coat hung with over 100 glasses half filled with crème de menthe fly floating in each’). Plate also described Meret Oppenheim’s Plate, Cup and Spoon of fur.

Untitled [fur egg] c1975-6
magazine paper collage on transcryll and magazine paper
13 x 21

Plate returned from Europe at the fall of Paris in 1940, determined to set up his own modern art gallery, to enable people in Sydney to see what was happening in the world. He brought sixty-four works from thirty-two of the artists he’d met, including Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Duncan Grant, exhibiting their work at his new Notanda Gallery in Rowe St, Sydney and then at Myers in Melbourne (where a young Sidney Nolan took money at the door and sold catalogues)3.

From 1940-42 he exhibited Desiderius Orban, Francis Lymburner, Contemporary Australian Drawings,4 Balinese Art, New French Painting,5 and held his own first solo show. By 1943 the Notanda Gallery concentrated on reproductions, books and journals. Running the gallery enabled Plate to promote the context for contemporary art and to keep up with new works of art and literature being produced here and overseas. With the arrival of more expatriates and refugees, Rowe Street became synonymous with all things cosmopolitan.

‘Pewter Pan Alley’ (Rowe St), Sydney Morning Herald, Bernard Hesling, 23/4/1946.

From 1940 Plate became an active member of the newly-formed Sydney Contemporary Art Society. ‘It was the evangelizing aspect that interested me. You’d “seen the light” and felt you should spread it.’ He felt ‘other people should share what you’ve discovered.’6 Busy re-establishing himself in Sydney, his own work as an artist emerged slowly. From early experiments with abstraction, he returned to semi-figurative work, experimenting with form, before moving into complete abstraction after 1958. Five years later, he was described as ‘one of Australia’s leading abstract painters.’7

We acknowledge the Darawal people as the original custodians of this land and their elders past and present and thank the Sutherland Shire Council for their ongoing support of Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre. Carl Plate: Collage would not have been possible without the support of Hazelhurst, whose Director Michael Rolfe responded to the idea of focusing on Plate’s collages with enthusiasm and dedication.

Without Rose Peel’s invaluable advice and work in rescuing many of the collages from their parlous state of disrepair, few would be available to us. Further thanks to Richard McMillan for generous cataloguing advice and to Ross Tzannes, who helps us sort out the management of an artist’s estate. A final thanks to our family, especially John Gillies for his unerring eye and support. We owe a special gratitude to A.D.S. Donaldson for his knowledge and advice about the conception and design of the exhibition and book, and for writing about Carl Plate’s collage practice. Donaldson’s essay re-reads Carl Plate’s modernism and places him in a new history of Australian collage, part of what he calls a history of UnAustralian art.

Daniel Thomas once wrote of Carl’s paintings: ‘each picture is a fresh exploration of form, not of a repetitious formula’;8 he could have been writing about the collages. We are honoured that he agreed to open the exhibition and write the preface. Few of Carl Plate’s collages, including his last set of unique ‘multi-strip’ works (1974-6), have been previously exhibited. This collection celebrates the long-term collage practice of a compelling and innovative artist.

Cassi Plate
Jocelyn Plate

1. Clarice Zander organised the ‘Exhibition of British Contemporary Art’ and accompanied it to Australia in 1932. Carl Plate remembers seeing Augustus
John, Epstein and Nash. ‘Enormous press coverage opened a debate – which became known as ‘the Zandrian War’ – as conservative audiences voiced
their displeasure,’ Christine France, Dictionary of Australian Artists Online, 2007.
2. Carl Plate, interview with Richard Haese, 29/6/74, State Library of Victoria.
3. The artists in the 1940 England Today exhibition are listed in the following essay, ‘Carl Plate, Within and Without’.
4. The artists exhibited were: Cardamatis, Dobell, Fizelle, Flower, Friend, Gleeson, Haxton, Hinder, Kingston, Lymburner, Medworth, Plate, Joshua Smith,
Strachan, Wienholt and Wilson.
5. ‘Modern French Painters’, 1941, exhibited gouaches, etchings and drawings by Bonnard, Braque, de Chirico, Derain, Dufy, Klee, Laurencin, Léger, Marquet,
Masson, Matisse, Miro, Modigliani, Pascin, Picasso, Roualt, Tanguey, Utrillo, Van Dongen and Vlaminck.
6. Carl Plate, interview with Richard Haese.
7. Sydney Morning Herald, 10/7/63
8. Daniel Thomas, ‘Three generations in one-man shows’, Sunday Telegraph, 17/11/63.

