The origins of abstraction have never been analysed in Australia. Our anti-abstraction mood of the 1970s and 1980s has passed. Four years ago, Melbourne University Press published Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. Maloon, curator of special exhibitions at the AGNSW, such as Classic Cézanne in 1998, thought a big-budget exhibition might now be possible, and director Edmund Capon trusted him to package excellent art with excellent scholarship for Australian audiences.

Gauguin’s influence reached Australia in 1917, just after Paths to Abstraction closes. From Willard Huntington Wright’s book Modern Painting, published in 1915, Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin had got the message that Cézanne and Gauguin were the then past masters of modernism, that Matisse and Picasso were the current masters, and that the latest thing was colour-music abstraction, as exemplified by a short-lived movement called Synchromism. (Kandinsky, now regarded as the crucial lead-in to Abstraction, was too landscapey for Wright.) De Maistre and Wakelin’s 1919 exhibition, Colour in Art, composed of small colour-slab Sydney landscapes with titles such as Syncromy, Berry’s Bay or Syncromy in yellow green minor, was long remembered as an exhibition of ‘Colour Music’.

De Maistre, like Matisse, started out torn between painting and the violin, and his quite large Rhythmic composition in yellow green minor (1919), a fully abstract swirl in sunlit grassland colours, can evoke ecstatic outdoor dance to music, and make us think of Matisse’s astonishing pair of huge red nudes on green grass carried away by Dance and Music (1910). Sydney ‘syncromies’ would not have survived near cubism by Picasso and Mondrian, or near Frantisek Kupka’s large colour-swirl Study for ‘Fugue in two colours’ (1911–12). Nick Waterlow’s 2008 exhibition, Colour in Art: Revisiting 1919, at the University of New South Wales, had recently told us all about the Australians, but, in a nice gesture to our local moment, Paths to Abstraction included a painting by Morgan Russell, one of the Parisian Synchromists.

The colour-music paintings suddenly being exhibited in many parts of Europe in 1912 and 1913 were usually very large, whereas classic cubism by Braque and Picasso was comparatively small, invariably confined to elegant earth colours and little seen in public. At the AGNSW a characteristic two-metre-square canvas was by Robert Delaunay, whose Orphism movement is indistinguishable from Morgan Russell’s Synchromism. One of two variations of the National Gallery of Victoria’s smaller Nude woman reading (1920), the big Delaunay became part of a fluorescent threesome that constituted a centrepiece for the exhibition. Maloon makes work held in Australian collections more interesting than we realised.

There were no paintings in Sydney by Gauguin, the crucial 1880s source for the Symbolists and Nabis and colour abstraction, but his five primitivist woodcuts and one lithograph were as useful, since the prints circulated widely among younger artists such as Matisse, and they demonstrate very well how to flatten and interlock strong jigsaw-like forms. (A minor fan-shaped Tahitian subject painted on tapa cloth, at Carrick Hill in Adelaide, is the only authentic Gauguin painting now in a public collection in Australia; the ‘Gauguin’ bought in 1939 by the AGNSW turned out to be by Charles Camoin.)

Maloon’s starting point was Whistler. A composition (not in the exhibition) of pretty English girls, conspicuously inscribed in 1867 with the words Symphony in white, was the artist’s first use of a musical title. It emphasised that the aesthetic arrangement of tones, colours and forms was more important than the subject. Whistler seldom indulged in warm–cool colour-values; dark–light tonalism was his forte. His Nocturne in grey and silver, the Thames (c.1873), an underappreciated ‘subjectless’ painting bought by the AGNSW in 1947, became the key work in the exhibition. A minimalist composition of four scraped-back bands of sky, land, water, and land again, accented with one upright tower and maybe a score of tiny liquid touches of river lights and reflections, it is a perfect exposition of Whistler’s 1885 credo: ‘When evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry … and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night … Nature, for once, has sung in tune …’

With two more Nocturnes – a companion riverbank painting, and a Furnace etching of assertive squares floating within the rectangular framing-edge – Whistler’s art lifted the spirits in the first room of the exhibition. The titles refer of course to Chopin’s piano nocturnes, and if you cared to hire the exhibition earphone guide you could have listened to his music in this room; Monet in the next room had Debussy, and further on you could listen to Stravinsky and Duke Ellington.

