Brenda
Niall
Judy Cassab: A Portrait
Allen & Unwin, $49.95 hb, 308 pp,
1741144744
IN
BRENDA NIALL’S BIOGRAPHY of Judy
Cassab, the art forms of the subject
and the author — life story and
portraiture — are nested one in
the other. As the story builds, one
comes to accept that certain unsparing
reflections on the subject’s personality
and behaviour have as their authority
Judy Cassab herself. She emerges as
a heroine in a decidedly modern mode.
Reproduced in this biography (though
not written about) is a late portrait
of Cassab’s husband Jancsi Kämpfner.
He sits smiling with his eyes obstinately
half-closed, as if daring Jucókám
to go beyond the visible to his inner
self. Her response was to paint what
she saw, thereby recording the challenge
Jancsi mischievously posed, yet following
her usual practice, which was to reflect
the persona of a sitter as it was presented
to her. In portrait after portrait by
Cassab, we get the sitter as proffered,
in public or private mode, and sensitively
rendered by the artist. Cassab’s
skill at capturing a likeness and correctly
assessing a situation took her to the
forefront of the art world in London
and Australia, where she attracted many
commissions to paint royalty and other
public figures. Her commissioned portraits,
like the intimate ones, were designed
to give satisfaction to the sitter without
undue flattery and to display an insight
into personality. She did not waver
from a commitment to civility, though
it was constraining to a twentieth-century
Western artist. Critics evidently regarded
social good sense as detrimental to
creativity. In Australia, Cassab was
accused of ‘compromise’. She
came to separate her role as portraitist
from her artist’s ambition to push
the medium of painting towards abstraction
and the expression of an inner self.
To aid expression, she would invite
friends to sit to her, an arrangement
that encouraged a mutual reflectiveness,
with the sitter yielding control to
the artist, who was able to experiment
with style and expression. Cassab developed
a mode whereby the abstract working
of the surface of the canvas would be
separate from the drawing of a likeness.
The two processes are interwoven yet
apart in most subsequent portraits,
though characterisation is successfully
extended into the abstract form in portraits
of fellow artists Stanislaus Rapotec,
Margo Lewers and Paul Haefliger, for
example. Perhaps only Jancsi teased
Cassab’s self-critical desire to
intellectualise the private self of
a subject. He, more than anyone, knew
the detail of her ambition and self-questioning.
Niall raises an issue of the dispersed
self. Her most valuable insight in this
biography is not to subscribe to the
concept of an essential person. Cassab,
arriving in Australia in 1951 —
a translated, irredeemably displaced
sub-Carpathian — acknowledged several
selves: ‘My chameleon self. My
con-man self. My adventurer self.’
These would be posed against the sharp
thought that: ‘Without the familiar
background no one is quite themselves,
neither in the eyes of the others or
in [their] own.’ Jancsi was pinpointed
by Cassab in her diary as ‘the
core of my shaky universe’. With
him alone she shared a language and
an eventful history. Niall divided Cassab
from her anchor, asking: ‘Who was
she when she was alone?’ The answer
to that question was in the soliloquy
of Cassab’s diary. Through the
text, the diary’s speculations
appear as at once the provisional explanatory
mode and the spur for action.
Niall has a great talent for biography.
Her prose is plain; she has not cultivated
an authorial voice, nor shelved it for
the sake of giving other voices sway
over the text; metaphor of the adventitious
kind intrudes only occasionally: her
talent is to build. Between pages 90–119,
one begins to comprehend what is being
gathered, the events of life against
Cassab’s self-reflections. The
first image is of a pretty woman whose
charm works miracles. To this point,
childhood, marriage and survival during
the Holocaust have been faithfully,
if woodenly, remembered. After the Soviet
Union takes control in Hungary, the
Kämpfners depart for Vienna, then
London and finally Sydney where, a year
after arriving, Cassab breaks down.
Many sound reasons could be adduced
for this nervous collapse. Niall, though
generally giving Cassab’s life
and memories sway underneath the text,
steps in to make some suggestions. Cassab’s
revulsion and stage fright in 1952 may
have related to the role she saw herself
set to play during a period when Jancsi
was disadvantaged as a New Australian.
Characterisation through doubling the
course of Cassab’s life with the
reflections of her diary, without imposing
one on the other, has occasionally required
Niall to forgo the safety net of surface
effects. When the biography gathers
momentum, the flatness of the text to
the mid-1940s acquires meaning retrospectively
by contrast to the vitality with which
Cassab shapes the consequences in subsequent
phases of her art and life.
