GA019 | Australian & International Art

56
Sir Ivor Hele enjoyed a long, distinguished career as a
painter. In 1926 he became the youngest member of the
SA Society of the Arts. The following year, at just fifteen
and his growing desire to rub palettes with the best in the
world, led him to Europe. From the Académie Colarossi to
La Grande Chaumière and the Académie Julian – the three
great independent French art schools of the time – Hele
jumped from one atelier to another. He was finally introduced
to Louis-François Biloul, a painter of the Ingresian nude,
who provided him with the structure and tuition he desired.
After six months, he progressed to Munich where he refined
his figurative and genre studies under the painter Moritz
Heymann.
Although Biloul and Heymann reinforced the strong classical
bias already evident in Hele’s early practice, the young
student returned to Australia sympathetic of international
Modernist trends. He valued ‘artists that painted their inward
emotions as opposed to older masters who merely painted
what they perceived on the surface’ and predicted that
‘Australia will come to appreciate modern art as soon as
enough of it appears in the salerooms.’ His work, however, in
both style and subject, remained truer to academic principles
of an earlier generation than those radical, vanguard ideas.
Portraiture, mythological scenes, figurative imagery, still-life
and flower studies were his principal themes. At 19, some
critics already anticipated that he was ‘going to be the finest
figure draughtsman that Australia has produced.
Commissioned as an official WWII artist, not even Hele could
have ever imagined the extent to which this appointment
would define his career and make him one of the most
collected and longest serving war artists of Australia. Never
had an Australian artist captured the multi-faceted aspects
of the grit of man at war with such brutal sincerity. National
recognition led to a huge demand and private commissions of
portraits, and between 1951 and 1957, he was awarded the
Archibald Prize five times. He then retreated to an eremitic life
at Aldinga – his long-time home and studio.
The Farrier, 1974, was probably painted in the idyllic
surrounds of Aldinga and the Fleurieu Peninsula. It is a unique
picture that summons, in a single composition, the artist’s
most cherished subjects: an action figure in a moment of
physical labour, a striking horse, the female body and the
sun-blazed Australian landscape. It is a synthesis of the
principal imagery that, already by 1970, had made Hele, in the
words of Lou Klepac, ‘probably the greatest academic painter
in Australia’.
The notable anatomical realism is the product of close
observation and a first-hand understanding of his subjects.
His pictures, noted Clive Turnbull, are ‘as forthright as the men
portrayed in them’. Shoeing is an artform that Hele would have
witnessed on countless occasions. Few artists painted the
animal with such curvaceous accuracy.
The horse is flanked by a holder, whose principal task it is to
keep the animal from become skittish. Her presence is one
of equal and conversely exaggerated sensualised femininity.
It is a deliberate contrast to the burly and knobbly farrier and
represents a classic dichotomy of gender performativity
common in traditional, academic pictures. Her womanly body:
slender, scantily clad and sun-scorched, is emphasised with
a slight cock of the hip in contrapposto. Her face is obscured,
creating a mystery of her identity.
An inquisitive cat and a few vigilant chickens further enliven
the busy, sun-drenched landscape. Everything is in its place
and in perfect resounding harmony: the farrier’s elbow is
doubled in the horses raised hind leg; his arched torso is
replicated in the horse’s curved back and rippled again in
the rolling hills; and the bend in the girl’s waist is mirrored
in the horse’s lean towards her. Painted using a balanced
combination of smooth, vigorous and expressive brushwork,
Hele has chosen a light, high-key palette of bright yellows,
toasty browns, white-washed pinks and faded blues: a colour
scheme that perfectly captures the bright glare of the South
Australian light.
If it were not for the military footlocker, there would be nothing
to suggest that this was a scene from the 20th century. After
decades of painting the modern fighting man in the age of the
machine, The Farrier, 1974, sums up Hele’s alternative vision
of a more bucolic version of humanity, living in perfect balance
with its environment. A world which – in Aldinga at least – was
still very much preserved and real.
Petrit Abazi
1. Hele largely circumvented commercial galleries and relied almost
entirely on winning judged prizes, private commissions to sell of his
pictures. See Gavin Fry Ivor Hele: the soldiers’ artist, Australian War
Memorial, Canberra, 1984, p. 11.
2. ‘Epstein or Rodin?’, in News, Adelaide, 6 May 1931, p. 9.
3. So this is Adelaide, Adelaide, December 1931, p.5 cited in Gavin Fry
Ivor Hele: the soldiers’ artist, Australian War Memorial, Canberra,
1984, p. 11.
4. The Australian War Memorial in Canberra alone has 492 works by
Hele in its collection.
5. Lou Klepac, cited in Gavin Fry Ivor Hele: the soldiers’ artist, Australian
War Memorial, Canberra, 1984, p. 30.