Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett
Born	Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett (1887-03-21)21 March 1887 Casterton, Victoria, Australia
Died	7 July 1935(1935-07-07) (aged 48) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Education	National Gallery School
Known for	Painting
Movement	Australian Tonalism

Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett (21 March 1887 – 7 July 1935) was an Australian artist and a key member of the Australian tonalist movement. Her works are featured in the collections of Australia's major public galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Early life[]

Beckett was born in Casterton, Victoria, the daughter of Joseph Clifden Beckett (c.1852-1936), a bank manager,^[1] and his wife Elizabeth Kate, née Brown (c.1855-1934). Her grandfather was John Brown, a Scottish master builder, who had designed and built Como House, and its gardens, in South Yarra, Victoria.^[2]

Undertaking her primary education in Casterton, for secondary school Beckett was a boarder at Queen's College, Ballarat, until 1903, where she revealed strong drawing ability and wrote a play, including a part for herself, which was performed by the students.^[3] To foster her artistic skill, she took private lessons in charcoal drawing in Ballarat. After her family's relocation to 22 Kensington Road, South Yarra,^[4] she finished her final year of school at the nearby Merton Hall campus of Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School. In 1914, she attended Melbourne's National Gallery School, completing three years of study under Frederick McCubbin, before continuing her studies under Max Meldrum, whose controversial theories became a pivotal factor in her own art practice.^[5]

In 1919, her parents moved from Bendigo to the then undeveloped Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris and, with their health failing, Beckett assumed household responsibilities that virtually dictated the structure of the rest of her life, severely limiting her artistic endeavours.^[6] Beckett could only go out during the dawn and dusk to paint as most of her day was spent caring for them.^[2]

Work[]

Beckett is recognised as one of Australia's most important Modernist artists, although some have classified her as a "daughter of Monet".^[7] In his review of the first of two exhibitions held at the Rosalind Humphrey Gallery in 1971 and 1972, Patrick McCaughey described Beckett as a remarkable Modernist, because of the "flatness of the surface in her painting".^[8][9] Despite a talent for portraiture and a keen public appreciation for her still lifes, the subject matter favoured by her teacher Meldrum, Beckett preferred the solo, outdoor process of painting landscapes.^[10]

She persistently and diligently painted sea and beachscapes, and rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Candice Bruce describes "a sense of an ever-present melancholy: a vulnerability mixed with a calm that, even if one were in total ignorance of the details of the artist's life, would still be felt".^[11] Her subjects were often drawn from the Beaumaris area, where she lived for the latter part of her life.^[10] She was one of the first of her group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations.^[12][11]

Formal qualities and reception[]

In her mid-thirties, Beckett elucidated her artistic aims in the catalogue accompanying the sixth 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.^[13]

A critic from The Age wrote later that year:

One would imagine from the little scenes that Miss Beckett has gathered, in the name of Australian art, that Australia was in a continual state of fog – all kinds of fogs – pink, blue, green and grey with an occasional mist that surely was never on land or sea. Miss Beckett is probably feeling her way through the fogs and no doubt she will [...] at least rise above the dreariness which characterizes her paintings at present.

In 1925, another critic took her to task over "a tendency to fuzziness and a certain weakness of drawing," but complimented her on "the best display she has made to date", especially "a view through the trees approaching the city in the twilight of a winter evening", which she has "nailed well".^[14]

Also writing in 1925, the now often-reviled Melbourne Herald reviewer James S. MacDonald,^[15][16][17] who even into the 1950s despised any Modernism, starting with Paul Cézanne, was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes.^[18]

By 1931, however, Percy Leason, writing a long review in Table Talk,^[19] draws comparison with Rembrandt, Whistler and Corot to say;

Miss Beckett's work has so much in common with them: there is a like success in achieving the first essential, a convincing illusion of actual space and air and light; the same refinement and delicacy of true color; the same regard for true form and character; and the same complete indifference to conventions and the mere clever handling of paint for the sake of it.

