Helen Ogilvie Explained

Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie (4 May 1902, in Corowa – 1 August 1993, in Melbourne) was a twentieth-century Australian artist and gallery director, cartoonist, painter, printmaker and craftworker, best known for her early linocuts and woodcuts, and her later oil paintings of vernacular colonial buildings.

Early life and education

Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie was born 4 May 1902 in Corowa and grew up in surrounding rural New South Wales where she would go sketching with her mother, Henrietta, a watercolourist, before her family moved to Melbourne in 1920. There Helen attended the National Gallery School in 1922–25 though she did not enjoy its conservative approach and prescriptive teaching methods. In her last year her style was influenced by George Bell while he briefly was the drawing master.[1] While at the school she became a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and started exhibiting in 1924.

Early career

Inspired by seeing a book of Claude Flight's Modernist linocuts in 1928,[2] Ogilvie produced many linocuts and woodcuts from the 1930s onwards.[3] Her work in a 1932 group show is praised, with that of other exhibitors, for skills in cutting and "an intimate artistic facility for illustrative design". She was one of many women artists who took up relief printing but, unlike Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers, Ogilvie could not afford to study it overseas, and when she took up wood engraving in the 1930s it was her friend, the artist and printmaker Eric Thake who provided instruction.[4] She focussed on subject matter familiar to her, including farm animals, rural landscapes and Australian flora and fauna. Curator Sheridan Palmer in the catalogue for a 1995 Art Gallery of Ballarat retrospective described her as;She exhibited frequently, but in an effort to survive in the Depression years she also produced bookplates, greeting cards,[5] [6] and calendars.[7] In 1933 she showed in a joint exhibition with printmaker Anne Montgomery.

She enjoyed good connections at Melbourne University and the National Gallery of Victoria, with art historians Joseph Burke, Ursula Hoff, and with Russell Grimwade, producing illustrations for the latter's book Flinders Lane: recollections of Alfred Felton (Melbourne University Press,Carlton, 1947)[8] and Sir John Medley's Stolne and surreptitious verses (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1952).[9] Buttons bearing her designs were sold for a shilling to raise funds for the 1955 building program at Melbourne University.[10]

War years

During WW2 and after, Ogilvie worked in the Red Cross Rehabilitation Service at Heidelberg Military Hospital under Frances Wade, where she taught patients lino- and wood-cutting, and basketmaking using locally harvested European and Australian native rushes.[11] [12] [13] In 1948 Ogilvie, assisted by Helen Biggs, set up a school to train handicrafts instructors for Red Cross occupational therapy services.[14]

Gallerist

Ogilvie was a generous mentor of emerging artists, and in 1949 Stanley Coe appointed her as one of Australia's first women gallery directors to create a commercial exhibition space on the upper floor of his interior design shop at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne.[15] Artist Tate Adams dubbed it "the lone beacon in town for contemporary art." For the period until 1955, and with advice from her friends Ursula Hoff, Arnold Shore and Alan McCulloch, she organised a program of exhibitions of the avant-garde;[16] John Brack,[17] Margo Lewers, Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952),[18] Inge King,[19] Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman (whose radical 'schoolgirl' series was shown there in May 1953), Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (whose first Australian show in a commercial gallery was there in 1953), Helen Maudsley, Clifton Pugh,[20] Michael Shannon and others.

The opening show in February 1950 of a group twenty Victorian artists associated with George Bell, whose work was also shown, included Alan Warren, Alan Sumner, Constance Stokes, Roger Kemp, William Frater, Charles Bush, Daryl Lindsay, Phyl Waterhouse, Ada May Plante, Francis Roy Thompson, and Arnold Shore,[21] and was followed by a survey show of contemporary art from Sydney. The National Gallery of Victoria purchased important contemporary works from Stanley Coe Gallery between 1950 and 1963. In 1954 however, the dominance of the gallery for emerging artists was being challenged, a fact signalled by the Contemporary Art Society's massive exhibition at Tye's Gallery at 100 Burke Street in 1954 and the ascendancy of their Gallery of Contemporary Art on Flinders Street.

During her period as gallery director, work by Ogilvie was among others selected in 1950 to decorate the liner Oronsay,[22] and in 1954 her work was show together with that of Tate Adams and Kenneth Hood at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, encouraging her change of attention to Europe and back to her own art-making.

