Geoffrey Edwards review of Peter Read, The Life and Work of Ante Dabro, Australian-Croatian Sculptor: The Midnight Sea in the Blood

(London: Anthem Press, 2023), 234 pp., HB £39.99, ISBN 9781839989926

Recalling the fictional dialogues or ‘imaginary conversations’ between various historical personalities published to acclaim in the late nineteenth century by British novelist Walter Savage Landor,¹ this compact monograph includes several wistful, imagined conversations between its subject, the contemporary Croatian-born Australian sculptor Ante Dabro, and his artistic hero, the Italian Renaissance master Michelangelo.

One such conversation occurs in the closing passages of the final chapter of the book (p. 196). It unfolds as follows. Seated, musing in his Canberra studio, Dabro recalls a recent visit to Florence whose artistic heritage and collections have long been a signal influence on his practice as a sculptor. He remarks that his hotel is only a short stroll from Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce.

Taking that short stroll in his mind and approaching the tomb, Dabro salutes his hero with a cheery ‘Good morning, Maestro.’ Michelangelo responds laconically and with an engaging hint of antipodean vernacular:

Hello again. I’m here as usual, not far from my Bandini Pietà.² I’m always close to my children. Yes, young feller, I know who you are. You’re that vlaj³ from across the water in Dalmatia … Are you still carving?

Dabro’s response:

These days I find that plaster is more subtle in just working with my chisel. You and I know that the greatest art is figurative and the greatest figurative art is the human form.

Thus the conversation flows with reference to studio practice and families, sage advice (from Michelangelo), and robust opinions (both interlocutors) on reputation and patronage. Fictional exchanges such as these punctuate Peter Read’s eminently readable and fastidiously researched, if occasionally problematic, biography. Yet, in that final ‘imaginary conversation’ we have a distillation of sorts of the primary motivation behind the sculpture of the talented, fiercely independent and somewhat curmudgeonly character that Read has chosen as his subject for a biography.

And an intriguing choice it is, given that the sculptor is hardly a household name outside Canberra, where his larger commissions—notably, the extraordinary Royal Australian Navy Memorial (1985) on Anzac Parade—do certainly enjoy a public presence and profile. And it is an interesting choice, furthermore, given that the author is known not as an art historian but for his pioneering and widely acclaimed research into the history of Indigenous Australians. Thus, it is no surprise that The Life and Work of Ante Dabro is not your usual art historical critique of the oeuvre of a contemporary artist considered, say, in the context of comparable developments in the careers of immediate predecessors and peers.

Indeed, as we learn from the Preface, Read prefers to:

rejoice in the intuitive moment, not to celebrate Dabro’s every sculpture but to magnify the creative act, that leap into the abyss, which sustains his vision and that of every artist who has shared the principle of poetry with us since humans walked the earth. (p. xi)

Then comes a knockout coda: ‘This book is a hymn to the humanities’ (p. xi). At which point, I must admit, my heart sank a little (happily, only momentarily, I hasten to advise).

Nonetheless, the ensuing text is heavily freighted with quotations from poets ancient and modern, as well as frequent reference to novelists, composers, philosophers and sundry other ‘greats’. And I guess it is no mean feat that, for the most part, these numerous digressions infiltrate the text with a novel sense that the likes of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Newton, Beethoven, Liszt, Conrad, Yeats and even Charles Dickens’s character Mr Pickwick are—as was Pickwick in his eponymous ‘Papers’—companionable fellow travellers with Ante Dabro in a mutual quest to tackle and triumph over ‘the impossible struggle between form and meaning’ (p. 102).

Read’s account of the life and work of Ante Dabro traces a straightforward chronology from the artist’s birth on 13 January 1938 in the small Croatian town of Čavoglave; to his early years spent in a humble farming community; and the emergence, in spite of impoverished circumstances, of a creative, self-confident and naturally rebellious personality. And there are experiences all too familiar for rural families battling to survive in a country ravaged by war and communist oppression. There is a spell of compulsory, but decidedly reluctant, military service and intermittent training in sculpture—when military service permits—in the time-honoured techniques of carving in marble and modelling in clay and plaster. As noted in his ‘conversation’ with Michelangelo, Dabro was then, and is still, an energetic maker of figurative compositions featuring expressively modelled nudes, some striking heroic attitudes, others depicted in thoughtful repose.

Enrolled in 1953 at the Split College of Applied Art, Dabro makes contact with influential sculptor-mentors, including Croatia’s foremost maker of state monuments, Ivan Meštrović, a sometime protégé of Rodin. Over time, it is, in fact, Rodin’s style of virile expressionism that informs much of Dabro’s subsequent sculpture.

