Grace Crowley

• Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA | 27 July – 28 October 2007
• Hawkesbury Regional Art Gallery, Windsor, NSW | 21 December 2007 – 17 February 2008
• Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, VIC | 19 March – 18 May 2008
• Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA | 14 June – 21 September 2008
• Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart, TAS | 2 October – 23 November 2008

In April 1926, soon after their arrival in France on their first trip overseas, Grace Crowley and her close friend Anne Dangar made a pilgrimage to Cézanne’s studio at Aix-en-Provence. Cézanne and the pursuit of modern art was the reason for Dangar’s going to France, and Crowley had followed her friend, intending to study at one of the more conservative art schools. The next four years in Paris were to change Crowley’s opinion of modern art. In 1930 she returned to Australia as a champion of modernism, establishing her own art school in Sydney and subsequently becoming one of the first Australian artists to paint purely abstract works.

Born in 1890 near Barraba in northern New South Wales into a well-off family of graziers there was nothing in her upbringing to have set Crowley upon a course of becoming an artist. She later wryly commented that her father ‘taught me what to look for in prize cattle but unlike Picasso’s father taught me nothing about art’.Crowley chose an unconventional path for herself, rejecting marriage in favour of an independent life as an artist. A complex personality, she was impeccably mannered and softly spoken yet her art was amongst the most radical of its time.

Crowley’s earliest training was at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, where she studied full-time between 1915 and 1918. She excelled as a student, becoming a favourite of Ashton’s and in 1918 succeeded Elioth Gruner as head teacher at the school. While the impact of modern art was felt increasingly in Sydney during the 1920s, Crowley remained aligned with the traditionalists, painting landscapes and rural scenes in a soft impressionistic manner. Her bucolic Ena and the turkeys of 1924 continues the sentimental genre of a bush childhood and was highly praised by the critics when first exhibited.

During the 1920s Paris was the undisputed centre of the art world and was to be the setting for Crowley’s wholehearted conversion to modern art. Cautious by nature, Crowley had taken some time to be convinced. Dangar recalled Crowley’s response to Modigliani: ‘A little Australian friend who has bravely tried to withstand the allurements of that unpopular, so called ‘modern art’ came and stood beside me. “When I first saw that picture,” she said “I thought, “this is not art – the artist is mad,” each time I see it I am more and more convinced this IS art – it is I who am mad’’.’

Early in 1927 Crowley enrolled at André Lhote’s Academy in the rue d’Odessa in the Latin Quarter. Lhote was one of the original cubists and his academy was considered one of the most advanced art schools in Paris, attracting many foreign students. Crowley flourished under Lhote’s instruction. Her work was transformed by his teaching as she applied his methods of simplifying form into geometric shapes and using the proportions of the golden mean in the composition. Sailors and models c. 1928 was the result of an ambitious exercise set by Lhote. Crowley recalled that for two weeks Lhote would pose models in the mornings from which the students made life drawings. These individual studies were then to be used as the basis for a multi-figure painting. Crowley’s Sailors and models has been constructed according to the geometry of the golden mean. Every figure is carefully placed along an internal axis, with the head of the standing sailor at the apex of a triangle. Lhote’s emphasis on pictorial construction was a revelation for Crowley: ‘For the first time I heard about dynamic symmetry and the section d’or – that it was necessary to make a PLAN for a painting of many figures as an architect does for a building and THEN construct your personages upon it.’

In Paris Crowley completed several elegant female portraits including Portrait of Lucie Beynis c.1929 and Portrait study 1929. Crowley’s exquisite draughtsmanship is evident in her Portrait of a woman c.1928, the work showing both her thorough academic training in anatomy and Lhote’s emphasis on geometry: the figure’s contours simplified into straight and curved lines, the torso contained within the upright of the chair’s back which divides the composition into a golden rectangle. Crowley studied with Lhote from 1927 until mid 1929, and in the summer of 1928 attended his landscape painting school in Mirmande in the south of France with Anne Dangar and fellow expatriate Dorrit Black. She travelled frequently – with Anne Dangar to England and Ireland in 1927 and to Italy in 1928 and with Dorrit Black to Holland and Belgium in 1929.

In 1929 Crowley contacted the leading cubist painter and theoretician Albert Gleizes asking for lessons which she intended to transmit back to Dangar, who was already back in Australia. While Crowley only had a few lessons with Gleizes his influence upon her was to prove profound. Crowley’s meeting with Gleizes was also the catalyst for Dangar to return to France where she became the mainstay of Gleizes’s artist colony at Moly-Sabata. The ensuing correspondence from Dangar to Crowley during the 1930s was a vital conduit, transmitting Gleizes’s theories to Crowley and later influencing the development of her art towards abstraction.

In 1930 Crowley reluctantly returned to Sydney. Her family, who had been providing her with a living allowance, had decided that it was time for her to take on some family responsibilities. On her return Crowley was one of the most experienced modernist artists in Australia. Her Portrait of Gwen Ridley 1930 is one of the first cubist paintings done in Australia and in 1932 she held a small solo exhibition of her paintings done in France. She recalled that her ‘ultra-modern’ works were considered to be very extraordinary and generally not understood. Crowley briefly taught at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre before establishing the Crowley–Fizelle School at 215a George Street in Sydney with painter Rah Fizelle in late 1932. The school became a focal point for a small group of artists including Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder who painted together on the weekends and became increasingly interested in abstraction. One of Crowley’s key works of this time is her portrait of Ralph Balson, The artist and his model 1938. She has based the composition upon a series of overlapping rectangles and circles and flattened the forms into areas of pure colour and pattern, exploring the abstract rather than representational qualities of the work.

In 1938, after the closure of the Crowley–Fizelle School, Crowley and Balson began painting together exclusively in her city studio. From this time onwards their work became ever closer stylistically and they began working towards creating purely abstract paintings. In this they were influenced by Gleizes, as well as by Mondrian’s theories and works which they knew of through publications.

By 1940 Crowley and Balson had begun painting totally abstract works. While both Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin had briefly produced abstract paintings based on ‘colour music’ theories as early as 1919, and artists such as Sam Ateyo had also experimented with abstraction in the 1930s, once Crowley and Balson had made the leap into abstraction, their commitment to abstract art remained absolute. In 1941 Balson held the first exhibition in Australia of abstract paintings, and the following year Crowley exhibited her first abstract work. While the earliest of Crowley’s geometric abstracts have been lost or were possibly destroyed by the artist, a small group of works from 1947 shows how far Crowley’s work had developed. These works are entirely constructed from the elements of form, line and colour without reference to representational elements. In Abstract painting 1947 Crowley creates the illusion of translucent planes of colour rotating around a central point, contrasting intense pinks and greens to create visual tension, the composition held together in a dynamic equilibrium with the linear elements creating a circular movement.

Throughout the 1940s Crowley’s and Balson’s avant-garde geometric abstracts were poorly received in an environment that strongly favoured the representational and narrative work of artists such as William Dobell. It was not until the 1950s, when Crowley was in her sixties, that a public gallery exhibited her abstract works. Yet Crowley’s geometric paintings from the early 1950s are arguably her finest achievement. They show her superb understanding of colour to create extraordinary lively and sophisticated abstract compositions. Abstract painting 1952 is one of her most ‘hard-edge’ geometric works, a series of overlapping rectangles in a shallow pictorial space jostling against each other, the forms appearing to be in continual movement yet anchored by the pink square at the front of the picture plane, and the dense black rectangle that lies behind. Crowley’s late abstracts can be seen as the climax of her long journey to realise a universal art based on the harmonious relationship of colour and form.

Crowley’s long artistic journey over five decades from painter of traditional landscapes to avant-garde abstracts was extraordinary. While Crowley is still best known for her cubist paintings of the 1920s and 1930s, Grace Crowley: being modern includes works that have never before been exhibited and reveals the full extent of Crowley’s contribution to Australian art.

Elena Taylor
Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

Becoming an artist –Australian pastoralism

Crowley’s long journey to becoming one of the most modern of Australian artists had an inauspicious beginning. Born into a wealthy family of graziers who had pioneered European settlement in the Barraba region of northwest New South Wales, Crowley was brought up on the family property. Nothing in her background of hardy pioneers would have set her upon the course of becoming an artist and she recalled that growing up her ‘contact with anyone interested in art was NIL’.¹ That she became an artist at all, let alone one of the leaders of the avant-garde in Australia, is remarkable.

The Crowley family traces its origins in Australia to John Crowley, a convict who arrived in 1803, transported for life for stealing a sheep. His son William took up a large run, Cobbadah, in the Nandewar Ranges near the township of Barraba, north of Tamworth. In 1845 William married Emma Baines and their fifth son, Henry, born in 1854, was Crowley’s father.² He married Elizabeth Bridger in 1878 and they set up home at The Forest, close to the main homestead at Cobbadah Station. However, the rural depression of the 1890s, together with the division of William Crowley’s estate among his many children, severely affected the family’s fortunes. As Crowley recalled, ‘When I was born things were tough in the country. Graziers those days had lots of land and fresh air and that’s about all’.³ Henry had built a slab house consisting of two large rooms connected by a breezeway at The Forest where all of their children were born.

Grace Adela Williams Crowley was born on 28 May 1890, the eldest daughter and fourth of five children. In 1893, the family moved to Cobbadah Station, which had been purchased by Henry in partnership with one of his brothers after their father’s death. A forceful personality, Henry was to clash with Crowley as she grew up. In contrast, Crowley’s mother was a gentle, softly spoken woman, who Crowley remembered as ‘always sewing, baking, washing, mangling, ironing, getting ready for visitors, getting hens, gardening etc., etc. and et cetera’.⁴ Crowley and her sister were brought up never to raise their voices in anger or in laughter, and all her life Crowley was known for her genteel demeanour. Yet there was another side to Crowley and, while her niece recalled that there was nothing obviously rebellious about either her appearance or her manner, she was considered the rebel of her family.⁵ She was also known for her fiery temper, of which her family learnt to be wary, and that ‘when she went off she could really go off’.⁶

In 1899 the partnership between Henry and William Crowley was dissolved and Henry purchased Glen Riddle, a property of 15 000 acres on the southern side of Barraba. Reflecting the family’s increasing prosperity, a large brick homestead was built, into which the family moved around 1900. Crowley’s upbringing was conventional: she and her younger sister Florence were educated at home by a governess and the family observed the manners and mores of their class.

