Rupert Bunny's Mythologies

Rupert Bunny (1864–1947) was born at St Kilda, Melbourne, in a house called 'Eckerberg' after his German mother's home in Frankfurt-an-Oder. Though, with Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) and Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) he belonged in the first generation of Australian-born artists and studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, with these two painters, his 'Australian-ness', unlike theirs, is not what is remarkable about him. His paintings until now have looked foreign. This is partly because there are no gum trees, but more because they are about people and their desires. Bunny used Greek myths and the Bible to tell stories which have equivalents in modern life. In Australia, social gossip has been the province of living-rooms, television screens, magazines and hotel bars. Its entry into our visual arts has been slow — and almost always clothed in myth. Bunny was one of the first to take this direction.

Governing Bunny's art, which developed over half a century, holding it while style changed and mood see-sawed, was the character of the man himself. The consistent elements were a deep love of music, an intimate involvement in the classics, and a quality of personal remoteness. Those who knew Bunny described a reserve behind the urbane manner and controlled, clever discourse. Art dealer and collector Lucy Swanton (1901–1981) remembered him as 'civilised, courtly, sensitive, delightfully cynical; the cynicism accompanied by a faint shrug of the thin shoulders and a gleam of amusement'. His habit was to present that part of himself which was best adapted to any given company; thus he showed different aspects of his personality to different people. Similarly his art was controlled, urbane and knowledgeable.

Bunny was an artist-manipulator, cleverly creating spectacles for our enjoyment, rather than the type of Impressionist whose energy is totally given to capturing a particular natural effect. He painted illusions, and at times showed that he was doing so by repeating the image and, by slight changes, altering the illusion. For instance, in the 1900s he produced a series of large paintings which suggested music — women grouped on balconies listening to distant music, music that is suggested by the lack of communication between the women, by the flowing elaboration of their gowns, the roses fallen on the floor, the half-folded fan, the darkness into which they gaze. He painted this tableau over and over again for some years, every now and then altering the illusion entirely: a suggestion of conspiracy in the women's postures and the subject became 'Scandal'; of weariness and it was 'After Work'; of accusation and the theme was 'Caught Out'.

Thus Bunny was a creator of effects and not the slave of appearances. If 'manipulativeness' gives his work a certain cold suavity it also allows an astonishing ease in the use of different styles and inventiveness in image-making. In this respect he was a truly modern artist, Australia's first artist to react to the twentieth century.

The supreme advantage of myths is that they express a common experience. Universal and ageless in their themes, and intimate in their frankness, they can represent each man and woman's life. Bunny's mythological paintings were dreams of our beginnings, human stories about hate and love, petty squabbles and grand ideals, well-known narratives about a remote world which he presented as in essence exactly like today, though honeyed by time and distance. Fascinated by the idea of a golden age, Bunny painted many of his mythological paintings as personal impressions of it. And in his re-creations Christian and pre-Christian worlds existed and sometimes overlapped in inexplicable but moving conjunctions. Even when his subjects were not mythological they reverberated with the past. As one critic wrote: 'In their classical poses many of his groups might have been transplanted from ancient Greece to a life of ease and opulence in modern Paris, a curious blending of ancient and ultra modern tendencies in art'.

As a child Bunny became familiar, first through his father, with the languages, literature, gods and goddesses of classical times. Education and liking confirmed this taste. Lucy Swanton, who knew the artist in his old age, noted his disconcerting habit of speaking 'of the old Olympian gods and goddesses, the Greek heroes and their women as casually and familiarly as of next door neighbours, with a reminiscent smile for the charmers and that look of slight distaste for the vengeful and meddling ladies'. A child of the nineteenth century, Bunny was also on terms of familiarity with the Bible, scribbling frank observations in the margins of his own copy (owned now by Colette Reddin) and painting its stories.

