Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1997

EXHIBITED
Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 27 February – 23 May 2021

LITERATURE
Tracey Lock, Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2021, pp. 26 (illus.), 182 (illus.)


In 1919, at the age of 32, Clarice Beckett moved with her family to the bay-side suburb of Beaumaris and remained there until her untimely death in 1935. After studying under the tuition of Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School from 1914 she joined the controversial art theorist Max Meldrum who had established his own rival school in Collins Street. Meldrum's beliefs placed the utmost importance on tonal relationships, arguing that 'The art of painting is a pure science – the science of optical analysis'. Beckett closely identified with his methods and practice, adopting a lighter, freer and more impressionist style of painting en plein air, translating to an atmospheric form of painterly abstraction.

'Meldrum's particular theory of how to see conditioned the way in which Beckett painted. He encouraged Beckett's distinctive subject matter (even when derided by some fellow students and critics), and while she applied Meldrum's practical and theoretical methods, she was not a slave to them. As Patrick McCaughey has noted, Beckett was too 'independently minded'. In her mid-thirties, and in her only, much reproduced statement, Beckett articulated her artistic aims in the catalogue accompanying the 6th Annual Exhibition of the Twenty Melbourne Painters in 1924:

To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.

During her career her art resisted easy categorisation within any of the contested modernist aesthetics and conceptual tendencies of her time. Meldrum remained supportive of Beckett throughout her short career, but she was 'both a Meldrumite and a pioneering modernist, the equal of [Margaret] Preston and [Grace] Cossington Smith in stature'. Her painting polarised critics, and her gender played a part in her work's dismissal as too ethereal, relentlessly 'befogged' and indistinct, unchanging from year to year, and lightweight.

Alternatively, her singular ability to capture the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere had critics like Percy Leason — one of her most ardently supportive — expressing disbelief that anyone could fail to respond to something that is so strong, so sensitive and refined...

Beckett drew with paint and analysed tonal registers but diverged from Meldrum and other of his students in her love of interactive but subtly modulated colour. Colour, rather than just tone, added complexity to her pictorial structure and utterly unconventional subject matter of telegraph poles, empty streets, cars and their taillights. She worked quickly... many small immediate studies made in situ were translated upon her return home into larger finished compositions at the kitchen table, not having the luxury of a studio.'1

Clarice didn't venture far for inspiration, Dalgety Road, Beaumaris, 1923–24, considered relatively early within the artist oeuvre, depicts a view close to the Beckett residence, St Enoch's which was located at 14 Dalgetty Road, cornering Tramway Parade. At the time Beaumaris was deemed the outskirts of the metropolitan area, it was a place where people had seaside cottages and came to holiday. The present work appears to look inland along the unsealed Dalgetty Road. A snapshot in time as horsedrawn carts carrying the daily produce would ramble past her home, a sight that Clarice was all too familiar with and portrayed in similar compositions, such as the aptly titled The First Sound, also painted in 1924, portraying a cart appearing through the morning mist.

1. Jason Smith, Clarice Beckett: Atmosphere, Geelong Gallery, Victoria, 2023, p. 9