Clarice Beckett

Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett (21 March 1887 – 7 July 1935) was an Australian artist and a key member of the Australian tonalist movement. Known for her subtle, misty landscapes of Melbourne and its suburbs, Beckett developed a personal style that helped give rise to modernism in Australia. Disregarded by the art establishment during her lifetime, and largely forgotten in the decades after her death, she is now considered one of Australia's greatest artists.

Born and raised in the country town of Casterton, Victoria, Beckett was seen as extremely shy from a young age, as well as bright and artistic. In 1914, after moving to Melbourne with her family, she began a three-year study at the National Gallery School under Australian impressionist painter Frederick McCubbin, then for nine months attended the rival school of art theorist Max Meldrum, a controversial outlier of the Australian art world who propounded his own tonalist painting system drawn from scientific principles. Beckett and others in Meldrum's circle, derided as "Meldrumites" by his critics, began staging group exhibitions in 1919. Beckett also exhibited with the Meldrum-inspired Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, and staged the first of her annual solo exhibitions in 1923.

Beckett never left Victoria and rarely traveled outside Melbourne, much of her adult life being spent caring for her ailing parents at their home in bayside Beaumaris. She did however paint prolifically, often ''en plein air'' in and around Beaumaris, and mostly at daybreak or towards evening, when she was exempted from domestic duties. In her method and choice of "everyday" subject matter, Beckett remained indebted to Meldrum, but her work also differed from that of other tonalists, in part due to its emotional and spiritual qualities, reflecting her interest in Buddhism, Theosophy and Freud. By 1926, she was creating landscapes unprecedented in Australian art for their "radical simplicity", and from 1930, she experimented further with a broader colour palette and more challenging compositions. In 1935, while painting the sea off Beaumaris during a winter storm, Beckett contracted pneumonia and died four days later, aged 48.

In what has been called "one of the great disasters of Australian art history",
well over one thousand of Beckett's works were destroyed in the decades after her death, including many by her father that he deemed "unfinished"—works from her final years that were said by friends to be more abstracted and spiritual. More works were lost in a bush fire, and in 1970, in an open-sided shed in country Victoria, as many as two thousand works were found abandoned, two thirds of which had been destroyed by the elements. Those that did survive were exhibited the following year in Melbourne, precipitating a resurgence of interest in Beckett. Catalogues, biographies and major exhibitions followed, and today she is represented in Australia's national and state galleries.

Life

Family and early years

Beckett was born in Casterton, Victoria, the eldest daughter of Joseph Clifden Beckett (c.1852-1936), a bank manager, and his wife Elizabeth Kate, née Brown (c.1855-1934) and sister of Hilda Raby, who marrried Thomas Mangan, 2 November 1922. Her grandfather was John Brown, a Scottish master builder, who had designed and built Como House, and its gardens, in South Yarra, Victoria.Rosalind Hollinrake, 'Beckett, Clarice Marjoribanks (1887–1935)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/beckett-clarice-marjoribanks-5178/text8701, published in hardcopy 1979, accessed online 5 November 2014.

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. 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, 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.

In 1919, her parents moved from Bendigo to the then undeveloped Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris into an existing dwelling at 14 Dalgetty Road which they named ''St. Enoch's'' after their Bendigo house. With her parents' health failing, and after her sister's marriage in 1922, Beckett assumed household responsibilities that dictated the structure of the rest of her life, severely limiting her artistic endeavours; Beckett could only go out during the dawn and dusk to paint as most of her day was spent caring for them.

Australian tonalism

After joining Meldrum's school, Beckett adopted aspects of his unique tonalist system of painting, the "Scientific Order of Impressions", which resulted in a style now known as Australian tonalism, characterised by a particular "misty" or atmospheric quality created by building "tone on tone". 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". The Australian tonalists opposed impressionism and modernist art styles, The whole movement had been the subject of fierce controversy. Its practitioners were unpopular amongst other artists, and derided as "Meldrumites". Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".

Beckett persistently and diligently painted, and was highly productive, mounting a solo show every year from 1923 to 1933. Her subjects were sea and beachscapes, and rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Early critical appraisal of her paintings was mixed, with members of the conservative art establishment often finding fault in their "opaque" quality. Reviewing one of her shows, a critic from ''The Age'' wrote that "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." In 1925, ''Herald'' reviewer and staunch anti-modernist James S. MacDonald was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes. By 1931, however, Percy Leason, writing a long review in ''Table Talk'', said that Beckett's work showed "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."

Meldrum blamed social decadence for artists' exaggerated interest in colour over tone and proportion. 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. A reviewer of her 1932 Atheneum show 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, notes a use colour to reinforce form, and more daring design, in the later years of the artist's short life.

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. She was buried in the Cheltenham Memorial Park.

Work and style

Beckett elucidated her artistic aims in what is her only known surviving written statement, published in the catalogue accompanying the sixth annual exhibition of the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society, held 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.

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. Her subjects were often drawn from the Beaumaris area, where she lived for the latter part of her life. She was one of the first of Meldrum's group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations.Catalogue: "Misty Moderns – Australian Tonalists 1915–1950", written by curator Tracey Lock-Weir, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 2008Candice Bruce, 'Clarice Beckett', in

Legacy

During her lifetime, Beckett was not represented in any public collection in Australia, though almost every major Australian gallery now holds examples of her work. By 2001, her paintings had achieved six figure sums at auction.

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; more than 2,000 of her works had been left abandoned to the elements and vermin in an open-sided hay shed near Benalla. 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. 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" was organised by the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and Rosalind Hollinrake. It toured eight national galleries.

