Richard Larter

Introduction

This retrospective recognises the work of Richard Larter, one of Australia’s most engaging artists. The exhibition includes works from the late 1950s through to the present. It conveys several key themes in the artist’s oeuvre including an ongoing interest in the human body, sexuality, popular culture, politics and opposition to censorship. It reveals Larter’s abiding interest in abstraction and figuration, often in the same works.

The exhibition is being shown on two levels. A linking aspect in works across the exhibition is the artist’s passion for his late wife Pat – his artistic collaborator and an artist in her own right – who he married in 1953 and who died in 1996. In the Project Gallery upstairs is a room devoted to his portraits of her. Other rooms focus on non-figurative paintings that reveal his mastery of patterning and interest in music, science and the natural environment.

This retrospective confirms Larter’s reputation as one of Australia’s most audacious artists, capable of conveying a feeling for ‘the theatre of life’ as well as a technical innovator and remarkable colourist.

Developing a visual language

Richard Larter’s art of the early to mid 1960s conveys his developing interest in the human condition and his innovative approaches to painting. The range of works reveal his spirit of technical and stylistic experimentation and includes varied depictions of the human figure, especially the female nude.

A number of works in this room incorporate linear rhythms and richly textured surfaces created with a hypodermic syringe. As Larter explains:

In 1956 I started teaching and in Camden Town while waiting for a bus home I was staring into a medical supplies shop window … In amongst the artificial limbs were open boxes holding hypodermic syringes. Something like St Paul on the road to Damascus I had this vision of myself filling a syringe with paint and varying the finger pressure on the plunger, almost writing with paint.

Before arriving in Australia from England in 1962, Larter had seen the work of many of the great European artists who often painted female models. He particularly admired the French artists Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse and Edgar Degas, as well as the Viennese secessionists Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Larter regarded the women who modelled for him, especially his wife Pat, as the expression of positive energy against the negative censorious attitudes of bureaucratic officials.

A political minefield

The late 1960s and 1970s was a time of political ferment when a range of ideas about the nature of society was being fiercely debated around the world. It was the time of the Vietnam War, university sit-ins, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Prague Spring and the Paris uprising of May 1968.

In Richard Larter’s painting First hand panorama way 1970 he invokes the suffering of children in images and words in what amounts to a heartfelt cry at the inhumane effects of war. Like Homage to Paris this painting was directly informed by media images of the day.

During the 1970s Larter’s approach changed from pictorial reportage to painted collages emphasising the absurdity of war. Having undertaken national service during the Second World War, he highlights the hypocrisy of societies that are prepared to tolerate graphic images of violence but profess indignation about images of the human body.

Art and the theatre of life

This room includes works by Richard Larter from 1967 until 1978. There are clear links between works across the decade – exemplified in the dense pattern-making in both abstract and figurative works and in the bold, graphic depictions of a range of personae. Larter’s works of the period include famous and unknown faces and figures: people on the street, models, musicians, politicians and women at the hairdressers among them.

Larter’s paintings of the 1970s are often like giant collages. Collage was an integral to Pat and Richard Larter’s home environment at Luddenham in New South Wales. The kitchen was papered floor to ceiling (including the ceiling!) with a massive collage of cuttings from a whole range of sources, including contemporary magazines. The idea of inhabiting this collaged environment along with the artist’s densely pasted collage books directly informed his paintings that can be seen to characterise the mood and energy of an era.

A room for Pat

The portraits in this room reveal Richard Larter’s obsession with the love of his life, Pat Larter (née Holmes). Pat was her husband’s favourite muse, model and collaborator and one of the most painted, drawn, photographed and filmed artist-partners in the history of art. Mother of their five children, she was also an artist in her own right.

Essentially a humanist, Pat shared Richard’s view that sexuality is a normal part of life. Her attitudes were manifested in her own art and in her performative poses and collaborations with her husband. She recognised the power of certain explicit poses to shock and enjoyed sending up stereotypes – acting up and presenting herself as a provocative, confident woman in control.

Richard’s portraits of Pat convey great vitality, tenderness and joy, as well as the passage of time from youth and maturity. An overview of Pat and Richard Larter’s forty-three years together reveals a dynamic exchange of ideas resulting in one of the liveliest and most productive art partnerships in Australia.

