It is impossible to consider the development of Modern Art in Melbourne during the post-war period without taking into account the activities of Alan Warren (1919-1991). While Warren has been overlooked by recent art history, as an artist, a critic and an educator he came into contact with most contemporary artists working on the local art scene in 1946-66.

Born in 1919, Warren studied drawing and painting at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School during 1937-38. This was a period of considerable change at the school as Bernard Hall, who had run it for 44 years, had recently died. However, students still learnt to respect Velazquez's sober tonalities and Streelon's square brushstroke under the guidance of W. B. McInnes and Charles Wheeler. Warren perservered at the school, but he also had a keen interest in Modern art. Before long he had started attending lessons at the private art school run by the Modern painter George Bell in Bourke Street. It was here that Warren came into contact with Bell's most promising students, including Russell Drysdale, Sali Herman, Constance Stokes, Clive Stephen and Alan Sumner. This was a tempestuous time for Australian art, for moves were afoot to start an official Australian Academy of Art in order to resist the modern movement. In Melbourne, a number of leading Modernists - including Bell, Adrian Lawlor, Jock Frater and Arnold Shore - initiated the Contemporary Art Society in opposition to the Academy during July 1938. As both a student of Bell's, and a committed Modernist, Warren joined the C.A.S. and participated in its early activities.

After an early period of unity, the Contemporary Art Society became troubled by internal frictions. In particular there was a serious disagreement between those who believed that entries for C.A.S. exhibitions should not be vetted, and others who argued strenuously that exhibits should go before a selection committee. The former group, which included surrealists, expressionists and social realists, opposed selection and argued that content, not form, was of crucial importance. The latter group, which was lead by George Bell, felt that the Society had to maintain artistic standards, and worried that some exhibits were clumsy and of little plastic value. Bell and his associates broke with the C.A.S. in June 1940, and started their own rival Melbourne Contemporary Artists exhibiting group. Alan Warren, who was aligned with George Bell, was a foundation member of the M.C.A. and subscribed to its view that Modern art should display some form of plastic value.

Warren served in the camouflage corps during most of the war, and was responsible for disguising the perimeter defence system at Darwin which was subject to continual air raids by Japanese bombers. He seems to have temporarily ceased painting at this time, later explaining that 'I knew the town's landscape backwards. I had driven over it, walked over it and climbed through it, yet I could not see anything that made me want to make marks on a flat surface'. He was bemused when the war artist Eric Thake, one of Bell's ex-students, arrived in Darwin and 'by seeing abstract forms within the bombing debris, transformed the mundane into significant artistic statements'. Warren was transferred to the education section in 1945, and finally took up his brush after being demobbed.

Warren became director of Myer Gallery during 1946-47. He attempted to liven up the space with exhibitions of contemporary art. For example, for the first exhibition he arranged a survey of more progressive artists from Sydney, including Donald Friend and William Dobell. This and subsequent Modern shows attracted considerable attention and drew the ire of the artistic establishment, in fact Alan Sumner recalls that the society portraitist William Dargie was outspoken in his dislike of these contemporary exhibitions. Myer Gallery ran for only a short period, being forced to close during 1 947 when it was clear that Melbourne's war-time art boom had ended. The demise of rationing and restrictions on imported luxury goods meant that more well-off Australians now had diversions other than art on which to spend their pennies.

At this time Warren was also involved with the reform of the Victorian Artists' Society. Led by Grahame King and Nutter Buzzacott, the Moderns had made a concerted push to liberalize the V.A.S. and re-establish it as a centre for artistic endeavour. The reformers were opposed by the old guard - a most reactionary band of amateurs, conservatives and followers of Streeton - but they did manage to install a number of forward thinking artists on the V.A.S. council. Warren was among the new council members who tried to inject some fife back into the V.A.S., and was instrumental in establishing the Society's annual art bargain sale. Unfortunately, this important turn in the direction was short-lived, for the old guard managed to roll V.A.S. elections in 1949. In a strained political climate many reforms were reversed. Artists suspected of holding Left-wing sympathies were ejected from the Society and there was a general backlash against the Moderns. Despite these troubles and being ousted from the committee, Warren stayed with the V.A.S. during these troubled times. But he did voice his opposition to the Society's president's attempts to exclude well painted but politically sensitive works from seasonal exhibitions.

