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

45 Olley’s light‑filled, vibrantly coloured and freely painted interiors and still lifes, such as Allamandas I c.1955–58 (p.84), would find a ready audience at the Johnstone Gallery, where she formed enduring friendships with dealers Brian and Marjorie Johnstone and artists associated with the gallery, including Blackman and Molvig. As Dr Nancy Underhill has established, the Johnstones — who would launch their gallery under their own name in 1952 in the basement of the Brisbane Arcade, before moving the gallery to a purpose-designed space in their Bowen Hills home two years later — set a successful pattern for their exhibitions, showing the work of artists from Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. 27 Their pioneering approach to ‘selecting, showing and promoting art in Australia at a time when commercial galleries were in their infancy’ created, as art historian Dr Louise Martin-Chew has documented, ‘a sense of anticipation and excitement about contemporary art that traversed a wide demographic’. 28 Jon Molvig moved to Brisbane in 1955 and exerted a significant influence on art practice in Queensland before his death in 1970, aged just 47. He embodied an infectious enthusiasm for life and painted in an energetic and frequently emotive style that revealed the influence of European expressionists such as Edvard Munch (1863–1944) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), whose work he knew from travelling in Europe following World War Two. Having taken over the art classes run by John Rigby at the Kangaroo Point studio, Molvig would become an inspiring and generous teacher who influenced a generation of students, including Joy Roggenkamp and Andrew Sibley. While Molvig’s own work was frequently charged with visceral energy, he adapted his visual language in response to his subject matter and intention. For example, his pastel sketch (Figures on a jetty) c.1955 is lighter in tone than much of his oeuvre, capturing the scene in sketchy colour-filled strokes. Typical of the riverside city that Molvig had made his home, the drawing features a crowd of people waiting at a ferry stop, with the figure at the head of the queue believed to be his friend Charles Blackman. 29 In contrast, Molvig’s A ballad of native stockmen no.2 1959 (p.256) reveals a vision of Australia’s interior and the First Nations people whose deep connection to Country he had encountered the previous year while travelling in Central Australia. One of four paintings based on the narrative of the death of an Indigenous stockman, the artwork captures the colours and scorching heat of the desert environment that inspired it, albeit from the perspective of a non-Indigenous artist. The 1950s saw the practice of Indigenous Australian art gain recognition in Queensland through the watercolours of Joe Rootsey, a member of the Ama Wuriingu clan, Traditional Owners of the lands around Barrow Point in north Queensland’s Cape Melville National Park. Rootsey had worked for decades as a stockman and knew the route linking Laura, Lakeland and Cooktown intimately. While he was hospitalised in Cairns in 1954 with the tuberculosis that would eventually end his life, Rootsey’s skills as an artist came to the attention of medical social worker Joan Innes Reid who, along with other staff at the facility, became advocates for his art. As the artist recalled: Visitors and people on the staff used to come up to my bed and say, ‘that fella painting is alright’, and ask me to sell it . . . One of the visiting doctors bought some to send to friends in New York. 30 In 1955, Rootsey’s work featured in the Department of Native Affairs exhibit at the Royal Queensland Show, and was included in the 1957 Cairns Show, at which, as curator Bruce Johnson McLean has noted, ‘he was shown non‑competitively alongside much more established artists’. 31 Following Rootsey’s success, Queensland’s Department of Native Affairs — which at the time had jurisdiction over Indigenous peoples in the state — invited him to study at the Central Technical College, where he was taught by Cyril Gibbs and Melville Haysom. 32 In October 1959, Rootsey’s paintings of Country, informed by his deep personal knowledge, were shown alongside Jon Molvig , (Figures on a jetty) (detail) c.1955 Jon Molvig in his Kangaroo Point studio, Brisbane 1956