School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemNo gods and no master-printers: Postwar communal self-printing in Melbourne( 2023-06)Existing international print scholarship is shaped by the dominant master-printer framework. This has made it difficult to judge Melbourne’s printmakers against their international peers. Prints made by Melbourne artists looked nothing like these large, professionally crafted images. Characteristically small and handwrought, prints made in Melbourne were largely self-printed by the artists with little technical assistance. To critique Melbourne printmaking on its strengths (and not the standards of distant art-centres), this thesis posits new critical frameworks that uncover a submerged tradition of amateur and communal self-printing. With a ‘group biography’ structure (examining artists as disparate as Harry Rosengrave, Barbara Brash, Tay Kok Wee, Bea Maddock, Ian Burn, Robert Rooney and Jas H. Duke), this investigation makes an original contribution to local and transnational scholarship on the popularity and influence of printmaking after WWII.
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ItemThe singular career of Clarice Beckett: painting and society in Melbourne, 1916-1936( 1984)Clarice Beckett has been a fugitive figure in the short history of Australian art. For more than thirty years after her death in 1935, her paintings were not seen outside a small circle of family and friends, and many were neglected. She became almost a nobody: Mrs. Beckett’s daughter, who had never travelled, never solicited success, never married, and who finally never left her parents. She had established, it seemed, only tenuous connections to the world. However between 1923 and 1933 she mounted annual exhibitions of her work in Melbourne. These exhibitions were reviewed with surprising regularity and often at some length. She also exhibited annually with the Twenty Melbourne Painters from 1923 to 1934, and the Women’s Art Club (WAC) from 1926 to 1931. These exhibitions were also widely reviewed. The discernment and attitudes revealed in this criticism constitute an illuminating depiction of culture, and of the place of women in art, in Australia between the wars. Beckett, or Miss Beckett as she was spoken of then, is now recognized as one of the finest painters Australia has produced, certainly before 1935. That this is so is due not so much to feminist art historians, and not at all to the attention paid to Australian landscape painting between the wars, but to the recovery and exhibition of hundreds of her paintings, and the recording of the recollections of friends and family, as a result of the researches of Rosalind Hollinrake. A study of Beckett’s art must account for her uniqueness and justify her promotion from the rank and file of Meldrumite painters. Such a study must also call into question the generally accepted notion that there was an absence of modernism in Melbourne till the years after her death. (From Chapter 1)