Australian Artists of the Right, Part I
Lionel Lindsay
Kerry Bolton
5,188 words
Background: Australianity
Nietzsche was a seminal influence on the brothers Norman and Lionel Lindsay, as he was on many other contemporary aesthetes, artists, and literati of the Right, including their fellow Australian, P. R. Stephensen, who was cured of his Communism at Oxford by the Philosopher.[1] When Stephensen returned to Australia, after a publishing venture in Britain, he did so as an avid Australian nationalist, and soon as an “Australian National Socialist,” which to him meant a faith arising solely from the soil and blood of Australia. It was a creed that had its origins well before any mention of the term in Germany or elsewhere in Central Europe. Colonial Australians were quick to immerse themselves in a concept of “Australianity,” that often took republican forms, helped by the presence of many Irish, and by the fact of Australian settlers being largely drawn from those who had displeased the British Establishment: born rebels and vagabonds, or, as the Australians say, “larrikins.” The miner’s revolt at the Eureka Stockade (1854) assumed a mythos like that of the miner’s revolt on the Rand (1922), or the defense of the Alamo. Poets such as Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and Banjo Paterson (1864-1941) wrote both of the character of the Australian landscape and its people, and of a coming new and great continental nation, that, as Lawson put it, “would look to herself,” and warned of a menace from Asia. Politically, embryonic Australian nationalism came from the Labor Party, and “Australian Nationalism” was synonymous with “Australian Socialism.” It was the Labor Party and the trades unions that campaigned zealously for the “White Australian” immigration policy. That was the focus of their demands, as it was among organized labor in New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Denis Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco.
D. H. Lawrence, whom Stephensen had published in Britain, travelled to Australia and also saw something unique about an aspiring continental nation, referring to the spirit of place. Stephensen had been one of the first to write an in-depth review of Lawrence’s book on the subject of the former’s native land, Kangaroo, which referred to the emergence of a nativist “fascist” movement.[2] Perhaps this appealed to Stephensen’s imagination and prompted him to lead such as movement, Australia First, for which he remained unapologetic after the war, while others sought to backtrack and obfuscate. Ian Mudie, the poet, was another adherent of the Australian First movement who remained steadfast in this belief during and after the war. A specifically cultural movement, the Jindyworobak, an Aborigine word meaning “joined together,” was founded in 1938 by the poet Rex Ingamells, who aligned the movement with Stephensen and Australia First, although it also included Leftists. These proponents of “White Australia” nonetheless were the first to champion the cause of the Aborigine, and Stephensen published the periodical Abo Call; part of a movement which, unlike the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the African National Congress, was actually run by those it claimed to represent: Aborigines. There was a theory, even in scientific circles, that the Aborigine was an “archaic Caucasian,” and this view was adopted by the Jindys as establishing a Caucasian presence in Australia reaching back some forty thousand years.[3]
Stephensen also wrote of the significance of place in the forming of a culture and “race” in his influential Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect, where he refers to the “genus loci,” and to “Race and Place.”[4] Among those who received Foundations of Culture from Stephensen was Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961), the author, painter, sculptor, engraver, printmaker, etcher, and cartoonist who had written to Stephensen congratulating him on his short-lived arts periodical, Australian Mercury.[5]
Lionel Lindsay
Lionel came from a family replete with artists. Lionel came from a family replete with artists. He was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His reputation as a notable watercolorist and printmaker was established in Britain with an exhibition in 1927. He was knighted for his services to Australian art in 1941.
