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THE
TRAITS WOMEN are encouraged to develop
nowadays, such as outwardness, attitude,
assertiveness and professionalism, did
not characterise Grace Cossington Smith
(1892–1984). Family snapshots showed
the young woman with tousled hair, guileless
face and buck-toothed smile: a neat-figured,
long-skirted Edwardian tomboy after the
style of Australian heroines in novels
by Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce.
The older woman in family photographs
still had the tomboy grin; conversely,
when she showed a public face, the mouth
was closed and the eyes steady behind
glasses.
Cossington Smith was reasonably well known
in her modernist youth, less so in later
years, until, in 1973, Daniel Thomas organised
a retrospective at the Art Gallery of
New South Wales that launched her as probably
the major artist of her generation. For
Thomas, the key to her art was colour
and spirituality: ‘all her paintings
are devotional.’ In particular, he
thought that the interiors of ‘Cossington’,
the well-loved family home, in a series
of late works vibrant with light and memory,
were the artist’s reflections on
the human values of ‘security, serenity
and stability … precarious and hard-won’.
The late, great interiors also dominate
this second, splendid retrospective, organised
by Deborah Hart of the National Gallery
of Australia, and now showing at the Art
Gallery of South Australia. The selection
and display of works suggests to me that
the tug of inner and outer worlds, of
exploration and revelation, informed Cossington
Smith’s art from first to last. One
creative source was within home and family,
the artist’s suburb of Turramurra
(adjacent to the bushland of Kuringai
Chase, on the north shore of Sydney) and
a small coterie of friends. The other
was the contemporary Western world as
it affected Sydney in both world wars:
industrial disputes, crowds filling the
man-made canyons of city streets, and
the spanning of Sydney Harbour by an iron
bridge, the bold arch of which gave form
to what, before, had been mere empty space.
Cossington Smith was unusual among Australian
modernists of her generation in visualising
the emotions shared by people within a
group. As well as picturing race-going
crowds, strikes, commuters at peak hour,
marching troops, she took her sketchbook
into churches and theatres to describe
the sharing of religious ritual and performances
of music and ballet.
A ceremonial preparation and ritual bridged
Grace’s inner and outer worlds. Jean
Appleton, who used to accompany Cossington
Smith on painting expeditions, described
her equipped with ‘a huge black brolly,
painting materials, stool, packed lunch
… plus a home-made padded box to
insulate her feet from the insects and
elements’. More significantly, Cossington
Smith had a bridge to painting in the
practice of drawing. The works in this
retrospective are displayed with some
drawings, plus a digital slideshow of
other relevant sketches. Drawing was not
a mere rehearsal of painting: a typical
drawing by Cossington Smith was a diagram
or plan. Its form was almost the negative
to painting in that the drawn outlines
would be replaced in the oil painting
by implied edges and the drawing’s
blank spaces would be built with substantial
bricks of colour.
The selection from early, middle and late
phases of the artist’s work conveys
the idea that the preparation for the
final phase was not simply the vitalist
1920s and 1930s paintings that show life
in action: a road or a ship swelling upward
or plummeting, waves advancing, plants
growing, crowds rushing, the Harbour Bridge
soaring into the sky. Those paintings
were exploratory, many of them searching
the styles and motifs of inspirational
masters (Christopher Nevinson, Paul Nash,
Roland Wakelin, Paul Cézanne, Wassily
Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh) as a provisional
way of scrutinising the subject in life.
Their imaginative trajectory is outward
to the stylistic exemplars, to modern
theories of art and religion, and to life
seen through special lenses. Revelation
was built into the form according to how
Cossington Smith achieved command over
her chosen sources.
This exhibition points to the significance
of hesitation for the mature work. In
some nondescript, mid-career works, Cossington
Smith seems poised for revelation, looking
to her subject and working very plainly
without the guide of a masterly style.
I take it that Hart, by including so many
of the muted paintings, is suggesting
that the essential preparation for the
late interiors in yellow was the quiet
representation of brown, untidy bush,
of blond fields hemmed in a stop-and-go
fashion with fences and electricity poles,
and flower paintings with dull, autumnal
colours and indeterminate structure. Among
the handful of memorable paintings in
the group are a couple in tones of bronze
and olive, mere formless samples of the
bush, in which the subject appears to
be the threshold in time between a summer’s
day and night. The atmosphere is blurring
to dusk, the leaves of the trees (evidently
still warm from the sun) are relaxed in
form, and oily and semi-transparent in
texture. In the late 1930s Cossington
Smith painted Bonfire in the bush.
Night prevails except where a plume of
flame and smoke lights some figures gazing
into the fire and shows a path leading
through the dark from us to them. Patrick
White (who once owned the work) wrote
ambiguously, ‘this glowing icon is
important because it conveys a communion
between the Edwardian ascendancy and the
original Australia’. Treania Smith
(of Macquarie Galleries) noted Cossington
Smith’s ‘great concentration’
during the mid-career painting excursions.
Her manner of brushing, from one corner
of the canvas steadily across the whole
work, suggests that she worked from a
mental template of the composition, colour
and emotion: the preparatory bridge evidently
served even those works, the closest she
ever came to direct, spontaneous painting.
Unlike the sharing of emotions between
people in a group, the ‘communion’
involved in landscape painting depended
on the artist waiting for a subject to
come forward. As Hart observes, many of
these paintings ‘work gradually’.
Cossington Smith has attracted some notable
writers: Drusilla Modjeska in Stravinsky’s
Lunch (1999), Bruce James in Grace
Cossington Smith (1990), Thomas first
of all, and now Hart. All have noted the
importance to Cossington Smith of reverie.
James observed that she ‘meditated’
on a motif for long periods, ‘with
due sensitivity to its elusiveness and
inscrutability’. Modjeska imagined
her occupying a ‘transitional’
or ‘sheltered’ space: ‘The
Buddhists talk of “bare attention”
as the capacity to be at ease with oneself,
to … attend to the world simply as
it is.’ Thomas found her paintings
devotional. Hart saw that the effect could
be gradual. It seems that for Cossington
Smith the scope for personal ease shrank
over time whereas her spiritual scope
expanded. She stopped communing with the
quiet bush: ‘by slow degrees I gave
that up … I began to feel not so
secure somehow.’ Eventually, even
the garden of ‘Cossington’,
her home, was to loom outside and at several
removes from the centre of her attention.
The last great paintings are of rooms
with doors opening over a deep threshold
onto a verandah beyond which the garden
glows. She painted rooms in which she
had lived and slept since her youth, opening
drawers and closet doors to show what
is stored within. Merely by changing the
angle of a door or mirror, or by opening
a drawer she was able to redefine the
plastic space in which she moved and had
her being. The final paintings in the
exhibition are of life’s familiar
vessels: jugs and jars brimmed with light.
Writers and viewers agree about the art
of Grace Cossington Smith. From within
her home environment, she addressed large
issues. There are paintings in this exhibition
that deal with the politics and dangers
of war, the psychology of crowds, the
powerful effect of technology on the natural
world, the rising crescendo of music and
the exhalation of the spirit. She realised
those themes with the confidence of an
Edwardian woman looking outward from her
home position rather than from a professional
position in the art community. However,
the peak of her art was within her home
and the memories it held.
Catalogue:
Deborah Hart (ed.)
Grace Cossington Smith
NGA, $89 hb, 187 pp, 0 642 54114 0
$59.95 pb, 0 642 54203 1
Exhibition:
Grace Cossington Smith
Art Gallery of South Australia
Closes on October 9
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