Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment | Adelaide Festival 2021 review
Exhibition curator Tracey Lock has put before us a thesis: the vision of an artist at the avant-garde of international modernism.
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Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment
Visual art
FESTIVAL
Art Gallery of South Australia
Until May 16
By staging a large-scale Adelaide Festival exhibition of a relatively obscure visual artist, the Art Gallery of SA has posed a fundamental question. It is up to audiences to answer.
Clarice Beckett may belong among the most important modernist visual artists in Australia.
However, her late arrival on the scene has complicated this assessment.
She died back in 1935, aged 47, when Australia was barely aware of a new phase in the arts.
Beckett had passing recognition in her lifetime, as of the Max Meldrum school of Melbourne artists, who were often derided for their views on tonal qualities in painting.
Even her father ruled that the kitchen table, rather than a studio, would best suit her art practice.
But isolated in her own very limited world of looking after an ailing mother, Clarice Beckett had been steadily evolving her ideas about art. She used them to capture the street and sea scenes of her environs south of Melbourne, often on long early morning walks.
In this exhibition, which starts with early morning scenes and moves through the day, we see flashes of where she was headed and what might have been.
There is a story to her art. Briefly, her sudden death from pneumonia, probably caught while painting en plein air, left her art in the hands of her father who may have destroyed her latest and most original works. The rest, hundreds of canvases, were stored in a farm shed and left to rot for more than 30 years.
By then, most had been lost, but the best of those that were saved and exhibited in the 1970s were immediately snapped up by institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, and many are included in this exhibition.
Another important trove of paintings, 21 in all, has recently been donated to AGSA by Alastair Hunter.
Tracey Lock, curator of Australian Art at AGSA, has joined with Rosalind Hollinrake, who initially uncovered the store of paintings, to painstakingly bring the best of Clarice Beckett’s work together from around Australia.
Some are rapidly becoming iconic works, of trams, traffic and streetscapes in the Melbourne of the 1920s and 1930s. Bathing sheds, fishermen and boats are also brought to life in minimal stokes that show her genius for economy in painting.
The striking vertical lines that often demark the scene speak of the arrival of the other kind of modernism; of motor cars, technology, electricity, tram lines and light poles.
Lock has put before us a thesis: the vision of an artist at the avant-garde of international modernism. She has also made the case for Beckett’s fascination for spiritualism influencing her art.
Without the artist’s own comments, and with a fractured and unfinished oeuvre, it is an exciting vision that will be left to us, and to connoisseurship, to decide.
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