Cosmopolitan Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art 1 2 Cosmopolitan Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery 31 August – 7 December 2019 1 Published by the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery University of Western Australia on the occasion of the exhibition Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art Curated by Sally Quin Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery 31 August – 7 December 2019 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-925793-17-8 The book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. No illustration in this publication may be reproduced without the permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Catalogue design: Clare McFarlane Printer: Scott Print Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery The University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Highway Crawley Western Australia 6009 Front cover: Ethel Spowers, Harvest, 1932, linocut, 19.3 x 29.1 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, University Senate Grant, 1982 Frontispiece: Adelaide Perry, Woman pilot, 1931, oil on composition board, 49.5 x 39.3 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, McGillivray Bequest Fund, 1983 Sybil Craig, Cyclamen, 1932, oil on canvas board, 37.5 x 29.6 cm, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia, CCWA 242 2 3 4 Contents Introduction ........ 7 Paris/London/Sydney/ Melbourne ........ 15 Other modernisms: the case of Western Australia ........ 31 List of works ........ 42 Acknowledgements ........ 46 5 6 Introduction The decade of the 1930s in Australia was framed by two cataclysmic events – the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 which precipitated the Great Depression, and entry into the Second World War in September 1939. Bearing witness to the widespread poverty and social unrest of the Depression, as well as the rise of totalitarian regimes of the extreme right in Europe, prompted a heightened consciousness of global affairs and a movement towards the ideologies of the left amongst many Australians: democracy was in crisis, capitalism had failed, and nothing short of complete transformation was required.1 For many artists working in this environment art invariably acted as a political statement, an expression of values. In the late 1930s Norwegian-born Harald Vike produced a series of portraits in Perth’s public library (figs 1 & 2). In the Reading Room, Perth Library, 1937 (fig. 1), shows a woman reading intently, the red beret leaving no doubt as to her (or Vike’s) left-wing political leanings. Image left: The library provided books and newspapers, but also Fig. 1. Harald Vike, In the Reading Room, Perth Library, 1937, oil on shelter, warmth, and a sense of community in troubled canvas on cardboard, 30.3 x 25.3 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, McGillivray and Sir Claude Hotchin Bequest times, particularly for the poor and unemployed. Funds, 1986 In contrast, Surrealism became the chosen means by which artist James Gleeson confronted what he Image right: 2 Fig. 2. Harald Vike, Reader (Perth Library), c. 1937, oil on canvas on described as the ‘lurking terror’ of impending war. In board, 26 x 21 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, The three dancers, 1938 (fig. 4), disembodied eyes, ears, University Senate Grant, 2013 7 8 Image left: Fig. 3. James Gleeson, Madonna and child, 1939, oil on canvas on composition board, 50.5 x 36.5 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, Gift of Sir James and Lady Cruthers, 2004 © Gleeson/O’Keefe Foundation Image right: Fig. 4. James Gleeson, The three dancers, 1938, oil on canvas on board, 37 x 39 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, The Ruby Rose Maller Fine Arts Acquisition Fund, 1997 © Gleeson/O’Keefe Foundation umbilical cords, and genitalia join in a macabre dance. The dynamism of the machine age might also act as a In Madonna and child, 1939 (fig. 3), a subject normally stimulus to creative practice. In Frank Hinder’s The Strath associated with wholesome and life-giving succour is leaving the quay, 1938 (fig. 5), the ‘Strath’ refers to ships rendered distorted and fearsome. completed in 1931, the Stathnaver and Strathaird, built by P&O to service immigration from Europe to Australia, While Gleeson’s response to the turmoil of the times and as tourist liners. Hinder expressed the power and took an anarchic, and highly personal form, Vike beauty of these machines through Cubist methods. The sought to capture the dignity of ordinary people in main curvilinear form suggests the outline of the ship, a comprehensible, realist style. Working from Perth and the semi-organic ‘gills’ in the upper right may allude (Vike) and Sydney (Gleeson), both artists were affected to the aspiration of modern technology to be like nature by an increasingly connected global scene: Gleeson itself. In a rather different