Volume 32, Number 7 · April 25, 1985
Remembering Douglas Cooper
By John Richardson
One point that Douglas Cooper, the controversial English art historian who died last year, would want his obituarist to emphasize is that he was not Australian. True, his antecedents had acquired a considerable fortune, not to speak of a baronetcy, down under, but they returned to England around the turn of the century; and they sold their Australian holdings, including much of the Woollahra section of Sydney, some years later. Given his father's lifelong possession of a British passport and his mother's Dorset lineage, Cooper understandably resented his countrymen's tendency to endow him with an erroneous—i.e., Australian—provenance. A very minor irritant, one might have thought. Unfortunately resentment made for paranoia; paranoia made for Anglophobia; and Anglophobia made for the outlandish accents, outré clothes, and preposterous manner that Cooper cultivated. Bear in mind, however, that many of his idées fixes only made sense if turned upside down, or seen in the light of willful provocation or perversity. Anglophobia was the only form of patriotism that Cooper could permit himself.
Feature, 2768 words
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