MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA.- The Art of Laurence Hope is at the Heide Museum of Modern Art until April 14. It is hard to reconcile the Laurence Hope photographed poring over an opal with Andy Warhol in 1971 or filmed playing a gangster alongside Germaine Greer in 1969 with the artist who, just days ago, turned 75 and is patiently, happily even, posing for photographs in his hotel foyer. It is more than 30 years since Hope was snapped chatting to Warhol. It is his first solo show in Melbourne since 1961, only his second solo show anywhere since 1977, and is, by his own reckoning, a big step.

This survey exhibition mainly contains works from the 1940s to the late 1960s. There are also nine works completed over the last 30 or so years, as well as one of his earliest pieces, an accomplished watercolor of a Sydney landscape that Hope painted at the age of seven. Hope studied art at East Sydney Technical College in the early 1940s but abandoned his studies in 1944 to head for Brisbane. There he met poet Barrett Reid and aligned himself with the Barjai group, a bunch of avant-garde writers and poets led by Reid. In Brisbane, Hope's paintings of isolated and vulnerable figures, with such titles as The Dispossessed and Tramp, contrasted markedly with the art establishment of the day, and Hope was a founding member of the Miya Studio of young artists who espoused freedom of statement.

Hope, whose work is in numerous Australian public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and Heide Museum of Modern Art, had a large retrospective at London's Commonwealth Art Gallery in 1972 (and another in Sydney in 1975), though his last solo shows in Britain were in 1977 on the theme of opals. His later works have a less troubled and more harmonious air than his earlier paintings.