Carl Plate - Moving into Abstraction - Paintings from the 1950s

from the Estate of the artist, 15 August - extended to 5 October 2024

Show exhibition essay

'Those who look at the titles in the catalogue and expect 'portrayals' will be puzzled. But those willing to be led into a rich world of imagination will find reward' (Gertrude Langer, 'Rich World of Imagination', Courier Mail, 6 October 1954)

Carl Plate was a pioneer in the development of Abstract art at a time in Australia when there was a good deal less sympathy for art that was non-figurative, art that wasn’t the view out of the window. In the 1940s and 50s it was a culture that in many ways was stuck in the past, and deeply provincial, so there is much that is heroic in the career of Carl Plate. Among other things he was the first Australian abstract painter to exhibit in a solo show in London and showed in New York and Toronto as well.

It must have been in the blood. Or the stars? Born in Perth, WA in 1909, Carl was the son of German-born artist and writer Adolf Gustav Plate (a marine cadet of 16 who jumped overboard and made his way to the South Seas and at the suggestion of Robert Louis Stevenson showed his art in Sydney). Carl is also the younger brother of artist Margo Lewers. He married Jocelyn Zander, whose mother, Clarice brought the first exhibition of modern art to Sydney (Blaxland Gallery, 1932.)

Subsequently he studied at East Sydney Technical College from 1930 to 1934, while at the same time working in advertising. By 1935 Plate travelled to Europe via Cuba, Mexico and the USA. While in London he studied under Bernard Meninsky and Vivian Pitchforth whose ideas of ‘holistic composition’ influenced his work. The visual syntax of abstraction involved the connected effort of Cubist drawing, Fauve colours, and Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk”.

The International Surrealist Exhibition meanwhile activated an enthusiasm for collage. These Carl Plate usually made on the long ocean voyages. He took along scissors and glue on his overseas trips. The dissection of reproductions into strips made the overlapping slices of a picture give a sense of the image falling apart only to be reassembled again. It gave a peek into the unknown while they rattled the senses like a stick along railings.

In 1940, returning from France, he opened the Notanda Gallery in Rowe Street, Sydney where he sold art books and prints of 20th century art, and curated shows of English artists (Hepworth, Moore, Nash, Nicholson) as well as prints of the Modern Masters (Braque, Klee, Miró, Picasso). Carl Plate largely initiated Contemporary Art Society in Sydney, along with the Lewers and the Hinders among others. It must have felt like an oasis for the young artists in those days emerging from the culturally starved suburbs of Australia.

The journey away from the more conventional art of the time (Academic portraits and true-to-nature landscapes) involved a journey toward abstraction: reducing depth of field and perspective space through more discrete and tactile brushstrokes; depicting familiar elements (rock, air, water, leafage) with less modelling and fewer shadows, and finding a way beyond mimetic or illusionistic form toward less colour - with chastened greens, bleached browns and greys - and evolving an ‘all-over composition’ that manifested ‘conflict-as-harmony’, a paradox he was happy to live with.

“A painting, Plate believed, “must exist by itself, unrelated to anything else.” He also stated that: “no non-figurative art operates completely in mid-air. There is no such thing as absolute abstract. You always find yourself, somehow, involved in the total human situation - no matter how far you may seem to be from it.” (The Australian, Nov 2, 1968) In his attempt to give shape to all the accumulated experiences and discoveries, they were meant to test your tolerance for ambiguities. He turned these apparent contradictions into aesthetic paradox. Looking at the pictures there is a strong sense of an artist attuned to the complexities of nature - growth and chaos and staccato rhythms - played out in the modulations of plane and line through the surface movement of the paint.

In his ‘Thoughts on Drawing’ (1957) he describes the way the eye, freed from the associations of the literal meanings of things, seeks out essential qualities of new forms, seen by some inner eye. Hence this play of the seen and the unseen, the non-visual world beneath the visual skin of so-called reality . “An abstract feeling that something exists beneath the material evidence”, in his own words. Here we get as persuasive a theory of Carl Plate’s art as there is: the play of the unfamiliar in the familiar. Or seeing what isn’t there. See, for example, the punning references to a figure and an interior in the beautiful muted colours of Bird & Rocky Landscape.

A dogged and disciplined artist one senses an intense, personal quest - as he stands for that fighting element in the practice of visual abstraction without which paintings were a way to just flatter the lazy assumptions of the majority, that paintings are just a mirror of the world. He was a key player in the history of modern art in Australia along with artists like John Olsen, Michael Johnson, Janet Dawson, and Ian Fairweather; as well as an influence for the new wave of young contemporary artists grappling with painting in the 21st century.

George Alexander, 2024