Grace Crowley’s work is the highlight of this joint exhibition with Ralph Balson

Grace Crowley seems to have drawn by Ralph Balson into genre so incompatible with her sensibility that it extinguished her inspiration.

Detail of Grace Crowley’s The Portrait of Lucie Beynis (1929), which the artist considered her finest.

Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson may be rather unfamiliar names to many readers, but this intelligently conceived exhibition not only allows us to understand the career and stylistic evolution of each of these artists and their relationship but also raises other important questions. Among these are the role of art education and its history across the past century, the attraction of stylistic fashions in art and the powerful but sometimes destructive influence that partners can have on each other.

The first of these questions is art education, which played such a prominent role in Crowley’s career. Art teaching was in constant transition during her lifetime, and from certain points of view in a long decline, yet it was still run by people who felt deeply committed to their art forms. Today the situation in art schools generally is critical, particularly in the teaching of painting, which is often run by people who no longer believe in painting at all. Students frequently are not taught the basic skills of their art and can even be ridiculed for seeking technical instruction.

To anyone in the real world, such a situation must seem almost incredible. Imagine if you went to the conservatorium to learn an instrument but received no training, or were laughed at for entertaining such an old-fashioned idea, or advised to look up a YouTube video for help. Or imagine going to a film and television school and not being taught basic camera skills. These scenarios are unthinkable both because students would immediately realise they were being cheated, and because the world in which they expect to find employment has very high expectations of technical mastery. No one gets a job in an orchestra, a rock band or on a film set without an exceptional level of proficiency.

Even in other areas of art, such as photography, printmaking or sculpture, it is fairly obvious to everyone that technical mastery is a precondition of success. But contempt for skill has long been almost an article of faith in painting departments, and now with a new generation of teachers who do not even believe in hamfisted self-expression, the standards of graduates have collapsed. There are today hundreds of young people completing painting degrees or even enrolled in postgraduate courses who have little ability and have received no useful instruction, yet they are encouraged in their delusion of being artists by teachers who need enrolments in their courses.

This situation could never occur in music, theatre or film teaching for the reasons already mentioned. But there is no real world of employment in which the incompetence and lack of talent of graduates from painting courses can be objectively demonstrated, so the whole thing ends with a whimper, and while a handful are taken up by galleries, most art school graduates fade away into some other line of work and are never heard of again. That is why there are so many art schools and so few conservatoriums and film schools.

When Crowley (1890-1979) was growing up, there were two art schools in Sydney, the East Sydney Technical College (today the National Art School), and Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, today the Julian Ashton Art School. The former had grown out of courses originally run by the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts and was slightly older than the National Gallery School in Melbourne, set up in 1867 as Australia’s first formal academy of art. Ashton’s school was originally preferred by many ambitious young artists, and among its most famous alumni was George Lambert, who had left for Europe in 1900.

Crowley’s Abstraction - Abstract painting, 1947.

Crowley – she insisted that her name should be pronounced to rhyme with “slowly” – was first a student and later a teacher at Ashtons. According to a wall label in this exhibition, she was the head teacher there by 1918, although the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes her as Ashton’s assistant.

She lived at the time with a slightly older fellow-student, Anne Dangar (1885-1951), who like her came from the country; this appears to have been the most important relationship of her life and their years together were probably her happiest.

In 1926 Crowley and Dangar sailed to Europe where they studied with Andre Lhote in Paris from 1927 and in 1928 attended his summer school at Mirmande, near Montelimar in the southwest of France (an hour or so by car north of Avignon). Later they both became involved with another teacher, Albert Gleizes, who had set up an art commune, Moly-Sabata, at Sablons, about an hour’s drive to the north and still in the Rhône Valley. After Crowley was obliged to return to Australia in 1930, when her mother fell ill, Dangar remained at Moly-Sabata, lived through the German occupation during the war and died in the care of a local monastery.

Lhote and Gleizes are often described as cubists – indeed a label in the exhibition calls them “pioneering artists of the cubist movement” – but their work was in reality an academic version of that style which has little in common with the works painted by Picasso during the analytical cubist years immediately preceding World War I. Their teaching emphasised the structural simplification of motifs and above all the geometrical principles of composition.

Ironically, perhaps, these were principles practised by painters for centuries and that had been ignored or to some extent forgotten in the vogue for naturalism – both in its modernist and academic versions – across the previous 100 years.