Taken from the catalog CARL PLATE, Collage, 1938-1976

Carl Plate: Within and Without

2009-05-02T21:22:00.008+10:00

Jocelyn and Carl Plate in their Paris Studio, rue Simon le Franc, 1975

Carl Plate : Within and Without 1

‘I’m trying to suggest another level which is a combination of what is seen and what is not seen, and finally to create something which exists by itself outside any visual experience. … Inside all my [work] I hope there is some little heart that people will recognise. But it is imprecise. I can’t say any more about it.’2

My father was a serious artist. Early each morning he disappeared up to his studio, built amongst the angophoras and banksias on a slope behind our small fibro house, in the hills behind the Woronora River. He reappeared to make himself a messy coffee, grinding beans in a hand grinder and pouring hot water through a paper filter. There were no coffee makers in 1950s Sydney and this ritual, along with red wine in the evenings, rewrote daily the thread of connection to a wider, cosmopolitan world. As children we weren’t allowed in the studio, to disturb the hallowed space of creation. It was a large, square wooden room, with tall windows along the northern wall and a window to the south, where his easel stood. A workbench ran under this southern window, holding shelves of painting materials, jars of vividly coloured powders and paint brushes, high stacks of Paris Match, Lilliput, Cahiers D’Art, Art International, Art News and other magazines.

On the bench stood a pot of the rubber solution glue used to stick down the collages; over time, as its gluing properties evaporated, it left behind yellowish-brown marks and disconnected pieces of paper. Rubber solution would become the bane of my life as I embarked on the process of cataloguing, repairing and preserving the collages in 2007-08.

Walls of books and more magazines surrounded a single bed behind the easel. An autodidact who’d left school at 15, he usually read three or four books at a time: Montaigne, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Balzac, Bauhaus 1919-1928, El Arte de Gaudi and the Penguin Classics. Paintings stacked thickly against the western and eastern walls.

Carl described his studio and work method to Hazel de Berg, in 1962: ‘I can only say … it has taken me a long while to get into use; I spend at least five days in there.’ [The other two days and every evening he managed his Notanda Gallery business.] ‘I don’t rush up in the morning and start painting. I may, if I’m following a line or something from the previous day, continue it, but normally I would perhaps potter round, working on some small suggestion or something that I’d seen or had in mind … like seeing a little glint of something somewhere, or imagining it, … a sort of will o’ the wisp which has no stable form, it’s a sensation, a thing that ultimately you hope will operate … in several layers of experience. This thing, as you can imagine, is extremely nebulous, but if it’s going to be seen by anyone else obviously it has to have some shape or form, to be put down somewhere. One makes a small maquette, a very small piece of note you might say, and if this appears to have some life, it is then a very faint flickering thing, one might develop it perhaps a bit more; it is a process of breathing on this tiny little flame.’3

Unless our father was working in his possum-proofed, fenced-in vegetable garden, picking beans or Warrigal spinach, we’d ring a bell to summon him down from the studio to dinner. No talking during the AB C seven o’clock news; he was not fond of Robert Menzies. There was no television but there were often guests – Godfrey Miller, Karel Kupka, Costas Taktsis, Alistair Brass, Syd and Rosalie Gascoigne, Billy and Sharn Rose, Leonard and Mona Hessing, Guy and Joy Warren, Margo and Gerald Lewers, John Olsen, Clifton Pugh, Margaret Olley, Adrian Rawlins, Reg and Janet Matthews, Francis and Charina Oeser, John and Joan Stephens; many regularly stayed for several days. Close friends, the artist, teacher and critic James Cook and his wife Ruth, built a house in the bush next door. After Cook’s sudden death, Ivan and Colleen McMeekin, potter and cellist respectively, moved in with their two daughters.

Occasionally we held wild parties. Dozens of artists, curators and friends made the long trek out through southern suburbs to our house in the bush. Many were still there the next morning, sprawled asleep on the grass when we woke early, to be sent to the corner shop for bread and eggs to feed the hangovers. It was an odd, Bohemian existence, veering from extreme isolation for both my parents, to bursts of conviviality and intense discussion, intercut with music collected by my father from all over the world: Cameroon, Paraguay, Django Reinhardt and Duke Ellington.

