Bernard Hesling (1905–1987) was a British-born muralist and painter who lived and worked in Australia and produced many vitreous enamel artworks and wrote humorous autobiographies.
Early years Hesling was from a Yorkshire family. He was born in 1905 while the family was temporarily in Wales. They returned to Yorkshire in 1907. He left school at age 15 and was apprenticed to a firm of painters and decorators. He studied art at Halifax night-school, where his teacher was the artist Joseph Mellor Hanson (1900–1963). At age 21 he went to London to try his hand at acting.Hazel de Berg Collection, sound recording, Oral TRC 1/368-370 An Interview with Bernard Hesling National Library of Australia
In 1960, Hesling reminisced about his 1926 debut as an actor and assistant Stage Manager at London’s Gate Theatre. To augment his meager wages he painted in his spare time and displayed his earthenware jugs and bowls in the theatre’s foyer. Norman Haire bought one and introduced himself. After the show they went to the Cafe Royal and Hesling was horrified because the 34-year-old Haire, ‘famous in Europe as he never was in his native land’, envied him, a 21-year-old, for being an actor. The stage manager worried that ‘a young innocent from the provinces’ had gone off with Haire ‘a professed homosexual’ but joked: ‘watch out for him, he’s a good bloke but never ask his advice about sex or he’ll send you a bill.’Bernard Hesling ‘The Facts-of-lifeman: A Memoir of Dr. Norman Haire', Nation, 23 April 1960, pp. 12–14.
In 1928, out of work in London and promised a job in Sydney, he migrated to Australia (for £16) and worked on Sydney shop-window displays at £6 a week. He had a room at Burdekin House, home to artists and writers. In 1929, he exhibited his abstract paintings but sold only three. He did not paint again seriously until 1943, when he became a part-time cartoonist. He was attracted to Sydney because of the prospect of a job and because his oldest brother, Charles, a gas engineer turner, migrated there in 1912. Charles died in a car accident at Lane Cove in 1931, aged 39, leaving a widow and young child.NSW Death Certificate 1931/013729 Charles William Hesling, Sydney Morning Herald 30 July 1931, p. 8.
Out of work again at the start of the Great Depression Bernard went back to London, where he worked first as a display artist at 9p an hour. In 1933 he married Flo’ (Florence Pickles) and became an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years. He returned to Sydney with Flo’ in 1939 with £50. They and other fit passengers served as U-boat spotters on the long voyage. For a short time he worked on accounts at Australia Paper Mills in Sydney.Dinkum Pommmie.
In 1929, he became friendly with new residents at Sydney’s 'bush suburb’ Castlecrag and came to know its designer Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. He described Griffin as "a small, plump atom bomb of a man in a broad-brimmed beaver hat, wearing a flowing Left Bank artist tie like an American in Paris". On returning to Sydney in 1939 Hesling resumed his interest in Castlecrag, where he and Flo’ settled in 1942.See the chapter 'Life with Burley Griffin’ in Hesling's Stir Up This Stew Ure Smith 1966 and Hesling's article 'Living with Burley Griffin' in Overland, no. 32, 1965, pp. 31–36.
Draftsman, cartoonist, journalist and critic
During the war he did design work at Slazenger’s Munitions Annexe, Botany.Dinkum Pommie, 1963, p. 170.(Artist Arthur Murch was there too.) In his spare time he drew daily cartoons for The Daily Telegraph, which caused some tension at Slazenger’s. Transferred later in the war to the Ministry of Munitions, Hesling worked with cartoonist George Molnar, who he said he prodded into becoming a cartoonist and who gave him lessons in drawing in return.Dinkum Pommie 1963 pp. 182–186. Hesling left the Ministry about 1943 to work full-time on The Daily Telegraph and his naive outline-style cartoons on war, food shortages and manpower control became well known.His cartoons were republished in Hesling’s Cartoons Consolidated Press Limited, 1945. Examples are in Coleman & Tanner’s Cartoons of Australian History, 1967, pp. 130–131.
He later said of his political cartoons: “Had I stuck to comic sketches of American servicemen buying tickets for Il Trovatore on the black market and such like, all would have been well. But my drawing had improved so much by now that I could get passable likenesses of Eddie Ward and Mr. Curtin. Brian Penton [Telegraph editor] saw me as one of those political bores – the scorched-earth boys who draw Russian bears and rising suns using soot instead of ink. What he didn’t like about me, of course, was having to write letters about art to pedantic readers who objected to a Prime Minister with six fingers on the hand instead of five.”Dinkum Pommie (1964), p. 178.
Hesling wrote in 1966 that it was through artist William Dobell, who won the 1943 Archibald Prize, that 'I did my first serious writing: a 10,000 word biography of him in Penton's Daily TelegraphHis biography of Dobell was evidently published in 1944. The cover jacket of his book Art Ruined my Career in Crime lists, among 'His Books', 'Biography: Dobell, Nolan - Sydney Bulletin'. While watching Dobell paint, Hesling decided to take up 'Art' again, 'not portraits but pussy cats like Bill's father painted and tigers and bush railway stations'.Stir up this Stew, 1966, p. 142. Dobell lent Hesling some of his untutored father's 'primitive' paintings and was soon able to paint in similar style.Art Ruined my Career in Crime, 1977 p. 33.
