An eye for art's fine lines

February 4, 2005
Harry Lew, surgeon and art collector, at home with a painting of himself by John Lawry.

Photo: Estelle Grunberg

A Melbourne doctor is an authority on some surprising subjects, writes Christopher Bantick.

Dr Henry (Harry) Lew is a Melbourne ophthalmic surgeon. He has lectured and written extensively on such topics as the first conjunctival tumour treated by immunotherapy in Australia. But besides his professional work, Lew has a deep interest in fine art.

He collects paintings and has written two internationally recognised books on the artists Horace Brodzky and Derwent Lees. His most recent book, The Five Walking Sticks: The Story of Maurice Brodsky Investigative Journalist Extraordinaire, was critically well-received. It is largely a Melbourne-based social history.

Lew was born in Melbourne, the son of refugees. His parents were survivors of the Holocaust, but he adds a rider. "My father used to say that he wasn't a real survivor of the Holocaust, because he was never in a camp. Yet everybody else I've spoken to says he was a survivor. He was displaced by it. He ran away from Poland to Russia to get away from the Germans. He left his whole family in Bialystok. They were all annihilated there."

Lew's work as an ophthalmologist is recognised both in Australia and abroad. But his interest in the human eye was not through any sense that this was his calling. "The reason I did medicine was not for passion. It wasn't a life's ambition. It was prompted by what my father said. He was a barrister - although he never practised in Melbourne - a hawker and a manufacturer of ladies' clothing. He had the displaced person's mentality and said that medicine was a great career as wherever you go, you can take it up again. That probably influenced me to a large extent.

"When I finished my training at the University of Melbourne, you could say that I bummed around doing various medical jobs. I also got interested in ophthalmology from my father. He rang me up one day when I was a second-year resident and said he'd just gone blind in one eye and he wanted me to accompany him to an ophthalmologist. He had in fact had a retinal detachment which was successfully repaired.

"I discovered that there were lots of aspects to ophthalmology that appealed to me. It was medical and it had a little bit of surgery. There was no drama where you were in constant life-and-death situations of casualty and coronary care. The other thing was ophthalmology was a very small area. In general medicine, I felt it was too big to be good at everything. Yet, in ophthalmology I saw myself as possibly being able to be good at everything. This turned out not to be true.

"In the 30-odd years I have been in it, there have been such technological advances, and the field has changed so much, that now, instead of people being ophthalmologists, they are for example cataract or retinal surgeons."

It might appear to be a significant step from the highly specialised field of exploring visual heath to an energetic interest in collecting art. On the day we speak, Lew's mobile phone goes as he's bidding for a painting.

"I was always interested in art and I also think the ophthalmology helped a lot with my later involvement," he says. "It is a very visual science and you get trained to observe things.

"When I started to do ophthalmology in 1973, one of my first tutors suggested that I read a paper in the Scientific American which explained how the retina sees things. It proved experimentally that the retina responds to lines. They can be horizontal, vertical, oblique, fat and thin. But if you can put the lines in the right places, with those lines, you can paint an image that the retina will see as a picture.

"Round about that time, I realised that some of the really great painters knew this stuff as they painted their pictures that way. The greatest exponent of this technique, probably of all time, was Frans Hals. If you look at a Rembrandt picture close up, you will see that it's very meticulous. But if you look at a Frans Hals picture, you'll see that it's just lines thrown on the canvas. Rolf Harris does a similar thing on TV. He makes a picture out of lines.

"This is how I got seriously interested in art. I started to look at brushstrokes to see who painted in that style and who had this knowledge. I became more and more involved in exploring it."

Despite Lew's awareness of art's visual cues, he says painters have not had a significant impact on how he sees the world and life's experience.

"I have enjoyed art more for the history that goes with it and as a vehicle for studying history. With artists like Horace Brodzky and Derwent Lees, to my surprise, I have become the world authority on them. People ring me up from overseas to talk about them. I've been quoted in artistic dictionaries as the source for those artists. But I got interested in them, at first, historically.

"The story behind the art has been important to me as much as the picture. This has enabled me to get interested in art that other people are not and thereby acquire paintings which are well within my means."

It was medicine, however, which caused him to take up his pen. "Maurice Brodzky and Derwent Lees were such amazing stories that they had to be told. But the other thing that got me interested in writing was a little bit of frustration with medicine.

"If you are a clinical person in medicine and you actually work with the patients, it's a little like being a front-line soldier in the war rather than the general. When people discuss the war 100 years later, no one remembers the guys who did the fighting, they only remember the guys who sent them to be killed and wounded.

"I realised that despite the fact that I was doing good work and getting a lot of positive feedback from my patients, which gives you a lot of personal satisfaction at the time, I realised your work survived only as long as your patients survived.

"I thought that if you wrote a story, if it's not remembered by anyone else, at least it will be remembered by your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren. The books I write will become a family curiosity. In 100 years, one of my descendants will be able to pick up one of my books, read it and have some image as to how I thought. I would have loved to have had this from my grandparents."