Lessons with Miss Dangar

In 2012 the National Gallery acquired an extensive archive of works and ephemeral material related to Anne Dangar, a figure who features largely, if distantly, in Australian art history as one of our most important cubist artists. The story of her life is one of the most fascinating and romanticised in Australian art. Based permanently in France for much of her professional life, she is best known for her ceramics: functional vessels which combine the rustic forms of French peasant pottery with bold abstract designs. Today, major examples of her work are held in collections across Australia and France, affirming her position in national and international histories of Modernism.

Comprising more than 700 drawings, sketchbooks, ceramic designs, letters, photographs and postcards, the Anne Dangar archive provides considerable insight into her practice. Importantly, however, it also provides insight into aspects of her life in France that would otherwise be lost to us in Australia, notably and perhaps surprisingly her role as an art teacher to primary-school aged children in Sablons.

While the fact that Dangar provided lessons to local Sablonais children has always been a part of her story, a collection of children’s exercise books discovered in the archive, gives a richer understanding of the advanced nature of Dangar’s teaching and, by extension, a richer understanding of the artist herself.

Born in 1885 in Kempsey New South Wales, Dangar studied under Julian Ashton at the Sydney Art School, forming part of an important group of artists developing an appetite for Modernism in Sydney in the 1920s. In 1926 she travelled to France where she spent the next three years absorbing principles of modern art, studying with cubist painter André Lhote in his Parisian studio and his summer school in the town of Mirmande in the south of France. With her savings depleted, Dangar reluctantly returned to Sydney in late 1928.

Up until this point, Dangar’s journey parallels that of many of her contemporaries of this period, including her friends the artists Grace Crowley and Dorrit Black, all of whom witnessed, experienced or read of developments in Modernism in Europe and America. Yet Dangar’s story took an unprecedented turn in 1929 when, at the age of 44, she was invited by the French cubist painter Albert Gleizes — an artist she had never met but whose work she had seen and admired while in Paris — to move to his artist community Moly-Sabata in Sablons, a small town picturesquely situated beside the Rhone River.

Gleizes was a painter, theorist and self-proclaimed founder of Cubism. In 1912 he had co-authored the first major text on Cubism, Du cubisme with the French painter Jean Metzinger and in the same year helped found the Section d’Or, a collective of cubist painters in Paris. Like other artists exploring Cubism and abstraction more generally, Gleizes sought two-dimensionality, eschewing perspective and other scientifically derived modes of representation. However, he believed pure abstraction without basis in theory or philosophy to be meaningless and instead advocated a mode of image making that was steeped in spiritual thought. He drew upon the symmetries, patterns and ratios found in nature and ancient cultures and theorised a rhythmic art based on the translation of planes and rotation of forms. Dangar accepted Gleizes’ invitation to join his community immediately and arrived at Moly-Sabata in 1930. Over the ensuing decades, she became a dedicated adherent and advocate for his philosophies and worked principally as a potter, decorating her vessels with cubist designs adapted from and inspired by his ideas.

Dangar began teaching at Moly-Sabata by 1931, holding weekly 90-minute classes for children between the ages of seven and thirteen. Her youngest student, the daughter of her neighbour, was barely two years old. Teaching was a logical way for her to supplement her limited potter’s income in France as she already had considerable experience, if chiefly with adult art students rather than children. Following her own studies with Julian Ashton at the Sydney Art School during the mid 1910s, she had remained as an assistant teacher. Alongside Crowley, she was responsible for the running of the school during the early 1920s as the ageing Ashton was regularly ill. In 1929, after her return to Sydney from France, she recommenced teaching for Ashton, but simultaneously offered her own art classes from her studio in Bridge Street where she attempted to share the modern ideas and lessons in Cubism she had experienced in France.