In the next issue of Table Talk, Leason reiterated his praise, calling the show "one of the best exhibitions of the year".^[20]

However, like her female contemporaries, Beckett faced considerable prejudice from conservative male artists. Meldrum, commenting as late as 1939 on Nora Heyson receiving the Archibald Prize, expressed his opinion on the capacity of women to be great artists: "Men and women are differently constituted. Women are more closely attached to the physical things of life, and to expect them to do some things equally as well as men is sheer lunacy [...] A great artist has to tread a lonely road. He becomes great only by exerting himself to the limit of his strength the whole time. I believe that such a life is unnatural and impossible for a women."^[21][22] an attitude he qualified in relation to his favourite pupil Beckett,^[23] announcing in the event of her death that "Beckett had done work of which any nation should be proud".^[24]

A 1941 review in The Bulletin of their show at Velasquez Gallery singles out Beckett from other "Meldrum disciples" for praise;

"...the most arresting panel amongst the pupils is that of Clarice Beckett. This artist, who after being a pupil for several years painted assiduously at Beaumaris for 20 years, scarcely ever wandering further than half a mile from the front gate of her parents’ house, died a few years ago, leaving hundreds of extraordinary little pictures which dispose of the notion that those who range widest see most. A bit of tarred road and motor headlights gleaming through evening mist or a couple of bathing boxes and a line of breakers was all the subject-matter that she needed, and she made more interesting pictures out of them than an R.A. out of a dozen royal sitters. There are a dozen of her glowing, opalescent landscapes in this exhibition, and, being pieces of Nature seen through the unprejudiced eyes of an unusual artist, they look stranger than any “modernist” picture.”^[25]

During her lifetime, no Beckett work was purchased for a public collection, though almost every major Australian gallery now holds examples. By 2001, her paintings had achieved six figure sums at auction.^[26]

Australian Tonalism[]

Australian Tonalism is characterised by a particular "misty" or atmospheric quality created by the Meldrum painting method of building "tone on tone". Tonalism developed from Meldrum's "Scientific theory of Impressions." In a 1999 analysis, John Christian paraphrases Meldrum's conviction that art "should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received. All adornments and narrative and literary references should be rejected".^[27]

Tonalism opposed Post-Impressionism and Modernism, but is now regarded as a precursor to Minimalism.^[28][12] The whole movement had been the subject of fierce controversy. Its practitioners were unpopular amongst other artists, and derided as "Meldrumites".^[29][30][31] Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".^[32]

Meldrum blamed social decadence for artists' exaggerated interest in colour over tone and proportion.^[27] However, Beckett's painting represents a departure from Meldrum's strict principles, which dictated that tone should take precedence over colour, as commented upon in a newspaper critique of her 1931 solo exhibition.^[33] A reviewer of her 1932 Atheneum show^[34] expressed her particular version of this as "an adaptation of art to nature, which belongs neither to the realm of the orthodox normalist or the avowed modern, but is a purely individual expression of certain sensations in light, form and color..." Rosalind Hollinrake, who was largely responsible for Beckett's revival,^[35][26] notes a use colour to reinforce form, and more daring design, in the later years of the artist's short life.^[2]

Death[]

While painting the sea off Beaumaris during a storm in 1935, Beckett developed pneumonia and died four days later, aged 48, in a hospital at Sandringham.^[36] She was buried in the Cheltenham Memorial Park.^[10]

Legacy[]

In 1936, a major memorial exhibition was organised at the Melbourne Athenaeum by Beckett's sister and father. In 1971, Beckett's sister alerted Hollinrake to a tragedy;^[37] more than 2,000 of her works had been left abandoned to the elements and vermin in an open-sided hay shed near Benalla.^[38] Most were unsalvageable, but thirty well-preserved but neglected works were discovered at the Montsalvat artist colony, sent there when the Beaumaris home was cleared. ^[39][40] An image of at least one of the lost works survives (see external links below).

