Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

by a palette that was still restrained. Yellow, 'the colour of the sun, the colour that advances',6was to become a signature of her late interiors. In 1920 she was a long way from realising it, and in this portrait it is like a whisper, the first sound of something a long way away, a note heard from a great distance. Of all the early portraits, The Sock Knitter is the most dramatic, the least muddy,7 and it is the key, in my view, to an understanding of the artists early work. Bolder in composition than the later Portrait o f a man, in The Sock Knitter her sister Madge sits face on, and face down, pushed forward onto the picture plane. The large blocks of colour — cerulean blue, ochre, cream — illuminate a background with virtually no anecdotal detail other than the knitting bag. There is minimal information, no furnishing or setting, no props, no certainty. What Madge thinks as she knits her socks we have no idea. The broad brushstrokes leave a greater trace on the canvas than in Portrait of a man. As with the portrait, character and story are not what this is about. Yet to paint a woman knitting socks in 1915 meant only one thing; and that one thing was the war. Virginia Woolf wrote that after the war nothing could be written in the same way, even strawberries on a plate had changed what they demanded of us. So, too, with painting. Awoman knitting socks, a man reading a book, took on different meanings with the carnage of a war that killed thousands upon thousands of young men. The anecdotalism that accompanied so much of prewar portraiture in Australia, the placing of a figure in a known environment with comforting presences waiting in the wings, was no longer possible. Well, it was possible, and plenty were done — the basements of our galleries are full of them — but as art it was not possible, and those are not the portraits that tell us anything about their time or come to us fresh with news of a world that has grown musty with distance. Grace Cossington Smiths portraits give us the condition not only of art in the aftermath of that war, but of the human soul. In actual life only one of the four Smith sisters married. Mabel's husband, a career soldier, survived the war. Grace, it seems, did not wish to marry, being, as she put it, 'wholly interested in painting',8but her sister Madge certainly wanted to, and so, probably, did Diddy. A portrait of a young woman knitting is a portrait about a generation of women whose sorrowful lot was to knit socks for the men they would otherwise have married, the brothers of their friends, their partners at dances, boys from the neighbourhood. They are knitting socks for men for whom they would grieve in a life without partners. Far left Grace Cossington Smith The Sock Knitter 1915 Oil on canvas 51.5 X 50.7cm The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Left Grace Cossington Smith The reader: The school cape C.1916 Oil on canvas on board 32.3 X 24.1cm Private collection Photograph courtesy Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne In another wartime painting, Reinforcements: Troops Marching c.1917 (AGNSW), which was exhibited in 1918, we see Grace Cossington Smith's dramatic use of space, her experiments, in this case, with perspective as well as colour. This was another celebrated work, now iconic of the war, but then dismissed for its play with colour and perspective. Its success, like The Sock Knitter, depends not simply on its technical achievement, but on a kick of emotion that reverberates in us eighty years later. The child in the foreground screams, it seems to me, with the cry of all the babies who would never be bom; a silent cry of loss from the women who line the streets to wave off the troops. So who was the man in Portrait o f a man ? To be literal about it, he was probably that Turramurra neighbour. But his real life, his historical identity is not what is important about him. In a sense it does not matter. One could say instead that he was the husband the Smith girls would never have. Or that he represents the condition of a man who was still alive when that vicious war ended. He takes his place, opens his book and lights his pipe with a certain masculine confidence, and yet the strain, the tension, the sorrow in his bearing, fall like the shadow across his face which no amount of light, be it from the kitchen or from the world beyond, could alleviate, or lift. This was the condition of man in those years immediately after the war; this his 'inarticulate grace and beauty'; this the shared secret of his being. There is no hero here, no striding power, no certainty or control. His future is different, but no more certain than the future of the sisters who read their books. Though he could have a wife where they could not have husbands, his relationship with the women who hover just out of range has forever changed. Perhaps the greatest change, ushered in by the war, comes with the observing gaze of the painter. For that compassionate and steady eye is feminine, ft is no longer the man who paints the woman, marking her as he wished her to be; it is the woman who conjures the man. Grace Cossington Smith was well aware of the power as well as the challenge of the changes she documented. She preferred to paint them than to marry. In opening the way for a generation of women who were to redraft the terms of Australian art, she reveals in her Portrait of a man the vulnerability of a man in the face of upheavals to come. Drusilla Modjeska is the author of several novels and works of non-fiction and Is soon to publish a new text on Australian women artists, Including Grace Cossington Smith. A SINGULAR PORTRAIT 123