Crowley recalled that as a child her first drawings were done with white chalk on the smooth side of an old square brown tank behind the kitchen. Later, she would draw the animals around the farm, and a drawing of her father’s prize bull was framed and hung in his office. Crowley’s early efforts were clearly of some pride to her family and, around 1903, her mother sent one of her pen-and-ink drawings to New Idea, where it was reproduced in the children’s page and won a prize. According to Crowley: ‘encouraged by this success my Mother forwarded it on to “Gossip” who conducted a page in The Stock and Station Journal for his opinion. “Gossip” showed it to Souter (do you remember Souter’s cats?) who said, “Your little girl has the gift” and advised an art training’.⁷

Souter’s opinion was possibly enough for the family to decide that Crowley’s talent should be encouraged or at least indulged. When, in 1905, Crowley and Florence were sent to Sydney for a year of school at Methodist Ladies College in Burwood, Crowley’s clergyman uncle, Archibald Crowley, encouraged her parents to allow her to attend classes one day a week at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. For her to be allowed to do so, Archibald also had to enrol in the classes and accompany Crowley to and from the school.

While Ashton was later to play a major part in Crowley’s development as an artist, and become a close friend, she remembered that her early time at Ashton’s ‘had bored me to death as a school kid’.⁸ She had wanted to paint pictures, but Ashton started beginners in the cast room, where they spent many hours making precisely rendered drawings of plaster casts. Crowley only attended the school for two terms before returning to Glen Riddle in 1906, where she was now expected to take on a greater share of household duties. Crowley was clearly frustrated as, although the drawing classes had not fired her with enthusiasm to be an artist, neither did she want to take on the expected domestic role. As she recalled:

When I returned to Glen Riddle I did no more drawing. I felt deflated – or was it partly because my Mother believed firmly that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’ and the best way to introduce us to ‘household duties’ was to sack the maid! Anyway, our time was more than full of ‘woman’s role’.⁹

Ashton had been invited to visit Glen Riddle in 1906 and returned in 1909 for a painting trip when Crowley was nineteen. Ashton’s visit revived Crowley’s interest in art and she accompanied him on his early morning painting trips when she too ‘became deeply engrossed in the attempt to seize the “momentary effect of light”’.¹⁰ However, it was several more years before Crowley returned to Sydney and enrolled as a student with Ashton again.

The date of Crowley starting at the Sydney Art School has been variously given as 1912 or 1915. Crowley herself created this confusion, giving the date as 1912 in correspondence with Daniel Thomas and later correcting it to 1915 for the catalogue of his 1975 Project 4: Grace Crowley exhibition.¹¹ She later conceded that ‘events between 1912 and 1915 are difficult to place in continuity, and I doubt if ALL that time was spent in study at the school, nor would ALL the time have been spent at G.R. [Glen Riddle]’.¹²

In late 1914 she became engaged to her first cousin Gordon, who owned a remote property between Narrabri and Barraba. Soon after their engagement, Gordon enlisted for the First World War, but just before he was due to sail, he was invalided out of the army and he returned to his property. Around this time Crowley broke off the engagement for reasons unknown.¹³

What is clear is that in 1915 she was enrolled as a full-time day student at the Sydney Art School and ‘certainly not with the approval of my parents’.¹⁴ However, this time:

I became enthusiastic about the anatomical head and figure, and still more absorbed in the nude figure when I entered the life-class – but then I was 8 years older and able to appreciate the master’s relentless insistence on the accurate ‘training the eye’. The structure of the human figure absolutely fascinated me so I guess I paid more attention to that sort of thing than any of the other students in the Sydney Art School when I was there. We had the skeleton, and the anatomical figure, and I’d trot along to the museum and make drawings there, hands, that sort of thing.¹⁵

Yet already at this early stage Crowley was aware of the limitations of Ashton’s teaching, which is significant in light of her later preoccupation with pictorial construction: ‘J.R.A did not teach composition. Once returning from Glen Riddle with an effort I had been struggling with of men mustering horses, Norman Lindsay gave me a valuable lesson on how to organise the group of horses … At that time N. Lindsay god to art students!’.¹⁶

Crowley’s first teacher at the school was Mildred Lovett, who was soon after replaced by Elioth Gruner, at that time a rising star in the Sydney art world. Crowley quickly established herself as an outstanding student and a favourite of Ashton’s and in 1916 had a drawing selected for the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists, of which Ashton was president.

During a sketching trip to Gerringong, near Wollongong, in late 1914, Crowley met Anne Dangar and began a friendship that was to play a major part in both of their lives.¹⁷ Their initial meeting was inauspicious. Crowley later recalled that every night before she went to bed, Dangar hid her money from Crowley in her shoe. Dangar’s first impressions of Crowley also were not promising: ‘she looked as though she wouldn’t say BOO to a goose’.¹⁸ In 1915 Dangar joined the day class at the Sydney Art School, as did Dorrit Black, and by the following year the three friends were living together in a flat in Potts Point, then moving together to Craigielea in High Street, Neutral Bay, sometime later. During these student years Crowley acquired her nickname ‘Smudge’ by which she remained known to her close friends.

In mid 1918 Gruner resigned his position at the Sydney Art School to enlist for the First World War and Crowley was appointed in his place. Crowley was a popular teacher, yet despite her diminutive size could also be somewhat intimidating. A former student, Karna Birmingham, related her impressions of Crowley: ‘you pattering down the “antique room” in those little dancing pump shoes you used to wear – your hair in a marvellous bun, all smoothly swathed … If you only knew with what awe we looked at you, and your drawings done in one beautiful flowing line’.¹⁹ From about 1920 Ashton’s failing health meant that his visits to the classes became less frequent and Dangar was appointed as an assistant teacher to help Crowley. She later recalled that between the two of them they carried the school.²⁰

Throughout this time Crowley continued to visit Glen Riddle, which provided the main subjects for her painting. While very few works from this period remain, the titles of her early exhibited works – such as Waiting for the ploughing c.1918, Plough horses c.1919 and Milking yard c.1919 – indicate her main interests. Sydney also provided interesting subjects, including the excavations at White Bay, and she was fascinated by the movement of men, horses and carts there. The drawing Emptying carts, White Bay c.1921 is one such study and appears to be used as the basis for a later painting.²¹ One of her earliest paintings, Horses pulling plough1920, shows Crowley working in the conventional late-impressionistic manner popular at the time. Similarly, the celebratory rural themes of her work accorded with the nationalistic mood that prevailed in Australia following the First World War. Having grown up in the country, all her life Crowley felt a deep affinity with such subject matter, and she continued to draw at Glen Riddle until the late 1930s.

While the first ripples of modernism had been felt in Sydney from as early as 1915, Crowley did not respond to these new developments. It is not known whether Crowley saw the 1915 or 1916 Royal Art Society annual exhibitions in which Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin exhibited their post-impressionist works. She did, however, know Roy de Maistre, a fellow student at the Sydney Art School in 1916, ‘and to anyone who wanted to listen, he would talk about colour’.²² In 1919 Crowley accompanied Ashton to the opening of de Maistre’s and Wakelin’s experimental and controversial Colour in art exhibition in which the artists exhibited abstracted landscapes based on colour–music principles. Crowley remembered Julian as ‘strongly disapproving’ and Howard’s [Julian’s son] critique in the Sun, as ‘scathing’.²³ As Ashton’s head teacher, it is likely that Crowley would have shared his negative assessment. While modernism was slowly making an appearance in Sydney, in these early years Crowley remained firmly aligned to the mainstream in art.

In mid 1923 Crowley resigned her teaching position at the Sydney Art School to concentrate on preparing works for the recently re-established travelling scholarship of the Society of Artists. She returned to Glen Riddle to work, a decision that she was to later regret as ‘the domestic situation had become impossible’.²⁴ Unfortunately none of the works that she submitted are known to have survived and are not known by reproduction, although the principal work, The milking yard c.1923, ‘was inspired by the familiar sight of a man milking, surrounded by cows’.²⁵

Crowley believed that, as head teacher of Ashton’s school and with his support, she was favourite to win the scholarship. The awarding of the scholarship to de Maistre was unexpected and a shattering blow to Crowley.²⁶ Apparently the votes of George Lambert and Thea Proctor, both influential and pro-modernist artists, had given the scholarship to de Maistre, and Ashton was outraged. In a letter to Sydney Ure Smith he accused Proctor of ‘bulldozing’ Lambert to support de Maistre and resigned his presidency of the Society of Artists in protest.²⁷ While bitter at the time, and believing that de Maistre had won because of his society connections, in retrospect Crowley considered that the loss of the scholarship was ‘a deliverance rather than a calamity otherwise I would have studied at the Slade London, like other scholarship winners’.²⁸ Instead, Crowley, through the enthusiasm of Dangar, set her sights on Paris. This decision was to have far-reaching consequences, introducing her to more advanced forms of modern art than prevailed in England at the time.

Soon after the loss of the scholarship, Crowley and Myra Cocks, a former student who had also submitted works for the 1923 travelling scholarship, briefly visited Melbourne, where, on the suggestion of Julian Ashton, they attended the classes of Bernard Hall at the National Gallery School. Crowley and Cocks were not impressed by Hall and apparently Hall was not impressed by them: ‘me thinks B.H. “not amused” – neither were we – deadly teacher. Met two delightful people Geo. Bell and his wife, also Daryl Lindsay’.²⁹ Crowley’s time in Melbourne and contact with these artists did not seem to make any lasting impression on her, although in the 1930s she was to exhibit with Bell and the Contemporary Art Group in Melbourne.