Carl Plate veered between movement and stasis. Although of few means, he travelled extensively. Most of his collage was produced on long sea voyages on cargo ships; in 1959 he travelled to Paris and London to exhibit at the Leicester Galleries, the first solo show by an Australian abstract artist in London4 and in 1962 he travelled to New York for a solo show at the Knapik Gallery. He produced another batch of collage on sea voyages in 1965, 1968 and 1970-71, when, an eternal Francophile, he lived in Paris for considerable periods, buying stock for the Notanda, and often living in the Cité des Arts. Carl and Jocelyn moved to Paris after the destruction of Rowe Street and the closure of the Notanda Gallery in 1974, until my father’s ill health forced their return in 1976. The name of one of his last collages, ‘Tough Stretch 1975’, refers to this time. Apart from this final return, all travel was by boat, undisturbed weeks at sea the perfect environment for his intense work; paper/scissors/glue the perfect materials for cramped cabins.

Thirty years later, when I approached Michael Rolfe, Director of Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, about the possibility of exhibiting the collection of my father’s unique, last collage, I had little idea of his long-term and prolific practice as a collage artist. With the help of Rose Peel, paper conservator at the Art Gallery of NS W, I began the long process of repairing 45 of the later collages, made up of dozens of thin strips of paper. In many cases each strip and each layer had to be reglued; in the process of repair I came to understand his unique method of working. Plate used multiple copies of any publications he could get his hands on – travel brochures, share reports, magazines – to repeat or stagger the pieces in a way that produces a dynamic effect.

This different form of collage took the artist in a new direction. Mounted and signed, they were less preparatory studies than exquisite works in their own right. Plate referred to them as ‘PMC’: Paris Multiple Collage (1974-6), or ‘AM C’, those produced on the boat Australis in 1974. They are exact and multi-layered; up to four layers are created to produce their rippling movement, not unlike work produced by the Czech poet Jirí Kolár, which he called rollage.5

While repairing this last set of jewels I had the good fortune to meet A.D.S. Donaldson, whose work on the Contemporary Art Society and early non-figurative art in Sydney drew my attention to my father’s long and unique history as a collage artist. I excavated the entire collection throughout 2007 and 2008, cataloguing, repairing, conserving and documenting what finally amounted to nearly 300 collages made between 1938 and 1976. With the exception of those too damaged to reproduce, the entire collection is represented, chronologically, in this book.

Apart from a card sent from London in 1938, and catalogue evidence of work produced and exhibited the following year, Plate’s earliest remaining set of collages were made as love poems to Jocelyn Zander, his wife-to-be, then working as an occupational therapist in Melbourne. This intimate set of playful cards often featured a pig, the subject of a joke between them. They clearly draw on his visit to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition.6

Untitled [Franco Pig] 1945
paper collage on paper
17 x 13

Record crowds to London’s first exhibition of Surrealist art saw, among other works, collage by English artists Eileen Agar, Roland Penrose, Paul Nash, P. Norman Dawson, David Gascoyne and Humphrey Jennings. European artists Magritte, Mesens, Miro, Servais and Picasso also exhibited collage, a medium perfectly suited to the liberating playfulness of the movement. Plate described the London exhibition as ‘a turning point. I felt “this is where I come in.”’ The Surrealist exhibition ‘had the most profound influence.’ … ‘I was never part of the subconscious/Freudian manifesto, but it’s influenced the Twentieth Century; life itself is surreal. Its essential quality has always appealed. Not as a style but an attitude.’7

In 1956, six of Plate’s abstracted collage were exhibited at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne and the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney: ‘Viewed from a brief distance the collages, composed from scraps of coloured paper, might be mistaken for highly finished water colours. They are undoubtedly the best work of the kind to be shown in Melbourne in many years.’8 Of the Sydney show, Paul Haefliger wrote of the ‘number of pretty collages cut from magazines and dextrously assembled with the help of glue, one sees the artist’s struggle to wrest from his chaotic emotions a valid form, a synthesis of what he feels, observes and believes in. Here the painter stands alone.’9

Less complimentary was James Cook in the Daily Mirror, whose stated amazement about Plate’s experimentation with collages – about how any normal adult could possibly bring himself to fiddle – suggests his view of collage as ‘a form of sedative occupational therapy.’10 This must have stung; Cook was a close friend and neighbour. Carl continued making collages but never again exhibited them. In the sixties he made torn, gouged, non-figurative work, which by the seventies had developed into bold, post-futurist collages, exploring illusionistic space in a decisive shift away from earlier, more painterly abstraction.

