Rix Nicholas - Spirit of the Bush

 Hilda Rix Nicholas, dressed as the 'Spirit of the Bush'

 

Hilda Rix Nicholas – the “Spirit of the Bush” - was a significant Australian orientalist painter. Born in the historic goldmining city of Ballarat in 1881, she traveled to Europe and then to Tangier and Morocco in 1912. Later exhibiting her work in Paris, was made of member of the Société des Peintres Orientalistes Français.

 

One would think that these are solid orientalist credentials, but in our times, of course, she is politically problematic. In this age of post-colonial identity politics there is the desire to promote and celebrate her, just for being a woman, but then… oh dear, she was involved in the dastardly colonialist ‘Othering’ of oppressed victims of Empire. How can this incongruity be reconciled? 

 

This is where an army of sociologists enter the scene and explain that, actually, she was not an orientalist at all – not really. Rather, she was a “counter-orientalist” posing as an orientalist, and rather than being instances of orientalist exploitation her work actually undermines orientalist ideology in subtle ways and is therefore safe to hang in public galleries.

 

This is the same army of sociologists who move in to rehabilitate non-European artists who – inexplicably - also have every appearance of being orientalists involved in the orientalist project. As oppressed minorities, this cannot possibly be correct, and so the scholars must explain how these orientalists were not orientalists at all. Not really.

 

 

We live in an age when artists of the past are either celebrated, denigrated or just ignored according to these extraneous criteria. This sort of historical puritanism is now at pandemic proportions. It is really a way of denigrating the past by judging it according to our own perceived moral superiority. Once whole swathes of the past have been exposed as morally repugnant we are relieved of any duty to study or appreciate them with sympathy and understanding ever again.

 

Critics must work especially hard to rescue women artists from the ethical ignomy of the orientalist project. Readers are invited to investigate this themselves. Select any female orientalist artist and witness the contortions academics, journalists and people in the art establishment go through to prove that they – the women artists – were actually “counter-orientalists” whose work subverted the evil colonialist narrative. This is not true of their husbands, teachers or companions: just the women. There is a long list of supposed “counter-orientalist” female artists who, somehow, just by virtue of being female – and despite every appearance to the contrary - were able to see through the cunning disguises of imperialist oppression, reemerging today as unsung post-colonial feminist heroines.

 

This is rife. Visit any art museum and scan the introductory literature prepared for tourists and visitors. It will explain, following the obligatory quote from Edward Said, how this or that female orientalist was not really an orientalist but was in fact subtly undermining colonialist ideology. This then clears the path to exalt her as a woman whose work has been neglected by a male-dominated art world. This rehabilitation literature is a genre in itself.

 

But in fact, there is not the slightest evidence that Hilda Rix Nocholas was anything but an Australian orientalist painter who worked within, and subscribed to, the norms of orientalist art. There are, of course, always good and bad orientalist artists, and other legitimate distinctions to be made, but the distinction between evil (i.e. ‘real’) orientalists and pretend ones (counter-orientalists) is entirely spurious. Hilda Rix Nicholas was a very good orientalist artist, working in a conservative style, and that fact requires no apology.

 

It is a pity that the female orientalist painters are subject to this grubby intellectual revisionism. It makes it hard for us to appreciate them in their context, and worse, it means we tend to see them and their work through a political lens that distorts our view in almost pervasive ways. To consider orientalist art from outside of that prevailing critical framework now requires a conscious disengagement from nearly everything being taught and propagated in our cultural institutions.

 

Given this, the humble and undorned purpose of this current page is to present this Australian woman’s work without any mealy-mouthed post-colonial apologia. She was an orientalist. And also a painter of Australian life. And a good one. There is no discernible difference between the great sensitivity with which she painted subjects in Tangier and the same sensitivity with which she painted her Australian subjects. It is the same sensitivity we find in so many orientalist painters, men and women. We do not need to rescue them from infamy or twist and turn to make them conform to our prejudices. Their work speaks for itself. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harper McAlpine Black