Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

paintings of'H. D' an unknown 'natural artist'19and in 1946, Tucker's essay, 'Exit Modernism', appeared in the Angry Penguins Broadsheet. In the latter paper, Tucker discussed Viktor Löwenfeld's book, The Nature o f Creative Activity , and his classification of'haptic' and 'visual' artists. According to Löwenfeld, the 'visual' artist was orientated to the 'external world', whereas 'with the haptic type, as with Modernism as a whole, his [sic] own inner bodily processes, his subjective knowledge and experiences derived from all sources are ALWAYS the real subject matter'.20 There is a relation between the 'haptic' and the 'primitive', with Löwenfeld linking the 'primitives' with the 'use of isometric perspective [Löwenfeld's 'touch' perspective], hieroglyphic symbols and pattern-making'. These ideas clearly informed Tucker's and Hester's use of expressionist, deep perspectival space, combined with distortion of form, and a more gestural, 'automatic' line. It is instructive to compare Löwenfeld's illustrations such as The cry for help and Exhausted proletarian woman with certain works by Hester, such as Screaming man C.1945 (private collection).21While there are similarities between these images and Hester's Man and tree, such as the swiftly drawn, heavy outlines, the gaping mouth and missing teeth, in Screaming man the distortions exceed even Löwenfeld's images. In Hester's image, the main features are schematically defined, while the distorted angling of the face results in the eyes nearly slipping sideways from their sockets. In a letter of 1944, Hester stated that 'my work... has always been groping for an expression of the psyshological [sic] and pshyic [sic] aspect of a moment or not even a moment but a split flash that half a moment can give'.22No doubt Hester's interest in reading and writing poetry contributed to this reductive aesthetic. She admired the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Judith Wright, amongst others. Readings of the work of Joy Hester are fraught with the drama of the artist's own life. Her personal narrative inevitably endows the work with a film of nascent tragedy. Simply to suggest that Man and tree was executed between 1945 and 1947 puts Hester not only near war's end, directly after the Em Malley hoax,23but also at a crisis point in her closest relationships with family and friends, initially due to the birth of Sweeney. Directly on Tucker's return from Japan in April 1947, Hester left him to begin a new life with the artist Gray Smith in Sydney, with Sweeney in time being adopted by his carers, John and Sunday Reed. At the time of her break with Tucker, Hester was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, from which she died, after a period of remission, in 1960. Even such a brief version of Hester's life story adds a poignancy and veracity, not easily put aside, to her rendering of emotional states, or at least to our reading of them.24 Increasingly, Hester's work developed a calligraphic intensity and speed of execution, losing the crude ugliness and broken mark-making apparent in Man and tree. In works such as Sleeping figure (QAG), there is quick facility, and the sleep is no longer that of the victim. Unlike her male peers, Hester chose to draw rather than paint, continually refining her medium to find the means that was most succinct. Sleeping figure, therefore, appears as an earlier, quickly drawn version of Girl 1957 (NGA), a brush and ink drawing in which the scarcely defined or modelled figure of the reclining girl, her chin resting contemplatively on her folded hands, appears to glide into the right-hand side of the paper.25 As Robert Rooney noted, the clarity of Hester's drawings particularly reflects the graphic work of the German Expressionists.26It is as if she has literally translated the woodcut print into the brush and ink drawing. Hester's series of the late 1940s, 'Love', and the mid-1950s, 'Lovers', provide sublime examples of this, their fusion of reduced and melded forms an erotic portrayal of female passion. In this, it would appear that Hester had heeded the wisdom that underlies Chinese painting: 'There are things which ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression to the invisible'.27 Michele Helmrich teaches art history at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane. 'WHEN THREADS ARE DRAWN ACROSS A NERVOUS-PATTERN' 195