Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

' S T R A P P E D T O T H E M A N G L E ' : Art, Work and the'Lady Artist Vida Lahey M o nda y m o rn ing Lynne Seear Facing page Vida Lahey Australia 1882-1968 M onday morning 1912 Oil on canvas 153x122.7cm Gift of Madame Emily Coungeau through the Queensland Art Society 1912 Queensland Art Gallery Above Vida Lahey, c.1903. Photograph courtesy Lahey family archive. Reproduced w ith kind permission of Shirley Lahey. I n a scrapbook compiled by Vida Lahey to document her career, a black and . white illustration of her painting Monday morning 1912 (Queensland Art Gallery) appears on a page titled 'Brisbane'. Underneath the photograph Lahey has written, in capital letters, 'AND THEN CAME THE WAR'.1Vida Lahey painted few works on the scale of Monday morning, all of them before 1916, and the stylistic break which demarcates her transition from large-scale genre painter to flamboyant but basically domestic watercolourist has become something of an issue in Australian art history. Janine Burke used Monday morning on the front cover of her book Australian Women Artists, 1840-1940, and then speculated that Lahey's abandonment of the style was due to a puzzling failure of nerve.2However, this interpretation belies the dynamic role Lahey played in Brisbane art politics for decades following her return from Europe in 1921. Perhaps the artist's scrapbook marginalia opens up a different reading — the war changed everything. Frances Vida Lahey was bom at Pimpama, Queensland, in 1882, the eldest child in a family of eleven. She trained with local art master Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Technical College and spent two periods of study at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, in 1905-06 and 1909. Her instructors at the Gallery School were the distinguished academician, Bernard Hall, and the Australian art world's revered 'Prof', Frederick McCubbin. Vida Lahey experienced the First World War more directly than most Australian women of her generation. She had been dispatched to England in 1916 to establish a 'home away from home' for various male relatives — brothers and cousins — who were fighting in Europe and the Middle East. She went as a dutiful daughter, though she was also lured by the prospect of eventually furthering her studies in the ateliers and studios favoured by expatriate Australian artists. During these years in England, Vida Lahey learned much more about the many-sided nature of 'work' than she could have as a middle-class spinster/artist in suburban Brisbane. As well as ministering to the men of her family, she traced airplane parts in a factory, escorted shocked and wounded convalescents in London, and grewvegetables by railway embankments to supplement free Sunday buffets for homesick Anzacs. All through this she was stirred by news of the war. As Bettina MacAulay has pointed out, by the time Lahey arrived in England total casualties from the battles at Verdun and the Somme had reached 1.6 million. In 1917 her brother Noel was killed, her brother Jack wounded and repatriated.3 Who could wonder at Lahey's reorientation of her career once the war was over and she was free to travel? From 1919 the artist visited art museums in Britain and Europe, and spent the next two years studying — she joined Filippo Colarossi's Atelier Libre in Paris, worked with Ethel Carrick Fox in her still-life classes and passed several weeks learning watercolour techniques from the New Zealand painter Frances Hodgkins in St Ives. When she returned to Brisbane in 1921 her palette had begun to lighten and revitalise due to a gentle (never radical) absorption of the colours of European Modernism and a search, as she put it, for the 'joy' in visual expression: ' joy in colours, joy in rhythm, joy in pattern, joy in telling things .. ,'.4The subtle nuances of style developed by Lahey in her still life, landscape and interior painting over the next two decades might be viewed as typical of strategies devised by other women artists of this period as they negotiated the conflicting demands of 'femininity' and the 'modern'.5 Vida Lahey was interested in the depiction of female figures in domestic surrounds throughout her career. Though scarce in number, these images are among the most engaging she produced — serene women basking in filtered light as they sew, read, pour tea, or daydream.6 None of them, however, possesses the authority or impact of Monday morning. A surviving oil sketch, Busy fingers 1913 (George Melsom Collection), one of the few from the same period, exemplifies the contrast; it is a mannerly domestic vignette. We can see that in Monday morning Lahey strove for a much tougher effect. Painted in Brisbane after the artist 112 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965