Returning to Sydney, Crowley would have been aware that the tide was gradually turning in favour of modernism. Lambert’s return to Australia in 1921 was an important event for many Sydney artists and his public support for modern British art has been considered as a milestone in the wider acceptance of modernism.³⁰ In 1924 Wakelin returned to Sydney after two years overseas where he had studied the works of Cézanne, an event which was a watershed for Dangar. At his lecture at the Sydney Art School he displayed his recent paintings for the first time, and Crowley recorded that ‘Wakelin returned from abroad head filled with Cézanne … the walls were filled with the best paintings he has done before or since, Anne and I much impressed by paintings’.³¹ Dangar later recalled that ‘[Cézanne] had shaken me so much that for two years I put all the money that I earned (8 pounds per week) into the savings bank to come to Europe to study “modern art” in the manner of Cézanne’.³² Crowley, however, was not convinced: ‘I remember her [Anne’s] interest in Cézanne’s theories of pictorial construction. However, J.R.A [Ashton] did not share it with her … Indeed at that time neither did I.’³³

That Crowley did not respond in the same way as Dangar is hardly surprising given her admiration and friendship with Ashton and her position as head teacher and stalwart of the Sydney Art School until 1923. From 1920 her works were also being well received. She included seven paintings and four drawings in the 1921 Exhibition of paintings in oil and water colours and drawings in black and white by eleven Australian women, alongside Dangar and Black, and her paintings were the highest priced. A pencil portrait drawing, Study c.1921, was reproduced in the catalogue of the 1922 Society of Artists annual exhibition. In 1924 she participated in the Exhibition of work by the younger group of Australian artists and her painting Ena and the turkeys 1924 was reproduced in colour in Art in Australiaand singled out by William Moore in his review: ‘From a technical standard the works of Crowley were among the most proficient. She is one of the few who are painting outback subjects and should produce something distinctive in this phase of art.’³⁴

The sentimental theme of a bush childhood of Ena and the turkeys is reminiscent of Lambert’s A bush idyll 1896. Crowley’s young niece Eena is depicted at her brother’s property near Barraba; the distant landscape of gum trees shimmers in the light of the Australian summer. Yet the rhythmic semicircle of the turkey’s fans is an early indication of Crowley’s fascination with geometric forms.³⁵

Despite having lost the travelling scholarship, Crowley remained determined to further her studies overseas and decided to accompany Dangar to Paris. She was also beginning to experiment with post-impressionism – in 1925 Crowley painted a work that in its subject and manner departed from her earlier works. Mary and the baby 1925 is Crowley’s first major figurative work, and uses large areas of contrasting high-key colour. There is an increased emphasis on design, with the curve of the umbrella being a dominant element in the composition. While the subject matter is somewhat sentimental and traditional, it is clear that Crowley was cautiously responding to some of the changes occurring in art in Sydney. That Crowley was pleased with this work is borne out by the fact that she took it to Paris with her.

On 17 January 1926, after a farewell party hosted by the Sydney Art School students, Crowley and Dangar boarded the steamer Ville de Strasbourg bound for Marseille. Crowley left Australia at the age of thirty-five with a modest reputation as an artist and teacher and a solid academic training in draughtsmanship. Many years later she summed up this first phase of her life: ‘I was in Australia a post-impressionist, and considered quite sane.’³⁶

The revelation of Paris – learning cubism

Paris was a joyous revelation to Crowley: ‘The lace shops … the antique shops … the cheese shops … the markets … the shops that sold reproductions, and O! ye gods! the bookshops.The bookshops in Paris are a paradise upon earth.’¹ After a short stay with friends in the south of France, and a visit to Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, Crowley and Dangar arrived in Paris in the spring of 1926 and moved into a pension in the Latin Quarter.

Paris was the setting for Crowley’s wholehearted conversion to modernism and the beginning of her lifelong identification with the avant-garde. She came into contact with some of the leading artists and theorists of the cubist movement and was part of the artistic milieu in Paris at the time when it was the undisputed centre of modern art. Yet, on her arrival, she and Dangar sought to enrol in one of the conservative art schools. After visiting the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian (where Ashton had studied), they began working atelier libre at Académie Colarossi where they had access to a life model but no formal instruction.

Still searching for a teacher, at the 1926 Spring Salon, Crowley and Dangar were impressed by a portrait by Louis Roger, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts, with whom they arranged to take private lessons. Dangar and Crowley continued their studies with Roger throughout 1926; however, by spring of the next year, Crowley had become disillusioned. In a letter to Ashton she wrote that she had gained ‘a much finer “finish” in portraiture’ but ‘apart from that I’ve gained nothing (from him), but I don’t expect to, and didn’t want to’.² Her low estimation of Roger may also have been influenced by the fact that a portrait completed under his tuition was rejected for the 1927 Spring Salon, while her Australian work Mary and the baby was accepted.

After a year in Paris, Crowley had become receptive to modern art, writing to Ashton that ‘Paris is full of rotten shows of pseudo-modern work, but my word, you come across the real stuff now and then – modern, mind you, the sincerity and force of which makes you sit up and think’.³ By early 1927 she had set her sights on studying at the Académie Lhote in the rue d’Odessa, reporting to Ashton that Dangar had already left Roger and that ‘I am going to Lhote’s myself in a fortnight’s time. His composition interests me tremendously … Lhote’s is really a very, very serious hard-working and sincere school, and I hope to learn much from it’.⁴ André Lhote’s academy, established in 1922, was regarded at the time as one of the leading modern schools in Paris and attracted many foreign  students, particularly English and American ones. While Lhote was one of the original cubists, exhibiting in the 1911 Salon des Indépendants and in the 1912 Salon de la Section d’Or, his work remained essentially representational and rooted in Cézanne while incorporating cubist motifs and techniques. His teaching emphasised pictorial composition, the simplification of forms into basic geometry and the use of colour to integrate forms.

Crowley’s response to Lhote’s teaching was immediate: ‘To my amazement his teaching was only the confirmation of the WANT I had been feeling for so long without knowing exactly what the want was. I feel rather dazed, but very happy, bewilderingly happy.’⁵ Under Lhote’s instruction, Crowley was to learn an entirely new way of working: ‘For the first time I heard about dynamic symmetry and the section d’or – that it was necessary to make a PLAN for a painting of many figures as an architect does for a building and THEN construct your personages upon it.’⁶ This idea of construction was widespread in much avant-garde art of the postwar years – a reaction to the destruction that the war had brought.

One of the most ambitious exercises set by Lhote for his students was a group composition incorporating several figures. Crowley remembered that Lhote posed ‘a nude model of a woman in the morning: a sailor in the afternoon, or two sailors, and at the end of the fortnight we were to produce a composition from these drawings’, an exercise that, as Mary Eagle has pointed out, is reminiscent of Picasso’s studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907.⁷ Crowley completed quickly drawn studies capturing the pose of the model as well as more finished works such as Composition study: seated female nude c.1928. This drawing shows Crowley’s solid academic training in anatomy and also the influence of Lhote in the simplification of the contours of the figure into straight and curved lines and the volumetric modelling of the forms. Unlike at the Sydney Art School, the model is not shown in isolation but is posed against a background, a technique that Lhote used to encourage his students to link the two through the blending of forms into each other. In another drawing, Study for Sailors and models: sailor with accordion c.1928, Crowley has used some of the array of abstract lines and symbols that were on the wall of Lhote’s studio to emphasise the curve of the sailor’s back and shoulders.

From studies such as these, Crowley completed the large-scale and detailed compositional drawing Study for Sailors and models c.1928, incorporating five figures.⁸ Following Lhote’s teaching to ‘search dimensions of [the] canvas and fit models and surroundings into these’⁹, the entire work is constructed according to the principles of the golden mean (section d’or). The dimension of the paper is a golden rectangle and the underdrawing of intersecting diagonal lines has the same proportions. Crowley carefully placed her figures according to this underdrawing. The centre line of the standing male figure on the right runs along one internal division, while the navel of the female nude on the left is exactly at the point of intersection of the diagonal axis of this rectangle.

In the painting Sailors and models c.1928 Crowley radically altered the composition, changing three of the five figures.

In doing so, she created a triangular composition with the sailor and accordion at its apex. The two female nudes fit within this shape, while another golden rectangle is created by the darker colours around the two sailors on the left. The painting unites the figures in a way that the drawing does not; however, while it is competently composed, the treatment of its subject is not convincing. The work remains a student exercise, and although Crowley never again attempted such a complex arrangement of figures, what she learnt from it nevertheless was pivotal in the development of her painting technique. All her subsequent works made while in France were constructed according to the geometry of the golden mean, and it was the basis of her last figurative works into the late 1930s.

It is only when Crowley began working in a purely abstract manner in the 1940s that the golden mean no longer underpinned her compositions. However, the manner of working – whereby individual elements were carefully considered, arranged and rearranged, inserted or deleted, until the final composition was settled on – still informed Crowley’s abstract paintings. She always acknowledged that to Lhote she owed ‘the first realisation that there were abstract elements which were a vital necessity to be considered in constructing a solid piece of painting’.¹⁰

As a result of Crowley’s increasing interest in pictorial construction, the actual subject of the work became less important to her. While portraiture was to be her main genre, many of her sitters were professional models and her purpose was not to express something of their personality. For Crowley, painting was an essentially rational and objective act, undertaken according to a set of pictorial principles. The artist’s individuality was expressed in their sensitivity to the placement of forms and colours rather than in the work’s subject matter.

After the end of their first semester at Académie Lhote, Crowley and Dangar spent the summer of 1927 in England and Ireland, briefly visiting Douglas Dundas and Rah Fizelle, both former students at the Sydney Art School, in London. By this stage, all thoughts of studying at the Slade had gone. On their return, Crowley and Dangar began the new academic year with Lhote. Much of his teaching involved analysing the works of the old masters and for Crowley it was a revelation to find that many of these works were constructed on a geometrical basis.In particular, Lhote admired Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, whom he considered the originator of abstract form in painting. Ingres’s influence on Crowley is most evident in her Portrait study of late 1928, which draws heavily on his Madame Devaucay de Nittis 1807.¹¹

Crowley adopts Ingres’s device of the round-backed chair and converging diagonals to focus attention upon the sitter’s face. The result is classical, yet modern at the same time. Her Portrait of Lucie Beynis (a professional model who may also have modelled for Portrait study) painted c.1929 is one of Crowley’s most successful works. She creates a dramatic contrast between the black of the dress and the white collar and the strong diagonal movement of the torso with the vertical of the forearm and hand. The sitter’s averted gaze and relaxed pose creates a mood of introspection and languor.

In contrast to the elegance and refinement of Portrait of Lucie Beynis, Crowley’s undated painting of the African model Olga stands out for its raw expressiveness. While based on drawings of the same model, the work is painted with an immediacy unmatched in any other of Crowley’s works. The sitter’s nude torso is rendered massive and solid through simple volumetric forms, her arms and hands simplified to their most basic elements. The broad mask-like features of the woman’s face recall the stylisations of African art. Yet the emphatic ‘s’ contour of the hips is pure Lhote geometric simplification, and the strong diagonals running though the composition are in accordance with the proportions of the golden mean.

