EILEEN CHANIN and STEVEN MILLER Awakening: Four lives in art. Reviewed by Annette Hughes
These four Australian women reached out and took what the world had to offer in the new light of modernism.
Awakening is a compelling work of cultural history which looks at the lives of four Melbourne women from diverse backgrounds, and follows their respective careers in the arts, cleverly contextualising them by taking each mini-biography up to World War II. In their day, any kind of professional career was extremely difficult for women to achieve and Awakening is a vibrant examination of their struggle for recognition during a time of flux and great social upheaval between the wars. It is also set against the unwillingness of Australia to be dragged screaming towards modernism. The book paints a vivid portrait of an age in the midst of epic modernisation and its impact on these four women. The rate of change between the wars must have appeared as mind-bogglingly fast to them as the current tech revolution seems to us.
The work opens with the life and times of Dora Ohlfsen, the child of Finnish migrants whose fortunes were enriched by the prosperity afforded by Ballarat gold. Dora was a talented pianist and like many gifted European migrant children, was sent back to the ‘old country’ (where the real culture was) to continue her musical studies, which she completed in Berlin. She played for the Kaiser and was about to embark on a performance career when she suffered a breakdown. The reason she gave was too little money. The crash of 1890 had taken its toll on her father’s capacity to finance her further, so she retreated to Finland to recuperate with friends. There she met her life-long partner, the Countess Elena von Kügelgen, whose family was eminently well connected in the Russian court at St Petersberg.
With Elena, Dora witnessed the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian culture, during which time she was exposed to theosophy, the work of the Symbolists, and most importantly, was introduced to sculpture, specifically the art of the medallion. However, by 1902 as a result of the rising civil unrest, the pair decided to move to Italy to further Dora’s art studies. Polyglot von Kügelgen would have eased them both into the ‘fluid cosmopolitan community’ of artists, teachers, scholars, patrons and collectors. There Dora acquired her skills as a sculptor, specialising in bas relief. ‘Sculpture was seen as a masculine art, requiring physical force and dirty procedures that entailed working with skilled trades, knowledge of which was considered beyond the experience of most women’, but Dora prevailed and began showing her work, gathering commissions, and establishing a celebrated career. With Mussolini’s support, she became the only expatriate sculptor in Italy commissioned to create a national war memorial.
She returned to Australia in 1912 after a 20-year absence, during which time the country had become a federation, almost doubled in population, given women the vote, and introduced an aged pension. More spectacular was the cultural transformation that had taken place, with the founding of symphony orchestras and conservatoriums, universities in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia, and the building of the Art Gallery of New South Wales underway. Her trip was for family reasons, but could not have been better timed. The Art Gallery of New South Wales was in the process of commissioning the bronze friezes to adorn the blank recesses intended to illustrate the six epochs of art. Dora sent her portfolio to the trustees and was commissioned to complete a full-sized plaster model to be cast in bronze for the panel immediately above the door, and two roundels. She also hoped her work would be included among the commissions for sculptures in the new federal capital, Canberra.
Sixteen months later, she returned to Rome to work on the commission, but with the outbreak of war, she endured increasing difficulty in obtaining reasonable quotes for the casting and began to find fault with the commission.
In September 1919, after much frustration at the Sydney trustees’ interference and financial constraints, Dora was bitterly disappointed to find that they had cancelled her commission. The authors note that it was probably Dora’s forthrightness and unwavering commitment to her own artistic vision that cost her the work; however, it is doubtful that trustee Sir John Sulman would have said this of a man: ‘Miss Ohlfsen is a woman, and although she has no case, can cause mischief.’ There were many disappointments in her long career, not least of which being that although there are paper trails of accounting and correspondence, much of her work has not survived.
Fifteen years younger than Dora, Louise Dyer had been groomed for a life as a society wife, fluent in all the gentle arts suitable for a young lady of her status, especially music, at which Louise was particularly gifted. In 1905 she enrolled at the Melbourne Conservatorium to study with Leipzig-trained Eduard Scharf, and then gained her licentiate in piano from London’s Trinity College. She returned to Europe on several occasions, most significantly to visit the Glasgow Athenaeum, where she discovered its library of early printed music and manuscripts of medieval liturgical works. This would have a huge impact on her subsequent career.
She married James Dyer, who shared her love of music, and when she discovered she would never have children, Louise threw herself into fundraising projects, especially for music. She became the key promoter of the renewal of British classical music by Vaughan Williams, Holst and Delius, among others, building on French Impressionism and English folk music:
Her interest in the new generation of British composers, including Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians, went beyond anti-German sentiment or even the patriotic attachment to England common to her generation. Her perspective was that of the musicologist … For her, music was a complex and diversified practice, in which historical, aesthetic, sociological and physical considerations intermingled … Her ambition was for something beyond the role of wealthy social hostess.
