Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

A SINGULAR PORTRAIT Grace Cossington Smith Portrait o f a man Drusilla Modjeska race Cossington Smith rarely painted men. There are several sketches and drawings of her father and her brother, but few oils of masculine faces. There are some group studies of men — soldiers at war, workmen in various poses, schoolboys, a church congregation — but Portrait of a man c.1918 (Queensland Art Gallery) is unusual for its intimate focus on an individual.1Which makes it all the odder that we do not know who the man is. He was neither father, brother, nor brother- in-law. He was not her friend and fellow painter, Roland Wakelin. He does not match any of the faces from known family or holiday photographs. It is a guess to say that he might have been a Turramurra neighbour. But while we are struggling to place this man, the artist certainly knew something of him; there is familiarity in this portrait, and a certain knowledge. As Cossington Smith did not sign or date the painting, merely putting her name — 'G. C. Smith' — on the back, or verso, we don't even know exactly when she painted it. All we know is that it was done before 1920, because it was then that the artist began to sign her work with her full name, 'Grace Cossington Smith'. The other portraits of those early years, and for which she has become famous, are of her sisters. The most celebrated of these, exhibited in 1916 and also signed G. C. Smith, is The Sock Knitter 1915 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales) in which her sister Madge is knitting socks. In The reader: The school cape c.1916 (private collection) and The Reader 1919 (AGNSW), Madge and her other sister Diddy are reading. In these portraits Cossington Smith evokes a world of intellectuality that Virginia Woolf laments is denied to women, and at the same time captures the private world of thought that women make their own, a feminine space that is at once hemmed, and filled with possibility. The sisters hug their books close, they are absorbed in their own interiority; and yet there is a certain loneliness in the image, as if they are consoling themselves against loss, or disappointment. Do they choose their solitude, or is it thrust upon them? Are they closed in? Or shut out? The brilliance of these portraits is their capacity to hold the tension of all these possibilities. Portrait of a man does not evoke this uneasy interiority. The man holds his book at a confident, slightly long-sighted distance and spreads himself, like the smoke from his pipe, into the available space; there is not the same sense of conflict between the world he withdraws into, and the world that presses upon him. In this it is very different from the feminine portraits. Yet if we consider the composition of Portrait of a man in relation to them, there are several points of continuity. In each the figure is pressed forward onto the picture plane, sitting in a chair, absorbed in thought. The figure is not aware of us, has no interest in the closeness of our presence; while we look in on a private moment, we know nothing of its nature. The portrait tells us nothing of the idiosyncrasy of character. The man, we surmise from his stance, does not doubt his right to be in that chair. But this confidence is not without anxiety; consider the furrow to the brow, and the way the light falls across his face, casting Facing page Grace Cossington Smith Australia 1892-1984 Portrait of a man c.1918 Oil on composition board 56x50cm Purchased 1992. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation half in shadow, and the slight discomfort of the arm that leans out of the chair as if it is not quite sufficient to hold him. His jacket is tight under the other arm and bunches around him. All this we can see, and yet we take in these facts dispassionately; the painting gives us no story to hold onto, no anecdote, no moment that we can pin down in time. The light from the window tells us that it is day, the buttoned jacket that it was not full summer. Beyond that, what do we know? Is he reading to withdraw from domestic demands, or to await domestic attention? To study, or to relax? Is he reading in his own house, this man? Or is he a visitor? We don't know. And we are not meant to know. For Grace Cossington Smith the portrait was exactly as she said, a portrait of a man. Her interest in painting him — or her sisters — was not to capture character or to record a personality, but to explore form and colour, shape and light. She was painting at a time when questions of form and colour had been thrown wide open by European Modernism, and, with Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin, Cossington Smith was among the first Australian artists to engage with its possibilities. It was a tentative start, and from the perspective of the late twentieth century it is hard to regain a sense of the shock with which a painting as seemingly innocent as Portrait o f a man was once regarded. By stripping the portrait of name, date and place, by removing the familiar props of social context, it confronts the viewer as art, the planes and shapes of form, the possibilities of colour take 120 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965