Grace Crowley

Grace Crowley’s paintings are few in number, for she has given much time to teaching, first in Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, then in her own school, with Rah Fizelle, at 215a George Street, Sydney, from 1932 to 1937. After that although she briefly taught at East Sydney Technical College in the 1940s she gave much of her energy to Ralph Balson, whom she recognised as Australia’s finest abstract painter. She helped ensure that his career was productive until his death in 1964.

Her gift for drawing is evident in the earliest Julian Ashton period, but he did not teach composition, and her four years in Paris, 1926–29, chiefly with Andre Lhote, made her a crucial Influence on Australian modernism through the 1930s. It was a revelation to learn that the great masters had strong pictorial structure, that a painting by lngres could look good upside down, that geometric systems existed like Dynamic Symmetry and the Golden Section.

In the 1940s the flat colour planes of Balson (which ultimately derive from Matisse) were an even more modern kind of pictorial structure for Crowley, but the retention of volumetric modelling within a context of modernism, available from Andre Lhote, had been very sympathetic to such a gifted academic as she.

Despite the sound theory in her academic modernist paintings, and their influence in Sydney through the 1930s, it is her persistent pleasure in flowing line and her personal feeling for luminous colour, combined in her later abstract paintings, which are uniquely characteristic of her work. They, as well as her influential French compositions, earn her an honourable place in the history of Australian Art, despite the smallness of her oeuvre – so small an oeuvre, on account of both teaching commitments and her own fastidious destructions, that almost her entire surviving production is included in this present exhibition.

Source: AGNSW exhibition catalogue (exhibition organised by Daniel Thomas).