The occasional collage has been included in exhibitions curated by Jocelyn Plate since the artist’s death. She describes collage as Carl’s way of composing, like other artists sketch; his means of transforming the world into its creative components of shape, colour and form. They reveal the exactness of his eye. ‘The finished collage never looked anything like the original thing he’d seen’ [in a magazine].11 Carl Plate’s collages are sculptural, even architectural. According to architect and writer Francis Oeser, Carl ‘had an intellectual structure within which he nurtured his interest, but it was set aside when he applied paint, or paper; when another spirit took over … a deep and un-wordy experience, a physical sense related to mystery and contradiction.’12

Untitled 1973
magazine paper collage on magazine paper
15.5 x 21.6

The later works defy ‘the Surrealist logic of juxtaposition of the different’ by creating a ‘multiplication of the same’.13 The repetitive pattern of narrow strips of paper creates dazzling optical effects, prefiguring certain contemporary digital work that uses time-slicing techniques, as seen in the work of Australian video artist Daniel Crooks. The late collages show an engagement with contemporary ideas of process and conceptualism.

During Plate’s fruitful collage years, 1970-76, he wrote a letter to his friend, the acclaimed Greek writer and his closest confidante, Costas Taktsis, in 1973: Art scene very depressing at the moment. Accent on youth with the latest adaptations from overseas. Happenings and ‘concepts’ played up, ‘painting’ being declared an old-hat activity. Haven’t done anything for months anyway, except prepare a mass of collage notes against the day when I feel free to do a continuous run.14

We’re grateful for that mass; they form part of the rich variety of collage work in this first book about Carl Plate.

Cassi Plate is the curator of Carl Plate: Collage

1. Within and Without is the title of a painting by Carl Plate, 1962.
2. Carl Plate, interview with Laurie Thomas, The Australian, 2/11/68.
3. Carl Plate, interview with Hazel de Berg, June 1962, National Library of Australia.
4. Adrian Rawlins, ‘Our Art Goes Over – Overseas’, Overland, No. 23, Autumn, p. 51, 1962
5. Brandon Taylor, Collage: the making of modern art, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p. 179-185.
6. The 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the New Burlington Galleries, London.
7. Carl Plate, interview with Richard Haese, 29 June 1974, State Library of Victoria.
8. The Age Art Critic, ‘Ingenuity Allied With Design’, Melbourne Age, 5 September 1956.
9. Paul Haefliger, Sydney Morning Herald, (late) October 1956.
10. James Cook, Daily Mirror, 1 Nov ’56. The quote is from Denise Whitehouse, unpublished PhD Thesis: ‘The CAS of NS W and the Production of
Contemporary Abstraction in Australia 1947-61’ p. 227, Monash University, 1999.
11. Jocelyn Plate, conversation with Cassi Plate, October 2008.
12. Francis Oeser, conversation with Cassi Plate, November 2008.
13. Brandon Taylor, Collage: The making of modern art, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, p. 83.
14. Carl Plate, letter to Costas Taktsis, 16 July 1973, Carl Plate Archive.

Taken from the catalog CARL PLATE, Collage, 1938-1976

Eva Breuer exhibition 2009 - paintings

2009-05-02T19:10:00.011+10:00

Below is an advanced selection of the paintings to be exhibited at Paintings and Collage from the 1970s at the Eva Breuer gallery in June 2009. Click here for more information about the exhibition and contact details.

X Plus
Oil on masonite
170 x 132.7cm

Tergate 3
Oil on masonite
55 x 62.9cm

Stabilised
Oil on masonite
48.5 x 63.8cm

Shadow Structure Five
Oil on masonite
65 x 54cm

No. 81
Oil on masonite
46 x 65cm

Homage to Dr C
Oil on masonite
54 x 81cm

Car Model
Oil on masonite
81 x 60cm

Barred on Green
Oil on masonite
54 x 65cm

Aftermath
Oil on masonite
54 x 81

Eva Breuer exhibition 2009 - collages

2009-05-02T18:04:00.015+10:00

Below is an advanced selection, with prices, of the collages to be exhibited at Paintings and Collage from the 1970s at the Eva Breuer gallery in June 2009. Click here for more information about the exhibition and contact details.

