It was a theme adapted by Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd in the 1950s and 1960s. Boyd brought a biblical aspect to the landscape, turning Australia into a sometime Eden but also a place for expulsions and dreams. Nolan is best known for his faux-naif Ned Kelly series in which, in comic book style, he shows the outlaw's rise and fall — his Kelly is an Antipodean Don Quixote with his tin-hatted head resembling a television screen with eyes. This, the quintessential Australian folk tale, was, said Nolan, a narrative "arising out of the bush and ending in the bush" and he was driven to paint it from "a wish to hear more of the stories that take place in the landscape". 

This exhibition is full of unfamiliar works that tell the stories that take place in landscapes. Those landscapes include empty spaces as well as the urban, farms as well as beaches, and each story is a chapter in the narrative of Australia itself. 

A less epic tale was told by George Grosz. His paintings and watercolours of interwar Germany are usually described as satirical but that is too mild a word for pictures that are filled with anger, disgust and, it has to be said, a palpable sense of his fascination with the tawdry scene too. His bitter vision of Weimar Germany is pervasive — a world of wounded soldiers, raddled prostitutes and porcine businessmen locked in a dance of excess.

A Communist and anti-authoritarian, Grosz wanted his art to be unequivocal: "I reject the ‘depth' that people demand nowadays, into which you can never descend without a diving bell crammed with cabbalistic bullshit and intellectual metaphysics." It is this lack of regard for niceties that gives his work some of its impact.

The Richard Nagy gallery on Bond Street, which specialises in German art, is staging George Grosz's Berlin, the first major exhibition of his work here for nearly 20 years. This is a major undertaking for a private gallery and Nagy has gathered some 50 pictures from both private and public collections. Among the array of bourgeois grotesques is a recently uncovered watercolour version of Grosz's statement oil painting, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen ("Germany, A Winter's Tale"), 1918, which disappeared in the early 1930s. (See p. 51.)

It was not the only one of his works to suffer this fate. Grosz's career as a provocateur started at school when he was expelled for striking a teacher and he remained foolhardy. In 1921 he was charged with defaming the German army and he ran into trouble twice more before leaving for America in the early Thirties. Numbers of his pictures were destroyed under the Third Reich. As this show demonstrates, however, what was "degenerate" was not Grosz's art but the world it portrayed.