Although Dangar’s Sablonais pupils were significantly younger than those she was used to, her plans for them were no less aspirational. She offered drawing classes and oversaw the creation of paintings, embroidered textiles and hand-built ceramics. She held annual student exhibitions and regularly incorporated their work in regional exhibitions featuring the Moly-Sabata artist community. Most notably, in 1937 Dangar included her students in Moly-Sabata’s display in the pavilion for the region of Forez-Vivarais as part of the International Exhibition held in Paris, and it was a great source of pride for her that Moly-Sabata received a special award from the Académie Française for the community’s effort. Photos Dangar sent to Crowley in Australia show their charming works on display in dense salon hangs while others show their hands wet with clay as they hand-built vessels and small sculptures under her encouragement. The pages of their sketchbooks held in the archive are filled with children’s drawings which showcase their personalities and interests, with depictions of favourite toys, exotic wild animals and misshapen portraits of classmates.

Most striking among these pages, however, is evidence of Dangar teaching her students a simplified version of Cubism, a surprisingly ambitious undertaking given her students were predominantly of primary-school age. Several sketchbooks include diagrammatic guides for Gleize’s principles of translation and rotation. The surrounding pages show students experimenting with these ideas through simple exercises in which brightly coloured geometric shapes are layered upon each other, and shifted up, down, left and right (translation) or, in more complex compositions, spun on the spot at the central point (rotation). The sketchbook of Ninette Doz in the National Gallery collection shows her development under Dangar’s instruction as her compositions became more and more complex, progressing from rectangular forms moving on a vertical and horizontal axis only, to more organic, irregular shapes that gently spiral around the composition.

The format of these exercises closely resembles those created by adult artists and followers of Gleizes, including Crowley who studied with him in Paris and at Moly-Sabata in 1929. Crowley’s studies — of which there are eight that we know of — show great discipline, with the artist creating two sets of identical compositions, replicating the same forms and formal arrangements, but using different monochrome palettes augmented through subtle colour highlights, contrasts and surface patterning. Doz’s advanced compositions are surprisingly similar — especially given she was only 12 years of age — to Crowley’s complex layered arrangements, using the same full bellied forms and spiralling scroll shapes resembling the elements of a violin or guitar to anchor the composition. Her understanding of Gleizes’ aesthetic principles and theories, as mediated through and taught by Dangar, is immediately apparent.

Similarly, Doz’s palette, while comparatively unrestrained in a seemingly childlike way, is also underpinned by a thorough understanding of theory. Colour wheels — a foundational tool in colour theory — appear throughout Dangar’s students’ sketchbooks, often with notations from Dangar herself, describing and grouping together primary, secondary and tertiary colours as well as their complements. Doz’s exercises reveal her swift adoption of these ideas. While her early designs use simple, harmonious combinations of primary colour, subsequent, more advanced compositions draw upon surprising complementary colour combinations, such as red, green and orange, taken directly from opposing positions on the colour wheel to enhance the effect of her layered, rotating forms. Dangar’s gouache composition created in 1936, is a highly sophisticated example of these compositional experiments, skilfully employing Gleizes’ principles of translation and rotation in concert with assiduous colour harmonies and contrasts. Her trio of overlapping circular forms spiral nimbus-like within the composition, each composed of the full chromatic spectrum of the colour wheel.

Dangar continued to hold art classes regularly throughout the following two decades, watching her students grow from small children to young adults. She lived at Moly-Sabata until her death in 1951, making her one of the few Australian artists to engage with currents of European Modernism in a direct and sustained manner. To her Sablonais pupils — many of whom are alive today — Dangar remains ‘Miss Dangar’, a gentle figure who always remained committed to Cubism. Certainly, the glimpses into Dangar’s classroom offered by these sketchbooks are an unexpected but valuable demonstration of this lifelong commitment. While Dangar allowed her young students to explore their own creativity and taught them basic artistic principles and theories, she did so while guiding them through advanced cubist ideas, an ambitious focus for a primary-school art class in rural France that says much about her own quiet determination. Alongside Dangar’s impressive ceramics, these traces of her life in Moly-Sabata, preserved in the archive, present a fuller understanding of her life in rural France and underscore the significant role she played as an exponent and conduit of Cubism during the early twentieth century.

Anne Dangar is on display from the 30 November 2024 to 27 April 2025.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.