Forty years ago the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales , with the help of defamation barrister Clive Evatt, staged the above pop art exhibition which dealt with mass media comic strip and other superheroes in Australian art. Naturally, The Phantom was well represented , but Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser , Ginger Meggs and Superman , with his zipper down , also got a run .
It introduced up and coming artists of the Australian art world to Newcastle , including one of Australia's greatest psychedelic artists , Martin Sharp ,about whom more will be posted at a later date .
It introduced up and coming artists of the Australian art world to Newcastle , including one of Australia's greatest psychedelic artists , Martin Sharp ,about whom more will be posted at a later date .
A longtime collector and friend of artists ,Clive Evatt owned and ran the Hogarth Gallery , Sydney, which closed in 2010 after 38 years . The Ghost Who Walks Can Never Die Exhibition which ran from September 1 to October 2, 1977, included works by painters and sculptors a number of which had been displayed in his gallery .
Over the years he has been the subject of much media attention . Evatt , above , struck fear into newspaper owners because of defamation cases he brought against them . In newspaper interviews he comes across as a larger than life character: A portrait of Lenin on a door ... a set of Little Britain dolls leering from a table near his desk ... six telephones ...gambling wins which enabled him to fly overseas and buy paintings ...early forays into Aboriginal art .
He explained he took on defamation cases against the Press to avenge his relatives who were smeared by them as Communist sympathisers ..."My father (a barrister and NSW politician ) and my uncle ( Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, onetime Labor Leader of the Federal Opposition , a NSW Chief Justice ) really copped it from the media ."
They had been treated cruelly , he said , and he welcomed the chance to kick back against the media . One of his many interests was running a toy and railway museum in the Blue Mountains .
Recently the Newcastle Regional Gallery staged a similar exhibition , The Phantom Show , one of the curators, Peter Kingston, had exhibited in the 1977 one . At the time of the earlier exhibition he had been a cartoonist for Oz Magazine and Tharunka and made the film , Mr Walker in Paris . The film had been made in partnership with artist, cartoonist and filmmaker Garry Shead , who had worked in Sydney, Paris , the cover for the above catalogue half his 1974 work , Orpheus .
It seems true that the Phantom lingers on and on ...In a Townsville barber shop last week , there was the Phantom , in a rack , watching the annual shearing of this scruffy scribbler.
