Clarice Beckett


Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett was an Australian artist and a key member of Australian tonalist movement. She is represented 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, a bank manager, and his wife Elizabeth Kate, née Brown. Her grandfather was John Brown, a Scottish master builder who had designed and built Como House and its gardens in South Yarra, Victoria.
Clarice was a boarder at Queen's College, Ballarat until 1903, before spending a year at Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School. She showed artistic ability, and after leaving school took private lessons in charcoal drawing at Ballarat. In 1914 she went to 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 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 endeavour. Beckett could only go out during the dawn and dusk to paint as most of her day was spent caring for them.

Work

Beckett is recognised as one of Australia's most important modernist artists, though some have classified her as a 'daughter of Monet'. 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'. 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. She persistently and diligently painted sea and beachscapes, rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. 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 her group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations.

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.

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.

Another critic in 1925 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 as "nailed well."
Also writing in 1925, the generally reviled and now discredited Melbourne Herald reviewer James S. MacDonald, 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.
By 1931, however, Percy Leason, writing a long review in Table Talk, draws comparison with Rembrandt, Whistler and Corot to say;
However, like her female contemporaries, Beckett faced considerable prejudice from conservative male artists. Meldrum, commenting as late as 1939 on Nora Heyson's receiving the Archibald Prize, expressed his opinion on women's capacity 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." an attitude he qualified in relation to his favourite pupil Beckett, announcing in the event of her death that "Beckett had done work of which any nation should be proud."
During her lifetime no Beckett work was purchased for a public collection, though now almost every major Australian gallery holds examples in their collection. By 2001 her paintings had achieved six figures at auction.

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." John Christian in a 1999 analysis 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."
Tonalism opposed Post-Impressionism and Modernism, and is now regarded as a precursor to Minimalism and Conceptualism. The whole movement had been under fierce controversy and they were without doubt the most unpopular group of artists, in the eyes of most other artists, in the history of Australian art. Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".
Meldrum blamed social decadence for artists' exaggerated interest in colour over tone and proportion. Beckett's painting however 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.

Legacy

A major memorial exhibition was organised by Beckett's sister and her father in 1936 at the Athenaeum. 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. 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.

Selected paintings

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

Selected bibliography