Despite his eminence, if he had been more conspicuously involved with Stephensen’s pro-Axis advocacy, this would probably not have saved him from internment during the war alongside his friend. However, Lionel had written Addled Art in 1942, a book lambasting “modern art” as a degeneration of aesthetics for the sake of money and promoted primarily by Jewish dealers, patrons, and practitioners. To Lionel, art was, as Stephensen had stated in Foundations (and indeed as had Jung), a reflection of the spirit of the land. Jewish dealers were, as anthropologists might say today, “deterritorialized,” as was the art they peddled or made, and as per the Zeitgeist of democracy, the motive was that of profit. Many artists and literati turned Right as a result.[6] What is remarkable about Addled Art is that it could be published during the war, and perhaps even more incredible in the immediate aftermath – 1946,[7] at a time when members of the culture-bearing stratum in Europe, which included figures such as Knut Hamsun, Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Robert Brasillach (executed for “intellectual crimes”), Josef Thorak, and others, were being killed, jailed, or rendered professional pariahs.
The themes of Lionel’s art were those of the Australian outback and the Australian folk, but also that of Spain and Arab culture. It might be a paradox and a puzzle to Leftist and liberal prejudices, but it is the artists of the Right who introduced the best of foreign cultures to the Western public, while eschewing the use of the foreign for the willful degeneration of Western art by those “addled artists,” such as Picasso, with their use of African fetishes to contort artistic form and order into the grotesque. One might refer here to the Chinese ideograms used by Ezra Pound in his poetry, and his translation and publication of many Chinese poems,[8] or the work by Julius Evola on Tibetan, Indian, and Japanese traditions. But there remains for the Left and the liberal art establishment the enigma of Lionel’s Addled Art, and amidst painting and etchings of exquisitely rendered birds, flowers, cats, horses, “swaggies,” and so on, there is often the allusion to this “anti-Semitic attack on modernism in art.”[9]
Addled Art: A Critique of Jews and Modernism
Addled Art begins with a poem, “New Bastille,” written by Lionel. The “modern artist” is a culture-whore and the product of whoredom – rootless, disturbed, an atavistic rebel against High Culture, and revolting against millennia of striving towards perfection and godhood:
Engendered in the stews, the spawn of chance,
Five francs to his father, with his mother’s taint
Troubling poor wits that should be in restraint,
The modern artist, he of the “Advance”,
Stands gazing on the noblest thing in France,
The mighty Louvre, House of the Lords of Paint,
Where the gods dwell at peace with man and saint,
And time stands still before the world’s romance.
“A bas le Louvre! Petrol and faggots plant
Against each door,” he cries, “the Past must burn,
That I the Lord of Art significant
May with my rotten boot the Ages spurn” . . .
Hard from the cave has been the upward climb,
But this cries: “Backward to the night of time.”[10]
Lionel regarded it as his duty to say something about the way art was being undermined, with the help of “powerful propaganda,” “by the same aliens everywhere,” regarding France – where he had studied from 1926 until 1935 – as the spawning ground. This “revolutionary,” “anti-traditional” movement succeeded through the “hireling critics” of “interested dealers.” Lionel saw the scattering of “the Paris School of International Art” (the name given to the Modernist movement in France) across the world as a happy event. However, it found another center in New York. Although Lionel cites a comment that American artists were reasserting their traditional culture, he viewed the activity of Jewish art dealers with concern. Modern art is the outward symptom of a “spiritual malady.” French art ceased to possess “a national character after the death of Degas,” and “the international swine” had flocked to Paris from Central Europe.[11]
The spiritual malady referred to by Lionel is “the spirit of the age that separates this century from all others; the age of speed, sensationalism, jazz, and the insensate adoration of money.” He saw art as having become a commodity, to be invested like stocks and bonds, and the “vulgar rich” set the value by their vulgar taste. “Art value almost reached the Stock Exchange.”[12] In such a climate, where money rules, “the shrewdest race in the world” grasped the opportunity to profit.[13]
