Kunapipi XXVI:2

MELISSA BOYDE
Art and Advocacy: Mary Alice Evatt in the 1930s and ’40s

On her return to Australia from Europe in 1939, Mary Alice Evatt remarked in an interview for the Australian Women’s Weekly that paintings devoted to gum trees, sheep, koalas and misty seascapes were the only Australian works selected to hang in World Fair Art Exhibitions. In addition she derided the decision makers who overlooked Australia’s modernist, experimental artists, many of whom were women: ‘if only those in authority were to select the paintings of Australian artists who prefer creation to photography, and were less overawed by official selection bodies, Australia might find a worthy place on the art map of the world’ (Evatt 1939 32).

Although born in America, Mary Alice lived all her life in Australia, marrying Herbert Vere Evatt (Bert) whom she met in 1920 while they were both students at the University of Sydney.1 The Evatts were passionate about the need for social change, Mary Alice being described as ‘a William Morris socialist’ (Cantwell qtd in Fry). They were also ‘fanatics about modern art’ (Fry), both welcoming contemporary art’s movement away from techniques of representational illusionism to abstractionism. Mary Alice played an active role as an advocate of contemporary art in Australia during a period in which the dominant climate was conservative. Censorship meant that thousands of books were banned2 and in the art world there was division between supporters of traditional and contemporary art. The most famous instance was the controversy that surrounded the awarding of the 1943 Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Archibald Prize for a non-traditional portrait. The tensions of this controversy were exemplified in the opposed views of Bert and the conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies: Menzies declaring that modern art was ‘ill-drawn’ and ‘unintelligible to the unilluminated mind’, finding ‘nothing but absurdity in much so-called “modern art”‘ (Martin 195); Evatt, on the other hand, was recognised as a connoisseur of modern art, opening the controversial first exhibition of the Contemporary Art Society at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1939.

From 1930 Mary Alice divided her time between Sydney and Melbourne as a result of Bert’s appointment as Justice of the High Court of Australia. The alternate locations enabled her to become an art student at both the Crowley Fizelle Art school in George Street, Sydney and at George Bell’s school in Bourke Street, Melbourne during 1936–37. Her artwork was initially, and indeed primarily, influenced by the teaching methods and theories of design, pure colour and significant line presented by the modernist painters Grace Crowley and Rah Fizelle. In fact, their influence never really left her work; looking back on that period Mary Alice writes that through their school Crowley and Fizelle,

influenced a whole generation of painters in Sydney with their aims of balanced dynamic symmetry and harmonious arrangement of colour which held too a note of urgency and passion for beauty that must never make terms with custom or prejudice. (Evatt 1966 314–16)