Why French Lost to English

Sir: The article by Jane Sutton (July-August 2017) on Elizabeth Vassilieff’s relationships to the major Australian painter and sculptor Danila Vassilieff encourages me to come out of my relatively quiet corner to rake over some of the old coals.

Like many another artist’s wife, Elizabeth was also a target of his sometimes vindictive brush. It was fine during the honeymoon years (when her theatrical cousin Dr Robin Sharwood attended their parties) but devastating when their marriage split. Sutton’s article is equivocal about the facts of this split but, quite apart from the archive, the split is also confirmed by the swag of vicious wedding paintings that tell a different story. Her third husband, William Wolf (the German linesman who was taking the power out to Warrandyte), was in fact her de facto husband at the time of Danila’s death and the loss of the house he had built with his own hands embittered him in his last years and damaged his pride. His estranged widow wasted no time in challenging his will, which gave his copyright to the Museum of Modern Art and Design.

If Betty’s cousins had dug deeper they might have discovered her July 1955 letter to Vassilieff when he was in Mildura teaching: “I have told everyone the same thing; that you are up there for your health and that you are teaching and quite liking it.” This letter, written from 106 George Street, East Melbourne, is overscored, “CONFIDENTIAL. This is privileged to you. Info to my legal people.”

In the same file of legal correspondence, written when she was again trying to get his copyright back from MOMAD, she quoted his denunciation of her political life: “I see that you are really a Red, after all I am really a White Russian. I ought to go to the Security Police and tell them all about what you are doing.”

Her political activity was a key factor in the breakdown of their marriage and it makes nonsense of the political implication of Betty’s claim that he was intending to join her in Moscow. Sutton takes her words at face value in a way that implies criticism of my research. It also undercuts the important influence of Vassilieff’s apolitical stance on the creative freedom of Melbourne Expressionism in the 1940s and beyond.

The subject of my research was Vassilieff’s art, about which his estranged widow could not have written because she was not qualified and had insufficient understanding of it. Besides, her marriage took place only five years before his first heart attack and her own interests were primarily literary and political. Betty’s naive artistic judgment is well exemplified by her exchanging his remarkable Expulsion from Paradise screen with a collector friend in Warrandyte.

As John Bayard later explained it:

Betty and Pat (Red) Mackie brought them around and gave them to me in exchange for a painting by a Warrandyte painter she admired. (Pat later gave me a bull-terrier puppy he brought down from Mt Isa in a small car) … Felicity could not have known they were extant, as at Betty’s request, I would neither speak to or allow Felicity to see or examine my Vassilieff paintings and sculptures.

That double-sided screen was the spark for Nolan’s Ned Kelly series including First Class Marksman (Art Gallery of NSW), which was painted at Vassilieff’s house the year before the Cossack Australian’s marriage to Betty Sutton-Hamill-Vassilieff-Wolf-Mackie.

As a much later head prefect of Tintern CEGGS I remain shocked by Betty’s aggression and censorship. I was also traumatised by her mean hounding of Oxford University Press and myself to the point that they settled for commercial reasons in 1986 which obliged me to apologise (through clenched teeth); and that Elizabeth’s costly defamation case, which they had to defend and had never even been to court, hastened their departure from Australia.

That she was simultaneously threatening bookshops for stocking my book on the grounds that it was sub judice, and putting pressure on art museums, such as the NGA Council, to buy her Vassilieff paintings, sculptures and watercolours, claiming the watercolours were her last batch (before offering another 270 at Niagara Galleries) was utterly shameful and indefensible.

Felicity St John Moore
(author of Vassilieff and his Art)
South Yarra, Vic

Sir: There is one solution, and probably only one, to the current crisis over North Korea’s development of a strategic nuclear capability. That is the initiation of a process leading to a peace treaty on the peninsula and an end to the frozen state of war, a war neither side won nor can win.

This process would involve the gradual bringing-in of North Korea from the diplomatic cold. The idea that North Korea will give up its nuclear deterrent is absurd, because as anyone can see, and certainly as North Korea sees it, nuclear weapons are the only certain deterrent against external threats from other nuclear-armed powers.

This solution, which entails the tacit acceptance of North Korea as a nuclear-armed power, will appear humiliating to the West, and it is. However, it has now become the only feasible solution. I would bet that the process has already begun in Washington, behind closed doors, and that Pyongyang will be in the loop. We could do with a conversation on this topic in Quadrant.

Philip Ayres
via e-mail

Sir: In recognition of the thirtieth anniversary of the publishing of Allan Bloom’s justly famous book The Closing of the American Mind, and in the spirit of the Marxist tenor of the times in which we live, I here place on record my confession. I understand that, holding the views I do, and resisting the call to “be more open”, I am no longer fit to be a citizen (notwithstanding thirty-five years in our armed forces).

In particular, I confess to not being open on some of the big issues facing our society. I confess to believing there should be limitations on our freedom to live as we choose. I confess to not being open to the idea that the unborn are without rights. I confess to not being open to the idea that men and women are the same (equal yes, but different). I confess to not being open to the idea that the state of marriage is indifferent to who joins it. I confess to not being open to the idea that the best interests of our children are indifferent to whether their biological parents are involved in their upbringing. Finally, I confess to not being open to the idea that the Christian faith is just a matter of opinion; indeed, I hold it to be grounded in verifiable truth claims.

And so I await a knock on the door.

Michael A. Swan
Hughes, ACT

Sir: Dr Michael Giffin (July-August) mentions many of the symptoms of the demise of Christianity in our day but does not identify the disease. The crisis Christianity is undergoing today is the same crisis it has undergone in previous ages and presumably will undergo in the future. It is a crisis of contemplation.