The artist's German-born mother introduced him to the myths and legends of her country, and some of Bunnys earliest mythological subjects were German. But the lasting inheritance from her was music. She had studied music in Germany and was a friend of Clara Schumann (1819–1896). Bunny loved music. At one stage he wanted to be a composer. Failing that, music entered his painting. Throughout the nineteenth century the nuance and infinite suggestiveness of contemporary music, particularly that of Bunny's favourite composers, Schubert Chopin and (later) Debussy, were emulated by poets and painters. Music's symbolic style became a special attribute of Bunny's treatment of myths and, indeed, of his art generally.

Paris, where he lived for forty-six years, formed Bunny and continued to mould him. He absorbed its music, theatre, plastic arts and dance, heard its intellectual arguments, and read its literature. He saw the dancing of Isadora Duncan and Otero and, later, the Ballets Russes; listened to the music of Fauré, Satie and Debussy; almost certainly visited the new plays of Maeterlinck and Ibsen; and read the novels and stories of the so-very-Parisian Guy de Maupassant. (One of Bunny's paintings, Courtisanes à la campagne, took its subject from a story by Maupassant.) Parisian culture flooded into his paintings, in their subjects, in an impressionistic symbolism, and in details of architecture, costume, pose and gesture. Frequently rhetorical and stagey, the poses of his models were taken from Greek and Roman images, the contemporary stage, Isadora Duncan's dance postures, and the rhetorical example of French official painting. (Etruscan, Egyptian and Greek poses, taken from the profiled figures painted and carved on vase and frieze, were employed by the Ballets Russes from 1909 and beforehand notably by Isadora Duncan. Even artists' models in Paris acquired a repertoire of poses from these sources.)

As a student of Philip Calderon (1833–1898) in London and, from 1886, as a private pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) in Paris, Bunny was expected to handle mythological subjects. Each week students were asked to compose an image, and the subjects were almost invariably classical or biblical. Bunny's many sketchbooks show a manner of composing mythological images that influenced his entire output of paintings. The method itself was traditional but it could be pushed to extremes of subjectivity. Each idea began in a number of thumbnail-size sketches, which started almost as scribbles and developed, sometimes in one sketch, usually over two or three, towards a more definite form. This way the artist arrived at his composition. The element of chance in the method may explain the unusual slant of some of Bunny's mythologies.

Examples of the work of the more promising students were sent with high hopes each year to the juries of the great annual Salon exhibitions. In 1887 Bunny was represented for the first time with a bizarre wash drawing of Walpurgis night, followed the next year by a monochromatic oil painting, Un Sabbat. Both works depict witches — their belts adorned with a grisly row of decapitated human heads — crawling and prancing around a smoking cauldron.

Though the pungent Germanic theme may have been Bunny's own choice, the paintings probably originated as a class exercise. The careful stage-by-stage production, including a wash drawing, followed by a near-monochromatic oil painting of the same image, was the formal method of preparing academic grand paintings.

Most students of Bunny's generation learnt the first stages — the charcoal drawings, wash drawings and oil sketches. The laborious final stages simply weren't taught in the schools. There wasn't time. Young artists coped as well as they could painting in their own time and away from the school. So comparatively few of them mastered the slow process that led all the way through to finished oil paintings, as Bunny did. Tom Roberts (1856–1931) was one Australian who painted brilliantly in the 'impressionist' oil sketch manner, while hankering all his life for proficiency in the slow build-up of an academic painting. Perhaps Bunny's skill as a practitioner was another reason for painting myths –  the technique of grand painting lent itself to traditional grand subject matter.

His next Salon paintings were large canvases, painted with Pre-Raphaelite clarity. One was the story of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Others included classical pastorals evoking a dream of rustic felicity and cool, grey paintings of Tritons playing in the sea at twilight.

During his long career, which lasted till the 1940s, Bunny painted portraits, landscapes and languorous images of women at leisure, while continuing to paint mythological and religious images. With one exception, myths were the vehicle of each major development in his art.

