OUTSIDER WINS ART PRIZE

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32450, 10 November 1970, Page 14

OUTSIDER WINS ART PRIZE

A South Australian “outsider” has won Australia’s major art prize, worth $5OOO, with his “visual, poem based on the tragedy of Hiroshima.” Bill Clements, aged 37, of Adelaide, won the Trans Held Art Prize with a painting which consisted of 37 photostat prints, linenbacked and hung with string. Titled “Reading for August Sixth” (the date of the Hiroshima Atom bombing), the work was selected for the prize by Sir Roland Penrose, the president of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Sir Roland said he expected his choice to create plenty of controversy, but he was willing to stand up for the painting he had chosen. Clements, who is best known as a sculptor, was attached to an art school in Japan from 1964 to 1967 and while there studied the sculpture of Buddhism. Explaining his painting, made up of old maps, Japanese scrolls, the graph of the splitting of an atom and a score by Bartok, Clements said he had always been obsessed with Hiroshima. “I know worse things happened, but Hiroshima was a culmination and a beginning,” he said. “We date our world from Hiroshima—it was something that severed ail links with the past.”