An anecdote on Post-Impressionism is instructive. According to what Professor D. S. MacColl, the painter, lecturer, and art critic, told Lionel, he visited a Jewish art dealer in Paris during the 1890s. The dealer had hoarded a large number of unsold Impressionist works. Twenty years later, these were profitably selling as “Post-Impressionism.” Propaganda and advertising created the market among the new rich. However, Lionel states that Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh should be separated from what became the later generation of painters; it was the dealers’ ruse to promote what came after, “to confuse and public and influence sales.” These three were representational painters; what followed “was an attack on life itself.” Modernism became a craze in Paris, promoted by journalists masquerading as art critics. “To market the base the noble had to be degraded.”[14]
Stagnation usually marks the end of a great creative epoch, and there is a lull. However, the dawn of the twentieth century was instead marked by excessive busyness, impelled by the age of the Machine. Spengler has said that the West had reached this epoch, the Machine, and there would be nothing left for Western Civilization to create aesthetically. The technocrat and engineer would – in this final epoch of Western destiny, after the defeat of plutocracy and democracy – become the new creative aristocracy where once there were artists. The arts had nothing left to say during the grand finale of the West, and it is no use lamenting the harshness of this reality. Spengler had written that great epochs, such as that of the Romans, can live without great art. But however much Spengler personally was impressed by the sublimity of the Renaissance masters, or by Bach and Mozart, of all the vast quantity of painting and writing that was going on in Germany during his lifetime, he asked, “is this culture? . . . And do the results justify in any way at all the noisy self-advertisement?”[15]
Has the West produced anything new that is worthy of the name “art” other than when it is derived from prior movements? The efforts of the Third Reich in reviving Western High Culture and repudiating Modernism resulted in a resurgence of the Classical (Breker, Thorak) and the Gothic, but not in a distinctly “Nazi art.” Likewise, Lionel painted in the representational style of a past era. Spengler seems to have been correct in his observation, but should we accept his hard realism of the primacy of the Machine over aesthetics, and the pointlessness of Westerners continuing to strive towards the divine through art?[16] The Futurists in Italy attempted to reflect Machine aesthetics and repudiate “pastism,” but produced mainly banal works. Lionel describing Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto as “some piece of mad humour perpetuated by a moonstruck mechanic,” and his impression of the exhibition of Italian Futurism at the 1926 Venice International as “the most gigantic joke ever executed in paint.”[17]
In referring to this Modernist reflection of the Zeitgeist of Western decay, Lionel wrote: “If Modern Art accurately reflects the spirit of the age, then our case is desperate, and the sooner the arts crash the better for mankind; for here there is no road to a decent future or a renaissance of the spirit.”[18] Here he seems to be concurring with Spengler, that it is better to accept the eclipse of Western aesthetics than be fooled into thinking that the West might still have something worth saying, which would allow that voice to come from psychotics, mattoids, degenerates, and merchants, with a heavy mix of aliens in each category. Hopefully there is still room for a continued striving for sublimity, even if it cannot be anything more than something based on the prior foundations of the Renaissance and the Gothic, rather than mere resignation.
First Appearance of Modernism
Lionel traces the first appearances of Cubism to a farcical event. Citing Francis Carco, the novelist, dramatist, art critic, and poet, in his De Montmartre au Quartier Latin,[19] where the bohemia of Paris circa 1925 is described first-hand, Lionel writes that Cubism “appears to have been started by Braque and immediately seized by Picasso, who was launched by Max Jacob and Apollinaire.” Lionel states that according to Cacro, “the honours of discovery” go to Max Jacob, who told Carco “the famous story of the lozenge, which Picasso had shown one Sunday, declaring it to be the portrait of his peevish mistress. This lozenge amused Max enormously, and to complete the resemblance he complicated the object and provoked the discovery of the cube.”[20] Lionel adds: “Thus two strange fellows, playing the fool in a studio upon a Sabbath morn, present the world with a new art. Vive la blague! (Long live humbug).”[21]
