John McDonald, ‘Driven to abstraction’,

The Sydney Morning Herald, January 6-7 2007, p.16-17 (excerpt)

"PLATE, CARL OLAF (b.1909. Perth, WA d.1977) Painter." So begins the entry for Carl Plate in The New McCulloch's Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, which I’ve been studying during the Christmas break. McCulloch's is the essential Australian art reference book and the new edition is an impressive production. Nevertheless, in a work of about 1200 pages there are always going to be many small frustrations. For instance, there are three mistakes in the entry devoted to yours truly

I could go on nitpicking but it is virtually impossible to eliminate errors in any reference work that aims to be comprehensive. With an artist such as Plate, the basic information seems to be correct but one could complain about a lack of detail and perhaps the choice of emphasis. For instance, Plate's Notanda Gallery is described as "a business enterprise dealing mainly in objets d'art and souvenirs".

This may be broadly accurate if one considers the Notanda from the perspective of the tax department but it suggests he was selling toy koalas and fridge magnets. The entry ignores the greater value of Plate's Rowe Street premises. When it first opened in 1941, the Notanda was Sydney’s only genuine gallery of modern art. The inaugural exhibition, England Today, featured 64 works by well-known British artists such as Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash and Vanessa Bell. The show would be a blockbuster today but then it was a commercial flop, reviewed in a sneering, dismissive manner by the press.

This little detail is important because it says something about the times and about Plate. When he returned to Australia in 1940, during World War II, Plate had spent five years travelling and studying in Europe. Full of ideas and enthusiasm, familiar with all the latest developments in progressive art circles, he returned to a narrow-minded, philistine country. The Herald exhibition of French and British art had recently been shown in department stores in Melbourne and Sydney, drawing
crowds of curiosity-seekers and plenty of insults from critics and directors of public galleries. Plate's British exhibition was a revelation to a small group of contemporary artists and art lovers but it meant nothing to a majority taste accustomed to gum trees and brown portraits of men in suits.

In the years that followed, Notanda became known as Sydney's leading art bookshop. Like Gino Nibbi’s shop in Melbourne, it provided local artists with a rare
source of books on modern art and colour reproductions.

As both bookseller and artist, Plate played an important role in creating a climate of understanding for modernism. A small survey exhibition curated by Anne Ryan
for the Art Gallery of NSW allows audiences a rare chance to see the work of a painter who was more influential than his latter-day public profile suggests. This show follows a larger, commercial exhibition organised by Eva Breuer, who still has a good selection of paintings in her stockroom.

It has been about 20 years since Plate's work was last exhibited, so he is due for reassessment. As the Art Gallery of NSW show reveals, his development as a modern artist followed a well-trodden path, from a stylised form of figuration to full
abstraction. Plate's mature paintings may be seen as works of abstract expressionism but his approach was broadly analytical. He proceeded by cautious stages, taking forms apart and reconstructing them in ways that retained the essence of a subject, if not the actual semblance.

Plate was equally reserved in his attitude towards colour. His paintings are not filled with wild chromatic contrasts; he preferred mid-tones, even earth colour. It is
as though he sought to retain a connection with the natural world even when he was pushing towards the frontiers of representation. He claimed to be seeking "a glint of the unknown' but one might just as easily say that he wanted to
convey a sense of familiarity in his non-objective work. If the unknown is no more than a glint, it was embedded in a setting that related strongly to international
trends and movements.

Plate's early pictures have echoes of Graham Sutherland's spikey forms, while the abstractions of the 1950s and '60s owe a debt to the work of the French Tachistes and perhaps to Alan Davie. Nevertheless, they do not present an exact match with any possible source. You can sense how earnestly Plate grappled with each painting, assimilating influences into his own, ongoing quest.

Like so many Australian artists, Plate was not one of the great originals, but someone who used the existing languages of international art to make a small statement of his own. His paintings are work- manlike rather than inspired and
are strangely hard to keep in mind. The large picture Graph Segments (1963-64) is arguably his masterpiece but it is a peculiar work It is a fully abstract painting that resembles an aerial map or perhaps a battered and graffitied piece of wall. The eye is led through the picture via a series of loops, twists and meandering trails.
One progresses through textures, through darkness and light. It is like walking around a partially excavated ruin in which you are left guessing at what each pile of bricks might once have been.

Cassi Plate, who recently gave a talk about her father’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW, says Graph Segments "visualises the 'inner workings': the joints, the body's architecture, what goes on under the skin”. In this scenario, Plate's lines are akin to the body's nervous system, while the patches of colour correspond to the emotional highs and low of the organism. It goes to show how difficult it is to imagine a pure abstraction, especially in paintings so alive with incident. You suspect it was hard for Plate as well. Throughout this survey there is no occasion when the work develops a practised facility. Plate gives the impression that painting
never came easily to him and one of the most fascinating aspects of this exhibition is to trace his struggles and his brief, hard-won victories. Life must be easier for an artist who within a tightly circumscribed set of rules imposed by the artist or some outside agency...