Being Modern
In recent times we have witnessed what has become something of an art historical fashion: the ‘reattribution’ of cultural production by certain male artists as a collaborative enterprise with their wives. In some instances we are seeing this phenomena played out during the artist’s lifetime, with Christo being perhaps the best-known example. Elsewhere it is a posthumous scholarly enterprise, with the reappraisal of Walter Burley Griffin’s work by the Powerhouse Museum a case in point. There Griffin’s wife, Marilyn Mahoney, was effectively presented as Griffin’s equal, a conceit that some Griffin scholars found preposterous: that notwithstanding Mahoney’s exquisite renderings of Griffin’s architecture, there is no evidence that she figured in the conceptualisation of his work.
We saw something like this at the recent Grace Crowley (1890–1979) retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia, which seemed, on first glance, to want to make the case that Crowley and Ralph Balson—a ‘couple’ for over twenty-five years—were artistic collaborators, their project the progressive development of abstract painting: that from around 1940 until Balson’s death in 1964 they worked side-by-side, initially on a highly personalised form of geometric abstraction, then from the mid-1950s on a looser ‘all-over’ painting, and finally, from around 1960, with liquid pigments, which were poured and trailed ‘in the manner of Pollock’.
The desire to acknowledge Crowley’s achievement as an abstract painter is certainly warranted and long overdue. Unfortunately, this was only really reflected in the exhibition title and the inclusion of one of the Crowley’s geometric paintings on the catalogue cover. The show itself was heavily dominated by figurative works from the first half of Crowley’s career, something which merely served to reinforce the existing and misleading perception of