Gerald Lewers Sculptor
by Peter Pinson OAM Phillip Mathews Book Publishers, Willoughby, NSW
The question obliquely raised by Peter Pinson’s compact monograph Gerald Lewers Sculptor is whether Lewers really counts among the pantheon of significant Australian artists, or was he just a patrician dabbler—as suggested by this description from a feature in Art Monthly about his wife, the abstractionist Margo Lewers: ‘Gerald Lewers, the well-to-do son of the quarry and construction company, Farley & Lewers—famous for its lolly-pink cement trucks into the 80s’?
Pinson can also quote fellow sculptor Lyndon Dadswell as listing Lewers’s talents thus: ‘He inspired affection, he started and kept the Society of Sculptors and Associates going, and he had a talent for integrating materials and art forms’. Not a resounding tribute, suggesting clubbability more than raw artistic talent.
In fact, we learn in his own words that he was ‘not a joiner’, and in Pinson’s assessment, his Farley & Lewers connection was a burden rather than the core of his life. For his bank manager father committed suicide and the company was started by two Lewers brothers and a brother-in-law. When Gerald returned from sculpture studies in London in 1934 fired by the ideas of Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, he nevertheless felt a ‘sense of family duty’ to return to the business for the next fifteen years, building a railway in South Australia and running the company’s Castlereagh quarry. His art during this time was, in Pinson’s estimate, only of ‘moderate significance’.
Indeed, artist, critic for The Sun (and later friend) James Gleeson damned a 1949 contemporary sculpture show, which included Lewers, with the words: ‘Australia has not so far produced a Dobell or a Drysdale of sculpture’.
But, extraordinarily, we have already learnt that in