July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
The Long Weekend
By Megan Backhouse
Agnes Goodsir is still a mystery. We know the Australian-born portrait painter lived and died in Paris last century, shared a studio apartment with the American Rachel Dunn and had at least one of her pictures framed by the same French framer as used by Rupert Bunny, but, as for her day-to-day life, well, it's all pretty hazy.
Bunny, himself, who also spent decades in France, was more well-known but his intimate southern landscapes shown here aren't the acclaimed, heroic works of his earlier years. In fact, when choosing Australian artists who lived in France between 1918 and 1939 for the Bendigo Art Gallery's summer exhibition, the gallery director Karen Quinlan says she deliberately avoided the famous likes of the Modernist Margaret Preston.
Quinlan, who curated the first comprehensive exhibition of Goodsir's work 10 years ago, says she wanted to look at artists who weren't particularly radical or experimental but were painting relatively quiet landscapes, interiors, and still lifes. Most of these artists, she says, had little impact at the time and were but a handful of a vast crowd of people in art, music and literature who settled in France between the First and Second World Wars.
"I didn't want their work to be overshadowed by the artists who prompted Australian modernism and have already been thoroughly researched," Quinlan says. "There were thousands of people there and it was easy to become lost in that. This was a period of euphoria, a time when war was over and people embraced life. Paris was felt to be the epicentre of art but the artists in this exhibition were not necessarily connected to the surrealists or other new movements of the time."
Agnes Goodsir, Cherry 1924, oil on canvas, 55.0 x 47.0cm
Glenelg Shire Art Collection, Victoria
Their work might have been relatively conservative but their lives were often unconventional and the anonymity of France during these between-war years, a period referred to as 'the long weekend', was possibly one of the attractions. "Living there was to do with the freedom of the moment, the ability to do what you wanted. You could leave traditional family life or the farm work and live an alternative lifestyle," Quinlan says.
Alternative lifestyle or not, these were also productive years with this
exhibition, The Long Weekend: Australian Artists in France 1918-1939 brings together 98 paintings, drawn from public and private collections around Australia. We get Stella Bowen's interiors, Ethel Carrick Fox's flower markets and beach scenes, Max Meldrum's parks and Bessie Gibson's portraits of friends, for instance.
While Will Ashton (represented here with country landscapes and Paris waterways) and Bunny worked together and several of the artists occasionally exhibited together, Quinlan says she has not been able to connect the artists in a way that suggests any of them knew each other well.
"Rupert Bunny and Agnes Goodsir used the same framer and their paths must have crossed but we don’t have evidence that they met. In Stella Bowen's memoirs she mentions an old Australian living on the top floor of the building in which she had her studio and we suspect she is referring to Bessie Davidson. I think we will start to find out more now," Quinlan says.
On a recent trip to Paris, Quinlan was invited for dinner at the apartment in which Goodsir lived and says 'walking in the steps of the artist' was quite an experience. She refers to Goodsir and some of the other artists represented here as a 'lost generation' in that most of them had low profiles in their own life-time and produced works that often 'faded into obscurity'. While the lack of historical detail has sometimes proved
frustrating, she says it gives people the chance to come to their own conclusions.
"What we want to do is let viewers work out a narrative for themselves. These paintings give us a picture of what France was like in the eyes of these artists. It was a great period and I just love the whole notion of these artists going away somewhere else."
Unknown artist, Agnes Goodsir with Cherry, Estelle and Winifred
The Long Weekend: Australian Artists in France 1918-1939 is at the Bendigo Art Gallery until 10 March.
Megan Backhouse is a Melbourne-based journalist who has been writing about the visual arts for more than 10 years.
