Max Dupain, page 11
Dupain’s surrealist phase was brief, lasting from 1935 until the outbreak of war in 1939, but this does not diminish its impact. The works he produced have a prime place in the history of Australian art – pre-dating by around two years the efforts of leading surrealist artists such as James Gleeson, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, James Cant and Peter Purves Smith. Painter and printmaker Eric Thake, like Dupain, was another early exception (1933). Other photographers, notably Laurence Le Guay, experimented with surrealist photomontage but did not assemble substantial bodies of surrealist work, while those like Geoffrey Powell and Olive Cotton, who made an occasional image that appears surrealistic, cannot be described as surrealists themselves. Cotton, for example, did not seek disorientation and provocation but rather coherence, unity and stability.
Most of Dupain’s surrealist photographs were artificial affairs constructed in the studio, but a few strangely surreal outdoor scenes also exist. One of these – factually titled Mona Vale landscape (1936) – celebrates the mysteriousness to be found in the everyday. Dupain referred to its ‘surreal quality’, saying, ‘It is a visual puzzle. These situations are around us all the time; it is for us to observe them if we wish to enrich our lives visually.’7
The suburban landscape depicted in the image is baffling – more European in appearance than Australian, and dominated by a large rock that obstructs the view (why hasn’t it been removed and why is a broken tree branch on top of it?). The ‘action’ of the image derives from the chanceful disposition of three sets of figures – one woman and two couples – ascending the road to an unspecified point. They appear as if on a theatre or film set, following preordained but secret instructions. Attempting a logical, linear reading of Mona Vale landscape by following sightlines is pointless: individual incongruous elements do not link together, and no narrative or apprehensible meaning emerges. This is an instance where Dupain, through his own responsiveness to an event outside his control, obtained an image that was occurring independently of him. As the detached observer of the scene, he was no more ‘knowledgeable’ about what he had photographed than subsequent viewers of the photograph.
Mona Vale landscape, 1936, image from Dupain’s negative, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
The nude
The decision to start photographing the nude in 1930 was a bold one – few others were involved in the genre and the nineteen-year-old Dupain wanted to make it his own. While his first efforts challenged prevailing social and cultural mores and conventions in photography, they did so relatively modestly, but that changed after he encountered Man Ray’s photography in Soby’s book. Man Ray was a superlative photographer of the female nude and set Dupain a new benchmark; the body of work he subsequently produced has no equivalent in Australian painting, drawing or printmaking. However, in a deeply conservative society subject to strict censorship only a handful of the photographs could be circulated at the time, and those that were published or exhibited contemporaneously were the least explicit. When the extent of Dupain’s nude photography and its range became apparent decades later it was within the new contexts of Australian photographic history, as well as the broader art world’s focus on ‘the body’.1
In Australia only a few photographs of female nudes from the early 20th century exist, notably by Lionel Lindsay, Cecil Bostock and Harold Cazneaux, and they have an old-fashioned quality to them. Dupain was aware of these precedents, but his own fascination with the genre drew on a more personal, idiosyncratic mix of factors. His upbringing was important, especially his father’s commitment to physical culture and to developing an ideal body type based on classical Greek statuary. Max photographed male nudes for illustrations in George Dupain’s books. He was well informed about the nude genre in art, and nude studies were a staple in the European photography magazines he read. Max’s attraction to vitalist philosophy cannot be overlooked either, as the physicality and solidity of his female nude subjects is inescapable – they are bodily presences, not spiritual or ethereal ones.
Returning to Soby’s Man Ray Photographs, a key question arises about the relevance to Dupain of Man Ray’s representations of female nudes and female faces, a category defined in the book as ‘Woman’. André Breton gives a clue. In his text he refers to Man Ray’s photographs of women’s faces as the ‘Ballad of Women of the Present Day’ and elaborates on their highly eroticised attractions: ‘These quivering nostrils, these trembling lips, these swelling throats – it is a whole communion of perfumes, of thoughts and of breathing which attach us to these beings as to no others making us feel again the best we have known.’2 Breton’s piece ends with the statement that ‘out of so many contradictory and charming features . . . the one being composes itself in whom we are given to see the last incarnation of the Sphinx’.3 Beautiful, powerful, seductive, mysterious and unknowable, the women in Man Ray’s photography are modern-day sirens, muses and sphinxes.
For Dupain, already influenced by vitalist philosophy (through literature and visual imagery rather than philosophical texts), these ideas obviously struck a chord. Although he always stressed that his interest in the nude related to form – and many of his nudes are sculptural and monumental – in practice he sought much more from the genre. He wanted his female nudes to be infused with life and the life force (at one point he photographed a nude woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy, which was very uncommon). This credo helps explain his reaction to Bostock’s nude photography, which he criticised for its coldness. Man Ray’s pictures, inspired by ‘individual human emotion and desire’, offered an exciting new perspective that Dupain aspired to match. Almost overnight he began to produce nudes that are charged with energy and eroticism, even when references to Greek goddesses and classical mythology persisted.