allusion to modern modes of was able to understand Surrealist concepts without travel, Adelaide Perry’s Woman pilot, 1931 (frontispiece), travelling to Paris or London, through the art journals captures the casual glamour of female pilots of the and books available at Sydney Teachers’ College; 1930s, such as Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, and Vike’s choice of subject matter was informed by Australia’s Nancy Bird Walton, whose feats were widely socialist imagery and texts circulating internationally celebrated in the media. in the 1930s. Artists were variously motivated by ideological and Contemporary artists were increasingly enmeshed philosophical beliefs; a desire to reflect the changing in the expansion of technologies such as print and world around them; and a primary interest in film, and advances in various modes of transportation aesthetics. The wide dissemination of visual imagery which made the flow of information faster and more in the form of prints, journals and books, and new economical. Gleeson and Vike developed their opportunities for travel to the centres of European forms of aesthetic protest as a result of the very modernism, led to experimentation with a range of cosmopolitanism which the world of global capital artistic styles in Australia: namely realism (often linked had made possible. to social issues), Surrealism, and Cubism. 9 Fig. 5. Frank Hinder, The Strath leaving the quay, 1938, watercolour and pencil on paper, 39.5 x 50 cm, The University of Western Australia Art Collection, University Senate Grant, 1980 10 Printmaking as an original art form also developed As Smith concludes, all of these ‘tendencies … contain in the 1920s and 1930s, and was consumed in elements of truth’,7 opting for what he describes as the multiple formats: Margaret Preston (fig. 9) created ‘Adopt, adapt, transform!’ approach: designs for the covers of ‘The Home’ magazine and other household journals; Eric Thake produced a Variably or consistently, certain artists pushed series of dynamic and inventive bookplates (figs 6, their practices beyond imitative adoptions of 7, 8). Both Preston and Thake moved between such imported style, through adaptations to local design-centred work and more traditional media such needs and tastes, to arrive at transformations as painting – but, in essence, these divisions were which asserted their own, independent value. becoming less relevant, artists adapting their methods Different from previous Australian styles, and to both popular and more rarefied contexts. And the distinct from international Modernism, they viewing public became increasingly familiar with such were at the same time dependent on both.8 alternative ways of viewing art. This essay traces these processes with special Cosmopolitan brings together these diverse works attention given to artworks which appear to from the 1930s, held in two collections – the University demonstrate transformation, using categories of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers suggested by Smith: firstly, the introduction of Collection of Women’s Art.3 While a relatively modest strangeness (‘making Australia strange’) in art survey in terms of size, the exhibition captures of the period; and, secondly, ‘Emigres bearing something of the eclectic, and indeed elusive, Expressionism’, in the work produced by German artist, character of progressive visual culture of the 1930s. Elise Blumann, in Perth in 1939.9 When writing about Australian art of this period one Though in this essay discussion of global interactions is inclined to resort to qualifying statements, due to focuses principally on those between Australia and the stylistic and conceptual diversity of art produced, Europe, new research relating to the evolution of as well as the exigencies of international and local modernism in non-western cultures alerts us to influence. Particularly problematic in discussing the the coexistence of multiple interpretations, and 1920s and 1930s is the perceived dependence of transformations, of modernist styles and concepts.10 Australian art on European models. The truly cosmopolitan and disparate nature of art of this period, rails against the reductive approaches Terry Smith has summarised the key theoretical that have so often framed a discussion of Australian approaches to this issue: the first relates to the ‘local- modernism. Art of the 1930s was the product of a international mismatch’, that is the time-lag between complex range of encounters leading to works which, the advent of modernism in Europe and settler though often difficult to define and sometimes societies like Australia, which renders the art ‘imitative unresolved, offer glimpses into a new artistic … and always too late’.4 A counter argument suggests consciousness. that: ‘Modernism in Australian art is not so much a lesser version of an international style that originated elsewhere, rather, it is a differentart.