The Art Gallery of South Australia’s Clarice Beckett collection shines
Eighty-five years since her death, the art world is rediscovering the wonders of Australian artist Clarice Beckett.
Clarice Beckett made the best of isolation. Not the sort of pandemic-enforced seclusion we’ve come to know in recent weeks, but the loneliness that came with being the carer for her elderly parents in interwar Melbourne because she didn’t have — and didn’t want — a husband. Instead, she wanted to paint.
Just as a new mother snatches time between feeds, Beckett painted when she wasn’t tending to the needs of her parents at home in the bayside suburb of Beaumaris. Joseph Beckett, a bank manager, was unsupportive of his daughter’s talents and refused to let her have a studio at home (the kitchen table would do), so the thrifty painter built a little trolley for her paints, easel and brushes. This operation was going en plein air.
A stylish woman in her 30s, sometimes sporting a red flower tucked in the crease of her cap — such details her lover Arthur Munday said “set off her pale good looks” — Beckett could be seen wheeling her cart along the clifftops and shoreline, painting landscapes imbued with the characteristic “mist” of tonalism. She painted St Kilda, too: a woman battling the wind outside Luna Park, the twilight glow of cars on St Kilda Road. At dawn and at dusk, Beckett wheeled her cart. She would not reach 50.
Art Gallery of South Australia curator of Australian art Tracey Lock says there is a “universal humanity” in Beckett’s paintings. “She understood isolation and human suffering and the restorative power of stillness. The same meditative silence of her paintings is that now being experienced by millions across the globe forced to slow down, retreat from the world and reflect.”
Lock has overseen what the AGSA has announced as one of the most significant donations of works by a single Australian woman artist to be made to an art museum; 21 oil paintings and three sketchbooks by Beckett from the private collection of Dr Rosalind Hollinrake, gifted by benefactor Alastair Hunter OAM.
The AGSA will reopen after a period of corona-closure on June 8, but audiences will have to wait to see the works until a 2021 Beckett exhibition.
“No Australian artist in the 1920s and 30s evoked such a quality of uncanny silence, or as much drama, mystery and beauty from what was often considered mundane subject matter,” Hollinrake tells Review from her home in Melbourne. “She brought beauty to a strip of wet, tar-sealed road, a telegraph pole and car. Under her painter’s brush, everything surrendered up its personality.”
They never met but the art historian and former gallery owner, who was once married to Barry Humphries, feels inextricably linked to the artist, whose memory she has dedicated much of her life to preserving.
Finding a place for women artists such as Beckett in the Australian cultural psyche is a campaign the National Gallery of Australia launched with vigour in February, showing the works of 45 Australian women artists on billboards around the country for six weeks in a partnership with oOh! Media, and an exhibition of 150 works from 1900 to now, which has been postponed to 2021. It is much needed.
In 1920-30s Melbourne the glass ceiling for women artists, who were often considered “dabblers”, may as well have been made of cement. Beckett held solo exhibitions every year for a decade at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne but the critics couldn’t connect with her work. Partly she was guilty by association, dubbed a “Meldrumite” for studying under divisive tonalist Max Meldrum (despite having previously studied under Frederick McCubbin at Melbourne National Gallery School). Meldrum was a Scottish-born artist who, after a stint in France, returned to Melbourne and opened his own art school. Touting painting as a science, his dogmatic approach, in which he encouraged students to squint in order to perceive tone, put him at odds with the conservative establishment. Beckett was one of Meldrum’s star pupils, but Lock says “she also went and did her entirely own thing”.
“What Meldrum was talking about was a way of painting that was mostly an indoors controlled-lighting form of painting, whereas Clarice took his theories and ideas and took them into shifting light, changing light effects.”
It was during one of these outdoor expeditions, painting a storm, that Beckett caught a chill. In 1935, aged 48, the year after her mother died, she died in a nursing home of double pneumonia. Her work was virtually forgotten for the next 35 years.
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Hollinrake was already familiar with a “C Beckett” when an elderly woman named Hilda came into her gallery in Melbourne’s Armadale in 1970 and presented some sketches by the artist, who was her sister. Hilda invited her on a road trip to visit a rural property at Winton North, outside the Victorian town of Benalla, where her daughter and son-in-law lived. There, beneath a piece of corrugated iron held up by four poles, Hollinrake made a harrowing discovery. Almost 2000 of Beckett’s works were housed in the cowshed, whose single back wall was useless against the wind, not to mention the possums and rats. Hollinrake salvaged more than 300 works and would go on to mount two exhibitions in her small Melbourne art gallery in 1971 and 1972. “Both the exhibitions stirred the embers, and certainly brought Clarice and her work back from the dark void,” she says. “This was an era when women’s art was barely acknowledged as being of any real importance, to what was then considered an Australian national identity.”
While a number of works were bought for the National Gallery of Australia, Hollinrake was afraid Beckett would be forgotten again. After all, she says, women artists were “almost unsellable”.
She began a relentless crusade. She interviewed Beckett’s peers, organised commercial exhibitions in Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney and Bendigo, and even gave a lecture at the Jaguar showroom since Beckett loved cars and had often painted them. She walked the streets of Beaumaris and became familiar with many of the places Beckett parked her trolley. A couple of things happened. She held a retrospective of 140 paintings in 1979, to coincide with the release of her book, Clarice Beckett: The Artist and her Circle. And the more she researched, the more she saw Beckett as a “classic case” of outrageous neglect as an artist.
Other important exhibitions followed, including the 1999 Ian Potter Museum of Art touring exhibition, Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, and the AGSA Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950, held in 2008, which included the artist.
Hollinrake, 82, was in discussions with Lock about the 2021 show when it dawned on her that Beckett could be at risk again after that exhibition ended.
“I had always strongly hoped that my Beckett collection could stay together after their exhibition had finished and I was in a quandary on what to do. I was concerned it would be broken up and disappear into private collections, and not be available to be experienced by artist students and the public again.
“I mentioned due to my age and having recently lost my husband I felt it was time to change my life. It was time to travel light once again and not leave problems for my children.”
The story of Beckett, as a woman who painted “within the confines of her personal and family life and within the boundaries of the patriarchal rules of society”, resonated enormously with Alastair Hunter, a former high school economics and mathematics teacher who took over his parents’ support of the AGSA after his father, Tom, an Adelaide doctor, passed away in 2008. “At least one member of my family from roughly the same era had goals which were stymied. Despite this, Clarice persisted with strength and determination to make the best of her lot and was not deflected,” says Hunter, who has secured the acquisition in memory of his mother, Elizabeth. “My mother was uncomplicated, natural and beautiful, and would have appreciated the quality of Clarice’s work: the Hollinrake Collection was a perfect fit.”
Lock says the AGSA’s collection of 26 Beckett oils — the NGA has 34 oil paintings by the artist — is the most significant group of Becketts in the world in terms of size, documentation, provenance and condition. That an Adelaide gallery should hold such a legacy of a Melburnian who painted Melbourne, Hollinrake and Lock are both keen to point out the AGSA’s long history of supporting women artists.
“It has become more fashionable recently, whether it’s Perth or Canberra or elsewhere, to promote women artists,” Lock says. “Really, if you look back, we gave women the vote in SA very early, in 1894. Whether it’s something in the water here, I don’t know, but you have people coming out of Adelaide like Margaret Preston, Bessie Davidson, Stella Bowen, Dorrit Black, Jacqueline Hick, Dora Chapman, it goes on and on.”
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