During a period of travel in the 1960s, specifically in Italy, Dabro studies and copies famous examples of Renaissance sculpture; he visits galleries and encounters several prominent modernists including Giacometti and Henry Moore. But, ‘like the first generation of post-war migrants in Eastern Europe threatened by the Soviets’ (p. 57), Dabro believes his homeland devoid of promise and plans to go abroad, thinking initially of Canada as a destination.

Instead, in 1967 he chooses Australia, encouraged by an offer of support from a relative living in Canberra. Upon arrival, with scant English, he picks up labouring jobs but soon manages to find a more congenial and skilled role with a Queanbeyan stonemason. Sundry art teaching positions lead to his eventual appointment as a lecturer in sculpture at the Canberra School of Art, a position held despite some contentious attitudes (‘politically incorrect’ in today’s parlance) for some two decades.

Most captivating are the chapters dealing with the inevitably fraught negotiations and preparatory work for major public commissions, notably, in Dabro’s case, his most ambitious and best-known work: the Royal Australian Navy Memorial (1986). Reviewing this colossal tableau—an unlikely stylistic fusion of vestigial socialist realism and futurist angularity—the critic and historian Sasha Grishin observed that Dabro had:

arrived at a compromise by combining bulky generalised figurative forms with an essentially abstract constructivist structure … [and that the] strength of the work stems from the conflict and tension between the dynamic abstract masses and the bursting figurative elements. (p. 128)

It is a complex, unwieldy and enigmatic work, without parallel in the sequence of Anzac Parade memorials.

A rather irritating theme running through parts of the book is the conviction that Dabro has been shamefully overlooked by ‘the art establishment’—that is, that his work has not been collected or much exhibited by our major state and national galleries. Probably true, but so too have countless other artists of similar accomplishment never received the ‘official’ acknowledgement they deserve. After all, for all his considerable achievements, Dabro has not embraced any of the seismic shifts in visual arts practice that have occurred over recent decades—no bad thing in itself—and it is chiefly these developments that are, for better or worse, in the cross hairs of curatorial decision-making in most public galleries.

So, when the author laments, for instance, that when Dabro’s otherwise remarkably generous late-career patron, a Canberra businessman named Terry Snow, fails to offer Dabro a major commission for a large-scale work for a building he owns (Canberra Airport), he dismisses the work that ultimately was commissioned instead of Dabro’s proposal as ‘in no sense memorable’ (p. 185). A dubious assessment at best. So, it is this occasional tendency to partisan commentary that is, for me, the problematic aspect of the biography.

By the same token, I might have expected more reference to other postwar European émigré sculptors who came to Australia (albeit perhaps slightly Dabro’s senior in years), such as the abstractionists associated with the Melbourne-based Centre 5 Group: Vincas Jomantas and Teisutis Zikaras from Lithuania, Inge King from Germany, Julius Kane from Hungary and Clifford Last from Britain. Comparisons here could have been instructive.

But these are minor quibbles, as the narrative is altogether engaging and informative while the design, including a fair number of mostly black and white photographs by Con Boekel, is pleasing. There are fulsome endnotes, a list of works consulted and a concise index. The small format (Crown Octavo or thereabouts) is a bit unusual for an ‘art book’ but has its own appeal. A larger format would certainly have benefited the reproductions but, that aside, this book is a serious addition to the meagre corpus of quality monographs currently published on contemporary Australian artists.

I have not mentioned the book’s subtitle: The Midnight Sea in the Blood. The line is taken from the epigraph, a verse from Douglas Stewart’s poem ‘Rock Carving’ about encountering an Aboriginal rock carving at night, a timeless record of a creative soul. Somehow, reading this put me in mind of a passage in a recent novel by British author Andrew O’Hagan, whose central character, an ambitious art historian named Professor Campbell Flynn, is speaking with his wife Elizabeth. She reminds him that it was she who suggested the subject of his celebrated book on the life of Vermeer. ‘There has never been a Life of Vermeer that does what art and biography must do’, she says. ‘Which is?’ asks Flynn. The response: ‘Express the secret drama of the creative self.’⁴

I submit that Peter Read has revealed much of the ‘secret drama’ of the life and the work of Ante Dabro. And for that, we are glad.

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1. 1 Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864), Imaginary Conversations and Poems; with an Introductory Note by Havelock Ellis (London: W. Scott, 1899).

2. 2 Also known as The Deposition, the Bandini Pietà, is a marble sculpture on which Michelangelo worked between 1547 and 1555. It is housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence. One of Michelangelo’s most celebrated works, it may have been intended for the sculptor’s tomb according to Vasari.

3. 3 Croatian term meaning peasant or shepherd.

4. 4 Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2024), 292.