The Secret Life
of Art

THE SECRET LIFE OF ART

Grace Crowley’s Portrait, 1939, entered the National Gallery of Victoria collection in 1981 as part of a bequest from the artist. Anticipating pure abstraction in its flattened space and use of pure unmodulated colour, Portrait is a pivotal work in Crowley’s oeuvre.

The painting techniques Grace Crowley used in Portrait were experimental and daring. For instance, Crowley flipped the pre-primed canvas to the reverse side and laid the paint straight onto the raw unprimed canvas with great confidence and directness.

Portrait came into the NGV Collection with an original artist’s backing board, consisting of a grey-painted sheet of cardboard secured to the back of the frame with nails. For decades this seemingly unremarkable backing board concealed an extraordinary secret.

In the lead up to Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson, NGV conservators observed distinctive variations in the colour and texture of the backing board, which indicated that underneath the grey paint was another artwork that had been painted out.

The underlying painting was captured using raking light images; a common examination technique whereby the light source is positioned at an oblique angle, almost parallel to the surface, to accentuate variations in surface texture.  The geometric and circular forms are consistent with compositional motifs seen in Ralph Balson’s Constructive paintings from the 1940s.

Remarkably, this is not the first unearthing of a hidden or abandoned work by Ralph Balson or Grace Crowley. Crowley and Balson often reused their supports, turning them over to start a different painting on the other side.

This raised the tantalising possibility that there might be a second painting on the inward facing side of the cardboard; although, the odds of finding something intact and in good condition appeared relatively slim.

The next step involved carefully removing the cardboard backing to find out…

The cardboard was carefully flipped, revealing an astonishing riot of colour on the reverse side. This was a fully finished intact artwork that was almost certainly intended for display! While there are no known prior records of its existence, like the painted-out work on the other side, it contains motifs typically found in Ralph Balson’s Constructive paintings, in particular works included in his 1941 solo exhibition at Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Galleries in Sydney.

The entirely abstract nature of the discovered Ralph Balson painting raised an intriguing conundrum, as neither Balson nor Grace Crowley had committed to pure abstraction at the time Portrait was painted. (Constructive painting), (1941) postdates Portrait by about two years. So how did a painting from the early 1940s find its way to the back of a painting from 1939?

It is unclear why the history of these two works from different dates came to be so intimately entwined. The word ‘storage’ written on the reverse may be an important clue.

In response to fears of an attack on Sydney Harbour at the outbreak of the Second World War, it is known that Ralph Balson and Grace Crowley moved a group of works into storage from Crowley’s George St studio to Balson’s home in Maroubra.

Assuming that Portrait was unstretched at the time, one theory is that Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson mounted the two works together as a temporary measure to protect Crowley’s loose canvas and Balson’s painting on cardboard which would otherwise be vulnerable to damage in transit.

This hypothesis is supported by the hurried and makeshift way in which the canvas support of Portrait had been tacked directly onto the back of the frame, rather than mounted onto a stretcher as is customary.

Mysteriously, the word ‘BALSON’ can also be seen faintly on the top of the frame. 

It is hard to imagine how such a significant example of one of Ralph Balson’s early Constructive paintings could have been lost to art history for so many years. It is possible that it was so well disguised that Crowley and Balson themselves forgot about it as the years passed.

After more than forty years as a stowaway in the NGV Collection, Balson’s (Constructive painting) has now been formally acquired and can be seen on public display following a full restoration and framed in a new reproduction frame – potentially for the first time ever.