Given his training in composition it is not surprising that in the late 1890s Bunny produced a series of dramatic colour monotypes using the fast sketch method. In the monotype process the image is quickly worked on a sheet of metal or glass onto which a sheet of paper is pressed while the paint is still wet. This way the image is transferred — in reverse. Bunny used monotypes in 1898 rather in the way the Surrealists later engaged in automatic writing, as a stimulus to the imagination and to memory. Memory — not the tame recall of facts but rather the powerful explosion of the unconscious memory into the present moment, stimulated by any of the senses of smell, sound, taste or touch — was a source of inspiration for many artists of Bunny's generation. In 1898 Bunny worked 'with brushes, rag or even his fingers — in any way, indeed, to obtain the particular effect desired'. He worked fast, using a line which circles and repeats itself across the image as if the painter had not once lifted his finger or brush from the copper plate. The subjects, inevitably, were charged with the same energy.

Death the reaper (or Death's summons) and A sea nymph were two of the 1898 oil drawings, and there were images of prostitutes (naked and gesturing obscenely) and of a naked man confronted by a huge, bearded female monster, as well as tamer exercises in figure studies (poses Bunny almost knew by heart).

By inclination he was receptive to the idea, in vogue from the 1890s, of expressing music, literature and dance in painting; an aesthetic synthesis that satisfied everything he believed in. Having chosen painting rather than his other interests, music, classics and the theatre, he continued to explore the others as well. His sketchbooks over decades contain occasional interpolations of musical scores, some his own composition. He sketched musicians and dancers. In his paintings he made direct and indirect references to poetry, the classics and music, and these were reflected in the titles of his work: 'Danse chromatique' (he wrote beneath a sketch of dancing figures), Sonata, The distant song, A Nocturne by Chopin. In his paintings of 1907–11 he extended the musical idea to the way he painted, and reviewers noted that the subtle patterning of bright colour and subdued tone was akin to 'the recurrence of a leit-motif in music'. One of his students of 1907 discovered that 'colour is like a note of music ... neither beautiful nor ugly', 'it's the notes that surround it that produce the effect'. From this point it was a short, decisive step to adopting two of the major preoccupations of modern painting, rhythm of colour and drawing, and expression through an emotive style rather than through a literary narrative.

In 1911 Bunny switched from a series of paintings depicting women on beaches and balconies, on which he had concentrated for some years, to mythological subjects in which he evolved a new style. This style was to be decorative while firmly eschewing the picturesque — 'ban the picturesque from decoration' the artist wrote in French in one of his sketchbooks of the time.

The new phase involved a change in Bunny's treatment of myths. Previously subtle and symbolic, his subjects now dealt with dramatic events. The visual style is distinctive, characterized by hot, rich colours, strong curving lines, an oriental as well as classical iconography and the introduction of a new type of human figure — stocky, brown-skinned and black-haired. Bunny's 'Post-Impressionism' was noted in 1912, his 'Orientalism' in 1913. With few exceptions, these paintings were smaller in size than earlier works. Bunny had always tended to avoid suggesting deep space, and the new mythologies followed the earlier, evenly accented compositions, though now landscape settings of emphatic curves and colours contributed to this as much, if not more, than the figures.

As it happens, we are able to pinpoint the time of change. In 1910, as a member of the jury of the Autumn Salon, Bunny saw Matisse's paintings Music and Dance. Although he passed them for exhibition, he found the style 'ridiculous' and Matisse a 'humbug'. These paintings were found difficult in 1910 even by the knowledgeable Russian collector who had commissioned them; Sergei Shchukin first rejected them, and changed his mind only at the last moment when he was on his way out of Paris. Likewise the impression made on Bunny, although initially negative, was so strong that seven months later he was able to describe the paintings fully and accurately: 'The lower part of each panel was painted a dull green; the upper, bright cobalt, "Music" was indicated by a number of female forms on the dividing line, playing on various musical instruments, or singing, apparently, and all of a pink colour. Female figures in various contortionists' attitudes and coloured bright red indicated "Dancing" ’.The radical simplicity, jumping colours and rhythmic concept of these paintings were to be characteristics of the style Bunny developed two years later.

