Grace Crowley
| Grace Crowley | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Grace Adela Williams Crowley 28 May 1890 Barraba, New South Wales |
| Died | 21 April 1979 (aged 88) Manly, New South Wales |
| Education | Methodist Ladies College |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Parent(s) | Elizabeth (née Bridger) and Henry Crowley |
| Relatives | Clive Crowley |
Grace Crowley (pr: as in "slowly") (28 May 1890 – 21 April 1979) was an Australian artist and modernist painter.
She was born Grace Adela Williams Crowley on 28 May 1890 at Forrest Lodge, Barraba, in North-Western New South Wales. She was the fourth child of Henry, a grazier, and Elizabeth (née Bridger). At about the age of 13 Crowley's parents sent one of her pen and ink drawings to New Idea magazine and she won a prize, but her career as an artist was not wholeheartedly supported, sometimes even actively opposed, by her family.[This observation may not be entirely accurate. There is evidence that Grace's family were proud of her accomplishments and financed her studies, including her time in France. It is no doubt true, however, that Grace felt misunderstood by her family. They seem to have been generally baffled by the modernist theories she subscribed to after Paris and teasingly lamented her growing interest in abstraction. There may also have been mutterings about her protracted absences, which meant that the burden of an ailing mother fell on the shoulders of others until she was eventually summoned home. < Skeletons, 2001, unpublished family history by Eena Job, who was Grace's niece. >] From 1905 until 1907, Crowley attended the Methodist Ladies College now MLC School, in Burwood, New South Wales.
Crowley studied in Paris in 1927 with the Cubist André Lhote, and took part in Exhibition I in 1939, the self-proclaimed first show of abstract art in Australia. Others in her circle included Ralph Balsom, Dorrit Black, Rah Fizelle, Frank Hinder and her best friend, ceramicist Anne Dangar. The Artist and his model (1938) The subject of Crowley's painting is fellow artist Ralph Balson, painting an elegantly posed model on the roof terrace of Crowley's studio in George Street, Sydney. Revealing a disintegration of figurative forms and division of the pictorial space into decorative areas, this work signalled a growing commitment, shared by both artists, towards complete abstraction. In 1939 Crowley and Balson participated in the important Exhibition I at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney which summarised the concerns of local painters of the 1930s, then moving towards geometric abstraction.
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