In Paris, Crowley and Dangar threw themselves into the life of the Latin Quarter, frequenting such cafés as the Dôme with other students and avidly visiting galleries. They also maintained their links with Australia, corresponding regularly with Ashton and friends from the Sydney Art School and receiving a steady stream of Australian visitors. Many of their letters were published in Undergrowth, the school’s journal, providing valuable first-hand accounts of their experiences in Paris. In December 1927, Crowley and Dangar were joined in Paris by Dorrit Black, who also took an apartment in the Montparnasse district and enrolled at the Académie Lhote.¹²

In the summer of 1928, Crowley, Dangar and Black enrolled in Lhote’s outdoor painting school at the small village of Mirmande, near Montélimar in the Midi region. Lhote had begun writing his treatise on landscape painting, Traité du Paysage, and Crowley recalled that they received the full benefit: ‘We got plenty of Cézanne this time and the early works of cubism – more dynamic symmetry, more painters of landscape, Breughel, Patinir, El Greco etc, anyone who composed landscape, Poussin, Seurat etc’.¹³ Crowley vividly remembered prints of Picasso’s ‘cube-like buildings’, possibly his proto-cubist views of the village of Horta de Ebro from 1909: ‘very familiar to everyone now but terrific for “une nouveau” just then’.¹⁴

In Mirmande Crowley completed several major paintings including the monumental landscape Mirmande 1928, a view of the town seen from below, with the mountain dominating the painting and rising up behind a ‘cubified’ village. While Crowley was once again on familiar ground, painting the landscape outdoors as she had done in Australia, this time she was asked to see it through new eyes. She recalled that ‘When [Lhote] saw my first efforts “en plein air” he remarked scathingly, “Ah l’Impressionisme”, so I set to work to overthrow impressionism’.¹⁵ Her solution was to consider the landscape as though it were a solid piece of sculpture: ‘The hill which had refused to become solid I thought of now as a sphere, trees pointing up to the church on top of the hill were cylinders, the buildings cubes.’¹⁶ The overwhelming influence of Lhote on his students is clear when Crowley’s Mirmande is compared to Dangar’s and Black’s paintings of the same subject. The three artists produced near identical works, each attempting to put in place Lhote’s teachings about colour, form and composition, with Black’s Mirmande c.1928 the most severely geometricised.

Girl with goats 1928 is another ambitious work in which she places a figure within a landscape. Comparing it with the similarly bucolic themed Ena and the turkeys, completed only four years before, shows the extent of the transformation in Crowley’s art. The triangular composition draws our attention to the girl’s face at the apex of one triangle. Following Lhote’s teaching of ‘passage’, forms are harmoniously integrated and blended into each other through the use of a limited palette of earth colours that blend into each other.It is one of Crowley’s most accomplished works, demonstrating how completely Crowley had assimilated Lhote’s lessons on composition. However, the exquisite draughtsmanship and subtle colour harmonies are Crowley’s own, as are the emotional restraint and structural rigour of the composition. The idealised and classical subject of Girl with goats, and many works that Crowley completed with Lhote, accords with the desire for clarity and logic, the ‘return to order’ prevalent in French art after the First World War.

After the end of the summer school, Dangar was to return to Australia as she had used up all her savings.As Crowley continued to receive an allowance from her older brother, she had decided to stay on in France. After Mirmande, Crowley and Dangar travelled through Italy visiting art galleries for several weeks to Naples where Dangar embarked in October 1928. Their parting was an emotional wrench, Dangar recalling:

‘I will never forget that dreadful night at Naples when that one tiny form which was my world was getting farther and farther from me … Oh my friend how long?’ [17]

After a short stay in Ravello on the Amalfi coast, Crowley returned to Paris at the end of December and, together with Black, continued to paint at the Académie Lhote during the winter and spring of 1929. The year 1929 was a breakthrough year for Crowley. In February, Girl with goats and possibly Portrait study were selected for the breakaway Salon des Artistes Français Indépendants and hung alongside Lhote’s work. Her works were well received, with one reviewer commenting: ‘Among the American exhibitors, many of whom are women, there is a definite Lhote influence, and in one case, or perhaps two, those of Mrs Genevieve Sargeant of San Francisco and Grace Crowley’s ‘Girl and goats‘ the pupils are at least as good as the master.’ [18] It also brought Crowley’s work to the attention of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, one of the leading contemporary art galleries in Paris, who wrote to Crowley offering her an exhibition.

Yet by the time the invitation arrived Crowley already knew that she was to return to Australia and did not take up the gallery’s offer. Crowley’s family insisted that she come home to take on some family responsibilities. Crowley’s mother was an invalid, confined to a wheelchair, and much of her care had fallen to Crowley’s sister Florence, by this stage married with young children. It is possible that the Depression, which had begun in 1929, and the worsening economic climate also had a bearing on the family’s decision. Crowley’s niece recalled that there was a significant reorganisation of the family at this time, with family members returning to Cobbadah Station during the Depression.

Back in Australia and unhappy with teaching at the Sydney Art School, in early 1929 Dangar wrote to Crowley about Albert Gleizes, whose work she had admired in Paris. Gleizes was a significant cubist painter and theorist who had exhibited alongside Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Jean Metzinger in the 1911 Salon des Indépendants, which had attracted public attention to cubism for the first time. Gleizes wrote Du Cubisme with Metzinger in 1912 and helped found the Salon de la Section d’Or. Dangar had read his treatise La peinture et ses lois on the journey home and, much impressed, asked Crowley to send to her any of his books she could find.

Crowley’s response was to contact Gleizes directly to ask for lessons for herself and Black. While Crowley’s intention was to transmit his methods of working to Dangar in Sydney, it is also likely that Crowley, anticipating her imminent return to Australia, wanted to absorb as much as possible before she left.In late 1929 she also briefly attended Amédée Ozenfant’s classes at Léger’s school, L’Académie Moderne, yet was disappointed: ‘I felt I should have that experience. But I wasn’t impressed at all.’¹⁹

Gleizes, however, was to make a profound and lasting impression on Crowley. At his Paris studio he gave Crowley and Black a couple of lessons, demonstrating the compositional principles of translation and rotation put forward in La peinture et ses lois: translation was the lateral movement of planes describing space, while rotation was the circular movement of planes around an axis to embody time and rhythm.

By this time Gleizes’s work had become highly abstracted, and the exercises that Crowley did under his instruction prefigure her move into complete abstraction in the 1940s. At this time Crowley completed the series of gouache studies in the National Gallery of Australia collection, in which she experimented with variations of patterns, colours and shapes based on Gleizes’s principles, and the four drawings on tracing paper, including Cubist composition c.1929 in which Crowley developed an abstracted cubist composition.²⁰ This process was later described by another of Gleizes’s students:

The composition of the form for the finished picture reaches its maturity through a number of different stages or tracings, super-imposed upon another; their foundation being the original angular construction. The paper used for drawing upon is the thinnest typewriting paper or tracing paper, so that the drawing underneath is clearly visible.²¹

Gleizes invited Crowley to visit his newly established artist colony at Moly-Sabata in Sablons, on the Rhône, Ardéche, where she could take further lessons with his student Robert Pouyaud and would later be joined by Gleizes. In October 1929, returning from a summer holiday in Italy, Crowley visited Moly-Sabata for approximately three weeks. Gleizes’s work made an immediate impression upon her. She was particularly impressed by two large religious works for the church at Sablons-Serrières, including a coronation of the Virgin (based on Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin in Florence) that were in Gleizes’s studio. In response, Crowley made a drawing, Cubist composition, study for a religious mural c.1929, based on Gleizes’s work. In another drawing on tracing paper she analysed the underlying pictorial structure of her drawing into a series of translated and rotated rectangles within a circular composition. The impact of this system of pictorial construction would be seen in Grace’s next major painting, the Portrait of Gwen Ridley of 1930. However, it would be another decade before Crowley explored the potential of this system to generate totally abstract compositions.

Crowley’s contact with Gleizes was the catalyst for Dangar to return to France the following year to join Gleizes’s colony at Moly-Sabata. While Crowley’s direct contact with Gleizes was limited to the two short meetings in 1929, through her correspondence with Dangar during the 1930s and 1940s, Crowley had privileged access to Gleizes’s teaching and the latest developments in his art. Over time, Gleizes’s influence was to be more profound than that of Lhote on Crowley. Gleizes himself continued to regard Crowley as one of the members of his extended circle, in 1934 urging Dangar to ask Crowley to join the Abstraction–Création group, one of the most important forums for abstraction at this time.²²

Many years later Crowley considered that

1927, 1928, 1929 were the happiest years of my life. Why? Because they were productive. A good staunch courageous pal – Anne – and the feeling I was really getting somewhere with my painting. The ‘woman’s role’ was reduced to a minimum. I could work everyday at my painting and there was the joy of discovering Paris in our own way.²³

Crowley left Marseilles on 5 December 1929 on the RMS Chitral. After almost four years in Paris, Crowley identified herself wholly as part of the ‘modern movement’ and her art had undergone a profound transformation. Through her studies with Lhote and Gleizes, Crowley had a personal connection to some of the original cubists, and through Gleizes had become aware of the development of cubism towards abstraction. While her art remained within the conventions of Lhote’s teaching, she had become receptive to ideas that were only to find their full expression a decade later.

Crowley believed that she was being called back to Australia just at a time when things were starting to happen for her in Paris. There had been the favourable reviews, the invitation to exhibit and the valuable contacts within the art world she made.Her return was a turning point in her life and later she ‘often wondered what would have happened to me if I’d stayed in Paris’.²⁴

Sydney modernist – experimentation with the figure

Crowley’s homecoming was not a happy time and she later recalled that ‘I wished I was dead’.¹ After the stimulation and freedom of Paris, the return to familial obligations and the provincialism of Sydney was stifling.

Crowley and Dangar were briefly reunited in Sydney before Dangar’s return to France. It was the last time the two friends would see each other. After a short stay in Sydney, Crowley returned to Glen Riddle to take up the role of dutiful daughter, one that did not come naturally to her. Crowley was clearly frustrated and bored, as Dangar wrote, ‘of having to sit with her mother hours and days and weeks and months merely listening to her mother’s visitors talking about babies and engagements and weddings and jam recipes’.²

Crowley was out of step with her deeply conservative family. Her niece remembers that when Crowley came back she shocked the family with her ‘red fingernails, red lipstick and red ideas’.³ Crowley’s family did not understand or like the change in her art and considered that her painting had been ‘ruined’ in Paris. According to her nephew, Crowley responded by burning many of the early works that she had left at Glen Riddle.⁴ Many years later Crowley wrote that ‘Grace’s things’, not valued by her family, were simply lost.⁵ This is echoed in the story she told to Daniel Thomas that, on her return, she found her easel thrown upon a rubbish tip.⁶ Either circumstance explains the scarcity of Crowley’s early Ashton-period works.