The origins of Dadaism are placed in Germany, among émigrés from Switzerland. Hugo Ball, “the John the Baptist” of Dada (meaning “rocking horse”), stated that “Dadaism loves the extraordinary, and even the absurd . . . nothing remains to us but pose and humbug.”[22] That was the cynics’ view of the world, and one played on by the Dadaists. Guillaume Apollinaire was “the great leg puller” who saw in this nonsense the opportunity for “poisoning fools.” Quoting Carco, Apollinaire – whom Lionel knew in Paris – played the game to the “furthermost reach of fantastic absurdity.”[23]
Now every kind of folly flew from the asylum cage. Cubism, Purism, Constuctionism, Neoplasticism, Vorticism, Expressionism, and Surrealism – “to name but the leading creeds” among the “thirty thousand ‘artists’ resident in Paris.” Galleries had to spring up to accommodate the mass production of the new art, and little shops, boot shops, and cafés became galleries overnight. “Nowhere could the eye escape bad painting.” It accustomed the public eye through sheer mass, “for nothing debauches the eye so quickly as a low standard constantly confronting it”; a “tiring of the optic nerve” of the unthinking, the “culture-cretin,” and the “snob-in-a-hurry.”[24] “And how proverbially shrewd was the confraternity of Jewish dealers, who adduced the pleasure of ‘taking down the Goysher’ for immensely over-priced works of ultimate questionable value to forcing the painters of their race on the credulous Christian.”[25]
Art became “fashion,” because Big Business demands constant flux to expand markets and profits. “. . . Novelty was the soul and inspiration of modern art.”[26] Today phrases like the “music industry,” the “film industry,” the “book trade,” and the “art trade” are commonplace because culture has long been a commodity in a commodified world, where the bottom line for judging the merits of everything is profit. The painter, stated Lionel, supplied “whatever his art merchant demanded”; like all fashion, “bound by the wheels of Supply.”[27]
“The Jew in Modern Painting”
Because of the “vileness of Nazi persecution,” Jews justifiably had the world’s sympathy, but Lionel was not about to be intimidated by the prospect of being labelled an “anti-Semite.” “But the defence of my art, my only religion, demands the truth . . .”[28] The Israelites had always been admonished by their prophets for chasing after false gods, and worshipping the Golden Calf remained with them. They had been admonished not to make graven images or any likeness of creation.[29]
There is perhaps nobody as zealous as a Jewish apostate, whether as a Bolshevik, a Freudian, or a proponent of some new form of Culture-distortion, and the ancient, messianic fanaticism seems to come to the fore. The Jews did not have a legacy of artistic greatness, and one might add that Protestantism likewise did not for the same reason. With secularism unleashed, the Jews were carried away with the tide, augmented by an alienation and a hostility towards Christian culture. Jews became leaders in the Modernist art movement, as they did in other manifestations of Culture-distortion. One might justly assume that there were Jews who thrilled at the contorting of Western and Christian imagery in the arts, just as they thrilled at Freud contorting the unconscious of the Christian (albeit, ironically, based largely on Jewish patients), and the connection between Freudian psychoanalysis and Modernism was predictable,[30] given that the apologists for the latter sought to rationalize the rendering of the beautiful into the grotesque and deformed by the use of psychoanalysis. André Breton gives credit to Freud in the first paragraphs of the Surrealist Manifesto.[31] Lionel says of this connection that Surrealism “naturally emanates from a study of Freud,” sharing “in the original imposture; and that its pretentions are equally suspect and fraudulent.” The images are drawn from the unconscious of “Tom of Bedlam.”[32] Lionel is as disparaging of Dalí, a man of the “Right” – whose artistic technique was at least one of striving towards perfection in a traditional sense – as he is of Chagall and Klee,[33] but one might suspect that Lionel was correct in regarding Dalí as playing to an audience for the sake of fame, and whoring himself to the spirit of the age. Even Picasso showed signs of talent in his pre-Modernist stage.
