London life

I recently returned to London after some years. It was a revelation: buzzing energy at street level, stupendous bounty in the art museums, profligate roaring life, day and night. I thought I knew London, but it surprised me once again. As Dr Samuel Johnson said to James Boswell in 1777, and my dad was fond of quoting, ‘… when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford’.

At the turn of the 20th century, London’s burgeoning life, and the vitality of the modern art that the city was beginning to sustain, drew Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand artists in droves. Particularly women: trailblazing, modern women hungry to study in London’s energetic up-to-date art schools. The Westminster School of Art, the Slade, the Central School and later the Grosvenor School of Modern Art admitted women students in numbers. These antipodean women were adventurous. They wanted to learn from the best, at the source. They thronged into London’s extraordinary art museums and dealer galleries: into the National Gallery, and from 1897, to the newly established National Gallery of British Art on Millbank, familiarly known as the Tate after its principal donor, and now as Tate Britain.

Then, as now, there was so much to see, study and enjoy. So much inspiration: antiquities in the British Museum from across the globe, remarkable holdings of Italian paintings in the National Gallery, and the first inklings in the English-speaking world of French post-impressionist painting, so named by the influential English artist and critic Roger Fry.

Today, Fry’s influence is everywhere in the history of London’s adoption of modern art. Fry founded the Omega Workshops with artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1913, with its focus on modern design, and his wise counsel helped form the peerless Courtauld Gallery collection with works by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat. It was this polyglot excitement that made London a beacon for Australian and New Zealand artists, right up until the Second World War halted the city’s thrumming rhythms.

At that time, London was still the centre of the Anglophone art world. Often, artists stayed for years: Margaret Preston and Gladys Reynell used London as a base in 1913–19, with stints in Ireland and the English countryside, always learning, always making. Later, in 1934–37, Nora Heysen took refuge from Adelaide’s small society, and from being the daughter of a famous father, seeking to find herself as an artist. She was open to ‘all that is living and vibrating around me’, as she wrote to Hans Heysen in 1937, just as her funds ran out and she was about to return home.

How marvellous to have made their getaway, as Heysen and her compatriots must have thought: escaping social scrutiny in Australian cities for a working life that allowed them to explore modern art for themselves, free from the constraints of antipodean art conservatives (including Heysen’s father). It was – at least in anticipation – a life of adventure and revelation (even love). The women were conscious of landing in a larger world, one full of possibility. Ironic, then, that Australasian women arrived knowing that their status was better than that of their British counterparts: New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893, Australia in 1902. In Britain the antipodean women witnessed terrible struggles for women’s emancipation, and in the case of some artists, notably Dora Meeson, participated in them: her 1908 banner, reading Commonwealth of Australia: Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done, was carried at the head of the Australian and New Zealand contingent in the Women’s Suffrage Coronation parade of 1911. In fact, full suffrage was not granted to women in the United Kingdom until 1928.

 With London at their feet, the Australian trailblazers plunged into exploring the great metropolis throughout these decades. The exhibition Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is epic in scope, featuring works by dozens of women who came to London, and Paris, in this period. One story, though, strikes me as symptomatic of London’s particular ethos: the group of artists who flocked to the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in the middle of the 1920s to explore the striking modern linotype printmaking techniques taught there by Claude Flight, in one of the most innovative and open-minded art schools of the time. This is a completely modern story: Flight promoted images of the city, of speed and machines, swayed by the philosophy of the Italian Futurists. His images were dynamic, rhythmic, even staccato. Remarkably, Flight’s printmaking methods were also, in their way, very democratic. Lino printing is a simple technology, available to anyone with a piece of spare lino and a wooden paddle, or even a tablespoon, to press paper against ink.

While Flight’s lino print methods were accessible, the flexibility of his techniques encouraged artists to make images that were full of life and vigour, and to overlay colours in a free and experimental way. The Australians Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, who studied at the Grosvenor School in the late 1920s, excelled with their brilliant rhythmic lino prints and glorious array of rich colours.

They applied Flight’s techniques to subjects of their choosing – children playing on swings, a Sydney hill bisected by a rising tramline, even to Sicily’s Mount Etna, with Black’s The eruption c1929–30 (pictured, bottom left). And they took their newly mastered print techniques back home to Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney where, in turn, they taught their own students and London’s modernism took root in Australia.                                                                                                                

A hundred years later, have we become blasé about London’s extraordinary cultural life, its enduring allure? I do hope not. One of the best ways to travel is to step in the footsteps of others: walking their paths, sliding through doors the trailblazers once opened. Seeing London again, though the eyes of the talented passionate Australian women who studied, lived and loved there, is to see it afresh, to understand it anew. I will never tire of that.

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Julie Ewington is a writer, curator and broadcaster based in Sydney.