A world of colour

Richard Larter has long enjoyed a fascination with luminous colour and pattern-making. Since the 1960s his vibrant non-figurative paintings have been inspired by a range of sources including various colour theories, physics, maths, musical rhythms and natural phenomena.

Over the years Larter has painted both abstract and figurative works but for a time in the 1980s he decided to focus mainly on showing non-figurative works. As he wrote in 1983:

In the 1980s I have stopped exhibiting figurative works as I believe that the art public has become so polarised by polemic critical viewpoints  …

My abstract works are much more malerisch [painterly] in an obvious manner, and I find complete satisfaction in working in this mode, when many who had worked completely in this mode are now flirting with new figuration. I have always preferred to work quietly in an unfashionable area, where I am unlikely to be influenced by transient trends. Using rollers and trimmers to make marks, I am finding vast unexplored tracts of painting opening before me, and I look forward to the next decade with keen anticipation.

Endless radiance

The works in this gallery form part of the exhibition Richard Larter: a retrospective. Richard Larter has painted many vibrant and lyrical non-figurative works over the years that are a significant aspect of his contribution to Australian art.

In this room works on the far wall, Cal-jo shift and Molehoppers shift, were inspired by music and flickering city lights. Others like Binary no.2and Binary no.3 recall the works of Sonia Delaunay known in part for her colourful radiating forms. All the works convey Larter’s inventive engagement with painting and his abilities as a colourist.

From his early days as an artist Larter enjoyed experimenting with unusual equipment to create his paintings. In these later works he adopts house-painting tools from the hardware store including rollers, edgers, trimmers and sliders that he uses to apply paint with considerable dexterity.

The multi-panelled painting Side thrust is a major work that reveals Larter’s emotional response to the environment. He reminds us that nature isn’t static but in continual flux. The animated rainbow forms move rhythmically across the landscape; their multiplicity and luminous colour suggesting infinite radiance.

Into landscape

For many years Richard Larter has been inspired by paintings of the natural environment. The earliest work in this room, My lilies, pays homage to Claude Monet’s paintings of waterlilies that enchanted him when he first saw them in Paris as a young artist.

After moving to Yass in country New South Wales in 1982, Larter became attuned to painting the local landscape including his impressions on train journeys from Yass to Sydney. The idea of views seen through windows in vibrant works such as Outlook also conveys his love of the works of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard whose luminous colour he greatly admired.

In recent years since moving to Canberra, Larter has depicted the natural environment as bright and buzzing as a joyous spring day and under threat, as in the local bushfires of 2003. Larter’s later paintings of the fires depict dark plumes of smoke as well as the aftermath when smoke drifted across a pale sky above the low-set rolling landscape. The subtle notations have such an ephemeral feeling that they almost seem to have been breathed onto the canvas.

Recurrence and revitalisation

From the 1960s to the present, Richard Larter has drawn, painted, screen-printed and photographed images of the female nude. This room provides a ‘snapshot’ of past and present. It includes a rare, witty self portrait in which the pin-up is former prime minister Robert Menzies. In this painting (that is also a bit like a drawing) the artist looks uneasy next to Menzies, shielding his gaze from the sensual small image below. By contrast Larter’s works focusing on the female form embody a sense of ease and vitality.

This feeling comes through in Larter’s engaging, playful and provocative drawings, in iconic images of Marilyn Monroe and in his more recent paintings of models. Before his wife Pat Larter died in 1996, they both worked with models in making their art. They enjoyed working in a collaborative way with the women (and in Pat’s case also with men), often taking many photographs that would form the basis for finished works.

After Pat’s untimely death from cancer, Richard has continued to paint and re-create images of her, for himself and for his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Encountering Richard Larter’s vibrant work it is hard to believe that he has turned 79 this year. His art seems to be that of an eternally young man. Yet he has painted exuberantly well and prolifically for over half a century. It is therefore high time that this major Australian artist had a full retrospective in a major institution.

In the 1960s and 70s Larter’s colourful and sexy work seemed part of Australia’s sexual liberation and pop culture. As time has gone by, the emotive and technical range of his inventiveness has become increasingly apparent; from striking, energetic works relating to the human figure through to radiant, subtle abstractions and works relating to the natural world (shown on this level of the gallery).

While he has experimented across a range of media Larter’s artistic reputation rests firmly on his abilities as a painter. Across a spectrum of his paintings one can also acknowledge that he is one of Australia’s great colourists. In 2008 Larter continues to make art with considerable passion and commitment.