The Telegraph sent him to Canberra, which he disliked, and he was fired in 1946.Dinkum Pommie 1963, chapter 'In the ACT'. He moved briefly to the Sydney Morning Herald and then to Smith’s Weekly, where he replaced Lennie Lower (died 1947) as humorous writer and remained for four years until it closed in 1950, 'decorating his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings'.George Blaikie Remember Smith's Weekly Rigby 1966. He contributed occasional whimsical cartoons and articles to Australia: National Journal, e.g. May 1947, and to Australia: Week-end Book, Vol. 2 (1943) of the latter has seven cartoons, e.g., couple looking at nudes, satyrs and pirates on beach and saying, “Aren’t those the people we met at Mr. Lindsay’s?”. He illustrated a book for Leon Gellert with simple, whimsical, line drawings.Leon Gellert These Beastly Australians: Some Faunagraphic Data Compiled for Students of Australian Wild Life (Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney, 1945.
Out of work in 1950 Hesling did a few recorded talks for the BBC at 30/- a time. He wrote freelance articles for the Sydney Morning Herald at about £8 per 1,000 words, 'and, of course, I did joke drawings. There is a terrific market for these; I remember once Man paying me three guineas for a whole page of them, one of which I later sold to The New Yorker (as an idea) for $40.Dinkum Pommie, 1963, p. 197. He drew cartoons and wrote for Nation, Bulletin, Quadrant, Meanjin and The Listener.Stir Up this Stew, 1966, p. 123. He wrote light-hearted 'social commentary’ for the Current Affairs Bulletin.'The Family’ CAB, vol. 13, no. 5, 21 Dec 1953, p. 13, and 'Vocational Guidance’ CAB, vol. 15, no. 5, 20 Dec 1954, p. 13.
He was art critic for The Observer (Sydney). As critic he was refreshingly cynical about the enthusiasm for abstraction. 'It is, I realise, cheap to say painters knock them off quickly, but it is none the less true that reputable artists who cross the tracks find that, instead of doing ten good small paintings per year, they can now churn out twenty big abstractions, each allegedly as full as an egg with serious perception, human understanding and what-have-you'.Bernard Hesling 'Art among the cakes and scones', The Observer, 19 April 1958, p. 148. Some people took him too seriously:It was also becoming increasingly difficult for the abstractionists to retain a sense of integrity when the Observer's critic, Bernard Hesling, brought a new low point to Sydney's art discourse by evaluating works according to their price tags and speed of execution. Frank Hodgkinson's Prelude to Conflict and Conflict, he wrote in March 1958: "would not be out of place in an enlightened pub or espresso bar, where the client could make even additional interest by discussing why these two works, which are almost twins, cost 35 guineas and 100 guineas respectivelyB Hesling 'The Society of Artists' Observer 22 March 1958, B Hesling 'Art Among the Cakes and Scones' Observer 12 April 1958.".The Contemporary Art Society of NSW and the Theory and Production of Contemporary Abstraction in Australia 1947-1961 by Denise Mary Whitehouse, BA MA, submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1999.
Hesling and Hughes
The Observer's editor Donald Horne fired him in 1958 and replaced him with the young Robert Hughes. Hughes told the story in his 2007 Memoir and described Hesling as 'an elderly immigrant Yorkshireman ... an artist who made his basic living painting garish enamel tea trays’. Hughes understood Hesling was fired because of his critical review of a Blake exhibition he hadn’t seen.Robert Hughes Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir, Vintage, 2007, p. 162. But it seems that Horne was desperate to get rid of Hesling because he complained about Horne's low pay and he had a reputation for being 'derriere-garde rather than avant-garde'.Patricia Anderson Robert Hughes: The Australian Years, Pandora Press, 2009, p. 84. There is a postscript to Hughes’ story which Diana Wyndham mentions in Norman Haire and the Study of Sex:Diana Wyndham. (2012), p. 131 Foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG. in a personal communication Peter Coleman told her he was there and that Hughes’ account was not true: the newspaper proprietor was a friend of the Hughes family and was determined to give Robert a job.
In 1961, after reading Hesling's essay on Dobell in The Bulletin,Bernard Hesling, 'William Dobell the Scared Genius', The Bulletin 28 October 1961. Hughes fired off a fractious letter to its editor: 'Sir, When I read the article on William Dobell I did not believe that human discourse could sink into such adipose servility. It was one long unperceptive puff, with no attempt at critical reference.'.Robert Hughes, letter to The Bulletin, 7 February 1962. Art writer Patricia Anderson later wrote: 'In fact Hesling's piece was radiant with perception of the man (if not always his art). It was responsive to the dilemmas of being an artist at that time in Australia and the reader learns something true and lasting about this shy painter. Dobell, suggested Hesling, had won a prize for drawing a still life painting of a banana at the local public school. "Unfortunately, the banana was also the prize, and, as Bill says, it didn't go very far, as he had too many friends to share it with."'Patricia Anderson Robert Hughes: The Australian Years, Pandora Press, 2009, pp. 134–135.
From murals to enamels
Hesling painted numerous murals from 1950 until about 1957 in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and North Queensland (Emerald). His first mural was for Qantas' head office, Sydney, and he did more for its overseas offices. Among his clients were Marcus Clark store, ES&A bank and Ambassador Restaurant. He said at the time that 1956 was the most successful year of his life, when he earned £5,000 (average wage then £900) from painting murals in pub lounges that came into existence only when 'six o’clock swill’ was legislated out of existence by reform of hotel licensing hours. That event had an enormous impact on his life, and the extra income financed his swimming pool and his much-loved MG Magnette car.personal advice from Bernard's cousin Dr D Roger Hainsworth, August 2012.