Four Lives in Art couldn’t be more different to the last biography I read, but the undertaking is the same: to rescue from obscurity Australians whose lives have been overlooked. And though the reasons are different, like Dundalli in Warrior, the four women in Awakening present challenges to those who would reconstruct their lives.
Anyway, it’s an interesting book. Elsewhere, I have read and heard about the impact of WW1 on Australia’s view of itself. In the wake of the war it became more introverted, more nationalistic, and less welcoming of new ideas. For the women in this book it meant that there was little alternative but to escape the stifling conservatism by going overseas, and that’s what they did, embracing opportunities for innovation and change. At the same time, they took with them the Australian sense of independence and egalitarianism, which contributed to their success in new milieus.
Dora Ohlfsen (1867-1948) was a modernist artist who began her overseas training as a pianist in Vienna, but abandoned music for sculpture, and was very influenced by her time in Rome. In particular, she created medallions, which – evidenced by the full colour illustrations in the book – were exquisite. (You can see some of them here at Museum Victoria though predictably they are all Anzac medallions). Not much of her work remains, but in the Art Gallery of NSW you can see The Awakening of Australian Art (1907), a detail from which is on the cover of the book, and other bronze work, the most beautiful of which is, I think Ceres (1910). The Art Gallery, however, turned out to cause major disappointment when (after a return visit to Melbourne for family reasons) she was commissioned to design a bas-relief to adorn the entrance, but it all fell through in the end. Her competition entry to design the sculptural decorations for the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne was not successful either.
Louise Dyer (1884-1962) was the brains behind the Lyrebird Press, rescuing early music from oblivion by publishing it in scholarly editions. A great philanthropist who also worked indefatigably on her projects, she used her wealth and privilege to produce, amongst other works, a 12-volume edition of the Œuvres complètes of François Couperin (1668-1733) in the wake of post-war aversion to German music. By the 1920s she had realised the cultural limitations of life in Melbourne, and its nationalism was stifling her attempts to promote new music such as that of Bela Bartók. She had found London no better, but Paris was the mecca for musicians and it was there that she was able to support the new interest in early French music. She was successful in many projects, the most spectacular of which, the authors say, was the 14th century Montpellier Codex of polyphonic works which she had transcribed into modern notation with notes and commentary, the edition enclosed in panels of Australian Blackwood. It is dispiriting to read that despite her extraordinary success and prestige in the world of French arts, she was virtually ignored when she made a return visit to Melbourne. This book is worth reading, if only to become aware of how Australian parochialism deadened cultural life in this period.
Clarice Zander (1893-1958) was a publicist. Like many whose lives were blighted by WW1, she was widowed early though it appears to have been a merciful release because her husband came back from the war as a changed man, and the disastrous soldier settlement scheme exacerbated his drinking. Clarice supported her daughter with a variety of jobs but found her métier when she was appointed manager of the New Gallery in Melbourne. The artist Will Dyson became her soul-mate although she never married him, and for reasons of discretion, she followed him on a later ship to London. Her promised job fell through, but she was a resilient woman and with Dyson’s connections and her own indomitable spirit she soon established herself in freelance journalism and eventually art promotion.
Once again, Australia let its talent down when she returned home to care for her ailing mother. In 1932 she organised an ambitious exhibition of contemporary art brought from London, but there were few sales and the costs were higher than she had anticipated. Most discouraging was the reluctance to embrace the modern in art, and market protectionism added to the cost of anything imported. Still, more than 5000 people visited her 1933 exhibition of paintings and sculpture at Newspaper House in Melbourne, notable because she brought art and design together for the first time with the inclusion of textiles, furniture and applied art from Cynthia Reed’s gallery. But as in Melbourne, at successive shows in other states local galleries failed to buy Australian artists who had succeeded overseas but were not well-known at home, and most them were returned to England unsold.
She also organised the first TV program from the Academy, but the advent of war, and the bombing of the Royal Academy in particular, brought her back to Australia. Where – depressingly – her career came to a halt.
But when an opportunity came to travel to New York, then enjoying a boom, Mary took it. Within months she was giving lectures, and before long her lectures were being published by Nortons. She was not an apologist or polemicist for contemporary art but rather a progressive educator, communicating complex trends in jargon-free prose. She seems to have fulfilled the role that the young Robert Hughes played when he brought The Shock of the New to television screens in the 1980s. What a pity Australia couldn’t keep her!
Awakening as a really interesting book which augments the literature of art history in our country.
Louise Dyer was clearly a very interesting woman. But, they all sound interesting. So many stories to be told yet, I bet.