[MUSIC] Hello everybody, and welcome to the National Gallery of Victoria, and to our Australian collections, my name's Isabelle Cromby, and I'm the assistant director at the NGV. As we've seen in the museum of modern arts, magnificent painting, the bather, Cézanne used a photograph to help him explore how a body moves in space. We discovered at MoMA that in referring to a photograph as the basis for his work, Cézanne's painting is quite different from most of the canvases on the theme that he produced over more than 30 years. Although the estranged photographer, Max Dupain, worked later in the 20th century, and was motivated by a different agenda, his interest in bathing resonates with Cézanne's bather. Let's look today at some of Dupain's photographs here at the NGV, and compare and contrast the work of these two talented artists. In this segment, we'll explore how Max Dupain's photographs about bathing share common interest with Cézanne's great painting, especially in the placement of the body and its movement in the natural world. Both artists returned frequently to the subject of the bather in their art and they approached the human body in the works he had considered in a cool and analytical fashion. In the 1930s, many of Dupain's photographs were taken on Australian beaches around Sydney. The best known of these is the Sunbaker from 1937, which shows an athletic man lying on the beach, fresh from the surf with beads of water on his back. Taken low to the ground, this Sunbaker is a monumental muscular form who solidly claims his place in the environment. Notice too how he appears to be almost hovering in this spatially disorienting photograph, as the sand and the sky seem to merge. Like Cézanne's Bather, this man has become part of the environment in which he is placed, as we view only his head, arms, and upper torso lying on the beach. Following the great loss of life during the first World War, there was an interest in Australia, as elsewhere, in the creation of a reinvigorated individual and national body. Concepts of revitalization and it's flip side, degeneracy, were articulated in Germany. These ideas also found a receptive Australian audience as they did in many other parts of the world. Photography played a central role in the creative and scientific exploration of body culture. The objective quality of photography gave it the authority to reveal sexually differentiated energies, as they were called, in a more factual way than other mediums. Dupain frequently focused on the body as a symbol of perfection. The Sunbaker is part of a series that he produced of men and women sunbathing, sometimes naked, on the beach to promote their association with the revitalizing forces of nature. An important source of inspiration for Dupain was the biologically based philosophy of vitalism. Developed by the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, this philosophy underpinned the health and fitness movement. Dupain was attracted to the vitalistic writings of Bergson, whose book, Creative Evolution, he kept on his bedside table. He also read D.H. Lawrence, and the philosophy of Frederich Nietzsche. A principal focus of these authors was what they believed to be the degenerative effects of modernity and modernism, and their belief that modern men and women should reconnect with the so-called life forces. Vitalism was of particular interest to artists, because of its emphasis on the intuitive and the subjective as a means of creative power. Much of vitalism was Anti-Darwinian in tone, rejecting mechanization and the modernist movement, and returning instead to the past and especially to the classical world. The Sunbaker was part of a series of photographs by Dupain about the beach and lifesaving that celebrate the power of sunlight. Then, a subject of medical research. Like many Australians, Dupain probably read Han Seren's book, Man and Sunlight, which promoted weather-hardened men, bronzed with sun, and strong as steel. Seren believed that everyone should participate in what he termed active hygienics for the benefit of the race and of humanity. Out of passion for sunshine, he claimed, springs the noble shrine of loftiness idealism. Seren referred to Greek and Roman antiquity as a period when humanity was physically at its peak, and we can see the Sunbaker as an example of physical good health in the classical mold. At a time when the world edged towards war, Dupain also took photographs of lifesavers patrolling the beaches and battling the surf with military precision that had clear military overtones. These lifesavers with their vigorous bodies and their military stance, fed into traditional values around nationalism, sport, and masculinity. Dupain looked to the past, invoking the refined musculature of the Greeks and Romans, which he proposed as a model for contemporary men and women, an antidote to the forces of degeneration that he saw at work in modern life. Dupain's views were formed during years spent at his father's gymnasium during his youth. George Dupain was a founder of the vitalist movement and of bodybuilding in Australia. With members of his gym, and adherence of his philosophies, shown indoors in poses deriving from Greek and Roman statuary. Max Dupain took his models outside and onto the Australian beaches. He carefully chose the models for his photographs who were, on occasion, members of his father's gymnasium, or were ballet dancers. In both cases, he is concerned to choose men and women whose bodies have a refined musculature. In Form at Bondi, taken at Sydney's most famous surfing beach in 1939, the figures appear to be carved from living stone. Though here, in a very human twist, his female beta is emptying sand from his swimming costume. Many of Cézanne's bathers also have a monumental quality, but unlike Cézanne, these series of bathers are often sensual and exuberant, Dupain's surfers are upstanding. They are symbols of moral virtue, displaying the conservative social and political agenda at the heart of his photographs. Both artists saw in the subject matter of the bather an opportunity to explore contemporary, scientific, and social theories about the body. Cézanne's New York Bather is an analytical study of form and movement, which drew on Darwinian-related science and photography, while Dupain's Sunbaker drew specifically on a philosophy which had at its heart a return to the classical past, which he believed would engender a revitalized future. In photographs such as the Sunbaker, Dupain taps into powerful, cultural memories to give added scientific weight and authority to his photographs. In his photographs, the beaches of Sydney have become the favored site for the proper development of the Australian body and the nation. The last work we will consider is from the early 1950s, taken at Newport, one of Sydney's best loved Northern beaches. For many Sydney siders, born mid-century, this photograph of a young man in swimming trunks leaving the pool defines a generation. He loved the beach, Australian nature, and warm weather. It also embodies a lanky, laconic masculinity that was believed to define what it was meant to be Australian. The stylized nature of the image divided by a low wall resembles a classical phrase and clearly relates to Dupain's interest in antiquity. This photograph, like Cézanne's the Bather, is also a study of how the body is placed in space caught at a certain moment while the subjects' thoughts are internalized. Cézanne and Dupain's bathers, both avoid the viewer's gaze, looking out of the picture plane. Their focus is inward, and their concern is for themselves and for no one else. Is there a shade sensibility between the two works? Consider the gaze of the bather in Max Dupain's photograph at Newport, in relation to the gaze of the figure in Cézanne's the Bather. What does the deployment of the gaze in these works tell us about the tropes of masculinity here at work? Both artists were interested in the natural world, and the outdoors. How are their ideals about a naturalized masculinity reflected in these works? [MUSIC]
