Curator's Highlights: Anne Dangar

1. Vase 1926–29

This vase is a very rare example of the ceramics Dangar decorated before moving to Moly-Sabata in 1930. Dangar collected ceramics in Sydney in the mid-1920s but wasn’t inspired to create them herself until she saw traditional pottery being created in the French town of Quimper. She soon undertook lessons in wheel-throwing and porcelain painting, decorating pieces with the geometric Art Deco patterns and traditional flower and scroll motifs. Dangar would have seen similar designs adorning the surfaces of ceramics offered for sale through Primavera, the successful design firm operated by Parisian department store Printemps. It is likely the vase was a blank obtained and hand painted by Dangar in Sydney as most of her Parisian pottery was smashed on its journey home.

2. Mirmande, La Drôme 1928

Dangar painted this cubist landscape on her first visit to France between 1926 and 1928 while she was studying with André Lhote. It is among the very few known surviving paintings created by her as much of the work she produced before 1930 was destroyed in a fire. It depicts the small village of Mirmande in the south of France, where Lhote established a summer school and displays her sophisticated understanding of his methods, the vista is rendered in a pyramidal arrangement of fractured tonal planes. Dangar and Grace Crowley studied with Lhote in Mirmande in 1927 and again in 1928 when they were joined by their friend Dorrit Black. All three artists painted similar cubist views of the site and together they form an important trio of paintings in Australian modernism.

3. Soup tureen with cubist design 1933–38

Throughout the 1930s, Dangar sent consignments of pottery to Grace Crowley in Sydney. Crowley circulated these pieces among Dangar’s friends and family, sold them on her behalf, and held small exhibitions in her Sydney studio—arguably the earliest exhibitions of cubist art in Australia. By the close of the decade, Dangar’s cubist designs were owned and used by numerous artists, writers and advocates associated with the modern movement including Ruth Ainsworth, Eileen Berndt, Dorrit Black, Rah Fizelle and Nancy Hall. This tureen was owned by Berndt who was one of Crowley’s students during the 1930s. Berndt later gifted it to the National Gallery—many key examples of Dangar’s work entered public collections in this way.

4. Gouache 1936

In 1938, Dangar exhibited ceramics and two gouaches in the major cubist survey exhibition Aspect actuel du cubisme chez quelques aînés et quelques jeunes, staged at the Salon d’Automne, the progressive alternative to the Paris Salon. In a photograph of the display, this gouache can be seen hung on the far wall alongside major paintings by Albert Gleizes and Robert Delaunay. Although smaller in scale, it matches their formal complexity, the trio of overlapping circular shapes spiralling upwards. Among Dangar’s ceramics was an angular coffee set and plate featuring a graphic black and white abstract design. Her inclusion in this important exhibition firmly announced her participation in the cubist movement in France.

5. Tea service 1949–51

This tea set is among the very last works Dangar created before her death on 4 September 1951. It was commissioned in 1949 by Daniel Gloria, a Lyon-based artist with whom Dangar became associated in the mid-1940s through Albert Gleizes. He asked her to create a tea set for six people, but subsequently asked for an additional six teacups and saucers to be created after their completion, making it one of her largest services. Although Dangar turned and decorated the final six teacups and saucers, she died before they could be fired. Along with a small group of objects that remained unfinished, they were lovingly completed by her close friend and possible lover, the weaver Lucie Deveyle (1908–1956), with Jean-Marie Paquaud (1909–1988), a potter with whom Dangar had worked closely since 1931.

Anne Dangar is on display at the National Gallery from 7 December 2024 to 27 April 2025.