In the meantime Warren had helped form the George Bell Group. Warren had been a member of the 'Thursday Club', a circle of intimates who gathered each week at Bell's home in Selbourne Road, Toorak. It was at one of these social evenings just after the war that the circle resolved to start a new exhibiting group for Bell's friends and former students.

In retrospect, the George Bell Group has taken on a considerable artistic significance. Some of their works were certainly acquired and exhibited by state galleries, which were starting to relax their position towards modern art. Despite this attention the group felt themselves to be fairly neglected at the time, for little work was sold at their annual exhibitions during the late 1940s and 1950s. As it was the George Bell Group was more a mutual support group, indeed, the artists initially came together out of a camaraderie and respect for each other’s works. Bell, Sumner, Warren and the older members also saw themselves as trying to establish or maintain an aesthetic standard, for they shared a commitment to firm plastic values in contemporary art.

In addition to displaying their own works, leading members of the group such as Bell, Sumner, Warren and Geoffrey Jones used these annual group exhibitions to encourage a new generation of Modern artists, including Barbara Brash, lan Armstrong, Dorothy Braund and Fred Williams. Admittedly, there were occasional disagreements on prospective members. For example, Bell was excited by the work of Roger Kemp, a younger painter experimenting with abstraction, whom he invited to participate in the group exhibitions, and even hang their shows (much to the chagrin of several older members).

The late 1940s were evidently a busy time for Warren. In addition to so many other activities, he was appointed to the art department at Melbourne Technical College (later to become R.M.I.T.) during 1948. Warren made a strong impact on a generation of art students gathered here in a number of ways. Some now recall that he was the first Modern artist that they ever encountered, and were suitably impressed with his trim beard, corduroy trousers and suede shoes. Others talk of their bemusement upon realising that this visibly committed contemporary artist was not at all a fierce rebel, but an unassuming, slightly shy man who gave little away. However, it was through his teaching that Warren most influenced younger artists. He had arrived at Melbourne Tech. to find instruction composed mainly of a lengthy series of skill-based exercises without any underlying rationale. Together with the head of the art school, Victor Greenhalgh, Warren reorganised these into a much more systematic three-year art course.

Warren was responsible for the graphic design course, which he approached with a distinct formal bent. Art History and Theory was not taught, but he did require students to read Roger Fry's Vision and Design (1926), a text which emphasised the compositional aspects of art making. Naturally, concepts such as pictorial structure, balance and proportion were fundamental to Warren's teaching; in fact, Pam Hallandal, one of his first students, remembers him explaining at the time that 'the artist's purpose is to orchestrate the visual elements into a purposeful whole'. Unlike other teachers, Warren advocated Modern art and did much to school his students in basic cubist principles. (Some even now tack of there having been a Melbourne Tech. 'look' which was characterised by a flattening out of space, a minimum of modelling, and the abbreviation of forms.) All the same, his approach was a mixed success. Certainly students such as Leonard French and CIement Meadmore seem to have benefited from this grounding in abstract form. But others, such as the then budding surrealists Ian Sime and John Howley, were dismissive of his approach and felt that it promoted a superficial understanding of the Modern movement.

