Melbourne Then … and Now

Early last month, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Tony Ellwood, announced that the NGV would acknowledge the 10^th anniversary of its hugely successful 2013 exhibition – Melbourne Now – with a new iteration of the event in 2023. The 2013 exhibition of art, design and performance celebrated Victoria’s creativity and raised almost $6 million from individuals, foundations, corporations, partnerships and government funding. Due to the impact of COVID-19 on the state’s creative community, this is an important and extremely welcome initiative.

Since the opening of the NGV in 1861, Melbourne has generated considerable art that has featured the city. Searching the gallery’s website for ‘Melbourne’ provides 272 pages with over 8,000 entries.  While I was looking at the plethora of images, three artists captured my attention.

Around 1890 English born Fritz Kricheldorff (1865-1933) emigrated to Australia and established himself as an artist initially in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. While there is virtually no accessible information about him (curiously he shares his name with a seemingly unrelated but exact contemporary Berlin photographer and camera inventor) he is remembered in the NGV collection by 70 works which capture Melbourne and its environs in the 1920s. His colour photo-lithograph images – which circulated as postcards – show us a growing city at work and play.

John Shirlow (1868-1936) was a contemporary of Kricheldorff’s and is remembered as ‘the first man in Australia to work in etching with any distinction’. Born in Sunbury to Irish parents, Shirlow attended evening classes at the National Gallery in Melbourne for five years from 1890 where the works on paper by Seymour Haden and James McNeill Whistler encouraged him to practise etching. This was not an easy task as he had to teach himself techniques from P. G. Hamerton’s ‘Etching and Etchers’ (London, 1868) make his own press and correct his own mistakes.

From 1895, Shirlow produced many pure etchings as well as a few aquatints and mezzotints. By the second decade of the 20^th century he was an examiner in drawing for the public examinations of the University of Melbourne. Subsequently, Shirlow founded etching classes at the Working Men’s College, became a trustee of the public library, museums and National Gallery of Victoria (as wells as serving as a Felton Bequest committee member), and concluded his artistic career as drawing master at Scotch College (his alma mater). In 1932, he published ‘Perspective, a Textbook for the use of Schools’.

Shirlow has 43 works in the NGV collection. His subject matter was mainly the old buildings of Melbourne and his work was as much admired for its historical as its artistic merit. (In 1917, the ‘Bulletin’ commented that he was ‘a painstaking but not inspired craftsman: his work is thorough but heavy, and there is little originality in his compositions or his technique’).

While interested in music, singing (he was part of many choirs) and bushwalking (poet C. J Dennis and sculptor Web Gilbert – whose bronze head of Shirlow is in the NGV Trustee’s room – often accompanied him), Shirlow was a conservative artist and, during his time as trustee of the NGV, violently opposed the purchase of paintings by Manet and Renoir and ‘all that kind of thing’!

In 1950 Mark Strizic (1928-2012) arrived in Melbourne at the age of 22 and, along with other post-war immigrant photographers like Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot and Helmut Newton, brought modernism to Australian photography. Born in Berlin, Strizic was the son of an architect father and textile designer mother. Due to the rise of fascism in Germany, the Strizics fled to Zagreb in 1934 and, following the end of World War 2, Mark left Europe to settle overseas.

Although Strizic initially studied physics in both Croatia and Melbourne, when he saw tourists with cameras around their necks, while holidaying in Sydney after his marriage in 1952, he decided that ‘he should have one too’.  This led to the purchase of a small German Diaxette camera from a chemist shop in Collins Street which he acknowledged he ‘couldn’t really afford’.

What excited Strizic’s creativity was ‘the harshness and strength of the Australian light – the light you don’t have in Europe’. This encouraged him to shoot into the sun contre-jour, to capture low afternoon side-lighting effects which produced high-contrast ‘silhouette’ graphic black and white prints. He was particularly attracted to city architecture and produced historically and culturally significant photos of post-war Melbourne.

Strizic’s friendship with David Saunders (Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Melbourne; and Acting Assistant Director of the NGV) provided him with increasingly frequent photography commissions – including the documentation of exhibitions at the gallery. Saunders also introduced Strizic to modernist architect Robin Boyd who was openly and increasingly critical of Australian suburban culture. In 1960, Boyd published ‘The Australian Ugliness’ – coining the doctrine ‘featurism’ to describe local architectural design – and Strizic produced ‘Melbourne: A Portrait’ stating ‘its central thought is that while men make cities, the cities also affect the men’.

Strizic taught photography at several tertiary institutions including the Preston (Phillip) Institute of Technology, the Melbourne College of Advanced Education and the Victorian College of the Arts. The National Gallery of Victoria has 103 photographs by Strizic which highlight his many interests from architecture to portraiture (there are many examples of his creative contemporaries) to fine art.

What attracted me to these three artists is their depiction of our city following times of turbulence. Kricheldorff and Shirlow’s artistry follows on from the first World War and the Influenza pandemic; while Strizic’s photographs address a city in evolution. All the images depict a strong and determined city and the relative absence of people in their works suggests ‘Melbourne Then’ as we currently experience ‘Melbourne Now’ – a city waiting to be revitalised.

Over the past two weeks I have been assessing almost 200 applicants for arts grants. These have included submissions from artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, performers and other local creatives. From the applications, it is clear that there is an extraordinary amount of talent in Melbourne just itching to enliven our city.  ‘Melbourne Again’ (my name for the NGV 2023 event) is still a long way off. In the meantime, when our city re-opens, let’s all embrace our local culture to ensure it continues to be a vibrant energising force.