Cheekily installed, the first room also contained little-known early works by Picasso and Mondrian in Whistler-ian style. In the exhibition book, there are similarly Whistlerian monochrome landscapes by Matisse, large canvases painted at Belle-île long before he was even an Impressionist; they were a nod to Monet’s Belle-île landscape in the next room.

The installation was full of wit and subtlety. Maloon’s placement and lighting of works on paper were unusually stress-free for viewers, with no need to peer; they were given space and were well illuminated. The quite numerous woodcuts, lithographs, and etchings often made essential art-historical points: Picasso’s four 1911 Saint Matorel etchings are the beginning of cubism. A local insight: the AGNSW’s own River Marne landscape by Cézanne, which echoes the four-banded structure of Whistler’s Thames but with a very different kind of touch, was accompanied by a watercolour of a quarter-circle hillside; we immediately recalled the quarter-circle and horizontal-band landscapes, and the touch, of Fred Williams – Australia’s Cézanne.

Mysticism and spiritualism, intriguing subtexts to much of this art, including Roy de Maistre’s in Australia, scored a few paintings by Maurice Denis, but Maloon emphasises that in Denis’s Nabi group the decidedly earthbound Vuillard and Bonnard were the major artists. Appropriately for a museum-based art historian, ideas about mysticism are mentioned at greater length in the book rather than illustrated by too many actual works of art in the exhibition; their lower quality would have dulled the aesthetic experience offered by material objects, which is the prime justification for any big-budget exhibition. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art twenty-five years ago, remains the resource for more than you will ever want to know about the occult in art.

Besides Maloon’s own extended text tracing the full chronology and themes of the exhibition, the book includes essays by three colleagues: Jean-Claude Lebensztejn of the University of Paris, on the ideology of early abstraction; Richard Shiff of the University of Texas at Austin, on the ‘Dream of Abstraction’; and Annegret Hoberg of the Lenbachhaus museum at Munich, on Kandinsky and Marc’s concept of the avant-garde. They tease out ideas of ‘pure painting’, ‘unveiling’, ‘internationalism’. Lebensztejn supplies a new candidate for Kandinsky’s much-disputed first abstract work, Improvisation 13, exhibited in Moscow, in 1910. Hoberg supplies a very interesting 1914 text by Marc, connecting the occult with modern science and technology: ‘mediumistic introspection into matter’ with X-rays; levitation with magnetism; table-tapping with the telegraph and telepathy with the ‘wireless telegraph’. Thus ‘thanks to these analogies, the occult acquires an importance never known in prior religious periods’.

The year 1917 was chosen as an endpoint because it was the year of the Bolshevik Revolution and Rietveld’s Mondrianesque Red and Blue chair, and because anti-art Dadaism, with its very different kind of formless abstraction, was one year old. It was also the year when Tristan Tzara, at the Dadaists’ Cabaret Voltaire, performed French versions of Aranda Aboriginal snake and cockatoo poems, now available as the first document in the MUP anthology Modernism & Australia.

Matisse’s The piano lesson (1916) is not illustrated in Maloon’s book. Grace Crowley, in the 1940s and 1950s one of Australia’s finest abstract painters, saw it in Paris in 1926 and she never forgot the grey room, the window with an emerald-green dawn, and the pink piano top that suggested, unseen, the young boy’s sore fingers. The large canvas is from the artist’s most austere and nearest-abstract moment; son Pierre is alone with a metronome and one of his father’s paintings, practising scales for two hours each morning from 6 a.m., a heart-rendingly emotional image of paternal love and discipline, and probably the greatest of all colour-music paintings.