What a world of paradox painting confronts us with. The death of John Olsen is a reminder of his stature and the complexity of the influences that shaped this man of Sydney and then there’s the scandal of go-getting whities merrily at work on acrylic dot paintings that were to be marketed as Aboriginal art. And how does this affect our sense of the grandeur of the greatest Indigenous art, the painting of Emily Kame Kngwarreye? (It was a famous Irish novelist who said her work meant more to him than anything on earth.)

Olsen was a painter with a world of influences bleeding into his work. There was his Spanish sojourn and a tangled iconography of what might be people at prayer and what might have been an auto-da-fé battle for attention in a modernist work like Spanish Encounter where the spectator is never quite separate from the liturgical shemozzle or the crucifixion it memorialises. This is a very consciously exotic painting and it leads on to the celebration of the You Beaut’ Country where the tumult of the physical world is a thrusting thing with the thickness of the paint weaponised and erotic all at once. It was as though Olsen had to discover the ritualised sense of the savagery and splendour of what he found in Spain in the way he used paint as a kind of sensual calligraphy. Sometimes we get a sense of teeming urban life in the Olsen of the Sixties but it also corresponds with the painter’s sense of lyricism which in his own terms is associated with that Catholic convert and priest who is the greatest of the Victorian poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Of course our sense of Hopkins’ towering orginality as a poet is not unrelated to his crypto-modernism but one of the things Olsen took from him – as Patrick McCaughey indicated in his history of Australian painting – is his doctrine of inscape: the world of nature is not separate from the world of the beholder, the painter in Olsen’s case who figures it forth. His 1969 painting, Pied Beauty (taking its name from the famous Hopkins poem) configures this with a ravishing sensuousness. Then there’s that extraordinary Olsen picture which brings to life one of the myths of ninteenth-century white dreaming – the dream of an inland sea.

Well, when Lake Eyre flooded the archaic romantic hope was made actual and Olsen captures the magic of this in the blue stillness of his 1975 Lake Eyre. It’s a looming lyrical immensity like an undreamt glimpse of the love that moves the sun and other stars (to use Dante’s phrase) and the dots that huddle round the edges are the almost irrevelant human spectators. Needless to say they can also come to seem like inhabitants who cling to alien shores.

It’s striking how much an apparently celebratory painter like Olsen could be dispirited by what had been done to the Sydney of his youthful beholding.

It’s worth remembering that Hopkins, who is such an extraordinary lyrical poet with his personalised but conceptually very coherent sense of the ‘kingdom of daylight’s dauphin’, also writes the tragic sonnets, those poems of terribilità in which he can say – with an idiomatic modernity that never deviates from the intensity of the feeling – ‘I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.’ Was he the supreme articulator of the agony of depression? ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.’

Olsen doesn’t follow that poetic minister of inscape down into that horror but you can tell that aspects of the world he celebrated troubled his sleep.

Everyone is likely to feel a degree of dismay at what has been apparently happening with the preparation of that razzle-dazzle of acrylic spots for an Indigenous market. It shouldn’t diminish our sense of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s work which came out of her sense of dreaming and country though they fell upon a world that wanted to be ravished by painting that seemed urgently modern as well as expressive of an ancient culture. They are that through all the development of her world that could encompass minimalism as well as elaboration in a work like Earth’s Creation.

Whatever it is that has gone wrong with the manufacture of lesser art – for a commercial market – we should hold to our sense of the best Indigenous art and not be too dismayed by this shadow of spuriousness that can and does afflict every form of art. Patrick McCaughey suggests that Australian painting looms especially large in the national consciousness while not having a dominant place in the eyes of the rest of the world. (There’s a certain irony in the way this doesn’t apply to Indigenous art in quite the same way.)

How much does this phenomenon depend on the perception of the interpreters of Australian art? Anyone who decades ago saw Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia was instantly made conscious of a critic who was also a supreme entertainer quite comparable to Kenneth Clarke in Civilization and the sense of Hughes was consolidated by the later art histories The Shock of the New and American Visions. That booming Sydney voice, that magnificent command of metaphor, that frog-leap over art criticism which created that luminous and epical work of history, The Fatal Shore.

A smaller country will tend to have difficulties highlighting the treasures of its art and literature. Colin McCahon in New Zealand may not have the international recognition his work should command.

And with literature it can depend a bit on timing. More people round the world would have attended to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda – helped out by the Cate Blanchett/ Ralph Fiennes film – than came to grips with the greatest Patrick White. And again it doesn’t help that Joseph Losey never got to make that film of Voss Patrick White longed for even if Fred Schepisi’s film of The Eye of the Storm with Charlotte Rampling, Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis is a considerable achievement and involved any number of potential disasters in terms of funding. But our art critics – Bernard Smith, Robert Hughes, John McDonald and Patrick McCaughey – are superb instantiations of what they care about.