biography
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Drusilla Modjeska
Stravinsky's Lunch
Picador $50.00hb, 364pp,
0 330 36186 4
Drusilla Modjeska (photo by Alan Morgans)
THIS MARVELLOUS BOOK displays Drusilla Modjeska's restless moral imagination at full stretch. It is a double biography -- and much
more than that. Modjeska takes as her project the somewhat
parallel lives of two female painters: no, the very phrase is in
danger of sounding reductive. I should say, two painters who are
women, Australian women. Moreover, these two very different
artists were for decades 'not seen by those who dealt in cultural
power', even though one of them lived for a decade among the
modern European power-brokers and the other became a member of
Robert Menzies' transitory, conservative Australian Academy of
Art.
Modjeska's subjects are Stella Bowen, who for too long lingered
in the shadows as Ford Madox Ford's partner, and Grace Cossington
Smith. The recovery of due interest in the work of women has over
the past thirty-two years given Cossington Smith her due, as
public gallery collections now make clear, but Bowen has remained
little more than Ford's 'placid and uneducated mistress': the
phrase comes from that ebullient cubistic macho, Ezra Pound.
Behind her, we are reminded are voices like that of Mr Tansley in The Waves, murmuring malevolently to Lily Briscoe, 'Women can't write, women can't paint.'
Cossington Smith's reputation is now so solid that it comes as a surprise to be reminded that Daniel Thomas initiated serious interest in her work as recently as 1967, following up his purchase of seven paintings with a 1973 touring exhibition of her work. Stella Bowen's invisibility has not only been due to masculine aesthetic blinkers; it is also the likely face of an artist who is not rooted firmly in one country, as Christina Stead's slow-hatching career proved. No wonder the peripatetic Stella so often painted windows and their framings of location.
Having read Modjeska's recent article on the paintings of Katherine Hattam and Angela Brennan, I had wondered about the critical tenor of her forthcoming book. For that review-article seemed uneasy with art, zigzagging between a psychoanalytic reading of the former and a formalesque but rather perfunctory account of Brennan's pictures (not that Brennan's work in that recent Bendigo show was at all easy to translate into language). It is good to see that she writes with consummate ease about Bowen and Cossington Smith, gliding without strain from the aesthetic to the psychological, from a gendered psyche to gender politics.
Indeed, one can read Stravinsky's Lunch as a distinguished successor to those two pioneering books by older Australian critics, Margaret Walters' The Male Nude and Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race. Except for this: that Greer and Walters emigrated to Britain and wrote about the Old World art, while Modjeska came south and has focused on the complex fate of two Australian women in painting -- and learning how to be themselves. There is a clear sense that the doubled enquiry here takes into painting the questions which Modjeska was asking ten years ago in her introduction to Inner Cities: 'How much can we control, or change? How much must we accept? Do we live in our cities with an eye to somewhere else? How do we understand our cities and our lives?'
In the case of these two escapees from respectable suburbia (or, rather, one emigrant and one internal exile) such questions of self-change are crucial. Bowen's eye took her to London, Paris, Villefranche-sur-mer, but we can say that the complicated cultural city which contained her was Ford Madox Ford. It was the ebullient modernist Ford who 'educated' and liberated her into the difficult, ironical air of European modernism. And then again, it was her love for him which she had to escape to become Stella Bowen, artist. Even when benign, his presence cramped her selfhood.
This curious balance within Eros, its capacity to both inspire and confine the female genius, is a major theme of this book; it is handled with great subtlety and clarity. Further, Modjeska quietly raises the question about the Great War's aftermath, 'Did they succeed as artists, these women, even to the extent they did, because a generation of men was either mangled and destroyed, or badly disoriented?'
Cossington Smith never marries, remaining within the strong cocoon of family, a North Shore woman, close to her sisters, to female friends, and to fellow-painter Roland Wakelin. She moved through a succession of experiments with theme and colour to the now-famous, bright-hued late interiors, of which Modjeska writes,
Here, in these paintings, we have the fullness of the spinster's life, the majesty of the room occupied by one, the intimacy of solitude, the contentment of faith, the revelation that there is no revelation, the experience of heaven, and the knowledge that there is no door that opens into heaven.
How attractively here the author resurrects the bad old diminishing term, spinster, to give it aesthetic and moral dignity.
Modjeska's refusal to pass easy judgment informs her subtle reading of these two personalities. Bowen, who lived amid the avant-garde bustle and fuss, eschewed any strong marks of personal style, refusing to adopt a manner. Neither expressionist nor formalesque, she chose a labile visual idiom which was capable of envisaging personal relations and window-framed vistas. Compared with the famous modernists, she does not flaunt a formal language. The blokey strengths of Matisse, Kandinsky, Leger, de Kooning (all different but all so instantly recognisable) were never her way, which was responsively tangential, tactically fluid.
Yet Cossington Smith's brushstrokes are now familiar to us all. As much as a Leger or a Kandinsky, one of her canvases is instantly recognisable, even the early, ground-breaking 'Sock Knitter' (properly foregrounded by Bernard Smith back in 1962). The juxtaposition of fauvish hues and, above all, the assertively strong, near-vertical marks of her brushes, declare her confident self.