Of the lack of Jewish artists until this epoch of Western decay, Lionel quotes the “well-known art critic Vanderpyl” as writing of an absence of Jewish painters appearing in the Louvre from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, with the exception of two paintings by the Portuguese Jew, Pissarro. But after the World War there was a sudden “swarm” of “Israelite painters”: Maxime Lévy, Simon Levy, Alkan Levy, Claude Levy . . . and many others using Gentile pseudonyms. Why this sudden surge among a people whose Law forbade such activity, yet who now seemed to be encouraged “even in the most orthodox circles”?[34] The answer for both Lionel Lindsay and Fritz Vanderpyl was that Jews have a peculiar talent for brokering goods, and that art had become a “speculative business.” Hence, “the Jew came in,” wrote Vanderpyl.[35]
Vanderpyl’s article in the widely read Mercure was the first of three, and caused controversy. While tracing this tumult to “anti-Semitism,” Romy Golan, a professor of twentieth-century art at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, stated:
The reason for these sporadic outbursts is all too easy to identify. More than any other cultural domain in France, it seems, the visual arts were characterized since the pre-war years by a conspicuous presence of Jews in nearly every area of activity. . . . This state of affairs was all the more true in the 1920s, a decade of general confidence and contentment in France as a result of the rapid achievement of post-war prosperity there. It was also a period during which France intentionally accepted more immigrants than any other country in the world. This was partly in order to meet its need for manpower after the population loss in the war, which was made worse by the fall in the national birth rate. While immigration was welcomed as long as it was a means to make up for specific deficiencies in the economy, things went differently in the art world.[36]
Affluence accompanied by a falling national birthrate, and demographic replenishment by immigration, are symptoms of national decay. In commenting on an upsurge in anti-Semitism, Golan states that this was a reaction to Jewish artists becoming even more excessive than Jewish dealers and collectors. A battle ensued between French tradition and the Modernism that was perpetrated largely by these immigrants.[37]
As one would expect, the defense of tradition is regarded as intrinsically “anti-Semitic.” Lionel was describing what he saw in France at a time when this culture-war was occurring. This was at a time when there was scandalous huckstering in modern art that reached into the officialdom of the Louvre. Lionel saw modern art as part of an anti-traditional revolt, alongside a similar one in politics. He was conscious of how a civilization might become static and that the “arts stand still, in endless repetition.” This might be recognized as the usual rationalization in defense of modern art, whilst both Spengler and Lionel thought it better for the arts to end than continue in a depraved manner. Lionel stated that “too swift a change” is “worse for a civilization,” “when revolutions sweep away the religion, political system and arts of a country” “in the twinkling of an eye. . . . For the negation of a principle does not necessarily establish an opposing affirmation.”[38]
There was an early alliance between André Breton, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. Their joint art manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art (1938), which was as critical of Stalinist “socialist realism” as it was of the art of Hitler’s Germany, was appropriated by the US after the Second World War in what has been called the “cultural Cold War.” Jazz and Abstract Expressionism became the de facto “American art” for world export,[39] promoted by the US State Department and the CIA, mainly through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to which Trotskyites and Mensheviks flocked in their hatred of the USSR.[40] The Soviet answer was an offensive against “rootless cosmopolitanism,” the condemnation of modernism as “internationalist” and “anti-national,” and a reaffirmation of the heroic, the traditional, and the folkish. F. Chernov wrote a major article (a policy directive) in 1949 on “Bourgeoisie cosmopolitanism and its reactionary role.” He described the culture of the West as “emaciated and decayed.”[41]
In 1946, the Australian Communist Party had condemned Lionel for Addled Art as an example of the “fascist mentality”:
Perhaps the most obvious, because the most terrible and irrational of its tenets, has been the fascist persecution of the Jews. This trait developed much later in Australia than the other Fascist traits that we have noted. But the 1940 Exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society brought a virulent attack upon the Jewish contributors to that exhibition in the form of a letter from Sir Lionel Lindsay to the Sydney Morning Herald. Lindsay’s book Addled Art confirms the anti-Semitic nature of his art-criticism. But as several million Jews have been done to death on the altar of anti-Semitism since Lindsay wrote his notorious letter, he has considered it advisable to include a qualification, by which he hopes to attack ‘Jewish’ painting and at the same time absolve himself from the charge of anti-Semitism. Lindsay patronizingly admits that there are some ‘good’ Jews: Heine, Disraeli, Einstein, Monash and Phillips Fox. This is not a new qualification.
