A key Sydney modernist in the inter-war period, Grace Crowley studied in Paris in the late 1920s under the cubist artists André Lhôte and Albert Gleizes, and went on to establish an art school with Rah Fizelle which became the principal centre for modernist painting in Sydney until its closure in 1937. Crowley’s own work was a modified, academic cubism based on planar geometry and dynamic symmetry.
The daughter of a wealthy grazier, Crowley was born in 1890 at Cobbadah, New South Wales. While at school in Sydney, she studied part-time at the Julian Ashton Art School in 1907 before returning to the family home in Glen Riddle, Barraba. Despite the fact that her parents did not want her to pursue a career in painting, Crowley resumed art classes in Sydney in 1915 under Mildred Lovett and Elioth Gruner, in addition to Ashton, and worked as Ashton’s assistant from 1918 to 1923.
Crowley travelled to Europe with fellow artist Anne Dangar in 1926, studying briefly at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and then with André Lhôte, whose teaching emphasised solid geometric structure over colour and who introduced Crowley to the theories of academic cubism as well as the geometric systems of dynamic symmetry and the golden section, which she later brought to Sydney. She attended Lhôte’s summer school at Mirmande together with Dangar and Dorrit Black, and visited Albert Gleizes’ art colony at Moly-Sabata, later describing the impact of these experiences on the use of abstraction in her work:
“We were united in one belief, the constructive approach to painting, and this insistence of the abstract elements in building up a design was the keynote of teaching with Lhôte and Gleizes … we were discouraged from making merely a faithful record of the nude [model] … the abstract elements in line, shape and colour were introduced in order to induce the student to construct from it a design within a given space.”
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A key Sydney modernist in the inter-war period, Grace Crowley studied in Paris in the late 1920s under the cubist artists André Lhôte and Albert Gleizes, and went on to establish an art school with Rah Fizelle which became the principal centre for modernist painting in Sydney until its closure in 1937. Crowley’s own work was a modified, academic cubism based on planar geometry and dynamic symmetry.
The daughter of a wealthy grazier, Crowley was born in 1890 at Cobbadah, New South Wales. While at school in Sydney, she studied part-time at the Julian Ashton Art School in 1907 before returning to the family home in Glen Riddle, Barraba. Despite the fact that her parents did not want her to pursue a career in painting, Crowley resumed art classes in Sydney in 1915 under Mildred Lovett and Elioth Gruner, in addition to Ashton, and worked as Ashton’s assistant from 1918 to 1923.
Crowley travelled to Europe with fellow artist Anne Dangar in 1926, studying briefly at the Académie Colarossi in Paris and then with André Lhôte, whose teaching emphasised solid geometric structure over colour and who introduced Crowley to the theories of academic cubism as well as the geometric systems of dynamic symmetry and the golden section, which she later brought to Sydney. She attended Lhôte’s summer school at Mirmande together with Dangar and Dorrit Black, and visited Albert Gleizes’ art colony at Moly-Sabata, later describing the impact of these experiences on the use of abstraction in her work:
“We were united in one belief, the constructive approach to painting, and this insistence of the abstract elements in building up a design was the keynote of teaching with Lhôte and Gleizes … we were discouraged from making merely a faithful record of the nude [model] … the abstract elements in line, shape and colour were introduced in order to induce the student to construct from it a design within a given space.”
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