London

After moving on from her directorship, Ogilvie's own oil paintings of abandoned country structures were shown in 1956 at the gallery, which had been renamed the Peter Bray.[23] She had firmly established her reputation in Australia, with works already acquired by Hoff for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, and had purchased a house in South Yarra.[24] That year she moved to London, where she was engaged with the Crafts Revival of the 1950s and 60s and because, as she joked in an interview, "art doesn't pay", she made a living designing modernist lampshades of Japanese papers and parchment for a period, selling them to the high society customers of interior designer David Hicks, of Knightsbridge and Oxfordshire.

During her stay overseas, she visited and sketched the English countryside, and with Melbourne friend Hattie Alexander, described as her 'companion', toured Italy over 11 weeks.[25] Though she produced sketches of European sites, she did not exhibit them but continued to paint small studies of Australian rural buildings, from memory and from sketches, holding two successful solo exhibitions of them in London, including one of 34 canvases, which sold out.

Return to Australia and late career

Ogilvie returned to Australia in 1963 where the subjects of her paintings and drawings continued to be humble rural buildings which she was aware were disappearing; in an interview she bemoaned the lack of protection given such relics in Australia, compared to the UK. While many Australian artists continued to follow European and international trends, Ogilvie devoted her art to Australian subjects, determined to create a new tradition of Australian printmaking and artistic practice. Reception of her paintings in Australia however, as opposed to her earlier prints, was lukewarm; Donald Brook in reviewing her 1968 Macquarie Galleries solo describes them as 'sweet and stiff'.[26] By the late 1970s she was producing little work but remained interested in the art world. The last of her solo exhibitions that she was able to attend opened at aGOG (Australian Girls' Own Gallery), Canberra, on her 89th birthday, 4 May 1991.

Ogilvie died suddenly in Melbourne on 1 August 1993.

Legacy

Critical response to Ogilvie's work was sparse, limited mainly to the prints and to vague praise or her 'fine impressions in line and colour' or of lino-cutting skills, 'the work of a sound craftsman [sic]', 'decorative' and with a sense of colour that is 'agreeable and harmonious'. By the time of curator Sheridan Palmer's touring Ballarat Art Gallery Ogilvie 1995 retrospective, The Age critic Robert Nelson in his review highlighted;Nevertheless, her work, especially her printmaking, has since enjoyed a renewed interest and reevaluation, and has featured in seven major surveys of Australian women's art (see section 'Posthumous exhibitions', below).