The presentation and circulation of photographs of nude subjects was highly regulated in Australia in the 1930s, extending to books on nudism, whose importation was restricted. The same era saw the banning of numerous novels on the grounds of obscenity (including Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Norman Lindsay’s Redheap, both of which Dupain read). Photo-historian Martyn Jolly has established that regarding photography, legislation was state-based and ‘it was up to individual magistrates to interpret the legislation if police had taken it upon themselves to seize publications or charge photographers’.4 Pubic hair was not to be shown, a situation ‘normally dealt with by the pose of the model, or shadows [or] . . . air brushed out’, techniques that were adopted by Dupain. Nor were photographs that included male genitalia considered acceptable.
Modelling nude was regarded as disreputable, too, being associated with bohemianism and sexual promiscuity. Finding female models was therefore often difficult. Little is known about the women who posed nude for Dupain (their faces are usually concealed, and they are not named in the works’ titles), or their working arrangements – whether, for example, they were paid or not. But we do know that two nude models – Olive Cotton and Jean Lorraine – came from his inner circle and the photographs of them are especially memorable. This is not an unusual situation: the history of Western photography is replete with such examples based on the intimacy of lovers and friends: Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse, and Man Ray and Lee Miller were lovers, as were Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, and Weston and Charis Wilson.
Man: The Australian Magazine for Men (1936–74) published Dupain’s photographs of a female nude on two occasions. The first was in 1936, when the improbably titled The Debussy String Quartet in G minor appeared in a category named ‘Camera Art Studies’ that also saw the publication of numerous nudes by Laurence Le Guay. Man provided a progressive alternative to the Ure Smith stable of magazines; as historian Richard White comments, in the late 1930s, ‘Man was presenting a new image of the Australian male, sophisticated, sexually broadminded, apolitical, city bred, modern, yet still identifiably Australian and proud of the fact’.5 The magazine was dominated by sexual imagery and looked to the United States as the centre of modernity; its design was innovative, with the spacious presentation of photographic imagery. Man provided Dupain with a sympathetic forum but not one he committed to.
Finding models for male nudes required similar discretion to female nudes. Dupain had two main options as outlined by photo-historian Isobel Crombie – he could either approach men who attended his father’s gymnasium or select men from ‘a model book’ (a catalogue of photographs of the faces of male and female models compiled by model agencies). Doug Waugh, whom Dupain used for Doom of youth (1937), preferred to model for nude and athletic photographic studies, which he had found more lucrative than working as a life model for sculpture. Waugh wrote about his experiences for Mixed Nudist Camps Throughout the World (1939), the first book published on Australian nudism. He explained that, for his assignment with Dupain, he ‘was left a message asking him to be at the studio that night at 8.30 pm. No “props” were necessary (inhouse code meaning this was a nude job) and the only request was that his hair should not be oiled but left slightly unruly.’6
Dupain’s interest in male rather than female nudes seems different, focusing on the body as ideal form rather than its erotic potential. His photographs of Paul Petrov, a dancer with the Ballets Russes, are examples – in one he adopts the classical pose of the discus thrower immortalised in the ancient Greek sculpture by Myron (George Dupain owned a plaster copy of the sculpture and juxtaposed its image with that of the Venus de Milo on the cover of his journal The Dupain Quarterly).
Sometimes, when a photographer and model work together exceptionally well, a kind of ‘excess’ can occur in the images they make. This is the case with Jean with wire mesh (1936), which surely transcends what either Dupain or its subject, Jean Lorraine, could have imagined, predicted or hoped for. (The wire mesh of the title is incorrect – the ‘mesh’ was cane wicker in the back of a chair.) For most of his nude studies Dupain acted in a directorial mode, having decided in advance on the image he wanted to achieve, its setting, the model’s pose, where he would position his camera and so on. While some changes could occur along the way, his model’s agency was limited. However, the relationship with Lorraine was clearly much more active and collaborative in nature than was usual, with her exerting control over the ‘look’ she presented to the camera. In Lorraine, Dupain found his boldest, most playful collaborator.
Jean with wire mesh, c.1935, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 2006
As an experienced life model Lorraine had no inhibitions about being photographed nude. She explained, ‘I do not feel guilty about shedding my clothes and posing for a group of young artists. I know that my body is pretty and symmetrical, and I am not self-conscious.’7 Another factor behind her ease in front of the camera was her friendship with Dupain and Cotton. They spent a lot of time together and despite differences in age, background and life experience she and Olive were extremely close, united by their ‘deep compatibility’. Lorraine posed for both photographers but produced a larger number of images with Dupain. Of their professional relationship she wrote: ‘I never categorised myself as his favourite model, but we always felt very comfortable working together. Compared to other photographers I posed for, his ideas were always more original. And he was great fun. He loved to laugh, and he loved to make me laugh.’8 Lorraine and Dupain also clearly enjoyed a highly eroticised exchange on camera; whether or not they were lovers is an open question.