There was one bright light at Glen Riddle. Crowley’s distant cousin Gwen Ridley shared her artistic interests and had studied at the Sydney Art School in the 1920s. Following on from the portraits that she had done in France, Crowley undertook a portrait of Gwen, the first major work she completed back in Australia. As in Portrait study, Crowley used the device of the round-backed chair and a similar pose for the sitter. However, unlike the dramatic diagonals of Portrait study and elegant pose of Portrait of Lucie Beynis, the more static geometry of Portrait of Gwen Ridley 1930 gives a sense of solidity and monumentality. The formal pose and arching rhythms of the composition strongly recall early Renaissance images of the Madonna enthroned, and Crowley’s reference to such works may have come from Gleizes’s interest in religious imagery. Certainly the impact of his compositional principles can be seen in the rhythmic repetition and contrast of rectangular and circular shapes that echo the exercises in translation and rotation that she had done with Gleizes.

Fortunately for Crowley, her stay at Glen Riddle was not long. While there had been talk about Crowley supporting herself by teaching art at a boarding school in Toowoomba, in a letter Dangar subsequently refers to ‘Daddy’s gift’ – presumably an amount of money that allowed Crowley to return to Sydney permanently in early 1932.⁷ To Crowley the Sydney art scene was very tame after Paris. She recalled that ‘things seemed rather dull in the art world – I just couldn’t understand why they hadn’t moved artistically in the four years I had been abroad. And of course my paintings were considered very extraordinary’.⁸

Crowley felt that her ‘ultramodern’ work was not appreciated or understood and later recounted that she ‘was shouldered off as one of those degenerate modernists’.⁹ Yet she still had opportunities to exhibit. Almost immediately after her return she participated in the A group of seven exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in March 1930, showing four of her French paintings including Mirmande and Girl with goats. Other exhibitors in this important modernist exhibition included Cossington Smith, de Maistre, Wakelin and Black. This was the first showing of Crowley’s new works, and the reception, while not hostile, was nevertheless unenthusiastic, with the critic for The Guardian commenting, ‘Miss Grace Crowley and Miss Dorrit Black have got out of their Sydney Art School rut. But we are not quite sure that we are not travelling in a French furrow. And why render subjects fundamentally definitive and strong in a laboriously indefinite colour?’¹⁰

Soon after her arrival in Sydney in March 1932 Crowley joined forces with Black at her recently established Modern Art Centre in Margaret Street, teaching the life-drawing class. Black had established the Modern Art Centre the year before as an alternative to what she considered the conservative British-derived post-impressionism that prevailed in Sydney at that time. Instead, her intention was that the Modern Art Centre would show the work of others who ‘have gone further and in a direction that is at present less generally understood. These painters have drawn their inspiration chiefly from the French school’.¹¹

Crowley held her first solo exhibition at the Modern Art Centre, in June or July 1932, showing about eight works from France including Mirmande, Girl with goats and Portrait of Lucie Beynis. She was, however, disappointed with the response to the exhibition – it was not reviewed and only ‘1/2 dozen people saw it – these were people who had been at the Sydney Art School and some were working at Smith and Julius and those were the ones that were interested’.¹²

Throughout the 1930s Crowley and Dangar – who was now firmly ensconced at Moly-Sabata, having turned her creative energies towards realising Gleizes’s teachings in her practice as a potter – frequently wrote to each other about the art world, the development of their own work and, from Dangar’s side, transmitting the ideas of Gleizes to a receptive Crowley. She also continued to send journals and books, including copies of the journal of Abstraction–création: art non-figuratif, while for her part Crowley sent her friend money. While initially they often discussed Crowley’s return to France, and even canvassed the possibility of Crowley joining the commune at Moly-Sabata (and later of Dangar returning to Australia), neither plan eventuated.¹³ However, Crowley’s correspondence with Dangar kept her focus firmly on France and in the face of the generally unenthusiastic reception of her work, Dangar was an invaluable ally, confirming her opinion of the provincialism of Australian art. Dangar’s response to the 1931 annual issue of The Home magazine was typical:

I opened it & turned the pages [and] saw there were beautiful photographs but the most terrible, terrible, shameful evidence of the vulgarity & baseness of the type of creature daring to call himself a painter out there. I felt choked and ill as I cut out all those coloured reproductions & the cover & put them in the fire.¹⁴

Significantly, through Dangar, Crowley was able to maintain a connection to Gleizes. As early as June 1930 Dangar wrote to Crowley that she was sending over a set of gouache studies and advising her to do exercises that she should return for correction by Pouyaud.¹⁵ Again, in late 1934, Dangar sent over exercises for Crowley and her students and this time Gleizes himself would supervise and make comments.¹⁶

In February 1931 Crowley’s Portrait of Gwen Ridley was hung in the Archibald Prize, and brought about her reacquaintance with Fizelle.According to Crowley, Fizelle, who had recently returned from Europe, saw the portrait and admired it very much and ‘[our] mutual misery concerning ART? in Australia drew us together’.¹⁷ Fizelle (known as ‘Fiz’) had recently returned from several years in Europe where he had studied in London and travelled extensively through Spain, Italy and France. Crowley and Fizelle had known each other in Sydney in the 1920s, and had met twice briefly in Paris and London. Throughout 1932 they painted together at the evening Sketch Club at the Modern Art Centre and while Fizelle’s European work employed a geometric simplification and ordering of form, he did not have the same depth of knowledge of cubism as Crowley, who later recalled that ‘[Fizelle] would ply her with questions re Lhote’s teaching, and seemed to regret missing the opportunity to attend his classes’.¹⁸ Fizelle’s art was certainly strongly influenced by Crowley during their association, his work using a similar manner of geometric reduction of forms. Yet it does not seem that Crowley’s work responded to Fizelle’s.

One of Crowley’s few major paintings from this period is the 1933 Portrait in grey.¹⁹ This work is more abstracted than any of her earlier portraits. Foreground and background have been merged into a tightly compressed space that is articulated through intersecting planes of graduated colour, resembling the fragmentation and faceting of space in analytic cubism. The contours of the figure are minimally indicated by definite straight and curved lines, while the face is the only part of the work to receive a more naturalistic treatment.

Towards the end of 1932, for reasons unknown, Crowley ended her association with the Modern Art Centre. Dangar says of Crowley and Black’s acrimonious parting

It’s just staggering after all you did for that studio! I’m astonished. I know Dorrit chokes me, but I thought you had real affection for her and that I was wrong & perhaps unconsciously spiteful & jealous & that was why I didn’t get on with her … I will send you everything I get hold of, mighty little I know, but all the same I do keep in touch with the movement a wee bit … I am sure you will get on a great deal better with only Fizelle.²⁰

Crowley and Fizelle decided to find a studio together and start their own school. By late 1932 they had found a suitable space at 215a George Street and launched the Crowley–Fizelle School. The front room was used as the studio for teaching, while Fizelle lived in a separate room at the rear. Either in 1933 or 1934, Crowley moved into the rooftop apartment at 227 George Street (known as ‘The 84 Steps’) in the same city block as the Crowley–Fizelle School. Guests frequently came and went between the two locations, and Fizelle kept his cactus plants on Crowley’s rooftop yard. Many of their students were drawn from the now defunct Modern Art Centre or were friends from the Sydney Art School. Among these was Mary Alice Evatt, wife of the Labor politician HV ‘Doc’ Evatt, who was to become a lifelong friend and supporter of Crowley’s work. Dangar continued to send information about Gleizes’s teaching, as well as copies of the latest art books and journals, and Mary Alice Evatt later wrote that Dangar ‘continued to tell of the abstract work of Albert Gleizes and of the tapestries and pots made at Moly-Sabata. This was a great help to students here and helped to bring Sydney and the little group in lower George Street into the stream of creative work being done in Europe.’²¹

Of their teaching Crowley wrote: ‘We were united in one belief, the constructive approach to painting and this insistence of the abstract elements in building a design was the keynote of our teaching with both Lhote and Gleizes.’²² While Fizelle was much more interested in dynamic symmetry, and was responsible for teaching it at the school, Crowley taught according to Lhote’s methods, advising her students to ‘dissociate [yourselves] from the sentimental interest of individual figures and think of the great geometrical plan’.²³ In her lectures, she would analyse the compositions of the great artists of the past, such as Vermeer and Mantegna, and contrast these with contemporary works by Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen, which she considered lacking in organisation, weak and sentimental.²⁴

In retrospect, the Crowley–Fizelle School was significant not so much as a teaching institution, but as a locus for modernism in Sydney. It brought together a group of like-minded artists who developed their work in a direction influenced by their studies of contemporary European abstraction and Crowley was the hub around which the group revolved. In 1932 through the evening Sketch Club at the Modern Art Centre, Crowley had become reacquainted with Ralph Balson, a former student of hers and Dangar’s at the Sydney Art School. He had assisted Crowley and Fizelle to paint their premises at George Street, and from about 1934 he began to regularly paint on the weekends with Crowley and Fizelle at their studio. This group was joined by Frank Hinder on his return from study in America and occasionally his American wife, the sculptor Margel Hinder. Frank Hinder had studied at the Chicago Art Institute and in New York with Emil Bisttram, who taught the principles of dynamic symmetry developed by Jay Hambidge. Hinder had already experimented with abstraction and Crowley recalled that ‘their arrival fresh from modern schools in New York and Chicago brought a special stimulus to the nucleus of interest in abstract art which was eventually to develop’.²⁵ The group was firmly focused on the latest developments overseas and they largely distanced themselves from the mainstream of the Sydney art world, which in turn mostly ignored them.

Judging from the few remaining paintings from this time, the mid 1930s was not a prolific period for Crowley. It is possible that the relationship with Fizelle and her teaching at the Crowley–Fizelle School took up much of her time, or that works have been lost or destroyed. She continued to show her paintings from France well into 1934, but rarely exhibited in Sydney between 1935 and 1938, although she did so in 1934, 1935 and 1937 with the Contemporary Art Group in Melbourne.

