Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

ICONS AND POLITICS Danila Vassllleff Dancing girl and Harry and Ike Felicity St John Moore Facing page Danila Vassilieff Russia/Australia 1897-1958 Dancing girl 1952 Lilydale marble 30.4x19x11 cm Purchased 1984 Queensland Art Gallery Right Danila Vassilieff, c.1946 Photograph courtesy the late Ted Cranstone Musicians, nineteenth- century folk carvings, Russian State Museum, reproduced in A. N. Tyrsa (ed.), Russian Wooden Toys, artist of the RSFSR, Leningrad. D anila Ivanovich Vassilieff, a refugee from the Soviet Union, can be said, with hindsight, to have carried the humanistic, folk stream of the Russian modern movement into Australian art. These two works from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, the carving Dancing girl 1952 and the painting Harry and Ike c.1952, represent the later phase of his career. Born in the village of Kagalnickaja near Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, Vassilieff had studied mechanical engineering in St Petersburg before becoming caught up in the First World War and then, as a Cossack, in the Counter- Revolution. His involvement in war and revolution turned him against politics and ideologies and towards modern art, which he associated with liberation from rules as well as traditional beliefs. In his view, an artist should respond to life directly through his own experience and paint the truth. Art was physical — a matter of gut response, as opposed to an intellectual or academic one. This kind of expressionist art emerged in St Petersburg in the early years of the twentieth century, most notably in the work of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. Vassilieff encountered the style in London in White Russian circles in the mid-1930s and he was influenced especially by the Moscow-bom artist and teacher Vladimir Polunin and his English wife Elizabeth, who were both scene painters with Sergei Diaghilev. His adoption of their humanistic and iconic approach was also intuitive, even atavistic — stemming from his folk art heritage. Vassilieff arrived in Australia as an artist in 1935 (with an Australian passport acquired during an earlier visit) and in 1939 he settled in Warrandyte, about forty kilometres outside Melbourne. There he built himself a house called Stonygrad, quarrying the local stone on his own land. His handling of this stone was the origin of his sculpture, begun some years later, after he 'sold' the house, married the purchaser and could finally afford materials for carving. Dancing girl is carved from nearby Lilydale marble — a stone Vassilieff admired for its varied colour as well as its mottled texture — which he obtained from the Thomas Mitchell Quarry. The use of this material for carving had been pioneered by doctor and artist Clive Stephen, a friend of George Bell. Stephen introduced Vassilieff to his carving method and equipment, which consisted of an electric drill attached by a long flexible cable to a half horsepower motor and a range of fittings, such as grinding wheels and polishing discs. Vassilieff followed Stephens method of drilling into the stone and carving away from the sides while the stone was splashed with water, then rubbing down with various abrasives, and polishing with oxalic acid and putty powder. Yet Vassilieffs direct and spontaneous use of this method, without preliminary drawings, differed radically from that of Stephen, who first drew on the block, then released the hidden form. Vassilieff's sculpture has more in common with the principle of 'truth to materials' espoused by Henry Moore, whose travelling exhibition he had seen in 1948. Thus, in Dancing girl, the mottles in the stone become a sympathetic setting for 230 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965