Anatomy of an artwork: Grace Crowley

In contrast to Grace Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor – peers from the same generation – multiple factors conspired to make Grace Crowley’s work little-known, and her position as the linchpin of second-wave modernism in Australia underappreciated. First, the small size of her total artistic output, which was fastidiously whittled down to ensure only the best works were preserved in her personal collection, and dispersed among state galleries through bequests after her death in 1979. A larger impact came from the long and enduring hostility of the Australian art world to her modernist theories and abstract practice, compounded by Crowley’s own self-effacement and efforts in her later years to minimise her profile in favour of that of her colleague, Ralph Balson.

The simply titled Abstract 1953 is a loosely geometric composition painted by Crowley, then aged in her 60s. Representing the culmination of a long, arduous trajectory towards pure abstraction, this painting is amongst her last works, as by 1954 she had almost entirely ceased to produce art. It is one of a group of three abstract paintings by the artist from the 1950s currently on display in the 20th-century galleries and presented opposite an abstract sculpture by the English artist, Barbara Hepworth. This proximity to Hepworth, a pioneer of international modernism and geometric abstraction, tacitly acknowledges the innovative nature of Crowley’s own adoption of and advocacy for abstract art in the 1930s and 1940s, well before abstraction became broadly accepted in Australian art.