Clarice Beckett Exhibition - Art Gallery of SA

"People can really relate to these scenes of Australian suburbia but at the same time there is something incredibly haunting and evocative about them." They're paintings which light the way to another world, long gone and largely forgotten the world of Australian suburbia in the 20s and 30s the world of Clarice Beckett. She was a prodigious talent, staging numerous exhibitions throughout her life but achieving only a modicum of fame prior to her untimely death at the age of forty seven. And throughout it all she was considered a radical. "She was painting very much the everyday and this was really quite a radical statement for the 1920s and 30s. Before her of course most serious artists were painting these grand nationalistic pieces from rural landscape, She came into the Australian suburb and really started to took at the suburb as a valid subject of art." While people like Hans Heysen focused on the grand old gum tree as a symbol of Australia's artistic spirit. Beckett was captivated by he quiet beachside suburbs of Melbourne with their red post boxes and their endless wooden stobie poles. Many critics at the time saw this seachange away from the usual panoramic pastoral landscape as the mere dabblings of yet another disciple of that outspoken art teacher, the eccentric Max Meldrum. Meldrum had many enemies and that's probably one reason why the works of one of his finest students, Clarice Beckett were never given the kudos they deserved. The other simply that she was a woman and female artists at the time were not to be taken seriously. "There were critics of women artists per se in the period and often very influential and outspoken critics who really would come out an say no woman could paint."

Beckett certainly set out to prove them wrong, each day painting at dawn and at dusk with the rest of the day taken up caring for her demanding parents. Much of her work was forgotten for well over thirty years until the curator of this touring exhibition, Rosalind Hollinrake was taken by Clarice's sister to a remote farm. "She then lead the curator to a heyshed in rural Victoria which contained some 2000 examples of Clarice Becketts work and these had really been there for years and years and this was a mixed moment for the curator of this exhibition because on the one hand it was a wonderful revelation to find this cache of 2000 painting while on the other hand the hayshed was open to the elements. The rain had come in the possums had come in and many of the paintings had been destroyed and they were destroyed irretrievably. But still luckily, many of them were able to be retrieved and they form the bulk of this exhibition." The exhibition is on at the Art Gallery of South Australia until September the 19th. An entry fee of $6 ensures admission into the exhibition of Clarice Beckett's work as well as Reflections: H J Johnstone's Evening Shadows.

For more information you can email info@postcards.sa.com.au