Sigmund Freud is numbered among the ‘bad’ Jews, and this is accounted for largely because – quite literally – Lindsay does not like the look of his face. ‘Glance at Freud’s face. The look of concentration in the eyes is confounded by a general expression of sulky disquietude and their sadness tempered by a vague hostility. It is the face of a man soured and ill at ease with himself or the world.’[42] The sourness, according to Lindsay, following his predilection for racial arguments, is due to one extreme of the Jewish character. If Lionel Lindsay had been a Jew living through the 1930s in Vienna, he may have been able to find other reasons for the ‘sadness tempered with hostility’. . . .
The general tenor of Addled Art is strongly anti-democratic. Lindsay has the same hatred of democracy as the leading fascist theorists Gobineau and Chamberlain, and the fascist writer Alfred Rosenberg. He speaks of the ‘mob’s invasion of art’ and that art can only survive this invasion if bad art is discouraged. To Lindsay a democracy cannot produce great art. He objects to art being included in the school curriculum because art cannot be taught. By including art in the curriculum, ‘the democracies level and lower all cultures’.
The pro-fascist mentality of Addled Art, however, is not limited to its anti-Semitism and a hatred of democracy. There is the same emphasis upon a natural élite that provides the leaders, to be found throughout fascist writing: ‘Natural men, guided by a profound instinct, destroys the weak and malformed at birth. Mistakes of nature, he knows that if they were allowed to propagate they would menace the vitality and continuity of the tribe. The weak chicken is pecked to death’.[43] Like Hitler and Mussolini Lionel Lindsay is also a red-baiter: ‘The tactics of the international Communists would serve: (the “bolshevik — modernist” confusion) corrupt, undermine, flatter the groundlings; put the boot in. The thing was to kick the stuffing out of the aristocrat Drawing’. . . .[44]
Yet, earlier in the Australian Communist Review, Modernism had been condemned with parallels to Lionel’s own “fascist” critique:
A good percentage of modern art expresses anything but intelligible ideas, and there is much that must be classed as experimentation, but tribute must be paid to the work of a small and conscientious section whose positive qualities are already evident in their realist approach. . . .
In a class-divided society where the individual has no realisation of his role, the artist is often caught in the trap of individuality, absorbed in his own frustration – delving into the sub-conscious and the irrational to the point where all rational thought is left behind. . . .
The influence of Surrealism and Formalism are apparent in much of the work exhibited – influences that must be curbed if the work of an artist is to escape triviality and deal with events that matter – the death of the old world and the birth of the new.[45]
The synthesis of Freudianism with Marxism is condemned; it was a movement that was fought in Germany by the Stalinists, who were repulsed by the degeneracy of the “sex pol”[46] faction of the Communist movement, but which was welcomed into the US by the State Department, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Columbia University, and became “Cultural Marxism.”[47] The Australian Stalinist continues:
The first of these, Surrealism, has lost much of its influence overseas, but is still influencing artists in this country. Surrealism claims to be revolutionary – purporting to add to Marxism the theories of Freud, apart from economic considerations. The free play of the sub-conscious in regard to the five senses, sexuality as a system, the involuntary cropping up of associations during the creative process, though perhaps of some scientific value, can play no part in making the people conscious of their social and revolutionary responsibilities.
