Update: hear more about this exhibition at Radio National's Artworks program for the rest of March, here.
Intelligentsia, a retrospective exhibition of Louis Kahan's celebrated portrait series for Meanjin, has opened at one of my favourite art spaces, the quietly shiny Potter gallery at Melbourne University. A goodly crowd turned out in searing heat last Wednesday on February 29 to hear guest curator Vivien Gaston and writerly/academic representative and poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe speak on the singular experience of standing in a room full of 'faces with thoughts inside' as Wallace-Crabbe so succinctly put it.
One of Kahan's portraits of Patrick White is on display - another garnered the Archibald Prize in 1962 - as well as many fine ink drawings of top writers and thinkers published in Meanjin from 1955 to 1974, including a couple of people I used to know and barely recognised, as of course they were MUCH younger then. Also on display is a video of writers included in the portrait series talking about Meanjin - I did glimpse Dame Mary Gilmore, but will return to watch it in a quieter moment as I could not hear very much of what was said.
Of the process of sitting for Kahan, historian Geoffrey Blainey is quoted as saying, "When I left, I had a slight feeling that I had been x-rayed."
Poet Fay Zwicky is quoted in Gaston's notes, which can be found on the Potter site:
'it seemed an easy thing to do, to sit
and let the master work his miracle,
humming away over black pots and nibs,
the sunny room, the light, the harmless ease of it.'
There are some beautiful photographs of Kahan at work in his studio too.*
This is quite a show, and I am assuming that some of these were among portraits by Kahan collected in a volume by Melbourne University Press in 1981, Australian Writers: the Face of Literature. The mind boggles at the thought of the cost of similar commissions for such a journal today. Many thoughts, many voices, indeed, and Kahan's inimitable style, fluid and emotionally intelligent, unites them all.
My favourites at first viewing I think are the captivating, surprisingly angular Patrick White portrait, the Miles Franklin, Francis Webb, Marjorie Barnard, Alan Marshall and the series of dinner sketches capturing Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith and a bunch of others at Meanjin's 21st anniversary dinner. There's a sense of listening in over their faces, rather than their shoulders, that's quite arresting. (So nice of Ms Gaston to pop all the notes on the website like this. Made to blog, and I hope they stay there.)
Louis Kahan was born in Vienna in 1905, and had a rich and fascinating creative life in Europe, North Africa and the US before coming to Australia in 1950. He was qualified as a master tailor, like his father, but used his father's customers as his first artistic models before taking on portraiture in the Army in the Second World War, where he felt his true artistic apprenticeship was served:
From 1943-5 Kahan began his personal contribution to the war effort, drawing
thousands of portraits of wounded allied soldiers, mostly Americans, signing
them modestly "by a guy from Paris". Copies of these portraits on 'Victory
Mail' were sent to loved ones back home and many of the original drawings
are held in War Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom.
In 2005 several
hundred of these were presented to the Red Cross Museum in Washington by
his family. Through these portraits, Kahan honed his skills and his ability
to capture the essence of his subject with economy and speed. These qualities
proved useful on his return to Paris after the war, when Kahan was employed
as a staff artist by Le Figaro to cover the war trials of Pétain and other
collaborators and they remained the hallmarks of his work.
(http://louiskahan.com)
He designed sets and costumes for the National Ballet and Sadler's in the UK as well as for Australian theatre and opera productions, and on his 90th birthday his peers awarded him the Australian Painters and Sculptors Medal, an honour given only to a handful of artists. More about his remarkable life and work, here; I hope to borrow Lou Klepac's 1990 bio soon from a public library near me.
Kahan drew painters and musicians in Australia as well as writers, and clearly had developed the art of capturing the face of creativity, if that's not too hackneyed a way to come at it. My thanks to Dena Kahan for inviting me to the opening, a truly moving and momentous occasion in Melbourne life and letters.
The exhibition will be at the gallery on Swanston Street (near the corner of Elgin Street) until April 22nd.
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