Anthony Horderns’ Fine Art Galleries
Ralph Balson’s exhibition at Anthony Horderns’ galleries in Sydney in July of 1941 was the first one-person exhibition of abstract painting in Australia. Of that there is no doubt. There were some earlier local experiments in abstraction by others, that is also clear. But Balson’s 1941 show, as this long-overdue celebration of it demonstrated, was an unprecedented inventive triumph, the true beginning of modernism in Australia, the real ‘Exhibition 1’. The curators of this ‘re-creation’, Nicholas Chambers and Michael Whitworth, deserve great credit for their vision and determination to realise such an worthy initiative. So too does Nick Waterlow, the Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, which was brought to life by a dizzying feast of colour and metallic form, a body of work that has been substantially overlooked by our major institutions (all bar two of the exhibited works came from private collections), but which has been lionised by a handful of artists and other less orthodox agencies of art in this country.
While the importance of Balson’s early geometric abstraction has been critically reconsidered on occasion over the years, the official histories have been both negligent and misleading, with, for instance, Bernard Smith in 1971 claiming that there was no tradition of Constructivist painting in Australia prior to 1965.1 In 1997 this claim was contested by the large historical survey ‘Geometric Painting in Australia 1941–1997’, which proposed that Balson’s 1941 paintings were the proper starting point for such a history.2 Despite this and other efforts, the genuinely eccentric and groundbreaking nature of Balson’s early geometric abstraction has remained relatively little known and appreciated. So the proposal to mount a re-creation of the artist’s 1941 exhibition appeared