Warren had started to write on recent art during his spell with the V.A.S. in the late 1 940s. Through George Bell, who was also the Sun art critic, he was able to publish several of these pieces. In 1951, when Bell decided to retire, Warren took over as the Sun's regular reviewer, a position he was to hold for over twenty years. Warrens' reviews emphasised formal values, the critic insisting via his weekly column that works of art be well-composed and competently executed objects. Like all newspaper critics, he suffered at the hands of unsympathetic sub-editors, who considered it their duty to heavily prune his weekly copy. It was undoubtedly a frustrating experience, for some weeks Warren's criticism was reduced to only two clipped sentences which indicated that an exhibition had opened. To compound matters, the Sun resisted anything that smacked of high culture, preferring to trivialise and sensationalise visual art. However, unlike the staff of more recent journals, the Sun's sub-editors did not tinker with reviews so as to remove appreciation and emphasise censure. Instead they tended to simply remove text from the end of each review as a page filled with advertising. As a result his earliest reviews sometimes lacked a conclusion or sense of judgement, for Warren had tried to compose his reviews as linear arguments, moving from an introduction through a discussion of the exhibition, then rounding off with an assessment. Warren devised a method of reviewing in order to remedy this process: his introduction was immediately followed by an assessment, and then he moved into the discussion. (Warren introduced Jeffrey Makin, who succeeded him at the Sun, to this manner of organising reviews.) Like many critics, Warren was intermittently accused of bias - of favouring his friends and interests - although it is notable that he clearly did not use his journalist connections to promote his work.

Warren continued to paint during the 1950s and 60s, despite a nagging lack of sales. He did not dabble in expressionism or free-form abstraction, but stayed fairly much with traditional subject matter: still life, the nude, and the landscape. The latter was of increasing importance to him, and came to dominate his output. But Warren did not seem to have a mythic vision of the landscape that he wished to express. Indeed, Alan Sumner recalIs that he would paint a landscape because he liked the formal issues suggested by a particular view. All the same, it is significant that Warren did not paint either thick bush, the mllee country or the parched desert. At a time when Modernists such as Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, Clifton Pugh and Fred Williams captured the popular imagination with landscape images that were explicitly Australian, Warren's pictures lacked distinctly Nationalist overtones. If anything he seems to have preferred painting views of the prosperous semi-agricultural open country that encircled Melbourne.

Such works commanded a measure of artistic respect in the mid-1950s. For example, in a survey of recent Australian art published in the Studio during 1957, Hal Missingham, the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, placed Warren alongside John Brack, Lawrence Daws and Leonard French as one of the better contemporary Melbourne painters. His work was so highly thought of that the artist won the Bendigo Prize in 1955, the Perth prize in 1956, and the BalIaarat Fine Art Gallery's prestigious Crouch Prize in 1958.

Strong in design and colour, the paintings reflected the distinct influence of Cézanne and analytical Cubism. Taking a semi-abstract approach, Warren tended to emphasise geographical contours and pictorial structure, while reducing colour to an unmodulated fill. For this reason a typical Warren landscape or nude appears to be composed of a firm network of lines with very little modelling. Pictorial space was flattened out and treated as a frontal pattern - so much so that many works do not establish any depth of field - whereas forms were abbreviated into flattened, brightly coloured bars and shapes, rather than being modelled volumetncally.

Several fellow painters remember that nearly all of Warren's works involved the Golden Section in some way, for he approached art as an exercise in pictorial problem solving (he later wrote that 'the underlying structure of my work more often than not is based on dynamic symmetry or ... the Section D'Or'). This probably explains why there is no sense of change or development in his works over nearly thirty years; taken as a single group, his pictures remained surprisingly consistent and are thereby difficult to date individually. Warren did not see himself as constructing an oeuvre that develops over a period of time, but as re-organising the world in line with his sense of structural harmony. The artist in him always aimed to make the world comprehensible by translating visual impressions into order upon canvas. In this regard he came to greatly admire Fred William's sparse paintings after paying a visit on the painter in his home at Upwey in the mid-1960s; 'I became lost, wandering up and down dirt roads looking for his residence . . . walking into Fred's lounge room, there was the destruction I had become aware of translated into art.’.

If Warren did sometimes paint out of doors, most of his paintings (even the landscapes) were composed at home in his garage-studio. As for his working process, Dorothy Braund recalls that he disliked painting upon clean surfaces and would not work on a fresh canvas. Instead Warren preferred to start painting upon old compositions, or sometimes an incomprehensible mess of random marks, which he set about correcting, rationalising and adjusting. Art for Warren was often a matter of imposing reason and coherence upon apparent visual chaos.