“Formalism” later became one of the “American” art forms promoted by art critic Clement Greenberg as part of the “cultural Cold War” by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Greenberg, commenting in 1948, saw the US as having become the center of “Western Art” at its apex, and “the center of gravity of industrial production and political power,”[48] patronizing the likes of the drunken paint-dauber Jackson Pollock. Greenberg, as a primary drum-beater for modern art, related its significance to American industry and politics. Not all Jews were enthused. Jason Epstein, the editor and publisher, compared Modernism to “the emperor’s new clothes,” everyone cheering what they are told is “great art” and too conformist to say “this stuff is terrible.” “Who’s going to stand up to Clem Greenberg and later to the Rockefellers who were buying it for their bank lobbies?”[49]
Lionel Lindsay had seen modern art as another commodity for Big Business, and the new center for Culture-bolshevism shifting from Paris to New York. The post-1945 epoch completed the process that Lionel had been witnessing since the 1920s. Addled Art reminds us that there was a critique and a warning about Modernism from the best elements of the art world, whose finer perceptions were buried beneath a well-funded mass of commodity advertising and intellectual charlatanry.
Notes
[1] On Stephensen, see the chapter in K. R. Bolton, More Artists of the Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017), pp. 79-102.
[2] Bolton, More Artists of the Right, p. 79.
[3] At the time, such theories were not too fanciful. Until comparatively recently, the Ainu were regarded by physical anthropologists as a remnant of “archaic Caucasians,” and anthropologists up until the early twentieth century generally accepted that Maoris were “Aryans” from India, as did the Maoris themselves. It was only recently that there was much puzzlement among anthologists as to whether “Kennewick Man” was an archaic Caucasian or a proto-Polynesian.
[4] P. R. Stephensen, Foundations of Culture in Australia: An Essay Towards National Self-Respect (New South Wales: W. J. Miles, 1936).
[5] David S. Bird, Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2012), pp. 61-62.
[6] See Bolton, Artists of the Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012) and More Artists of the Right (Counter-Currents), passim.
[7] Lionel Lindsay, Addled Art (London: Hollis and Carter, 1946).
[8] Yang Zhao, “On the Influence of Chinese Culture on Ezra Pound,” 2015 International Conference on Economy, Management and Education Technology (2015).
[9] “Sir Lionel Lindsay: Australia’s Audubon,” That’s Inked Up, May 19, 2017.
[10] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. viii.
[11] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. ix.
[12] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 15.
[13] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 16.
[14] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 16.
[15] Oswald Spengler, “Pessimism?” (1921) in Prussian Socialism and Other Essays, introduced and annotated by K. R. Bolton (London: Black House Publishing, 2018), p. 140.
[16] For a discussion on these matters, see K. R. Bolton, “Faustianism and Futurism,” in Aristokratia, Vol. 1 (Melbourne: Manticore Press, 2013), pp. 82-114.
[17] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 26.
[18] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 34.
[19] Francis Carco, De Montmartre au Quartier Latin (Paris: Albin Michel, 1927).
[20] Carco quoted by Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 17.
[21] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 17.
[22] Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit, quoted by Lionel Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 18.
[23] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 18.
[24] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 18.
[25] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 19.
[26] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 26.
[27] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 27.
[28] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 20.
[29] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 20.
[30] See, for example, A. H. Esman, “Psychoanalysis and Surrealism: Andre Breton and Sigmund Freud,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, May 23, 2011.
[31] André Breton, Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924).
[32] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 35.
[33] Lindsay, Addled Art, pp. 36-38.
[34] Fritz Vanderpyl, “Does a Jewish School of Painting Exist?”, Mercure de France, July 1925; cited in Lindsay, Addled Art, pp. 20-21.
[35] Vanderpyl, ibid., p. 21.
[36] Romy Golan, “The ‘Ecole Francaise’ vs. the ‘Ecole de Paris’: The Debate about the Status of Jewish Artists in Paris Between the Wars,” in Rose-Carol Washton Long (ed.), Jewish Dimensions in Modern Visual Culture (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2010).
[37] Golan, ibid., p. 2.
[38] Lindsay, Addled Art, p. 50
[39] Today it is Hip Hop in particular. See what is being called “Hip Hop diplomacy” in “Next Level,” at the US State Department.