Bunny's experimentation followed that of two of his friends in pre-war Paris, the painters John D. Fergusson and Anne Estelle Rice. In April 1911 Rice and Bunny exhibited their paintings at the Baillie Galleries, London. In the same year a painting by Fergusson, with the appropriate title Rhythm, became the name and frontispiece of a new magazine edited by Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. In the first number the editors explained 'Rhythm' as 'the ultimate essence of life' seen 'through the externals'.

Bunny, in Australia in 1911, endorsed their interpretation, saying that the artist's role was to express his 'convictions' through a total way of seeing. He distinguished this whole-hearted type of Modernism from what he felt were the one-sided experiments of Picasso and Matisse. The latter were committed to style, whereas Bunny's commitment was to personality or outlook.

The first ideas for a number of mythologies in the new style are in three sketchbooks datable from 1911 to 1914. These include drawings for a number of paintings and oil sketches which are in the Australian National Gallery collection: Heracles and the Nymphs of Himera, The Apple of Discord, Poseidon and Amphitrite, Eos and the Hours, On the seaweed etc., and some of the designs for murals in Australia House.

Bunny's later mythologies divide into three sub-groups or stages. Two of the Gallery's paintings — Heracles and the Nymphs of Himera and The Apple of Discord — are clearly from the earliest stage, distinguished by their large size, cool colours, full (though shallow) modelling, and the complexity of their imagery. They show Bunny entering a new phase upon a teasing and scholarly note.

Then in the Autumn Salon, at the end of 1913, Bunny showed two paintings which were noted as a break from tradition. These works (representative of a style that changed after the war) were rhythmic and barbaric, of all his paintings the most energetic. They included The Rape of Persephone, On the seaweed and Fortune-telling. In them Bunny retained some of his earlier interest in naturalistic effects of light.

By comparison, the paintings and monotypes of the third stage (c.1920–22), were stolid, simpler, and their subjects more generalized. In 1920 Bunny was commissioned by the dealer Georges Petit to execute one hundred monotypes to be shown in March 1921. This exhibition was followed by one of oil paintings in May 1922. Since some of the monotypes have exactly the same images as some of the 1920–22 paintings, it seems probable that in producing images in a simpler, closed-outline technique for monotypes, Bunny changed his style. The dance is a typical generalized image of 1920–22 and so are The Fountain of Venus, Youth and maiden and The fountain, held in the Gallery collection. Peleus and Thetis and The Prophetic Nymphs also belong in this group.

Bunny painted few mythologies after 1922. The slave women, first exhibited in 1926, is large, statuesque and academically dry by comparison with the works of a few years before. Some paintings exhibited in 1930 and 1931, however, have more in common with the paintings of earlier stages.

Bunny is known primarily for his mythological oil paintings and for his simple line drawings of the female nude. Unlike many of his contemporaries he produced few book illustrations or drawings for commercial reproduction; he rarely exhibited watercolours and did not execute any etchings or lithographs. However, he did produce over one hundred and fifty monotypes, a form of printmaking that enjoyed a revival from the late nineteenth century. These prints, which he exhibited from 1899 to 1943, constitute a large but relatively unresearched part of his oeuvre.

The monotype is a hybrid technique combining the spontaneity of painting and drawing with the surface textures characteristic of printmaking. In its simplest form, an image is created in ink upon a hard, flat surface and is then transferred by pressure to paper. Only one impression is obtained, hence the name monotype. The Italian artist Giovanni Castiglione (1660—1669) is credited with producing the first known examples.

Rembrandt's technique of inking his etched plates to give expressive variations to his prints was the method used by the French etcher Vicomte Lepic (1839–1889), who was responsible for the revival of the monotype in the nineteenth century. He called his technique 'l'eau forte mobile' — the changeable etching. By manipulating ink on a single etched plate, Lepic was able to produce prints suggestive of different times of day and varying seasons. It was only a short step to dispense with the etched image altogether. It was Lepic who guided the French artist Edgar Degas (1834—1917) in his first experiments in the technique.