The Melbourne art scene entered a creatively turbulent period during late 1950s. Disputes broke out between artists committed to figuration, and those experimenting in new forms of abstraction. Attempts were even made to oust pro-Modernist staff members from the National Gallery of Victoria, and at one point Warren and his friends formed a deputation which lobbied the government to appoint artists to the N.G.V.'s board of trustees.

Warren's reviews sided with none of the rival parties during this troublesome period, and were equally critical of abstractionist, figurative expressionist and die-hard tonalist. What seems to have been important to him was whether a work was successful within its own formal terms as a painting or a sculpture, and not which 'ism' an artist practised. Surveying his many columns, he seems initially to have been conservative and narrow-minded in his assessment, reserving praise only for the less daring displays. Although, on closer inspection, one discovers that Warren regularly described shows by established art groups, such as the Twenty Melbourne Painters, as dull and monotonous. He also dismissed all of the exhibitors - excepting Charles Blackman - in the notorious Antipodeans show of 1959, which aimed to defend Modernist figuration. On the other hand, Warren occasionally applauded the non-objective experiments of artists such as Inge King, Peter Clarke and Ian Sime, whom he considered to be developing a new visual language.

Warren left R.M.I.T. to become head of art at Prahran Technical College in 1961. He arrived in what was basically a design department with certain arty edges. Warren was to see the school through a time of great change, for post-secondary art education was about to fee! The full impact of the Coldstream report. William Coldstream, the head of London's Slade School, had recently completed a lengthy report which proposed sweeping reforms to British art schools. Coldstream endorsed an integrated approach where intending artists and designers should be instructed in a range of basic technical skills. Certain academic disciplines were also incorporated into the new curriculum, and students were awarded a tertiary level 'Diploma of Art & Design' upon successfully completing their studies. The Coldstream report was not only applied in Britain, but also served as a model in Australia.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Warren and his staff saw that students at Prahran Technical College were given a technical grounding in a range of media and artistic fields, and undertook a survey course in the history of Western art and design. Warren also played an important role in upgrading the Technical College to a full College of Advanced Education during this period, and rehousing the new 'School of Art and Design' in the specially designed six storey building that it occupies today. His own teaching was still weighted towards formal skills; as Pam HalIandal remembered, 'he believed fervently in visual organisation and form-space drawing ...'. Attracted to the latest Pop Art, Colour-Field and Minimal Art styles, few of his students were sympathetic to this view, and considered him stodgy and old-fashioned. Some were irritated that he was not sympathetic to the conceptual and theoretical contemporary art movements of the later 1960s. He regarded these trends as being fundamentally literary and thereby extraneous, and he continued to insist that a picture or sculpture should be successful in plastic terms.

Warren left Melbourne in 1972 and travelled north. He became Dean of the new Seven Hills Art School in Brisbane where he lived through the 1970s, and, after a trip to Europe, spent the late 1980s at Coffs Harbour. A major stylistic change is evident in Warren's paintings at this time. He was greatly impressed by the early Northern European Expressionists, outlining in letters to his friends a new admiration for the works of Alexei Jawlensky, Max Pechstein, Gabrielle Munter, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as the American painters Ashile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. If Warren did not develop a precise colour-symbol system, Kandinsky's book concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914) became very important to him. Warming to early expressionist principles, he shirked professional artists' materials and started to use the simplest of media for his own paintings: enamel on Masonite. Warren also adopted a spontaneous approach and worked so quickly that he sometimes finished several small works in a day. If he did continue to anchor his pictures with a firm compositional structure, the artist's output took on a new vividness of colour. Obviously there was a sense of hit-or-miss about these pictures for Warren was endeavouring to capture the most fleeting and light-hearted of moods, emotions that he began to experience in the landscape around Bellingen, N.S.W. This desire to make his late works into a source of joy seems to have paralleled an extended battle against cancer.

Surprisingly, after nearly 40 years of neglect it was these later expressionist-oriented paintings that began to sell. Viewers responded well to the painter's most recent attempts to instil a new vitality into the landscape and the nude. Alan Warren spent his last months in southern New South Wales and died in late 1991.

Christopher Heathcote