The most significant known works dating from the mid 1930s are the many drawings of country life made during her visits back to Glen Riddle, although apparently none of these compositional studies were developed into paintings. These generally light-hearted works evidence her deep affection for the country and are a return to her earliest subject matter. In these drawings Crowley has turned the lens of her Parisian training to quintessentially Australian motifs. Her large compositional drawing Horses by a pond c.1932 has a direct antecedent in her Study for Sailors and models c.1928. The work is similarly ruled up according to the golden mean, yet this time instead of the typically French theme of sailors and nudes, there are draughthorses, gum trees and windmills. In other versions of this work, Crowley has substituted cows for horses – another example of how, following Lhote’s teaching, Crowley felt free to rearrange the elements in her painting to create a harmonious composition.There are also numerous drawings of Crowley’s nephew, Clement (Clemmie) Smith, including Boy and his dog c.1932 (AGNSW). In several versions, such as Boy and his dog c.1932 (NGA), Crowley has reversed the image by transferring it to tracing paper and then ‘flipping’ it over.

Another major composition Shearing shed c.1932 is important, for here Crowley enters territory that in art, as in life, had been regarded as the preserve of men. As a young woman at Glen Riddle she had longed to draw the men shearing but her father had not allowed her to work in the shearing shed. Such nationalistic subject matter was predominately the domain of male artists.In broad terms, during the late 1920s and the 1930s, female artists gravitated towards modernism, while male artists continued to depict Australian landscapes and nationalistic themes in a more traditional manner. Crowley’s depiction of the shearing shed is significant in this context because it represents a challenge to these orthodoxies and creates a contemporary modernist version of the national self-image. It is possible that Crowley was motivated to do so to gain wider acceptance for her art or, like Margaret Preston, was consciously attempting to create a distinctively Australian modernism. While she exhibited two paintings on nationalistic themes in the late 1930s, including her Sesquicentenary Prize entry The gold rush 1851–54 1938, these works are nevertheless an aberration from the direction that Crowley’s work was taking through her association with Balson and Hinder.

The year 1938 brought about a major change in Crowley’s life and began a period of intense experimentation in her art. Between 1938 and 1939 Crowley produced an extraordinary group of paintings in which she explored ever-increasing degrees of abstraction. Crowley’s relationship with Fizelle had been under strain for some time and in late 1937 they closed the school.²⁶ The following year their relationship ended for reasons unknown, although Fizelle, who had been wounded in the First World War, was known to suffer from symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress. Crowley had little to do with Fizelle from this time on and tensions arose between Fizelle and Balson. While Fizelle remained at 215a George Street, Crowley set up a studio at her apartment at 227 George Street. Balson, and for a short time Hinder, continued painting with Crowley on the weekends. The work of Crowley and Balson became closer stylistically and Crowley recorded that she and Balson ‘first began our efforts in abstract painting’.²⁷ Their increasing closeness from 1938 on a personal level is indicated by the portraits they made of each other that year.Balson’s gentle Portrait of Grace Crowley 1939 depicts her as slightly remote and introspective, as though absorbed in her painting.

Crowley’s portrait of Balson, The artist and his model 1938, is one of her most important paintings from this seminal 1938–39 period. She painted Balson as she saw him at his painting: from behind, standing at his easel in front of a model on her rooftop garden. Balson’s sprightly pose, and the purity of the colours laid next to each other with the white of the canvas showing through, give the work a joyous spontaneity and freshness. Crowley later said that she was ‘making an exaggeration really of what Lhote had taught me about … not isolating the figures against the foreground, bringing the colours of the background into the figure and the colours of the figure into the background’.²⁸ However, Lhote is no longer the main source of this work. While she employed the geometry of the golden mean – Balson’s canvas is a golden rectangle – it was subjected to Gleizes’s principles of translation and rotation. However, the most radical change is her treatment of form into flat areas of colour or pattern, rather than the volumetric modelling she had learnt from Lhote. While Crowley never specifically acknowledged Henri Matisse as an influence, the high-key palette and decorative treatment of The artist and his model indicate that Crowley had looked carefully at his work. In Paris, one of Matisse’s early masterpieces, The piano lesson 1916, had left an indelible impression upon her: ‘I remember standing gazing like Alice in Wonderland, glued in front of Bernheim-Jeune’s window in Paris, intoxicated with sheer delight at that great sheet of emerald green contrasted with a huge slab of wicked stinging pink … It was my conversion to l’Art Moderne of that time!’²⁹

Since 1937 Crowley, Balson, Hinder, Fizelle and Eleonore Lange – a German-born sculptor and academic who had lectured regularly on modern art at the Crowley–Fizelle School – together with several other artists associated with the sketch club at 227 George Street, had begun planning an exhibition to show the abstract direction of their work. In addition to the core group, Frank Medworth and sculptors Margel Hinder, Lyndon Dadswell and Gerald Lewers participated in Exhibition 1: paintings and sculptures, which was opened by HV Evatt at the David Jones’ Art Gallery in August 1939.

Intended as the first of a series of exhibitions, each of which would address a different aspect of what was referred to as ‘the central problem of modern art’, Lange’s catalogue foreword, a manifesto for the group, stated that the direction of art was towards the abstract. In painting, composition was based on ‘colour laws, instead of linear or atmospheric perspective’ and Lange considered that ‘Henri Matisse, was the first to offer a new system of order, e.g., composition, in replacing the vanishing point by the pictorial plane.’ She went on to state that ‘the painter today uses a scene or a posing model only to elaborate its inherent colour-sensations into an artistic theme of colour relations; the endeavor to arrange these special values into an ordered whole is the subject of a modern picture.’³⁰

Crowley showed five works, including The artist and his model and Woman (Annunciation) c.1939, and Balson showed seven works, including his Portrait of Grace Crowley.In Woman (Annunciation) Crowley pushed her work further towards abstraction than ever before without losing the figure. She sacrificed anatomical correctness for the sake of the overall composition, elongating the arm of the figure – something she had never done before. However, the work is still close to her portraits of women from the late 1920s and early 1930s, and she similarly used the back of the chair to frame the subject and based the composition on strong diagonal and vertical forms.

As in The artist and his model, colour is no longer used primarily to describe form, rather it has become a semi-autonomous element within the work. Crowley emphasises the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, and in Woman (Annunciation) created her most abstracted composition to date.

Unfortunately, Exhibition 1 was poorly received, with Howard Ashton, the conservative critic for the Daily Telegraph, writing that ‘their sterility is apparent in the conventionalism of all colour, design and form, a quality which would excuse some under the heading of applied art’.³¹ The hopes of the group to continue with the planned exhibitions was not realised – the commencement of the Second World War and the formation of the Contemporary Art Society in Sydney (of which Fizelle became the first president), as well as personal tension between Fizelle, Balson and Crowley, dissipating the group’s energies. Not discouraged, Crowley and Balson retreated to her studio to begin working towards an even more radical series of paintings.

Progression and collaboration –abstraction

In retrospect, the semi-figurative work shown in Exhibition 1 marked the end of a period for Crowley rather than announcing a new one. By the following year Crowley and Balson, working together, had made the radical leap into total abstraction. Their paintings are among the first purely non-objective works painted in Australia and were some of the most avant-garde works of their time. Crowley’s geometric abstracts, painted between 1947 and 1953, are undoubtedly her greatest achievement, the climax of a long journey towards realising an ideal art based on the harmonious relationships of form and colour. Crowley emerges as one of Australia’s most sophisticated colourists, her paintings exploring adventurous combinations of pure colour held together in a dynamic equilibrium. While geometric abstraction was often accused of being cold and impersonal, Crowley’s works are brilliant gems of colour, pulsating with an inner energy and life. Painted with a directness and spontaneity, her late abstracts are highly individualistic expressions of Crowley’s search for a universal art based on irreducible principles.

In 1941 Balson held the first exhibition of abstract works in Australia at Anthony Hordern’s Gallery in Sydney, and Balson has been given the distinction of being the ‘father of abstraction’ in Australia. However, this does not properly consider Crowley’s key role in the origins of abstract art in Australia or acknowledge the parallel development of Crowley’s and Balson’s work. This omission is almost entirely due Crowley’s rewriting of history late in life. When asked by Thomas about her influence on Balson, she replied, ‘I did no more for him than provide a quiet corner where he could work out his own salvation … Balson owed me NOTHING! … Please keep me out of the picture as much as possible’¹ and, when asked, would always insist that she owed ‘a tremendous lot to Ralph Balson for leading me into abstract painting’.² Crowley was sincere in her admiration of Balson as one of Australia’s greatest painters, and her consistent underplaying of herself in favour of Balson has at its root complex factors including the dynamics of their personal relationship.

The reality of the move by Crowley and Balson into abstraction is better understood as a collaborative process of exchange and mutually supportive effort. This was also Mary Alice Evatt’s assessment.S he considered that Balson ‘developed his work largely under the guidance of Grace Crowley. However, it is only fair to say that as she influenced him, he influenced her work just as strongly’.³ Frank Hinder, who worked closely alongside Crowley and Balson at this time, later considered that ‘Balson owes a great deal to her influence’.⁴

Crowley stated that her first abstract works were done around 1940. Her earliest recorded abstract painting is Construction c.1942,⁵ exhibited in the 1942 Society of Artists annual exhibition alongside two abstract paintings by Balson. A more definitive statement of her new direction was her participation in the 1944 Constructive paintings exhibition at Macquarie Galleries with Balson, Frank Hinder and Gerald Ryan in which she exhibited six works titled Linear rhythms 1–6 c.1944. Unfortunately none of Crowley’s early abstract paintings are known to have survived – the earliest dated works are from 1947 – and it is likely that she destroyed many.⁶

The recently discovered Composition study, most likely painted between 1940 and 1941, is an opportunity to bridge the gap between Crowley’s last semi-figurative works of 1939 and her fully realised abstracts from 1947.⁷ In response to questions about the main factors that prompted her move into total abstraction, Crowley listed her studies with Lhote, the cubist work of Gleizes, and Balson, ‘who finally was by far the strongest influence and help to me in the problem of abstract painting’.⁸ She also mentions a final series of correspondence lessons by Gleizes in 1940. In Exhibition 1 Crowley had pushed figuration as far as it could go towards abstraction and it was possibly to find a way out of this impasse that soon after the exhibition in late 1939 or early 1940, she wrote to Dangar for help. In response, Gleizes, through Dangar, made a ‘most generous offer to conduct a sort of correspondence school: we were to send our works to him he would criticize and advise and post them back’.⁹ Unfortunately, the German occupation of France brought an end to this plan and there were only a few such exchanges, Crowley recalling that ‘all communication between France and Australia ceased. Our dream collapsed’.¹⁰

These last exercises may have been the catalyst that provided Crowley with a way into creating a purely abstract painting. Composition study is strongly based on Gleizes’s compositional precepts and may even have been painted in direct response to his exercises. The three overlapping rectangles in the upper right are an example of Gleizes’s translation of planes, while the grey vertical rectangle underneath them is rotated to the left. Crowley was, of course, familiar with the principles of translation and rotation from her lessons with Gleizes in 1929, her diagram of overlapping planes – Cubist composition, study for a religious mural c.1929 (NGA) foreshadowing her abstract paintings of a decade later.