In an article on Degas' monotypes, Eugenia Janis identifies two main approaches to the monotype: the subtractive and the additive. In the subtractive method the plate is completely covered with ink which is then wiped, scratched or otherwise removed to form the design. Working from dark to light is a manner that is also used for mezzotints, a process that was being revived in the late nineteenth century; and the lithographs of Degas' contemporary, Eugéne Carrière (1849–1906), were also scraped from a black ground.

The second method, the additive process, is more akin to painting, the design being conceived as a positive image on the plate.

Monotypes had become quite common by the mid-1890s. Degas exhibited four examples in the third Impressionist exhibition of 1877; in 1881, in Boston, the American artist Charles Walker (1848–1920) produced and exhibited monotypes which were quite independent of European experiments; the artists working in Venice with the American Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) in the 1880s produced monotypes as an after-dinner pastime (as did Degas); and in England in 1896 Hubert Herkomer (1849–1914) patented the 'Herkomergravure', a process by which the monotype's unique character could be reproduced in infinite numbers.

The development of the monotype as a fashionable technique is paralleled in the history of photography by the emergence of Pictorialism, which also produced soft, out-of-focus, 'fuzzy-wuzzy' images. Some photographic techniques such as oil transfer prints even involved off-setting an inked photographic image to another sheet of paper, bringing them even closer to the monotype process. This link was recognized by photographers, and Alfred Stieglitz exhibited monotypes by Eugene Higgins (1874–1958) in his Photo-Secession Gallery in 1910, stating that they had the 'rich quality of a good platinum print'.

Bunny, who was a frequent commuter between London and Paris, could have learnt the technique in either city. In Paris many of the American pupils at the Académie Julien produced monotypes, and it has been suggested that the technique might have been taught at that school. In her forthcoming book, 'Rupert Bunny. The Final Years', Colette Reddin relates:

"…At the American Club in Paris, Bunny regularly played cards with a group of artists; and he told us that, during one of their games, they tried to produce monotypes in colour … Bunny was the only member of the group to really succeed in producing an impressive array of coloured monotypes, and was rather proud of his achievement."

Like most artists who produced monotypes before the turn of the century, Bunny would have had the technique introduced to him as a black and white art. Herkomer enthused over the 'beauty of the printed blacks' that only the monotype could produce, and Edward Ertz stated: ‘the artistic mysteries that can be given, the finesse, the depth of tone and variety of texture, make this a most delightful medium to the painter.’

But the 'colour revolution' initiated by the Impressionist painters was making itself felt in printmaking, colour woodcuts and especially colour lithographs, and had become not only acceptable, but in vogue, by 1900.

It was to the problem of producing monotypes in colour that Bunny and his American friend the decorative artist Augustus Koopman (1869-1914) addressed themselves.

In 1898 Bunny exhibited eighteen colour monotypes at the Fine Art Society’s Galleries, London, while Koopman exhibited at the Galerie Georges Petit. The catalogue introduction explains that his colour monotypes are the results of lengthy experiments which have been carried out by Mr Bunny, in a method of which he does not claim to be the inventor, but which he considers has been carried further by him than by any others working in the same field.

Unfortunately Bunny does not identify those other artists. Perhaps one was Degas, who exhibited colour monotypes of landscapes at the Durand-Ruel Gallery, Paris, in 1892; another may have been the American Maurice Prendergast (1859–1924), who was working in Paris at that time.

Bunny’s exhibition was the subject of a long illustrated review in the British journal The Magazine of Art, and it is obvious by their claim, that Bunny had invented the technique, that no other artist had produced colour monotypes in England.

