Herbert Badham

(1899-1961)

Hazy Morning, 1944

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The estate of the artist, Sydney
thence by descent
Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
Herbert Badham, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, until 10 September 1979, cat. 8
Herbert Badham 1899 - 1961, Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales, 27 August - 4 October 1987, then touring, S.H. Ervin Gallery, 10 October - 15 November 1987, cat. 37

LITERATURE
Nancy Borlase, 'Forgotten Pillar', Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1979
Christine France and Christine Dixon, Herbert Badham 1899 - 1961, Wollongong City Gallery, New South Wales, 1987, pp. 6, 24, cat. 37

In 1979 the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, staged a posthumous exhibition of works by Herbert Badham who had passed away some 18 years prior. Nancy Borlase, then working as art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, noted, 'It has been almost axiomatic that the innovative avant-garde painter rates more attention in Australian art writing than those artists who have worked, however soundly, within conservative academic traditions.

In this regard, if the name of Herbert Badham, who died in 1961, strikes any response at all it is seldom as a painter. He is better known as the author of two standard books on Australian art (published in 1949 and 1954) and as a teacher (later head of the Intermediate Art Department) at East Sydney Technical College.

The Macquarie Galleries, which has had an honourable record in showing the work of painters who represent the forgotten pillar of recent Australian art, has mounted a backroom Badham retrospective: the main gallery is given over to the abstract expressionism of Rod Withers.

Withers exemplifies how far painting has divorced itself from the flinty disciplines which underlie the Badham works. Autonomy of gesture has no part in Badham's studiously observed pictures. Only in some small landscapes, and his luminous Hazy Morning Sydney, does the brushstroke or pat of pigment float free from modelled form.

An upholder of sound draftsmanship allied with a thorough working knowledge of perspective, Badham belongs to that generation of painters, among them Dobell, Dundas, Crowley, who studied at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton.

In this modest exhibition, it becomes apparent that he approached each subject, including himself in his wry, quizzical self-portraits, with the detachment of a skilled surgeon. He is an acute observer of life, reflecting the period styles of the 30s and 40s, and his genre scenes are painted with the eye of a social historian.'