As art historian Bruce Adams has observed, a number of Balson’s earliest abstract paintings relate closely to the vertical formats and centralised compositions of his cubist portraiture as though he ‘atomized the former figurative elements into autonomous colour shapes’.¹¹ There is a similar correspondence between Composition study and Crowley’s earlier Portrait of Gwen Ridley – both works share the device of an arch and are composed of a series of circles and rectangles.

Composition study is significant in that it marks a new approach by Crowley to the problem of creating an abstract picture. In contrast to Crowley’s semi-abstract portraits of the late 1930s, such as Woman (Annunciation), in which the anatomical figure was simplified and abstracted into geometric shapes, Composition study represents her first known attempt to construct an abstract painting from geometric and entirely non-representational elements, although the disposition of elements may have been loosely based on an earlier composition.

It is also instructive to compare her Composition study with one of Balson’s earliest abstract paintings, Constructive painting 1941. The two works share the same palette of yellows, greys, blues, reds and black; the same flatness and opacity of colour; and the same geometric elements of circles and rotated and translated rectangular planes. Comparison shows how closely the two artists were working at this very early stage of abstraction. Balson’s painting, along with many other of his early works, was signed by Crowley on his behalf – Crowley’s elegant script being considered superior to Balson’s for this purpose.¹²

As much as Gleizes’s direct example provided a path into abstraction for Crowley and Balson, certainly other important influences came to them through books and periodicals. Crowley recalled, ‘Balson and I became more and more interested in abstract art and we would read books together and talk about them, and gradually we began to do them’.¹³ By the early 1940s Crowley and Balson had access to a number of books and journals that included reproductions and discussion of abstract art – almost certainly a 1934 edition of Herbert Read’s Art now, a gift from Crowley to Balson, a 1936 edition of Cubism and abstract art by Alfred Barr and a 1939 edition of The new vision by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.¹⁴ According to Adams, by 1938 Balson (and by extension Crowley) had access to Frank Hinder’s copy of Hilla Rebay’s 1937 catalogue to the Solomon R Guggenheim collection of non-objective paintings and the 1937 anthology Circle: International survey of constructive art, which included Piet Mondrian’s essay ‘Plastic art and pure plastic art’ in which he argued for an art based on neutral constructive elements.¹⁵ Crowley was clearly looking to many sources in her early experiments in abstraction, and in Composition study the motif of the red semicircle with black rectangle has been borrowed directly from the fundamental geometric grammar of the Russian suprematist movement.

There is a great leap from the clumsy Composition study to Crowley’s elegant abstracts from 1947 that mark the beginning of her mature abstract phase. Abstract drawing 1947 is one of Crowley’s most minimal works.Unlike her earlier tightly controlled compositions, the black and white lines have a decidedly haphazard quality and the nebulous and softly speckled shapes float unanchored on the unpainted background. It is a work completely without an underlying geometric structure and, as such, is a virtual anomaly in Crowley’s oeuvre, as is her exploration of texture in the spattering of the gouache.The linear elements in Abstract painting 1947 (private collection) and Abstract painting 1947 (NGA) are more considered, unifying and bringing circular movement to the composition.In Abstract painting (private collection) Crowley experiments with the illusion of transparency through changes in tone and colour, creating an impression of two-dimensional shapes in front of and behind each other, rotating around a central axis.

These early abstracts were composed in a completely different manner to her previous works, which were carefully constructed through a series of preliminary drawings. Instead, Crowley experimented with coloured papers and pieces of ribbon or string to work out the composition, creating a kind of temporary collage as the basis of the painting. At the painting stage Crowley would make only minor changes, correcting a contour or occasionally changing colours. Mary Alice Evatt recalled: ‘For many years [Crowley and Balson] planned their paintings helped by pieces of coloured paper and even slivers of string on paper.But when the design was planned the picture was painted with passion and inspiration that rarely faltered.’¹⁶ Whether Crowley was also allowing an element of chance to enter into these works is unclear. In 1975 she claimed that Abstract painting c.1950 (Cruthers Collection) was an early experiment in dropping objects such as leaves, books and ribbons onto the floor and painting them from above.¹⁷ Of all Crowley’s abstracts, Composition – movement 1951 most closely resembles collage: the flat red, black, grey and yellow forms resembling loosely torn strips of coloured paper laid on a green field. The intensity of the vibrating colours is reminiscent of Matisse’s late gouache papiers-découpés and similarly Crowley used gouache painted on green paper to give the work a flat and even surface. Composition – movement is one of the liveliest of Crowley’s abstracts, the brightly coloured shapes dancing across the surface of the painting yet held in a dynamic balance.

From around 1950 Crowley returned to more structured compositions and the use of geometric and ‘hard-edge’ elements. Painting 1950 (NGV) is her most severely geometrical painting, employing a vocabulary of circles and triangles indicated both by areas of colour and contour. The shift in tonality between the large green circle on the left and the surrounding area is extraordinary, as though this one area of the composition has been illuminated by a strong light source that allows us to see through the layers of the work. Crowley considered this to be one of her most mature abstracts and was among her favourite works.

In both Abstract painting 1950 (private collection, Sydney) and Abstract 1953 (AGNSW) Crowley uses an overlay of jagged lines to generate movement across the composition. In Abstract painting 1950(private collection, Sydney) this is counterpointed by the inclusion of brightly coloured rectangular shapes punctuating the composition and emphasising the picture plane. Abstract painting 1952 (NGV) is one of Crowley’s most minimal compositions, consisting of a fractured grid of rectangular planes. The apparent simplicity of this work masks Crowley’s subtle achievement of animating her composition, as each element appears to be continually in motion, restlessly jostling up against the others or slipping in front of or behind the next. In these works, based on a loose grid, her abstract work converges most closely with that of Balson. In Abstract painting 1952 (NGV) and Abstract painting 1953 (AGSA) Crowley fully explores the qualities of transparency and luminosity of the coloured planes to suggest space, movement and light.

Abstract painting 1953 (AGSA) is one of Crowley’s most dynamic compositions, with two dramatic black diagonals dissecting the work. Underneath lies a sombre black rectangle in stark contrast with the delicate luminosity of the transparent green and orange planes that lie over it. It is a remarkable achievement in the balancing of opposing forces and has an intensity and tension unmatched in her earlier works.

The 1940s and early 1950s were the most productive period in Crowley’s life. Although she did not hold a solo exhibition, between 1944 and 1954 she exhibited regularly with the Society of Artists and the Contemporary Art Society, which she joined in 1947. She participated in important group exhibitions of abstract art, including six paintings in the Abstract paintings drawings sculpture constructions exhibition at the David Jones’ Art Gallery in 1948, three paintings in the Contemporary Art Society – eleventh annual interstate exhibition in 1949 and three works in Abstract compositions / Paintings / Sculpture at the Macquarie Galleries in 1951.

Yet Crowley’s (and Balson’s) abstract paintings were poorly received in an environment that remained unreceptive and even antagonistic to abstraction throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s. Crowley recalled that she and Balson worked in almost complete obscurity: ‘Balson would laugh when in group exhibitions we were hung over or almost behind a door, and say we are the most ‘Extinguished Artists’ in Australia!’¹⁸ The overwhelming reaction to their style of geometric abstraction was that it was formulaic and sterile in contrast to the representational romantic style associated with such artists as William Dobell and Jean Bellete. Art historian and critic Bernard Smith was among the most prominent critics of abstraction, writing as early as 1944 that:

The failure of Constructivism and Abstract art is not surprising. The endeavour to create an impersonal and disinterested art has led the Constructivists into the same technical cul-de-sac as the Neo impressionists who reduced painting to an analysis of the colour spectrum. To reduce a matter of art completely to the terms of a science is to rob it of the creative power upon which genuine art is based.¹⁹

Crowley’s and Balson’s response was to remain detached from the Sydney art world and maintain a close circle of friends, including the Hinders, who shared their artistic aims. In 1948 Crowley briefly returned to teaching, taking a new weekly class in abstract art at the East Sydney Technical College before resigning after several months (Balson was appointed in her place). Among her students was Tony Tuckson, who considered that Crowley and Balson were his most influential teachers.²⁰

In 1951 they befriended the much younger sculptor Robert Klippel on his return from England and France, and Balson invited Klippel to share with him his 1952 solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries. Klippel acknowledged the importance of their support, later writing that they ‘both gave me the confidence to push more deeply into my work – and that serious art was truly significant’.²¹ There are strong correspondences between the brightly coloured curved and elliptical forms of Klippel’s No.59 of 1952 and Crowley’s Composition – movement of 1951, which Klippel had seen in the Abstract compositions /  Paintings / Sculpture exhibition.²²

The year 1951 marked the death of Dangar. After the liberation of France in 1944 Crowley and Dangar resumed their correspondence – Crowley also sent food, clothes and money. However, once Crowley had made the move into abstraction, she no longer looked to Gleizes’s example. She certainly did not share the deepening religious convictions of Gleizes and Dangar or their quest for the renewal of religious painting, and Dangar did not share Crowley’s enthusiasm for Mondrian. Yet Dangar continued to keep Crowley connected to what was happening in Paris, writing to her in 1946 of the newly formed Salon des Réalités Nouvelles for non-representational art and asking whether Crowley wanted to be nominated as a member and exhibit with them.²³

In late 1952 Crowley began to correspond with Mary Webb, an Australian artist in Paris. Webb had been living in Paris since 1949 and was exhibiting abstract works in important Parisian galleries. To some extent, Webb was to take the place of Dangar as Crowley’s conduit to the latest developments in art in France, writing to Crowley in 1955, ‘There is a big wave of expressionist abstract work going on here lately, usually the kind they call ‘informel’ no geometry, no form in line, no definite forms, no construction.’²⁴ Like Dangar, she urged Crowley and Balson to send work to Paris to be to be exhibited in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles.²⁵ Through Webb, Crowley’s work (together with Balson’s and Hinder’s) became known to the influential writer and art critic Michel Seuphor, co-founder of the abstract group Cercle et Carréin the 1930s and friend and biographer of Mondrian.²⁶ All four painters were subsequently included in Seuphor’s Dictionary of abstract painting, published in 1957, and were invited to participate in the major survey exhibition 50 ans d´art abstrait at the Galerie Creuzein Paris, timed to coincide with the launch of the dictionary. Crowley and Balson sent over one painting each; however, due to a problem with customs their works were held up at the docks in France and never made it to the exhibition. It is ironic that at a time when Crowley’s work was barely known in Australia, in Seuphor’s influential dictionary she was accorded a place among her peers within the international context of post-war abstraction.