Five commercial gallery exhibitions of Beckett's work were staged from 1971 to 1980. The first museum exhibition of her work, In a Certain Light (a two-person show with photographer Olive Cotton) was curated by Felicity Fenner and artist Jenny Bell for UNSW's Ivan Dougherty Gallery in 1995. Over 1999 and 2000, the retrospective exhibition Politically incorrect: Clarice Beckett constituted from some of the remaining paintings and organised by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and Rosalind Hollinrake, toured eight national galleries.^[23]

Ballarat Grammar, where the artist studied, awards the Clarice Beckett Prize annually to a student for outstanding achievement in the study of Art at VCE level.^[3]

Clarice Becketts Lane in Black Rock is named after her.

Selected paintings[]

• 

  Motor Lights, 1929, Art Gallery of South Australia

• 

  Wet Night, Brighton, 1930, private collection

• 

  Evening, St Kilda Road, 1930, Art Gallery of New South Wales

• 

  Taxi Rank, 1931, National Gallery of Australia

• 

  Sandringham Beach, 1933, National Gallery of Australia

Exhibitions[]

Represented in public collections[]

National[]

State[]

Regional[]

Universities[]

References[]

Further reading[]

• Burn, Ian (1990), National life & landscapes : Australian painting 1900-1940, Bay Books, retrieved 23 March 2021
• Davis, Joseph (2021): THE LOST WORKS OF CLARICE BECKETT
• Eagle, Mary; Jones, John (John James); ICI Australia (1994), A story of Australian painting, Macmillan Australia, ISBN 978-0-7329-0778-5
• Fenner, Felicity; Bell, Jenny (1995), In a Certain Light: Clarice Beckett & Olive Cotton, UNSW Sydney, ISBN 0733410014
• Hollinrake, Rosalind; Beckett, Clarice, 1887-1935 (1979), Clarice Beckett, the artist and her circle, Macmillan Company of Australia, ISBN 978-0-333-25243-7CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Holt, Stephanie (1995), "Woman about town: urban images of the 1920s and 1930s", Art and Australia, 33 (2): 232–243, ISSN 0004-301X
• Garry Kinnane (1996) Colin Calahan: a portrait, Melbourne University Press
• Locke, Tracey (2021). The present moment: The art of Clarice Beckett. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia. ISBN 9781921668463.
• McAuliffe, Chris (1996), Art and suburbia : a world art book, Craftsman House, ISBN 978-976-641-029-2
• McGuire, M. A (1986), "'Life and your imagining': the art of Clarice Beckett", Australian Journal of Art, 5 (1986): 90–103, ISSN 0314-6464
• McGuire, Margaret E (1984), The singular career of Clarice Beckett: painting and society in Melbourne, 1916-1936, retrieved 23 March 2021
• Perry, Peter W; Meldrum, Max, 1875-1955; Perry, John R., 1952- (1996), Max Meldrum and associates : their art, lives and influences, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, ISBN 978-0-9598066-7-0CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Terry Smith (1997) "Pictures of, painting as" in Levitus, Geoff; Levitus, Geoff, 1951- (1997), Lying about the landscape, Craftsman House, ISBN 978-90-5704-031-3CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Robin Wallace-Crabbe (1997) "Artist's choice:- Eloquent silence", Art and Australia 1997 vol.35 no.2
• Drusilla Modejesa (2014) Clarice Beckett at the Edge: Clarice Beckett 29 April- 24 May 2014, Niagara Galleries (Catalogue of exhibition held at Niagara Galleries).
• Hollinrake, Rosalind (1999), Politically Incorrect, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, ISBN 0-7340-1593-3
• Modjeska, Drusilla (2002), 'Framing Clarice Beckett' in Timepieces, Picador, ISBN 978-0-330-36372-3
• Thornell, Kristel (2010), Night Street (1st ed.), Allen & Unwin, ISBN 978-1-74269-123-7
• THE LOST WORKS OF CLARICE BECKETT

External links[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Clarice Beckett.

• Beaumaris seascape (c. 1925), with commentary
• THE LOST WORKS OF CLARICE BECKETT