Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith were two painters. Bowen was born in Adelaide in 1893, went to Europe at the age of 20 and never returned. The other was born in Sydney in 1892 and, apart from a couple of 2 year trips to England (you had to go by ship in those days, so it was never a short trip), lived there all her long life. The book about their lives by Drusilla Modjeska is wonderful. Stella Bowen wrote an autobiography in 1940 Drawn from Life, left a raft of letters behind and is referred to in the papers of people like Ezra Pound, Margaret Cole (née Postgate) and Edith Sitwell, so her story is firmly based on documentary evidence. The story of Cossington Smith has a much more flimsy basis - there is way too much speculation for my rather academic taste. Nonetheless it presents an interesting puzzle, if only it could be unravelled. How could somebody produce such brilliant works and be a pioneer of modern art in Australia without ever having participated in the artistic life of London or Paris, having been taught by a Neapolitan impressionist émigré (Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo) and having lived all her life in an outer suburb (Turramurra) of Sydney? The two years living in Winchester, within a short train ride of London, must surely hold some kind of key, but there is no shred of evidence available! Moreover, in interviews given when she was 90 and in a nursing home, she denies such grand origins for her ideas. Yet in 1915 she had painted the first ever clearly modernist Australian painting . Surely you can't paint like Van Gogh or Cézanne when you’ve only ever seen reproductions of the work on the walls of your art teacher's studio?

Bowen was better known during her lifetime as the consort of Ford Madox Ford, a writer apparently well known in England and among the expatriate community in France,though his reputation never made it to the colonies. Her book is really about the difficulty of living with a man and trying to be an artist at the same time. In Modjeska's hands it makes a very gripping story and one from which Bowen emerges with huge dignity, as well as some bloody good paintings. (In her case, however, a lot of the paintings are lost). She and Ford separated in 1928 - he having spent her Australian middle-class capital already - and she struggled with poverty for the rest of her life. But it was only after the split that her painting came good. The story is a very moving one. I think Modjeska (or was it Bowen?) sets up a rather straw-mannish opposition between Love and Art, but it is surely the story of thousands of women of talent who have tried to make something of and for themselves in the face of ego-centric and demanding men.

Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him. He thought I lacked the will to do it at all costs. That was true, but he did not realise that if I had had the will to do it at all costs, my life would have been oriented quite differently. I should not have been available to nurse him through the daily strain of his own work; to walk and talk with him whenever he wanted, and to stand between him and circumstances. Pursuing an art is not just a matter of finding the time – it is a matter of having a free spirit to bring to it.

The title of the book comes from a story of Stravinsky who,apparently, demanded total silence from his wife and kids while he was working,including during lunch!

But Love and being around to pick up the laundry are not the same thing. Cossington Smith also had a home drudge: for most of her life it was her younger sister Madge, who the parents kept at home to look after themselves and her painterly sister. Modjeska shows several pictures of Madge in which she looks unremittingly downcast. After WW2, when the parents were both dead, Madge went back to England and her pre-WW1 fiancé who, despite having married somebody else, had become single again. Of Grace, Modjeska says, "Her lack of domestic proficiency, maintained over a lifetime, was quite an achievement."

Neither woman achieved much recognition during their most productive years. Incredibly,there was a touring exhibition of modern art in 1939 (Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin and everyone). It had to be shown in department stores because the state galleries (AGNSW and NGV) wouldn’t touch the stuff with a barge pole. In the end, all of the paintings were stored in a basement at the AGNSW for the duration of WW2. Despite protests, the Gallery refused to put them on show and not a single painting was purchased for any collection. They’re all now in major collections in Europe and North America. Modjeska quotes Robert Menzies, he was briefly Prime Minister in 1939, telling the modern artists that they would sink into oblivion because people like him (people with money) would never buy them!

In Cossington Smith's case there were extremely antagonistic reviews by male defenders of 'true art'. She and a handful of colleagues were virtually alone trying to do modern art in this country (and only she and Roland Wakelin didn’t really have the option or desire to escape abroad like Bowen). It wasn't until the Second World War that a new generation of male artists found modernism.They, of course, didn't acknowledge the legacy of their female forbears, but commanded attention as the pioneers of modern art in Australia. Cossington Smith's only champion before 1967 was a female art critic, Edith Anderson, who had access to the press because of her husband's position in the NSW Governor's office. But Anderson was also a lone voice among a chorus of anti-modernist male critics. GCS was by no means the only female modernist whose work had to overcome the male prejudices - there were also Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black, Margaret Preston (Bowen's teacher in Adelaide before the First War), Clarice Beckett, Thea Proctor and Nora Heysen. Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre got more attention, but the latter also felt he could survive better in Europe.
I wonder why it is that such a high proportion of these female modernists - Bowen, Preston, Black and Heysen - came from Adelaide?

Edith Anderson and her ear trumpet (from the book). I couldn't resist this - I thought ear trumpets were a myth.


Cossington, the house in Turramurra named after Grace's father's English home village. I drove up there this afternoon to have a look.


The street, Kuring-gai Avenue.


Added to my list:
Stella Bowen, Drawn from Life
VirginiaWoolf, To the Lighthouse
Christina Stead, For Love Alone