Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

40 Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s Sidney Nolan , Mrs Fraser (detail) 1947 In 1948, John Cooper’s Moreton Galleries was, with Finney’s Art Gallery, one of only two commercial galleries operating in Brisbane, soon to be joined by Brian Johnstone’s Marodian Gallery, a precursor to the Johnstone Gallery, which would become an influential force in Brisbane’s art world. That year, Cooper staged Sidney Nolan’s seminal exhibition of paintings exploring the legend of British woman Mrs Eliza Fraser, who survived a shipwreck off the coast of Queensland in 1836. The exhibition introduced Brisbane audiences to the artist’s naive, semi-abstract style, and effectively marked the start of his stellar career. Nolan had travelled to Brisbane from Melbourne in 1947 to escape the suffocating atmosphere of Heide, the artistic community established by his patrons John and Sunday Reed, and their emotionally fraught ménage à trois. On Nolan’s arrival in Queensland, he was drawn to Mrs Fraser’s narrative after learning of her variously recounted tales of survival from friends, including Brisbane-based writer and librarian Barrett Reid, whom Nolan met at Heide, and through research at the State Library of Queensland. Several of the paintings depict K’gari (known for a time as Fraser Island), the landscape in which the story unfolded, which Nolan visited several times. 22 However, by far the most compelling painting in the series is Mrs Fraser 1947, which graphically represents the disassembled Englishwoman stripped of her clothes and the social niceties that someone of her class would have come to expect. With its raw and visceral qualities, the painting represented a new and invigorating aesthetic that would influence artists such as Sydney painter Charles Blackman, who saw Nolan’s artworks in Brisbane and would soon form his own associations with Queensland. Several years later, Nolan would expand on the bleak, sun-bleached imagery in Mrs Fraser when, in 1952, the Courier-Mail commissioned him to document one of the worst droughts in Queensland’s history. The newspaper deemed Nolan’s photographs of the desiccated carcasses of horses and cattle he encountered along the Birdsville Track as too graphic for its readership, instead publishing a series of drawings Nolan made based on the images. The iconography later reappeared in Nolan’s paintings such as Animal c.1953–55, and his ‘Dust’ series of etchings, published in 1971. 1950 s The 1950s saw significant shifts in artistic practice and appreciation in Queensland. An influential factor was the appointment in 1951 of Robert Haines as Director of the Queensland National Art Gallery. Haines was responsible for major purchases of early modern European art, such as Pablo Picasso’s La Belle Hollandaise 1905, organised a series of important exhibitions of international art, including ‘British Watercolours 1850–1914’ (1952) and ‘French Painting Today’ (1953), and initiated a formal program of fundraising for the Gallery through the National Gallery Society of Queensland. 23 Moreover, the arrival in Brisbane of painters such as Blackman and Jon Molvig, the return of Margaret Cilento and Margaret Olley from overseas and the emergence of new artistic voices, including that of Indigenous watercolourist Joe Rootsey, enlivened visual culture in the state. Blackman travelled to Brisbane from Sydney in 1948 and quickly connected with the city’s younger and more progressive artists (notably, Miya Studio members Laurence Collinson and Laurence Hope; and the affiliated Barjai