In 1954, at the age of sixty-four, Crowley reorganised her life in anticipation of Balson’s impending retirement. She purchased a house, High Hill, at Mittagong, although she kept her studio in George Street as a convenient base in the city. The following year a garage in the garden was converted into a studio for Balson and he subsequently divided his time between Mittagong and Sydney. The move to Mittagong brought about a dramatic decline in Crowley’s output as she committed her time to maintaining the house and garden, and to Balson: ‘I wanted to paint but the garden and the care of the whole place seemed to take up my time but it was wonderful to have this complete isolation from the world as it were and be surrounded by [Balson’s] wonderful paintings.’²⁷ In contrast, this was to be the beginning of Balson’s most productive phase. Balson had retired from his work as a house-painter in 1955 and for the first time in his life was able to devote himself entirely to his painting. During the 1950s Balson and Crowley became aware of the new gestural directions in abstraction and, in response, Balson began work on his series of Non-Objective Paintings in 1955 in which dabs of paint were applied evenly across the entire painting, resulting in a dense mesh of stippled colour.

Although in her letters Webb urged Crowley to consider her own work and continue painting, Crowley painted very little during these years and rarely exhibited new work after 1954. However, the works that she did after her move to Mittagong indicate that Crowley had followed Balson’s direction into a looser, more gestural style of abstraction. In the only two known paintings of this 1955–59 period, Crowley had completely abandoned geometric forms, instead creating an all-over field of gestural brushwork.²⁸ For the first time, Crowley experimented with such a dramatic application of paint, and the emphasis of these works is no longer colour but texture, the paint having its own materiality and presence.

In 1960 Crowley and Balson travelled overseas for a year, visiting galleries in England, France and America. At the age of seventy, Balson was making his first trip overseas since his arrival in Australia as a young man in 1913, and it was Crowley’s first since 1929. They sought out some of the recent forms of contemporary painting and saw exhibitions of minimal and hard-edged painting, as well as the work of the European tachists.²⁹ In Paris they briefly met Seuphor and arranged an exhibition of Balson’s work at the Galerie Creuze for later in the year. For three months from June 1960 Crowley and Balson lived in the small village of Crediton in Devon, where Balson began painting for his exhibition in Paris.

During this short stay in Devon Crowley began her last series of paintings. In her notes Crowley recorded that at Crediton ‘Balson began his series of poured paintings in the manner of Pollock’ and, in the same way that their art had moved in tandem for nearly twenty-five years, Crowley also began to pour paint. By the end of their time there Crowley recalled that ‘Balson had 27 framed paintings; Crowley 3 and additional 5 unframed’.³⁰ Only one of these paintings is known to have survived.³¹ Painting 1960 is a radical progression from her geometric abstracts of the mid 1950s and shows that Crowley was determined to continue to push her work in new directions to the very end.In Painting Crowley experimented with pouring or trailing paint onto a board on the floor, allowing a new fluidity and linearity in her work. However, unlike the exuberance and rhythmic energy of Pollock’s works, Painting is essentially static, the dense web of red, yellow and blue paint concentrated at the centre of the composition over a darker mass that was painted with a brush. On her return to Australia in 1961, Crowley exhibited two of these ‘pour’ paintings at Farmers Gallery in Sydney in her last exhibition of new work.

One of Crowley’s last works is her enigmatic drawing Self portrait with garden rake 1962. After two decades of total abstraction, Crowley returned to the world of appearances. Drawn in her fractured cubist style of the 1930s, Crowley presents herself front on firmly holding an upright rake. There is something in the formality of Crowley’s pose that recalls Grant Wood’s famous double-portrait American Gothic 1930. Yet this is a clue that there is perhaps something missing in the work and in the position of the rake next to Crowley, and in the mirroring of her head with the head of the rake, is a suggestion of a second figure. Is it possible that Balson, the great abstractionist and Crowley’s painting partner of the previous twenty-five years, was himself abstracted into the geometry of the radiating tines of the rake? Is it also possible that in the title of the work there is a sly pun on the meaning of rake?

In August 1964 Crowley and Balson were making plans for a second overseas trip when Balson died unexpectedly. His death marked the end of Crowley’s life as a practising artist. While Crowley was seventy-four years old, and her advancing years would have been a factor in her retirement from painting, Balson’s death affected her deeply and brought to an end a significant part of her creative life – an intimate and collaborative relationship with another artist. Crowley’s friendships with Dangar, Fizelle and most significantly Balson were the pattern of her life, and her art was created through the exchange of ideas and support within these relationships. As she recalled in a 1964 interview about Balson, ‘we built on each other’.³²

Epilogue

Thomas considers that in her later years Crowley regarded her support of Balson as the most important thing she could have done.³³ In 1964 Crowley suggested to the Art Gallery of New South Wales that they mount a retrospective exhibition of his work – a suggestion that was not taken up but instead resulted in the group exhibition Balson Crowley Fizelle Hinder 1966.This exhibition was the first major showing in a public gallery of Crowley’s work and included seventeen works from her French period to her most recent gestural abstracts. It also brought her work to wider attention for the first time.

In December 1971 Crowley was forced by the Rocks Redevelopment Authority to leave her studio at 227 George Street. In 1967 Crowley had purchased an apartment in a block of flats overlooking Manly Cove. Unfortunately, moving from the studio into a small apartment prompted a final round of destruction of her paintings, Crowley believing that ‘you want to be known by your best work’.³⁴

During the 1970s, already well into her eighties, Crowley found herself approached by art historians and curators eager for information about herself and the artists she had known: ‘The last two years have (for me) been very active with unexpected (for me) publicity which somehow seems to have been thrust upon one – extremely pleasant of course.’³⁵ She was persuaded by Janine Burke to record her student years for inclusion in the catalogue accompanying the pioneering exhibition Australian women artists and assisted Adams with his research on Balson. She also maintained an active interest in art, visiting the 1975 Modern masters exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales four times and wryly noting of the queues ‘it just goes to show how public opinion alters – if you wait long enough’.³⁶

In 1975 Thomas organised the first retrospective exhibition of her work for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Project 4: Grace Crowley opened on 10 May 1975, only a few days before Crowley’s eighty-fifth birthday. According to Thomas, Crowley was ‘appalled, and thrilled’³⁷, writing that ‘to me that little exhibition seemed just a beginning and to see it hurt as much as the pleasure it gave’.³⁸

On 21 April 1979, after a short illness, Crowley died at her home in Manly. Crowley was never a prolific painter and destroyed many of her own works; her remaining paintings probably number no more than fifty. Her place in Australian art is, however, much greater than the smallness of her oeuvre.

Discovering a Grace Crowley painting

The Gallery has eight Grace Crowley paintings in the collection, spanning 32 years of her work, from 1920 to 1952. These paintings highlight changes in her style and materials during her artistic career. One of these works, Abstract painting 1947, a well considered and balanced abstract composition, recently came into the conservation lab due to some minor flaking and loss of paint mainly restricted to the green, blue and white lines in the work. Originally these lines had been painted black but Crowley changed the colour, altering the colour harmonies in the work. The paint was now lifting because it was not well adhered to the underlying paint. Consolidating the flaked paint with a conservation grade adhesive and retouching the areas of loss with powdered pigment in a conservation resin quickly remedied the problem. However, having the painting in the conservation laboratory allowed for closer examination of the entire work using infra-red imaging.

The most interesting discovery was the hidden painting on the reverse. The grey priming layer was abraded in places, showing glimpses of coloured paint, and changes in the surface texture indicated different forms. When viewed under infra-red it became obvious that there was a relatively well considered painting below. Infra-red examination is a useful tool for conservators – it is slightly longer in wavelength than visible light and cannot be seen by the naked eye but it can be photographed and, as in this case, captured through a video link onto a computer. Black-and-white infra-red reflectograms reveal layers underneath the surface of a painting depending on how the infra-red is absorbed or reflected by various materials. For example, dark lines of underdrawing can be seen due to dense carbon content while different pigments can be indicated by different shades of grey. However, there are limitations to this technique with some materials blocking the light or having similar properties that do not allow different layers to be distinguished.

In Abstract painting 1947 infra-red examination showed the shapes in the composition underlying the grey priming, including some dark drawing lines such as the circle and a cross, and captured them in a series of images. These images were then stitched together in Photoshop and using digital imaging we have transposed the colours that we could see over the black-and-white infra-red image.

Crowley is known to have been critical of her work, destroying many of the studies and earlier works she was no longer satisfied with. Examination under the microscope reveals that in this case she had painted an image, left it for a considerable amount of time for the oil layer to completely dry, painted over it and then painted a new composition on the other side. This does not appear to be an isolated incident with another Crowley work subsequently found to have an image on the reverse that had been painted over with grey priming.

Elena Taylor, Curator of Australian Art, examined the image on the reverse of Abstract painting 1947, compared it against pencil sketches of similar compositions and has dated the work, now titled Composition study, at c. 1941. Composition study appears to be one of Crowley’s earliest purely abstract paintings and is closely based on Albert Gleizes’s compositions. It seems likely that Grace experimented with this technique of abstraction as a stepping-stone to the style of work seen on the front of the panel. It also appears that this is not a finished work. Unfortunately there seems to be no surviving examples of Crowley’s early experimentation with pure abstraction. The earliest abstract works are dated 1947, however, it seems probable that Crowley’s earlier abstract works were destroyed or suffered a similar fate to Composition study.

Uncovering a deliberately hidden painting always raises questions of ethics. In this case, although it may be possible to investigate the removal of the grey layer to reveal the colours and composition of the work underneath, Crowley obviously did not want the work viewed and it is unlikely that the Gallery would ever display it. However, the discovery and digital mock-up help us gain a greater understanding of Crowley’s progression through one of her many painting styles and techniques.

Kim Brunoro
Conservator