The magazine also gives a description of Bunny's method of producing his colour monotypes, or 'oil drawings', as he termed them:

Mr Bunny's drawings are made upon a zinc plate in transparent colours. The lights are, of course, left, and the colour is applied with brushes, rag, or even his fingers — in any way, indeed, to obtain the particular effect desired. The work necessarily has to be done quickly, as once the paint begins to dry it is apt to stick when the printing stage is reached ... For the purpose of printing he uses the strongest blotting paper that can be obtained, and the transfer is made by the pressure of an india-rubber roller. Mr Bunny having found this much better than a press …

It was the speed at which the artist had to work that appealed to Bunny. After laboriously producing large paintings for the Academy and Salon exhibitions it must have been a relief to turn to this intimate form of expression. In his catalogue introduction Bunny noted that monotypes '... have certain qualities of freshness and directness which are not to be found in either oil or water colour painting'.

Monotypes were also recommended 'as a quick means of jotting down impressions — a shorthand method of composing a picture', and a comparison between Bunny's oil sketches and his monotypes reveals a similar way of working.

The earliest known monotypes by Bunny are in dark brooding colours, mainly sepia and blue, and closely follow the themes of his paintings. In his print Prometheus, all is conveyed in a mass of swirling lines and smudges where Bunny has removed the ink from the zinc plate with his fingers. These flowing lines strongly suggest the influence of Art Nouveau, and The Magazine of Art commented that:

The result is extremely charming and highly decorative. These designs are so pleasing and luminous in colour, so opulent, and at the same time so graceful in conception and arrangement, that it is easy to foretell a great artistic success.

By 1905 when Bunny exhibited at the Galerie Henry Graves there was a change in the subject and execution of his monotypes. As well as mythological subjects, he introduces scenes of domestic tranquillity, in light, bleached-out pastel colours, perhaps reflecting his marriage in 1902. Instead of the reduction method where much of the pigment was removed to form the image, he now used the additive method, treating the zinc plate like a small canvas and only applying the ink necessary to form the image. There is far less manipulation of the paint on the plate's surface before printing.

It was not until after the First World War that Bunny once more produced monotypes. In 1920 his dealers in Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, commissioned him to execute one hundred examples which were exhibited in 1921 and 1924.

These post-war monotypes have an exuberance not seen in previous works. The sharp acid colours have been applied in short, energetic brushstrokes, with the coloured areas seldom overlapping, forming cloisonné-like patterns in the flat, frieze-like compositions.

Pagan myths and exotic tales have become the pretext for his delight in decorative colour and rhythms. The theme of his exhibition was carried over into the frames, which were painted in blue and grey. The critic Edith Fry remarked that Bunny was 'in close sympathy with the artistic movements of his age. He is most truly himself in purely decorative work. he is now doing the things he had always wanted to do'.

Before Bunny returned to live permanently in Australia in 1933, he purchased from Galerie Georges Petit all his monotypes still in stock. In 1933 these were exhibited in Melbourne and in 1941 and 1943 in Sydney, where the artist's decorative work was better received.

One of the legacies of Bunny's work in the monotype process is that large numbers of Australian artists have practised the technique since the turn of the century. A.H. Fullwood would have seen Bunny’s work while in London, and from about 1905 he produced many monotypes and wrote on the subject. Others, like Hans Heysen (1877–1968), would have read about Bunny's experiments and then tried the technique themselves. Heysen later introduced the process to his Adelaide students, Irene Everand, May Grigg (1885–1969) and Marie Tuck (1866–1947). Emmanuel Phillips Fox (1865–1915) perhaps learnt directly from Bunny, and taught Ina Gregory (1875–1964). J.J. Hilder (1881–1916) and Tom Garrett (1879–1952) also exhibited monotypes. Margaret Preston (1875–1963) learnt the technique from Bunny in Paris in 1905, and after his Sydney exhibition of 1943 once more experimented in the technique.

Exhibitions of Bunny's and Preston's monotypes in Sydney in the 1940s and books on their work were an inspiration to others, and in the following years artists as diverse as James Cant (1911–1983), Sidney Nolan (born 1917), Byram Mansell (1899–1977) and Bea Maddock (born 1934) all made numerous experiments in this most painterly of print processes.