HOW LINDSAY SAW AMERICA

Evening Star, Issue 21099, 11 May 1932, Page 1

HOW LINDSAY SAW AMERICA

Norman Lindsay is a first-rate observer. At past fifty he is as quick as ever he was to gather impressions, and they never go stale in his mind! Returned from America and England, he is full of interesting talk. No one should get the idea that he has “ gone literary ” altogether. He is still an artist. And, coming from America, he is an artist amazed, writes Colin Simpson in the Sydney * Daily Telegraph.’ Norman Lindsay returns to Australia convinced than the Australian school of landscape painting is the finest in the world The light in Australia, he says, is incomparable. The sky is bluer. Bluer than the blue Mediterranean skies, bluer than it is at vaunted Capri. “ The general public in Australia have an appreciation of painting that simply does not exist in America. Americans are very confused in what they know of painting; the majority know nothing at all. " On the other hand, Americans are in advance of Australians in their appreciation of writing. Everywhere prose, especially the novel, is discussed and admired. Art in America, he says, has foundered between Scylla and golden Charybdis. The advertising artists and illustrators or the big magazines are entirely separate from 1 the rest, and are a remarkable class. Many of them ara amazingly skilful technically. They work entirely to the orders of the proprietors of magazines and advertising agencies, and have absolutely no opportunity of doing creative work. These artists make enormous salaries. Their pay can be gauged from the fact that Norman Lindsay himself did a. •job of illustration for a well-known American magazine, and was paid for it dollars equalling £2OO. They spend money like water, these artists, and they spend most of it on liquor. “ Booze!” says Norman. “ I thought tho Australians could drink, but chaps I met in New York were terrifio drinkers. The high life is completely amazing.” He says that they make their money so easily that they despise themselves for it as much as they are despised by the art-for-art’s-sake fraternity. This group makes no money at all, and in endeavouring to escape ,tha horror of commerciahty has gone mad. Its members live mainly in art colonies outside the towns, and paint pictures out of touch with everything. Among the prominent illustrators ha speaks of the Australian king of black-and-white, John Richard Flanagan, 'instancing the remarkable specialisation that has taken hold of art. All Flanagan’s commissions are for illustrations to Chinese stories of tha Sax Rohmer type. He draws practically nothing else.