Artist Mirka Mora left a distinctive mark on Melbourne, from murals to mosaics, even trams

MIRKA Mora, the cherished St Kilda artist who died aged 90 yesterday, was a part of Melbourne’s fabric. But anyone familiar with her life story knew there was darkness behind the bright colours.

Mirka Mora becomes one with her art at her Richmond studio. Picture: David Caird

TO enter Mirka Mora’s home was to enter a world unto itself.

This most cherished of Melbourne artists, who died on Monday aged 90, was surrounded by art and easels, books and bags, kettles and cabinets, trinkets and toys, and every visitor to her St Kilda house — or, in later years, Richmond apartment — had to navigate this marvellous clutter before they met its owner.

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“Hello, Simon, is that you?”

Mirka’s distinctive French accent always floated out first and when you finally found her, sitting at the very heart of this Aladdin’s Cave, the reception was as warm as one of her sunny paintings.

Eyes twinkling, a wicked smile playing around her lips, Mirka would clasp my hand and immediately suggest a “little cup of coffee”.

Of course.

Mirka’s great friend, the French mime artist Marcel Marceau, once warned her about the dangers of encroaching treasures.

“Marceau’s warning I have not forgotten,” she admitted in her 2003 book, Love and Clutter.

But Mirka was never apart from Melbourne.

She was a vital part of it.

Mirka Mora in her studio at Richmond.

Her playful spirit animated so many corners of this city, from trams decorated with cupids and cats to murals inside St Kilda’s Tolarno hotel and mosaics at Flinders Street Station.

Today, so many Melburnians will be thinking about their own encounters with Mirka.

Perhaps you first saw her in the 1950s and 60s, promenading down the Paris End of Collins Street in bright red socks.

Or enchanting customers at her raffish Mirka Cafe.

Or naughtily lifting her skirts at East Melbourne’s Balzac restaurant where fellow artist Charles Blackman — who died last week — occasionally minded the stoves.

More recently, you may have seen Mirka dispensing romantic advice on ABC-TV’s Agony Aunts and talking rather freely about her, er … passions.

But you didn’t have to actually meet Mirka to know her, of course.

Mirka Mora and one of her angel paintings in 1995.

Mirka Mora in 1990.

Everything she wished to say she said in her art and across half a century of work — an incredible 35 solo exhibitions — the brushmarks she made were instantly recognisable.

Angels and birds, cats and snakes … these were recurring motifs, inhabitants of a dreamworld which only Mirka could unlock.

But anyone familiar with her life story knew there was darkness behind the bright colours.

Mirka Madeleine Zelik was born in Paris in 1928, the daughter of a Lithuanian father and a Romanian mother.

The outbreak of war ruptured their lives.

Mirka — who barely escaped with her life in Nazi-occupied France — went on to marry a French Resistance fighter, Georges Mora and emigrated to Australia with their infant son Philippe in 1951.

The Moras were part of a great wave of migrants who energised monocultural Melbourne and almost from the moment they arrived, the pair were encouraging a deeper, richer culture inspired by Europe.

Into the 1960s, their home-studio at Number 9 Collins St evolved into a bohemian hub where art was made and issues of the day were hotly debated … between fabled parties.

The partying continued when the Moras managed Tolarno in Fitzroy St.

Guy Grossi and Mirka Mora at the Tolarno restaurant in St Kilda, which Mirka helped decorate and restore.

The hotel’s fanciful Mirka murals teeming with nymphs hinted at after hours abandon but the legacy of those halcyon years — one of genuine hospitality — informs restaurants of today, especially those in St Kilda.

Mirka and Georges also forged firm friendships with modern art patrons John and Sunday Reed who nurtured a circle of progressive painters and writers at their farm by the Yarra.

That property, known as Heide, is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art and will host a commemorative Mirka exhibition in October.

“Heide is where I grew up as a woman,’’ she once said.

“So many dramas, so many affairs.’’

Mirka always wore her heart on her sleeve but that impish exterior disguised a deep thinker, a well-read woman of the world who could quote poetry at the drop of a brush.

Work was her other engine. Inimitable and unstoppable, Mirka was still painting at 86.

“I have to, I need to,’’ she told me.

Mirka especially treasured her palettes and never liked to clean them, explaining the colours were like “the notes of a musical composition”.

So when Mirka bequeathed one of those palettes to me, I was deeply touched.

I’m thinking of that generosity today, recalling those visits to her private world and reflecting on all the joy Mirka Mora brought into ours.

SIMON PLANT is a Herald Sun senior writer.