From an early stage in his artistic life Richard Larter (b. 1929) wanted his work to make an impact. He agreed with the philosophy that art should not sit placidly on the walls of museums but should engage people in a range of ways: be it to provoke, excite, disturb or enchant. He recognised that art is a one to one dialogue with the viewer and that it can incorporate a wide range of ideas and subject matter. For many years his art has been both figurative and abstract (often in the same works). Yet he realised, like many artists, philosophers and psychoanalytical thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, that the human body in its many permutations provides a sure way of catching people’s attention and involving them in a work of art.

As Richard Larter’s retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia reveals, his work has been inspired by popular culture, music, politics and society, the natural environment and personal relationships – particularly his relationship with his wife, Patricia Larter (1936–1996). They met in 1951 and married in 1953, moving from England to Australia in 1962. Mother to their five children and his best friend until her untimely death in 1996, Pat was his model and collaborator. She also became an artist in her own right. It would almost certainly be true to say that Pat is one of the most painted, drawn, photographed and filmed artist–partners in the entire history of art. When one critic complained about too many images of Pat in a show at Watters Gallery, Larter promptly went and filled single canvases with multiple images of the love of his life. Although there are many sexually explicit images of his wife, revealing their shared interest in freedom of expression and frustration with moralistic censorious attitudes to the body, Larter was also more than capable of depicting Pat’s introspective moods, as many portraits from the 1960s through to the 1990s convey. In Cliché no. 2 (blue Patricia) 1965, he depicts a thoughtful woman, and there is a similar tenderness of expression in later lyrical portraits such as Portrait of Pat 1984. One of the fascinating aspects of Larter’s portrayals of Pat is the way that the works chart the passage of time from youth to maturity, from model to active performer, collaborator and artist. As gallery owner Geoffrey Legge has noted:

I think you can feel in the early paintings Pat is modelling in the conventional way. She would get into a pose and he would paint her. Whereas subsequently through the camera she was able to express herself and the whole thing lifts up a gambit. So she taught Richard something and they discovered something together which he is brilliantly able to apply to his work.¹

A sense of Pat as the active performer is apparent in Larter’s striking paintings Page three coffee: TATTOOS 1967 and Yellow eye research 1971. In the former, painted solely in black and white, Pat appears dancing from one pose to the next. This approach of including the same performer in different poses in the one painting came to the fore in his earlier Stripperama paintings in the mid 1960s, which showed the model going from fully clothed to undressed (except for the shoes). While the dazzling Stripperama no.3 1964 was painted in strips echoing the idea of film strips or frames, in Page three coffee: TATTOOS Pat is liberated in space in a more direct, personal engagement with the viewer. Over the years, Richard and Pat developed a quite particular artistic partnership. It is not widely appreciated that Pat Larter was Australia’s main contributor to mail art, an art form that had its roots in the anti-establishment approach of dada and the Fluxus group and came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s. The idea of mail art was that artists from around the world could send their works through the postal system. Pat’s work was included in all the significant international mail art catalogues from the 1970s to 1991.² Her contributions were mainly performative self-portraits.

Although Richard often took the photographs, Pat chose the poses, the theatrical personae, and the outfits (which she usually made herself). In the 1970s, when feminism was opening up many possibilities for women artists, Pat came into her own. In her work she relished sending up stereotypes, recognising that by taking control of representations of the body, issues of identity and sexuality could be critiqued and enjoyed and celebrated. Other artists who worked with Pat recall her humour and her fearlessness; her belief to ‘say it at it is’, not to cover things up. This attitude came through not only in her mail art but also in her film Men 1975 and her work with male and female models (shown at the Adelaide Biennial in 1996).

An important distinction between Pat’s and Richard’s ways of working is that while the performative photographs constituted her art they were often the source of the poses that he chose for his paintings. The films they collaborated on had a homemade quality that was very much part of the atmosphere of the 1970s. The fluid interplay between performance, film and aspects of home and family life also appears in some of Larter’s paintings, such as Yellow eye research where Pat is depicted as a woman confident in her own body alongside meticulously drawn fairytale images inspired by storybooks they read to their children. Larter has always seen drawing as an important basis for his paintings. In the 1950s, when he was still living in England, he took art classes at night at Toynbee Hall in London, where he drew from plaster casts. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of his later nudes, he was reluctant to progress to the life classes, believing that it was of the utmost importance to be able to attain a likeness.