These principles later were summed up in a famous book, The Painter’s Secret geometry (originally Charpentes: la geometrie secrete des peintres, 1963), by Charles Bouleau with a preface by Jacques Villon, the brother of Marcel Duchamp. They appealed to a modernist sensibility because they took it as axiomatic that the picture plane is a matrix in which divisions into halves and thirds, diagonals, the analysis of the rectangle into a square and its supplement, and so on, are fundamental to composition. Most important of all, perhaps, was the concept of the golden section, the unique point at which any line can be divided, at which the proportion of the short to the long section is equal to that of the long to the whole. This proportion (1:1.618) fascinated many modern artists and architects, especially Le Corbusier.

We can see Crowley applying these structural principles in her landscape Mirmande (1928) as well as in the painting Sailors and Models(c. 1928), which is hung next to a drawn study for the composition. These pictures are appealing if somewhat self-conscious; in the latter, for example, some contours of the figures are almost omitted, while those that correspond to compositional lines are heavily emphasised. The same features can be seen in Torso, Study in Volume (1929), but this painting has a more satisfying sense of physical substance and feels like a synthesis of the new structural principles with the foundational skills she had learnt at Ashtons.

Detail of Crowley’s "Mirmande", 1928.

Unfortunately Crowley had to return to Sydney, as already mentioned, in 1930. There is a fine portrait of her cousin Gwen Ridley (shown in the 1930 Archibald Prize) and an impressive pencil drawing of a female nude from the 1930s. But in 1932 she and Rah Fizelle opened the Crowley-Fizelle art school (1932-37) in George Street in Sydney and began to move increasingly towards abstraction. One of their students was Ralph Balson (1890-1964), whom she had known and probably taught before her time in France.

After her school closed, the two of them worked more closely together, to the extent that she eventually wrote the signatures on his paintings. Considering her own previous inclinations and the fact he was married with three children, the exact nature of their relationship is difficult to gauge exactly.

It is hard to resist the impression that Crowley was increasingly drawn into Balson’s exploration of abstraction. His well-known portrait of her (1939) hangs next to her picture of him, seen from the back painting at his easel (1938), and it is as though her previous style is disintegrating under his influence. Her Portrait (1939) shows this disintegration carried even further; the wall label implies that it represents some kind of progress but it is objectively far less satisfactory, as a portrait or as a composition, than her earlier work – something of which, as we shall see, she would later at least be aware; but again it seems to be dragged into the same vortex as Balson’s The Sisters (1939). There is something sadly disoriented and shapeless about her Woman (Annunciation), also painted around 1939.

Ralph Balson’s Portrait of Grace Crowley, 1939.

During the ’40s, Balson became increasingly prolific, painting abstract compositions that combine geometrical principles learnt from Crowley with borrowings from constructivism, later Kandinsky and other modernist abstract painters. At the same time Crowley painted less, and virtually stopped in the early ’50s, when she bought a house at Mittagong in the NSW southern highlands with a studio for Balson and seems to have devoted herself increasingly to supporting his career.

Balson was a thoughtful and intelligent painter, but it is hard to deny that the idiom he practised ultimately was rather disembodied and bland. The whole vast room of constructivist abstract paintings is less engaging than the smaller group of Crowley’s earlier work. In his last years, when he had more time to devote to painting after his retirement in 1955, he moved into a rather more substantial style with his “non-objective” series, mainly because these works now have a more vigorous sense of materiality, a tactile appeal quite unlike the flat transparency of his earlier paintings.

Balson’s Construction in green, 1942.

In 1960-61 Crowley and Balson travelled overseas and had the opportunity to study recent tendencies in abstract painting. Following their return, Balson painted his final series, the so-called matter paintings, which included pouring and splashing paint and allowing it, as he said, to “produce its own rhythm, its own structure – a natural paint structure”. These pictures, too, are intriguing and have their place in the history of Australian art, but they nonetheless represent the endpoint of an artistic journey from impersonality to radical nihilism. It is in a sense poetically appropriate that he died soon after painting these pictures, which evoke the end of painting.

This was a journey on which Crowley was drawn, it seems, by the force of Balson’s personality – aided by the current of a prevailing fashion for abstraction in the third quarter of the 20th century – but which was so incompatible with her own sensibility that it first impoverished and then extinguished her own inspiration. After Balson died in 1964, she devoted herself to promoting his work, but on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1975, she declared “1929 really was my best painting year. The Portrait of Lucie Beynis now in our New South Wales Art Gallery I consider my best portrait”.

Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, to September 22