During the 2021 Adelaide Festival, the Art Gallery of South Australia staged the exhibition "Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment". Her most comprehensive retrospective to date, it featured 160 works, including a long-lost portrait that had recently been rediscovered. It drew large crowds and was the most successful ticketed solo exhibition in the museum's 140-year history. Between April and July 2023, the Geelong Art Gallery will stage the retrospective "Clarice Beckett—Atmosphere".

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.

Kristel Thornell's debut novel ''Night Street'' (2009) is a fictionalised account of Beckett's life. It co-won ''The Australian''/Vogel Literary Award, and won the Dobbie Literary Award.

A number of Beckett's paintings feature as a plot point in the 2022 film '' Poker Face'', directed by and starring Russell Crowe. An avid collector of Beckett's work, Crowe used real Beckett paintings from his personal collection, as well as some from the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Clarice Beckett's Lane in Black Rock is named after her, as is Beckett Ward, one of seven Bayside City Council wards.

She is the eponym of Beckett, a crater on the planet Mercury, discovered in 2008 and named by the International Astronomical Union.

Selected paintings

File:Spring Morning 1925.jpg, ''Spring Morning'', 1925, Benalla Art Gallery
File:Summer Fields 1926.jpeg, ''Summer Fields'', 1926, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:October Morning by Clarice Beckett, c. 1927.jpg, ''October Morning'', 1927, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Motor Lights by Clarice Beckett, 1929.jpg, ''Motor Lights'', 1929, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Sea Drift 1930.jpeg, ''Sea Drift'', 1930, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Clarice Beckett Wet Night Brighton.jpg, ''Wet Night, Brighton'', 1930, private collection
File:Clarice Beckett - Evening, St Kilda Road, 1930.jpg, ''Evening, St Kilda Road'', 1930, Art Gallery of New South Wales
File:Moonlight and Calm Sea 1931.jpg, ''Moonlight and Calm Sea'', 1931, private collection
File:Clarice Beckett - Passing trams - Google Art Project.jpg, ''Passing Trams'', 1931, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Clarice Beckett Solitude.jpg, ''Solitude'', 1932, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Clarice Beckett - Hawthorn Tea Gardens, 1933.jpg, ''Hawthorn Tea Gardens'', 1933, Art Gallery of South Australia
File:Clarice Beckett - Sandringham Beach - Google Art Project.jpg, ''Sandringham Beach'', 1933, National Gallery of Australia
File:Clarice Beckett Tranquility.jpg, ''Tranquility'', 1933, Art Gallery of South Australia

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

* 1923 June, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1924 September, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1925 July, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1926 July 20–31, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1927 September, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1928 July, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1929 November, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1930 October, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1931 October, Athenaeum Gallery (show opened by Max Meldrum)
* 1932 March, The Meldrum Gallery
* 1932 October, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1933 November, The Meldrum Gallery

Group exhibitions

* 1918 May, Victorian Artists' Society Autumn Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1918 September, Victorian Artists' Society Spring Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1919 September, A Meldrum Group, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1920 June, A Meldrum Group, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1921 May, A Meldrum Group, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1922 May, Victorian Artists' Society Autumn Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1922 November, Victorian Artists' Society Spring Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1923 April, Victorian Artists' Society Autumn Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1923 July, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1923 October, Victorian Artists' Society Spring Exhibition, East Melbourne
* 1924 May, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1925 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1926 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1926 December, Women's Art Club, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1927 July, Women's Art Club, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1927 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1928 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1928 October, Melbourne Society of Women Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1929 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1929 October, Melbourne Society of Women Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1930 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1930 October, Melbourne Society of Women Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1931 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1931 October, Melbourne Society of Women Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1932 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1933 March, Meldrum Gallery
* 1933 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1934 September, Twenty Melbourne Painters, Athenaeum Gallery
* 1934 October, A Meldrum Group, Athenaeum Gallery

Selected posthumous exhibitions

* 1936 Athenaeum Gallery (Memorial Exhibition)
* 1971 Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne
* 1973 "Clarice Beckett", David Sumner Galleries, Adelaide
* 1975 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
* 1978 ''Clarice Beckett 1887-1935'', 58 Wattle Valley Road, Canterbury, 29 October
* 1979 Realities, Melbourne (Retrospective Exhibition)
* 1980 Gallery Huntly, Canberra
* 1995 "In a Certain Light" (with Olive Cotton), The University of New South Wales Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney
* 1999–2000 "Politically incorrect: Clarice Beckett" A retrospective touring exhibition organised by The lan Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne:
:: Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria: 5 February 1999 – 28 March 1999
:: S. H. Ervin Gallery, Adelaide SA: 6 August 1999 – 19 September 1999
:: Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, Victoria: 30 September 1999 – 31 October 1999
:: Art Gallery of Ballarat, Ballarat, Victoria: 5 November 1999 – 16 January 2000
:: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania: 3 February 2000 – 26 March 2000
:: Burnie Regional Art Gallery, Burnie, Tasmania: 7 April 2000 – 22 May 2000
* 2000ff: Niagara Galleries, Melbourne has held three survey exhibitions of Beckett's work in 2000, 2002 and 2014.
* 2021 "Clarice Beckett: The present moment" Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide SA: 27 February – 16 MayHannah Reic
Clarice Beckett: Australian artist's place in global art history cemented in exhibition
''ABC News'', 25 April 2021. Retrieved 25 April 2021.

References

Bibliography

Books

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Journals

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External links

Between Sea and Sky: A Portrait of Clarice Beckett
ABC Radio National

{{DEFAULTSORT:Beckett, Clarice
1887 births
1935 deaths
19th-century Australian women artists
20th-century Australian painters
20th-century Australian women artists
Artists from Victoria (Australia)
Australian women painters
People educated at Ballarat Grammar School
People educated at Melbourne Girls Grammar
People from Casterton, Victoria
National Gallery of Victoria Art School alumni