Beyond these classes, his adult art training was limited. This aspect of being largely self-taught is significant to his highly experimental approach with an array of techniques. This included his discovery of the hypodermic syringe as a painting tool. In a ‘road to Damascus’ moment, he saw the syringes through the window of a medical supplies shop in Camden Town while waiting for the bus home and realised they would provide an excellent way of drawing with paint. His abilities in this regard shine in many works of the late 1950s and 1960s, including the intricate, colourful linearity in Stripperama no. 3. By the late 1960s he had stopped using the technique.

Early on in his artistic career Larter was fascinated by pointillism and refers to his seminal paintings as ‘pointillist abstracts’. His fascination with the fine dotting techniques of artists like Seurat and Signac, as well as their interest in the science and emotive resonances of colour, took on new life in his works such as the ravishing painting Exercise 1967. Here, dots of varied sizes flow in curvilinear patterns across the surface. They are layered over vertical bands of colour so pure and vibrant that the combined effect is to dazzle the eye and lift the spirits. Larter’s love of decorative patterning and luminous colour was also informed early in his artistic life by a visit he made to Algiers in 1951 where he was greatly inspired by Islamic art (something he shares with Henri Matisse whose work he admires).

Movement in Larter’s work is often associated with music. From the 1950s to the present, music has been an important aspect of his life and he often listens to music while he paints. The subjects in some of his major figurative paintings include portraits of musicians associated with pop and rock, like Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger. Compared with the strident nature of some of his figurative works, there is a lightness and lyricism, and a subtle use of colour in Swingalee no. 4 1986. The experimental nature of his painting techniques is again apparent in the small notations– like grace notes – applied by edgers used by house painters for the finer work. At the same time, there is a feeling of effortlessness in the way the rhythmic forms fan out and rotate and literally appear to swing.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Larter undertook a number of works that were inspired by natural phenomena and the environment. By the time he painted his epic work Side thrust 1989, he had moved with Pat from Luddenham, in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, to Yass, New South Wales, about an hour’s drive from Canberra. This meant that he and Pat became regular visitors to the National Gallery of Australia, enjoying the collection and exhibitions that included works by some of his favourite artists – Claude Monet, PierreBonnard and Henri Matisse among them. For years, Larter had been fascinated by luminosity in colour, both in terms of natural phenomena and in a painterly sense. A feeling for light and colour also informed Larter’s life in Yass, where the changes in the seasons were palpable. As a child, Larter was very excited when he witnessed the aurora borealis, which became the subject of paintings decades later in 1986. In these works the bands of refracted light appear soft and semi-transparent. In Side thrust, on the other hand, the rainbow forms appear more substantial, as though they have become the embodiment of light and energy rhythmically pulsating through the landscape.

Side thrust comprises nine panels and extends over ten metres. It was recognised as one of the most significant works in Larter’s output when it was acquired for the national collection. As John McPhee wrote:

"The work is principally a combination of two essential elements, Larter’s mastery of a highly original technique and his love of light and landscape of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. Side thrust should be read as a metaphysical landscape, a distillation of sound, light and emotional tension. The mosaic-like ground and attenuated ribbons of rainbow colour, both made with a paint soaked roller, produce a resonance that embraces the viewer … The ‘view’ is not simply something to look at, but to be part of." ³

The following decade Larter had to face tragic circumstances when his beloved wife and friend for some forty-three years died in 1996. In the same year, he painted his grief in Into the silence – a dark painting tentatively searching for the light. In contrast to the somnambulist beauty of that work, however, the joy, love and energy that Pat brought to their lives is celebrated in Farewell my lovely 1996.

By the turn of the new century, Richard Larter had moved to Canberra, where he now lives and continues to paint with unabated commitment and passion. In recent years he has captured the local environment, including the Canberra bushfires of 2003. Now in his late seventies, his memory is ever-present and he has continued to paint portraits of Pat for his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. He also continues to create figurative and non-figurative works inspired by the human form, politics, music, nature, art and culture of the past and present. Along with Larter’s abilities as a colourist, this rich amalgam of interests has informed an extraordinary body of work over the years; a body of work that is recognised and celebrated in his retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Deborah Hart
Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture after 1920