Clarice Beckett had a power that very few artists possess, says Lisa Sullivan, senior curator at Geelong Art Gallery. Imbued with emotion and atmosphere, mood and nuance, Beckett’s art – even a century on from its creation – is strikingly contemporary and evocative.
The Australian modernist who died aged 48 in 1935 – from pneumonia contracted while she was painting outdoors – is celebrated in a new exhibition,
, which opens at Geelong Art Gallery this weekend. Despite having shown work during her lifetime, Beckett was largely overlooked for 35 years after her death, in part thanks to politics in the art world, and in part, no doubt, because she was a woman.
Art Guide Australia — September/october 2020 By Art Guide Australia
“[Her] late works verge on abstraction, she’s testing perception, the boundaries of abstraction... and [there’s a] focus on the mood and emotion that different places evoke, ” says Sullivan.“We can only wonder where she would have gone had her life not been cut short.”
A prolific painter who often worked outdoors, Beckett captured images of everyday life in the suburbs and the changing world around her. Another constant was the beach around Port Phillip Bay, particularly Beaumaris, near where she lived. She focussed on atmosphere and would go back to the same places again and again, to capture them in different conditions.
“The silence is so powerful that it actually [seems to] create a sound. It’s the suggestiveness that some great artists get ... Sometimes they just pull you up. You look at the painting, and it vibrates; it has an aura, like the
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For many years, few people - in the art world and in her personal life - would speak freely to Hollinrake about the artist, and many secrets shrouded her story. One was the existence of an older brother, who had an intellectual disability, and who was never mentioned.
According to Hollinrake, Beckett swam every morning of her life, winter and summer; loved theatre, drama, and classical music; and would have loved to have been an actress. She also loved cars.
All will be revealed in a much-anticipated biography, which Hollinrake hopes to complete before long. She is adamant Beckett’s contribution to the Australian canon of art cannot be overstated.
Art Steps—clarice Beckett
She captures the first truthful impression when looking at her subject, Hollinrake says. “This is purely shapes of light and dark tones. There is no distracting detail, just the sensation of an illusion of reality. Yet they are powerfully full of feeling, ” she says. “[Beckett] creates an intense atmospheric effect of the present moment, of a sense of place and the feeling of objects, such as cars, trams, wet roads or telegraph poles, suggesting some sense of them as being more than prosaic objects.”
Her landscapes are a key feature of the Geelong show. As Sullivan notes, they were painted during a transformative time for the artist: when she spent six months at a friend’s property in the western district and had a studio of her own for the first time in her life.
Panoramic works celebrating the prosperity of farming. “[But] Beckett’s were small in scale, very much responding to the haze and the light and the temperature of the landscape in a series of works that have been likened to precursors to the abstraction of Mark Rothko, ” Sullivan says.
Art Guide Australia — May/june 2022 By Art Guide Australia
Detail of ‘Rainy Day’, 1930, by Clarice Beckett. The painting is part of the Geelong Art Gallery’s collection and one of its most popular, according to Lisa Sullivan.
That Beckett is known at all is something of a miracle, largely thanks to Hollinrake’s tireless work. Having established a gallery in Melbourne, Hollinrake – then known as Ros Humphries, as she was married to Barry – put out a call for female artists. When Beckett’s sister Hilda came in with six of Beckett’s paintings in 1971, it would change both their lives– and Australian art history.
Together they went to a property near Benalla where they found 2000-odd of the artist’s neglected canvases in a remote, open-sided shed; they managed to salvage 369.
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“It is one of the biggest tragedies in art history, ” says Sullivan. “That so much was lost is very sad but that so much could be salvaged is fantastic. Ros’ life’s work of resurrecting Clarice’s reputation is legendary.”
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Arriving on April 1 2023, Clarice Beckett—Atmosphere is the much anticipated thematic survey of the work of beloved Australian artist Clarice Beckett (1887–1935) which has been curated by Geelong Gallery and presents over sixty exceptional paintings dating from 1919 to the early 1930s. Beckett is now considered one of Australia’s leading female artists of the early twentieth century.
Jcr Uk: Former Whitley Bay Synagogue And Jewish Community, North Tyneside, Tyne & Wear, N.e. England
The exhibition will provide a critically focussed representation of this enduringly enigmatic modernist artist’s atmospheric depictions of light, climate, and bayside Melbourne. Beckett’s mesmerising paintings are revered for the ways in which they captured the essence of her local Beaumaris foreshore and streetscapes, and Melbourne city, Yarra River, and Port Phillip Bay views in varying light and weather.
Beckett also worked in the Geelong region—on the Surf Coast and in the Western District—and the resulting works provide an important local context for Geelong Gallery’s exhibition.
For a period of six months in 1926, Beckett left the familiar environment of her Beaumaris home to stay with the brother of her good friend Maud Rowe on his Western District sheep station, ‘Naringal’. It was in this new environment that she produced some of her most experimental landscapes, capturing the radiating heat of the afternoon sun, or the muted light of dusk, across wide panoramic farming country. In addition, Beckett also frequented the beaches of Anglesea and Lorne.
Jcr Uk: Hendon (united) Synagogue, Raleigh Close, Hendon, London Nw4, England
This Geelong Gallery exhibition will offer new perspectives on the imagery of this intriguing and increasingly popular artist through major works borrowed from Australian public galleries including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, State Library of Victoria, McClelland Gallery, and regional gallery collections including Ballarat, Benalla, Bendigo, and Castlemaine, alongside rarely seen private collection works.
“Clarice Beckett—Atmosphere will extend our presentation of Geelong curated scholarly and highly successful exhibitions that have striking local specificity: Land of the Golden Fleece — Arthur Streeton in the Western District (2016); Fred Williams in the You Yangs (2017); and Frederick McCubbin — Whisperings in Wattle Boughs (2021). It will also place into a wider context one of the Gallery’s most popular works: Beckett’s 1930 painting Rainy day, ” says Geelong Gallery Director & CEO and co-Exhibition Curator Jason Smith.
Clarice Beckett had a relatively short life but was a singularly minded and prolific artist. She studied at the National Gallery School under Frederick McCubbin before becoming a pupil at Max Meldrum’s art school where tonal principles were championed. Beckett preferred to work en plein air —wheeling a cart packed with paints and easel about the streets of her bayside home in Beaumaris—to capture the modern world. She developed a distinctly atmospheric style, rendering seemingly everyday scenes in a loose painterly style and reduced tonal palette.
Art Guide Australia — September/october 2022 By Art Guide Australia
Her commitment to her painting practice sadly had a significant impact on her health. While painting outdoors in Beaumaris in a storm in 1935, she developed pneumonia and passed away four days later, aged only 48.
Clarice Beckett—Atmosphere will run at Geelong Gallery from Saturday, April 1 2023 – Sunday, July 9 2023. Tickets on sale now here.