Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'WHEN THREADS ARE DRAWN ACROSS A NERVOUS-PATTERN' Joy Hester Man and tree Michele Helmrich the plaster mould is hollow of hands withdrawn in silent watching — unworded sentences form an intangible link with men's eyes and the graveyard pallor of their cheeks. Facing page Joy Hester Australia 1920-60 Man and tree c.1945-47 Brush and watercolour on wove paper 36.5 X 27cm Purchased 1986 Queensland Art Gallery Above Joy Hester Portrait of a woman C.1941 Charcoal, pencil, ink and wash on paper 37.5 X 27.5cm Purchased 1992. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation observe each hydrant leaning towards the eyes of children — unformed smiles that lurch when threads are drawn across a nervous-pattern that outreaches all expedience. challenging elemental depths to rise in defence of unwritten history — before time changed to sever the umbilical cords of dead women. Joy Hester1 J oy Hester's Man and tree c.1945-47 (Queensland Art Gallery) is an abrasive image. Aman's head turns to stare directly at us, his shoulders bare, unruly hair blown back to stand almost on end, mouth gaping, teeth missing, features emaciated, brow furrowed. His look is one of horror, bewilderment, pain. A tree, a fir tree perhaps, on a distant hill, is his only company. Short sparks of colour — orange, blue, green — combine with heavy outlines, while a wash of dull burning orange surrounds the face, kindling this living nightmare. The generality of the title, Man and tree, explains little of what is before us. We are faced with a man (and Hester more often depicted women) and nature. If this is a portrait, then it portrays a psychological state rather than a specific person. Rarely did Hester identify her subjects; she wrote of her drawings as 'anonymous ... heads that pass me in the streets'.2Even when the subjects were known, as in Harry 1942 (University Art Museum, The University of Queensland) and Portrait o f Michael Keon 1942 (private collection), her focus was on an emotional register similar to the one explored through the disconnected images of her poetry. Hester's Communist sympathies, combined with the influence of artists such as Danila Vassilieff and Josl Bergner, infused her early work with a seriousness which noted the pressures of urban life and the sombre mood cast by the distant European conflict. However, by 1942 Hester had shed that social realist integrity to form, inflected by a surreal distortion, which had been evident in drawings of only a year before, such as Street scene (II) (private collection) or Portrait o f a woman c.1941 (QAG). Following Japan's entry into the war in late 1941, the distant threat of Fascism was replaced in Australia by a sense of immediate crisis. Invasion anxiety was acute and Australian society was alarmed by the bombing of Darwin, Townsville and Mossman, the Battle of the Coral Sea, fighting in New Guinea, the revelation of the 'Brisbane Line', and the influx of American and Allied troops in Australian cities. American troops brought jazz, the jitterbug, and money to spend. With soldiers arriving en masse in 1942, prostitution became an obvious feature of city life. Already in 1941, Joy Hester's husband Albert Tucker had painted a critique of blatant female sexuality in Pick-up. The violence of war transmuted into the sexual violence of'The Brown-out Murders' in Melbourne in 1942, exacerbating a climate of fear for women. American GI, Edward Leonski, was tried for the murders, court-martialled and hanged. Tucker's images of distorted and hacked-up women's bodies in his series 'Images of modem evil' c.1943-47 read as savage indictments of promiscuous women, the part played by men often deleted from view.3The Leonski murders clearly informed this series, with Tucker painting Memory o f Leonski (National Gallery of Victoria) in February 1943.4 One might compare Tucker's watercolour, Victory girl 1943 (National Gallery of Australia) with Hester's ink drawing, Frightened c.1945 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales).5In Tucker's image, the girl's face is quickly defined by one radiating eye, a pig-snout nose and the V-shaped gash of a leering mouth, while her breasts, bare above a striped skirt (red, white and blue), are being groped by her male company. The huge V for Victory-shaped mouth, so filled with teeth, could easily translate as a vagina dentata. 192 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965