All these factors played a part in the creation of Jean with wire mesh, which exists in two versions from the same session (in the one shown here her eyes are shut; in the other even more erotically charged image she looks directly at the camera lens and her mouth is open). However, it is impossible to imagine Jean with wire mesh without Man Ray, whose images gave Dupain extraordinary examples to emulate. And emulate he did: Jean with wire mesh is indebted to a solarised female nude in Soby’s book that exploits an optical illusion. Like Man Ray, Dupain photographed his subject lying down but in a fantastical inversion of gravity she appears to be standing up, her long hair streaming impossibly upwards. Also similar is the positioning of the figure within the frame and her pose in which her left arm is raised and her right hand is prominent. Using mesh to cast a patterned shadow over a woman’s body is another of Man Ray’s common devices, setting up a contrast between the hardness of metal and the softness of flesh, an effect which is muted by Dupain’s use of cane instead.
In their unabashed eroticism, stylishness and sophistication the two versions of Jean with wire mesh propelled Dupain’s work to a new level. However, only the image of Jean with her eyes closed was known publicly at the time, published as Photographic study in The Home (1 February 1936). The invisibility of Dupain’s boldest nudes meant that the extent of his challenge to conservative social and artistic mores remained a private matter.
Another photograph, The bride, for which Lorraine also posed, is a strange, eclectic mix of symbolic referents. She wears a protective cape of chainmail and a wedding ring, and holds a phallic-shaped bottlebrush flower. It is a playful and mocking image, designed to blaspheme the conventions of a traditional wedding – this bride is completely nude, her pubic hair prominently exposed, and yet her expression with downcast eyes is demure.
The end of Dupain’s interest in surrealism did not mean the end to his photography of the nude, though the disruptions brought about by war made the genre harder to pursue. Throughout his so-called surrealist phase, Dupain had kept making straight (that is, unmanipulated) photographs in which the only obvious connection to surrealism is their liberationist underpinnings. He also looked for source material beyond Man Ray, purchasing a rather prurient English book, The Beauty of the Female Form, in addition to the far more erotic French book, Formes Nues (Nude forms).
The bride, 1936, National Gallery of Australia, purchased with the assistance of James Agapitos OAM and Ray Wilson OAM 2007
In The Beauty of the Female Form, Bertram Park and Yvonne Gregory made their case for photography of the female nude in carefully de-eroticised language. They suggested that in the post-Victorian era ‘with the advance of true education, hygiene and open-air culture, athletics and sun-bathing societies, every normal person can and should take a natural delight in the pure loveliness of the human body untrammelled by the ugliness of fake conventionality’.9 Formes Nues had no truck with such platitudes, enthusiastically embracing the erotics of nude photography. Andreas Feininger, for one, delighted in ‘woman divine’, declaring, ‘A woman’s body – of perfect shape under a wide sky, in sun and air – what a theme!’10 Man Ray contributed the cover photograph of Lee Miller for Formes Nues, and additional images, and Brassaï and Moholy-Nagy were among the other photographers whom Dupain especially admired. Formes Nues also stands out in its representation of several women photographers, notably Laure Albin-Guillot, Florence Henri and Dora Maar, whose work is now widely celebrated.
It is significant that in both the English and French books many of the photographs were taken outdoors, especially at the beach, reinforcing the interest in naturism. Beach settings were a hallmark of Dupain’s nude photography from its inception, and in the late 1930s and early 1940s his use of the studio dropped away further as he became increasingly enamoured of strong natural light. This is exemplified in the monumental nude form Torso in sunlight No. 1 (1941), whose subject is Olive Cotton; Dupain chose this as one of his best works for inclusion in his 1948 monograph.
Most of Dupain’s female nudes date from the second half of the 1930s, one of the freest phases of his life. Now more than eight decades old, much about them looks outdated. They belong to a profoundly different historical moment, when feminism and queer culture were yet to have a widespread revolutionary impact in the West, and ideas based on dualisms and polarities that Dupain fully subscribed to were yet to be comprehensively challenged. He believed in a male/female binary, and the idea of Woman as a universal category, and did not change his views. And yet, while Dupain’s nude photography has its obvious limitations and his female subjects are often objectified, the important exceptions must be recognised – Jean Lorraine and, later, Moira Claux actively engage with the photographer and with photography as a performance in which they exert their own agency and energy. More generally, the radical impetus of his nude photography must be acknowledged, too, and credit given to his surrealist-inflected quest for liberation (bearing in mind that the misogyny and homophobia of much early surrealist art has also now been widely critiqued). Many of Dupain’s nude studies are explicit and can be understood as a direct challenge not only to censorship laws of the time, but also to the entrenched conservatism of Australian society, art and culture. His goal was freedom from orthodoxy – to reiterate his own crudely expressed claim, he wanted ‘to kick convention right up the arse’. Man Ray’s brand of surrealism and vocabulary of eroticism gave him a way of doing so.
