THEA
PROCTOR’S LONG career spanned
the 1900s to the 1960s. Sadly, she
lived to see her reputation decline.
Barry Humphries, in private life a
noted art collector, relates here
how his characteristic appreciation
of the aesthetically démodé
led him to seek out Proctor’s
acquaintance in the 1960s. A new generation
of professional curators sniffily
dismissed the grande dame,
then in her eighties, as a ‘minor
artist’, more important as a
teacher and passionate champion of
other modernists than in her own right.
To Proctor, though, an aesthetic reputation
was everything. ‘If I have not
got that a life’s work is wasted,’
she despaired to a friend.
The aestheticism of Charles Conder
in the 1890s was her earliest influence,
particularly his frothily painted
silk fans, a genre she imitated and
made her own. By the 1920s she had
built a reputation as a leading modernist
‘decorator’ in Sydney, with
the support of Art in Australia.
Jan Minchin and Roger Butler’s
lavish Thea Proctor: The Prints
(1980) revived demand for her stunning
lithographs, woodcuts and covers for
the women’s magazines Vogue
and The Home, somewhat at the
expense of other periods of her work.
Despite all that, Proctor remained
rooted in the tradition of Conder
and Oscar Wilde. For her, art was
always an extension of her carefully
cultivated image. Returning from London
in 1921 when in her forties, she set
out to deprovincialise Australia by
demonstrating how to be an urbane
modern woman. In articles picturing
her minimalist striped-and-white studio,
her fancy dress and her flower arrangements,
she was a model of how to decorate
and how to live, importing fashion
into art and vice versa. Persistent
rumours of a long-running love affair
with the flamboyant and much more
famous artist George Lambert only
added to her aura.
As well as giving us more detail than
ever before on Proctor’s life,
including the ‘did-she-or-didn’t-she?’
affair with Lambert, this new book,
based on an exhibition at the National
Portrait Gallery in Canberra, shows
us a different side of Proctor from
the elegant Jazz-Age fashionista.
Instead, we have a conservative draughtswoman
who specialised in portraits of women
and children. It reminds us that it
was her drawing, not her graphic art
and design, for which she was most
admired. The critic J.S. MacDonald,
no lover of ‘cactus-painting
modernists’, elevated Proctor
above other decorators for her ‘masculine’
skill in drawing, while to Graham
McInnes, in The Road to Gundagai(1965),
she was the ‘Sydney watercolourist’
whose ‘delicate, though rather
anaemic art nouveau drawings were
much in demand among the social set’.
And anaemic they can be, even though
Proctor was a connoisseur of exotic
and sophisticated colour. A favourite
contrast was magenta and acid lime,
an alarming combination if you don’t
know what you are doing, but one that
Proctor confidently carried off in
a portrait photograph taken when she
was eighty-five (sadly, for all the
trouble she took, the picture reproduced
here is in black and white). Such
effects, so well exploited in her
prints, drain away in her drawings
and watercolours. Today, her portraits
look like charming period pieces,
meticulously composed, but cool and
hieratic in comparison with the sexy
stylisation of her best graphic work.
Nonetheless, attention to Proctor’s
portraits is overdue, not least because
it forces a reassessment of other
aspects of her oeuvre, including her
much-celebrated modernity. Even by
female standards of the day, Proctor
was not much interested in the kind
of modernism that expressed the twentieth-century
experience. Her one concession to
either of the two world wars is a
lithograph called Stunting (The
Aeroplane), 1918, which pictures
a group of women posing against the
criss-crossed patterns of searchlights
in the night sky. Margaret Preston’s
fascination with the Machine Age,
or Grace Cossington Smith’s with
the surge of the city mob, escaped
Proctor. Nor was she remotely interested
in fashionable nationalist obsessions.
One can hardly imagine a sheep wandering
into a Proctor picture, and gumnuts
and banksias were strictly for décor.
While Preston adopted air travel and
‘went Aboriginal’ in the
1940s, Proctor’s primitivism
moved no further than the Ballets
Russes.
Printmaking helped make her modern
by simplifying her line and flattening
out her colour, but the content of
Proctor’s ‘silken universe’,
as one contemporary critic called
it, would be at home in the eighteenth
century. Children and men hover devotedly
around beautiful, languorous young
women, who spend their apparently
limitless leisure time trying on clothes,
shopping, playing in parks and gardens,
and attending masked balls. Afterwards,
exhausted, they collapse picturesquely
on divans. It is surprising to see
how many of Proctor’s images
feature Victorian dress, particularly
of the 1870s, the decade in which
she was born. She liked Spanish and
commedia dell’arte costumes
and abundant Edwardian hair more than
prosaic day gowns and shingled bobs.
Her demure, self-absorbed heroines
carry fans and parasols, not cocktails
and cigarettes. The flapper’s
clichéd blank, confrontational
stare is almost entirely absent.
Although Proctor usually seamlessly
translated her natural fin-de-siècle
elegance into modern style, occasionally
her famous taste let her down. Even
a stunner like her cousin Hera Roberts
could not save some of Proctor’s
frightful get-ups. A fussy Victorian
lace ensemble donned by the artist
for a magazine photograph in 1929
makes her look like Miss Havisham.
Proctor’s definitive portraits
are those by Lambert from the early
1900s. He has her striding out with
a borzoi into a swirling black landscape,
turning attention from the clothes
to the woman. Lambert always painted
her like a goddess.
Proctor went on ‘incendiary sprees’
late in life; try as the authors might,
hard evidence of an affair with the
married Lambert (or indeed with anyone
else) is lacking. Of course, we have
his pictures, several of which weirdly
juxtapose Proctor with his ultimately
estranged wife, Amy, and their precociously
talented children. But Proctor maintained
a tender friendship with Amy until
death intervened. On the other hand,
she terrified Syd Ure Smith with her
infuriated meddling when he left his
wife for Hera Roberts in the 1920s,
hinting darkly at her own blighted
history as the reason for her objections.
One hopes that this was not so, and
that the tremendous sensuality in
her drawings and in Lambert’s
drawings of her was somewhere fulfilled.
Puncturing Proctor’s reserve,
not to mention her mystique, Andrew
Sayers and Sarah Engledow reveal that
her first name was Mildred, not Alethea.
She fell out violently with practically
everybody in the 1920s, including
Preston, but kept her taste for people,
and was rewarded with the friendship
of the young in old age. Although
her work celebrated the indulgent
lifestyle of the rich, she was usually
broke, eventually reduced to taking
in boarders in her tiny flat and selling
off Lambert’s portraits. This
absorbing book gives us a fresh, definitive
account of an influential artist and
personality. As a bonus, its superb
illustrations considerably refine
and expand our view of her art.