As well as establishing her international Lyrebird Press, publishing music ranging from the 13th to 20th centuries, she recognised that ‘in actual performance, the music she had recovered went beyond historical interest and had a life as viable as the most recent contemporary work. A new dynamic of space and time was created’ with the emergence of commercial gramophone recording, and Louise became the first publisher to simultaneously release printed music and recordings. She built up a ‘catalogue that became the envy of the commercial moguls of the gramophone world, whose initial scorn turned into grudging admiration then furtive and finally open imitation’. Regardless of all the accolades and awards bestowed on her work, she was still, after all, a woman, and felt the need to state that she did not want people to think her ‘just a rich woman who gives money to a cause’. Had she been a man, the question would not even have arisen.
Like Dyer, Mary Cecil Allen was privileged with a private education, rich in intellectual stimulation and social engagement. Her father was a medical professor and consequently the Allen home was a centre for students and visiting intellectuals, with Mary and her two sisters becoming equally distinguished in their chosen fields. At the age of 16, Mary qualified for an arts degree at the university of Melbourne, and also for the prestigious art school at the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1912 Bernard Hall issued her with a certificate in drawing competency. However, she did not progress immediately to painting, but rather interrupted her studies to travel to England.
Mary was extremely impressed by London and enrolled in the Slade School to train alongside such English art greats as Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson. She had planned on three months, but only stayed for one, being under-impressed by the teaching. In 1914 she returned to Melbourne to resume her studies with a ‘confidence that awed fellow students’. She had her heart set on winning a travelling scholarship so she could resume her studies abroad, but it was not to be, so she graduated and set about developing her own work. In 1919, at the age of 26, Mary held her first solo exhibition. She continued to exhibit in Melbourne to some critical acclaim, and in 1925 became one of the first women art critics to write for a major newspaper, the Sun News Pictorial. She also began giving lectures, which were extremely well attended.
In 1926 she was 33 years old and most of her contemporaries were raising families, but Mary must have been just a little jealous of her fellow Gallery School student Ethel Spowers, who had spent three years in London and Paris. When an offer came from a wealthy American visitor for Mary to be her personal guide in Europe, Mary jumped at the opportunity and, after eight months there, sailed for New York, where she immediately felt at home, and began lecturing and publishing in the epicentre of modern art. She returned to Melbourne in 1935 to exhibit, but the staid, conservative city found her modernism too confronting. Despite her art not finding favour, many were eager to hear her lectures, which she had developed into an art form.
Of the four, Clarice Zander is the most interesting. She had the biggest hoops to jump through to attain her achievements. She started out with every opportunity – a high-quality education and art studies at the new Eastern Suburbs Technical and Art School in Hawthorn, where she learned the skills to gain considerable success as a freelance illustrator, earning ten quid a week when the basic wage for a woman was eight shillings a day. Around this time she met her husband-to-be, Charles Zander. They were only married for four months before he left for Europe to serve in the Australian Imperial Force, arriving at the front on 12 July 1916. Charles returned from the war damaged but determined to make his way on his own terms, and dragged Clarice to a soldier settlement block in Mildura. This dramatic descent into hardship with a war-damaged husband mirrors the agony of many post-war families.
They built a modest house and began digging out the tenacious mallee roots to grow sultanas for export. It was hard, back-breaking work to clear the mallee and must have been even more difficult for Clarice once her daughter was born. Clarice wrote:
‘… women patiently gathered up what they were able of the roots flung about like tremendous tentacles … When these heaps had been burnt off, the ground was ploughed again … and the women patiently stooped or followed the furrows on their knees, gathering the pieces. A back-breaking effort.’
Charles, like many others unable to shake the horrors of the trenches, took to heavy drinking and went slowly and painfully mad, leaving Clarice with his power of attorney and a small child. She returned home to her mother’s house and became the main breadwinner for four generations of women. With post-war reconstruction underway, and modernism emerging, Clarice cut her hair into a bob and went out into the world to make a life for herself and her daughter. She held several jobs at once, but most important were the five years she managed the New Gallery, in which most of Melbourne’s leading artists were shareholders. During this time she met Bill Dyson and in 1930, followed him to London, where she became manager of a Bond Street gallery, which was to become the Redfern Gallery, where her art world connections expanded, and to which she introduced Australian artists like Sidney Nolan and Donald Friend.
In 1932 she received word that her mother and grandmother were ailing and decided to return to Australia, but would bring with her an exhibition of contemporary British art. Over 5000 people visited the show in Melbourne and it recorded daily attendances of 500 in Sydney. Then from 1933-35, on her return to London, she became the roving correspondent for Melbourne’s Star, representing it in London and Paris, and wrote features for the Argus. In March 1934 she became press agent for the Royal Academy, an institution ‘to British art what Lords is to cricket’. Today she would be called an education officer, but then she was making her job up as she went along, and was credited with bringing ‘the Academy into touch with an immense newspaper-reading public’.
All these women’s lives are deeply interesting and each deserves a full biography. They reached out and took what the world had on offer in the new light of modernism and awakened generations of women to what was possible to achieve in the arts. Awakening is generously illustrated throughout, and a well written, immaculately researched testament to their legacy.
Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller Awakening: Four lives in art Wakefield Press 2015 PB 272pp $39.95
Annette Hughes is the author of Art Life Chooks and a writer/singer/songwriter who will be releasing a double album in 2016 with DATSON+HUGHES.
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