Car Model 1975
mixed media magazine paper collage
19.8 x 29 cm
$4,500

Dance with Boat 1975
magazine paper collage on card
21.3 x 32.2 cm
$5,000

PMC 5 1974
mixed media magazine paper collage
17.5 x 22.3 cm
$4,500

Night Passage 1 1974
magazine paper collage on card
20.5 x 25.6 cm
$5,000

Tunis PMC 38 1975
magazine paper collage on card
29 x 20.3 cm
$4,500

Untitled 1971
mixed media collage on magazine paper
27.7 x 20.4 cm
$4,000

Untitled c1971
magazine paper collage on magazine paper
23 x 19.5 cm
$2,500

Untitled c1973
magazine paper collage on magazine paper
12.7 x 16 cm
$2,500

Untitled 1974
magazime paper collage on magazine paper
14.25 x 19 cm
$2,500

Watchers 2 1975
magazine paper collage on card
19.2 x 24.3 cm
$3,500

Selected paintings from the 1970s

2009-05-02T17:36:00.014+10:00

Azimuth Fraction 1971
PVA on canvas
178 x 127cm

Untitled no. 82 1970
PVA on vinyl french cotton
65 x 47cm

Orange Centre 1970
PVA on vinyl bonded cotton
52.5 x 64cm

Untitled No. 86 1970
PVA on vinyl bonded cotton
54 x 65cm

Untitled 'No. 27' 1970-1
PVA on vinyl bonded cotton
55 x 66cm

Bars III 1976
PVA on vinyl bonded cotton
49 x 60cm

Composition Red 1971-2
PVA on masonite
25.8 x 31cm

Crossways 1971
PVA on masonite
64 x 45cm

Selected paintings from the 1960s

2009-05-02T10:55:00.008+10:00

Third Edge 1961
Oil on board
181 x 121cm

Result Unseen 1965
PVA on masonite
49 x 64cm

Up There 1965
PVA on board
44.8 x 63.8cm

From Here to There 1965
PVA on masonite
49 x 64cm

Graph Segments No. 5 Retold 1963
PVA and oil on canvas
95 x 159.5cm

Study for Graph Segments 5 1963
PVA on grey cardboard
46.8 x 68.4cm

Untitled (Study for a 6'x18' painting) c.1963
PVA on masonite board
29.9 x 104cm

Basis for U.S. no. 9 1960
PVA on masonite board
91.5 x 61cm

Blue Monument 16 1965
PVA on canvas on masonite
127 x 96cm

Green Becomes Black 1968
Lithograph 39/40
45 x 60cm (image size)
50.6 x 66.2cm (paper size)

Selected paintings from the 1950s

2009-05-02T10:23:00.008+10:00

A selection of paitings exhibited in 2006 at the Eva Breuer gallery: Carl Plate: Paintings from the 50s, 60s & 70s. A full record of exhibited works can be found on the Eva Breuer website.

Family of Birds 1954
Synthetic (PVA) on caneite
59.5 x 91.5cm
Signed and dated l.l. Carl Plate '54
Verso: Carl Plate, 41 Rowe St, Sydney;
'Four Birds and a Nest'

Light & Surface 1958
PVA on masonite board
33 x 45.6cm

Escape 1958
PVA or oil on heavy masonite
61 x 91cm
Signed and dated u.r. Carl Plate '58
Verso: 'Escape'
'Arbitrary Time' [deleted, title of previous picture on this board]
Carl Plate, 41 Rowe St Sydney Australia

Fall & Rise 1958
PVA on masonite
60.8 x 91.2cm
Signed & dated u.r. Carl Plate 1958
Verso: Mr George Trim [obliterated chalk]
'FALL & RISE'
Carl Plate 41 Rowe St Sydney, Australia.
Remains of Label: CO Plate signature, dated April...
(denotes entry in exhibition with prizes offered, instructions to write to the Director, Tye's Art Gallery, 100 Bourke St, Melb, with price. [This upside down label may relate to previous picture]

Solace 1959
Oil or PVA on masonite
66 x 53.5cm
Signed Carl Plate '59 lower left
Verso: SOLACE / C. O. PLATE
714/59

Runaway Jumper 1958
PVA on masonite board
61 x 91cm

Night Trotting Incident
PVA on masonite
90 x 55cm

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

2009-05-02T10:07:00.000+10:00

‘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.

•

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.

•

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.