Exhibitions

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Posthumous

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Inclusions in

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Publications about

References

  1. Amelia Saward, 'Helen Ogilvie: Australian modernism and a changing sense of place,' in Web site: Younger. Gavin. 2019-07-17. Issue 23, December 2018. 2020-10-12. Museums and Collections. en.
  2. Web site: Maxwell. Helen. 1995. Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie biography. Design and Art Australia Online.
  3. Book: Ogilvie, Helen, 1902–1993.. Wood engravings. 1995. Brindabella Press. 0-909422-24-9. Canberra. 38359628.
  4. Book: Art Gallery of Ballarat (author) ; Julie McLaren (author) ; Louise Tegart (author). Becoming Modern : Australian women artists 1920–1950. 24 May 2019 . 978-0-648-45802-9. Ballarat, VIC. 1101996633.
  5. 'Original art on Christmas cards,' The Age Thursday 23 Dec 1954, p.5
  6. 'Hand-designed',The Age, Thursday 27 Oct 1955, p.10
  7. The Age, Tuesday 26 Dec 1933, p.5
  8. 'The story of a benefactor', The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, 10 Jan 1948, p.8
  9. Illustrations mentioned in Peter Ryan review 'A well-carved cherry-stone', of a memoir of Medley by Geoffrey Serle and John Marginson in The Age, Saturday 21 Aug 1993, p.151
  10. The Age Monday 25 Apr 1955, p.2
  11. News: Interesting People . . 10 . 45 . Australia . 10 April 1943 . 12 October 2020 . 14 . National Library of Australia.
  12. 'Craftwork for soldiers,' The Age Saturday, 14 Nov 1942, p.4
  13. 'Rushes ready for basketmaking,' The Age Tuesday 28 Dec 1943, p.3
  14. 'Handcrafts school to open,' The Age Tuesday 20 Jan 1948, p.5
  15. 'New gallery' The Age Wednesday 07 Dec 1949, p.7
  16. News: 16 July 1952. Young people buy pictures. 6. The Argus. 33,031. Melbourne. National Library of Australia.
  17. Shore, Arnold (1955). 'Artist stresses human values'. (8 March 1955). The Argus (Melbourne, Victoria: 1848–1957), p. 13. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71637449
  18. Johnson, George & Heathcote, C. R. (Christopher Robin) & Zimmer, Jenny, (editor.) (2006). George Johnson : world view. South Yarra, Vic. Macmillan Art Publishing
  19. Inge King's art has "the gadget air". (21 October 1952). The Argus (Melbourne, Victoria: 1848–1957), p. 5. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23217241
  20. News: 21 June 1955. Four art styles. 9. The Argus. Melbourne. National Library of Australia.
  21. 'Show by twenty Victorian artists,' The Age Tuesday 14 Feb 1950, p.2
  22. 'Australian art will decorate new Oronsay,' The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday 26 Oct 1950, p.6
  23. The Age Tuesday 10 Apr 1956, p.2
  24. 'Artist home after six years abroad', The Age Saturday 22 Jun 1963, p.8
  25. Interview, 'Australian plans London art show', The Age Friday 05 Jun 1959, p.8
  26. [Donald Brook]
  27. The AgeWednesday, 19 May 1948, p.5
  28. catalogue, Helen Ogilvie: Australian country dwellings, London: Leicester Galleries, 1963
  29. The Observer Sunday 10 Mar 1963, p.27
  30. Listing, The Age, Friday 09 Oct 1970, p.15
  31. Listing, The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 28 Sep 1968, p.206
  32. Listing, The Sydney Morning Herald Sunday, 30 Apr 1972, p.107
  33. Listing, The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 9 July 1979, p.10
  34. Advertisement, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tue, Nov 18, 1924, p.6
  35. ’Designs in Lino Cut’, The Age, Tue, Apr 5, 1932, p.8
  36. 'Exhibition at Collins House,' The Age, Tue, Oct 25, 1932, p.5
  37. 'The Arts and Crafts Society: Annual Exhibition,' The Age, Monday 16 Oct 1933, p.5
  38. 'The modern spirit,' The Age, Tuesday 14 Jul 1936, p.9
  39. 'New Melbourne Art Club's Exhibition', The Age, Tuesday 13 Jul 1937, p.3
  40. 'New Melbourne Art Club: Seventh Annual Show,' The Age Tuesday 22 Aug 1939, p.11
  41. The Age Saturday 24 Oct 1953, p.9
  42. The Age Friday 19 Nov 1954, p.4
  43. 'Nine Artists exhibition', The Age Wednesday 24 Feb 1954, p.2
  44. The Age Thursday 14 Jun 1956, p.8
  45. 'Exhibition of modern art', The Age, Tuesday 25 Aug 1964, p.14
  46. Munk, Frances (1996), 'From Banksias to Slaughter Houses: The art of Helen Ogilvie’, Imprint, 31/1, Autumn, pp25-26, A review of the travelling exhibition 'All this I knew’ curated by Sheridan Palmer and organised by Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, VIC.
  47. Book: Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum.. Women printmakers 1910 to 1940 in the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum. 1995. The Gallery and Museum. McKay, Kirsten.. 0-646-23161-8. Castlemaine, Vic.. 37179933.
  48. Nunn. Pamela Gerrish. Hylton. Jane. Hart. Deborah. Drayton. Joanne. 2003. Modern Australian Women: Paintings and Prints 1925–1945. Woman's Art Journal. 24. 2. 44. 10.2307/1358789. 1358789. 0270-7993.
  49. Book: Into the light : the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art. 2012. UWA Publishing. Cruthers, John., Kinsella, Lee., Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.. 978-1-74258-485-0. Crawley, W.A.. 800667960.
  50. Web site: The Black Rooster. 2021-08-11. Castlemaine Art Museum Collection Online. en.
  51. Web site: Helen Ogilvie works, State Library of Victoria. 2020-10-13. search.slv.vic.gov.au.
  52. Web site: Helen OGILVIE Artists NGV. 2020-10-13. www.ngv.vic.gov.au.
  53. Web site: Helen Ogilvie: NGA collection search results. 2020-10-13. artsearch.nga.gov.au.
  54. Web site: Helen Ogilvie :: The Collection :: Art Gallery NSW. 2020-10-13. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au.
  55. Web site: Helen Ogilvie works. 2020-10-13. collection.qagoma.qld.gov.au.
  56. Web site: Ogilvie works in the collection, Ian Potter Museum search. 2020-10-13. storeroom.its.unimelb.edu.au.
  57. Web site: Helen Ogilvie works – search. 2020-10-13. www.uwaccwa.uwa.edu.au.

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