There are two types of churches in Christianity at present, as there have ever been: those that are dying and those that are growing. Those ecclesial communities that are dying are led and made up of people who, when a situation presents itself—whether it be defining if Christ is truly present in Holy Communion or not, marrying same-sex couples or renovating the parish hall—stack synods, are on the blower trying to convince people of their arguments and opinions, proclaiming what is and isn’t the will of God and generally behaving as if they are politicians.

These people have forgotten, if they ever knew, that the primary task of every disciple of Jesus Christ is worship. The church (and the world for that matter) is not made up of Homo sapiens but Homo orans—the praying person. We are made in “the image and likeness of God”. In other words, we are created, unlike the rest of creation, capable of having a relationship with God made possible through prayer. The worldly model of politically correct Anglican synods and Pope Francis stacking his curia with like-minded mates would have us think that we are made in “the image and likeness of the world”.

On the other hand, ecclesial communities that are attractive to thinking people and provide a challenging and sustaining spiritual basis for their lives and a distinctive worldview that demands a generous and informed response, while at the same time are making an impact in society, are those who, when confronted with a situation, “gather together as a community of believers with their pastors, subject to the Gospel” (all those words are important) and, in prayer, ask, “What is it God wants us to do in this situation?” No politicking; no networking; no getting up the numbers. Just waiting patiently on the Lord.

It’s a crisis of contemplation, as it always is, because, contrary to the widely held opinion of many church leaders, church bureaucrats and lay people, you do run the church on Hail Marys. Many simply haven’t tried it or, because prayer is a problem, don’t want to.

I recall many years ago a popular Sydney Anglican bishop discussing prayer on a television forum. He said all the usual things expected of a Christian pastor. A week later he wrote a column where he admitted that the discussion had pulled him up short because, actually, he never prayed. He presided at church services, but he had no personal prayer life; no time for contemplation. He had no personal relationship with God. And he was involved in running the church! He was doing an important job affecting the lives of many people and he didn’t even communicate with his Boss! Needless to say he was quite a political mover and shaker on the Sydney Anglican scene.

As for the church’s future being revitalised by going back to a marginalised, persecuted catacomb community? The church can never go back but only exist in the present, because the God of Christianity is “I AM” not I was or will be. And He speaks today and can be heard if only we have the humility and courtesy to listen. As St Benedict says in his Rule, “Listen to the precepts of the Master and turn the ears of your heart to hear …”  That’s not possible if your local church, or your universal church, is simply a noisy extension of Apex, or the Masonic lodge, or Argentinian culture, or the gay movement, or any “ism” with a bucket of holy water thrown over it.

Phillip Turnbull
Cornelian Bay, Tas

Sir: Does the truth matter? Perhaps never more than now in our “post-truth”/“fake news” age. The traditional virtues of objective commentary—avoiding ad hominem argument, rhetorical flourish, and quoting out of context, getting the facts right and reading what one is criticising first—take on new urgency. What a pity then to see Mr Windschuttle (“A Disaster of the Active Kind”, May 2017) betray these virtues in pursuit of his old nemesis, the History Department at the University of Sydney (reiterating previous attacks over the years) and his two main bogey men, Dirk Moses and myself.

Professor Moses can answer for himself. For my part rebuttal is not difficult. There are simple factual errors. Mr Windschuttle claims I am the author of four books; actually, it’s seven, when one counts co-authored books. Selecting facts to suit the argument. He cites two books he believes are inspired by Foucault, one on madness and another on the history of sexuality. True, but I’m also the author of a book on poverty and social policy, a book on returned soldiers, and co-author of one on the history of Harlem, another on the impact of the Dawkins reforms on the University of Sydney and one on New South Wales and the Great War for the New South Wales government—all topics of little interest to Foucault.

But has he actually read the two books he cites in support of his case? My book on madness acknowledges the importance of Foucault but is actually a sustained critique of his failure to examine the patients in institutions and their socio-economic, religious and cultural characteristics. And my history of sexuality, while also acknowledging the critical importance of Foucault’s work in this field, canvassed the arguments of as many fierce opponents of Foucault as supporters.

There are also regrettable exaggerations for effect—quoting David Stove, he claims the “complete capture of the Faculty of Arts by the Left” and other rhetorical flourishes that, surely, he knows are exaggerations but can’t resist the temptation of a “good line”. A quick glance at this year’s Faculty Handbook, if he bothered to look at it, might disabuse him of these preconceptions—he will undoubtedly find many things that offend to support his case, but where is the dangerous leftism in “Foundations of Ancient Greece”, “Greek Philosophical Texts”, “Introduction to Economic Statistics”, “Comparative Public Sector Management”, “Descartes”, “Locke”, “Shakespeare” or “The Victorian Novel”? The maligned History Department has courses on genocide and sex and other topics that repel him but there are also courses on Medieval Women, Renaissance and Reformation, the Middle Ages and Modern China’s Wars 1895–1953, studies that would not have been unusual when Mr Windschuttle was a student, in its heyday, when presumably the Faculty was not captured by the Left.

Mr Windschuttle is an old sparring partner of the Department, especially myself and Dirk Moses. We have crossed swords in public and in print. But the History Department is thriving and doing remarkable work despite these slurs and it sits in one of the few faculties in the world that can genuinely claim to some reasonable coverage of both the Western canon and the Eastern. Mr Windschuttle’s perceptions seem set in aspic. One only wishes that he would get his facts right and read what he criticises so he can get the story right, instead of recycling old enmities.

Stephen Garton
(Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Sydney)
Camperdown, NSW