[40] See K. R. Bolton, Stalin: The Enduring Legacy (London: Black House Publishing, 2011), pp. 30-38.
[41] Bolton, Stalin: The Enduring Legacy, pp. 38-46.
[42] Lionel contrasts Freud’s countenance with that of Einstein.
[43] Quoting from Addled Art, p. 42.
[44] Bernard Smith, “The Fascist Mentality in Australian Art and Criticism,” The Communist Review, Australian Communist Party, June 1946, pp. 182-4, and July 1946, pp. 215-217.
[45] D. Diamond, “Art and the Struggle,” Communist Review, November 1943, pp. 151-153.
[46] K. R. Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’ Ideology: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, DC, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Fall, 2010), pp. 329-355.
[47] See K. R. Bolton, “Cultural Marxism: Origins, Development, and Significance,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, DC, Vol. 43, Nos. 3-4 (Fall-Winter, 2018), pp. 272-284.
[48] Greenberg, quoted in Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: the New Press, 1999), p. 255.
[49] Epstein quoted in Saunders, p. 275.
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The Red Terror in Kiev: A Warning from a Century Ago, Part 2
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Archibald Roosevelt: A Brave Captain of the First World War, Part 1
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Jonathan Bowden’s Heat
7 comments
Great article. Another brother, Percy Lindsay, produced some brilliant landscape paintings.
On the topic of Australian Socialism, the pamphlet entitled ‘The Social Revolutionary Nature of Australian Nationalism’ by the late Alex Norwick is a good introduction.
Readers will quickly understand that the form of socialism which developed in Australia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries bears little resemblance to the socially liberal, globalist Fake Left which passes for socialism in most quarters today.
https://australiafirstparty.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Social-Revolutionary-Nature-Of-Australian-Nationalism.pdf
Yes, Alex Norwick’s pamphlet is very good, and has been around for a long time as a a landmark in Australian nationalist thought. His recent passing at a quite young age is one of a series of losses to the ‘Right’ around the world this year. The New Zealand labour movement was much the same during the late 19th C. , but this is not as well known as that of the Australian labour movement.
Agreed, a terrific and well-researched commemoration, particularly for those of us less familiar with that country’s history. Thank you . . .
I disagree on Italian futurism (even many works from its Russian offshoot), and the threads in your interesting essay are not well-connected, although you try to make them appear so. The flow is a word flood.
However, I realise that I must more closely read it, an interesting article.
You make a great point re. the organised effort to shift the centre of western art from Paris to Noo Yawk. That was a CIA coordinated programme. Lots of money. The originators of abstract expressionIsm were in a group called CoBrA, for Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels. Their work was clearly thoughtful.
So, next, you had crowds of New York jews doing their own take on it.
I can take a photo of toilet paper after I used it, adjusting colours, look as good as anything Rothko or any of those fakes did. Could and have done the same or better with paint or chalk pastels.
By the way, South Korean artists were more recently producing a better version of what CoBrA was doing in the fIrst place, some of the works breathtaking. I am not sure if it is continuing.
Mr. Bolton, excuse my long reply, and I will be closely re-reading your article soon, but, serious question, what do you think of Pro Hart? I liked what I saw on a visit, read more and saw more examples since, seems to me an interesting figure.
Reference 3 from the article is rubbish. The idea of the Ainu being like Europeans was pushed by Japanese sources only from the mid-19th century, sure, it may have taken wings with some pseudo-scholars later in the century, but then, so did Piltdown man.
Don’t forget that the conquest of the Ainu was not complete at that time. In old photographs, the Ainu look more like Polynesians, except with quite full beards on the men.
You may be correct re. the Maori, but AFAIK, they were perfectly aware of their Hawaiian origins through their own tales. After all. It had only been 500 or so years between their arrival and wiping out the earlier humans or hominids and the arrival of the pakeha.
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