Glimpsing Clarice Beckett

I’ve been thinking about the Australian modernist artist Clarice Beckett lately. She first came to my attention about eight years ago when a major retrospective exhibition of her work was held in Melbourne.

Clarice Beckett painted Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s, the period between the First and Second World Wars. Her simple landscapes of the city and the bayside suburbs, captured an emerging modern world of motor cars, electric lights, and telephone poles.

I actually missed the  retrospective exhibition. When I finally got to see some of her paintings at a smaller gallery the following year, I was struck by the beautiful simplicity and structure of her compositions. I was also taken with the sense that she had captured a moment in time, the barest outline of a second before the world moved on.

A few glimpses into the story of Clarice Beckett:

• she had no studio of her own in which to paint. Her father deemed that a studio was out of the question and that ‘the kitchen table would do’
• thematically, her work has a transitory ‘in between’ quality. Many of her paintings contain cars disappearing into the distance, figures dissolving into the canvas and empty roads
• most of Beckett’s paintings are of urban spaces – the city, St Kilda, the bayside suburbs – at a time when many male Australian artists were painting pastoral scenes
• Beckett’s inclination to paint the effects of diffuse light (mist, fog etc), was seized on by her harshest critics as a metaphor to condemn her. From the Bulletin in 1925: ’the artist makes so much use of fog in her landscapes that she occasionally loses herself in it’
• she reminds me of the figure of Lily Briscoe from Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse: ‘women can’t write, women can’t paint’. Beckett’s own teacher, Max Meldrum, had once said ‘There would never be a great woman artist and there never had been … ‘
• much of her creative output has been lost. Over 2000 of her paintings were stored in a shed for thirty years. Around two-thirds of these were destroyed by the elements

Unfortunately, for copyright reasons I can’t actually post any images of her work here but The National Gallery of Victoria has a few images of Clarice Beckett paintings on their website. Most of my knowledge of Beckett comes from Rosalind Hollinrake’s study, Politically Incorrect: Clarice Beckett.

Image credit: Clarice Beckett – Across the Yarra (Circa 1933), National Gallery of Victoria.