Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

the Australian press as the triumph of Queensland's 'girl sculptress'.6Newspapers continued to adopt this tone during later reportage of her civic and commercial commissions, and repeatedly used photographs of Mayo, seemingly overwhelmed by the size of her tympanum on the Brisbane City Hall, to illustrate her 'extraordinary' success.7Even years later, when Daphne Mayo was herself a highly regarded 'elder' of the art community, she was consistently popularised in the press as 'Alittle woman ... with a man-size job'.8 Despite the clichés and labels, Daphne Mayo established herself as one of Australia's foremost sculptors with a series of significant public commissions. Her training had been orthodox. She studied at the Central Technical College in Brisbane 1911-13 and in 1914 was awarded Queensland's first publicly sponsored art bursary, the Wattle Day Travelling Art Scholarship. Owing to the outbreak of the First World War she was unable to take up the award until 1920, when she was admitted as a probationer in sculpture at the Royal Academy, London. Her gold medal in 1923 included the Edward Stott Travelling Scholarship to Rome. This was the Academy's highest honour, and Mayo was only the second female recipient.9 Mayo was deeply influenced by the Royal Academy's concentration on classical representations of the human form and by her direct experience of European sculpture during her tour of France and Italy in 1924-25. She returned to Brisbane in 1925 and began teaching and carrying out commissions, including work on the City Hall (1927-30) and the Queensland Women's War Memorial, Anzac Square (1929-32)!° Commissions have traditionally been the lifeblood of the sculptor, especially in Australia, where commemorative sculpture was widely sought after, particularly following Federation and the First World War. The need for the young nation to create the monuments considered essential for a civilised society meant that academic traditions in public sculpture lasted longer in Australia than they did elsewhere.1 A little woman ...with a man-size job By GEORGE BLAIKIE SYDINKY. - \ vr a»n. »Ii. ii Diiplu M uyo , O imtiis I hiu I sil tillj!lii«ll<-il unilptriw , urcrplrrl ,-rrulr a <J-fii.il lironz«' »lain.- of funi<-<l soldi™-, Ihr lali- M ajor-C rm ral Sir W illiam G lasóo», she lln.ujil.l il would lie an easy, pleasaiil joli. During this time Mayo was also active in local art politics. She worked intensively for the Queensland Art Fund, raising money for art purchases for the neglected Queensland National Art Gallery.12 These commitments left Mayo little time to develop her personal sculpture, and it was not until after her second overseas trip during 1938-39, and a move to Sydney from Brisbane in 1940, that she was able to produce more experimental work. In France she had been particularly impressed by the example of Aristide Maillol, whose up-dated classicism' Mayo preferred to the radical abstractions of artists such as Henry Moore.13Maillol confined his sculpture to female nudes and his work attracted the favourable attention of important formalist critics such as Roger Fry and Albert Dreyfus. Maillol's work also received notice in Australia, with artist Jean Bellette writing in Art in Australia in September 1941 that Maillol's sculpture 'arouses in the spectator a delight impossible to describe', and that 'the strong torsos and full limbs radiate the inner architectural harmony'.14Included in the reproductions of Maillol's work accompanying this article was a drawing that seems to relate directly to Mayo's Susannah — a semi-nude female figure, stepping forward and half-turned to the right. Susannah and some Elders 1942 consequently reflects Maillol's influences on Mayo: the scale and form are classical, and yet the solid rounded mass of the principal figure deals, in a quite 'contemporary' way, with the details of individual expression, without decorative additions. One of Daphne Mayo's incentives for moving to Sydney in 1940 had been to execute a commission for a pair of bronze doors for the Public Library of New South Wales and these were completed in 1942. Mayo was derided by Sydney modernists of the Rah Fizelle - Frank Hinder circle, who had an intense interest in abstraction, for attempting to produce an Australian equivalent of Ghiberti's Gates o f Paradise 1424 -52. She was consequently pigeon­ holed by this group as a supporter of the conservative and controversial Australian Academy of Art.15 198 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965