AUSTRALIAN ART

‘This is the most beautifully written book about the processes associated with the art of painting that I have read in a long, long time. . . The voice is Modjeska’s authentic own: consistently passionate, intelligent, reflective and wise.’-Stephen Scheding, Sydney Morning Herald. Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith were born a year apart, in the antipodean autumns of 1893 and 1892 respectively. Beyond this fact their lives were very different. One was a good cook; the other was not. One left Australia on the eve of the First World War and lived the rest of her life in Europe; the other lived for decades in the same house on the outskirts of Sydney. For one Paris and famous names; for the other the quiet life of a provincial suburb. One went off to find a life of art; the art of the other grew out of the life she lived. The bohemian and the spinster. They are like mirror images of each other.Already a bestseller in hardback, “Stravinsky’s Lunch” is both a continuation of Drusilla Modjeska’s previous work and an exciting new departure, and explores the ways in which love, art, and life intersect.The expatriate Australian artist Stella Bowen was a woman of enormous integrity and generosity. After Bowens death on 30 October 1947, her friend Keith Hancock wrote to her daughter, Julia Loewe: Stella was the most courageous, vital and harmonious personality that I have known … Her death is a waste, for she had so much to live for and such a genius for living.2 But it is for her art that she is remembered today, in particular, the war drawings and paintings she created towards the end of her life.Having left a comfortable Adelaide middle-class upbringing in 1914 to find artistic training in Europe, Bowen spent the next thirty-three years seeking her own visual form of expression. This quest led her from England to France, America and eventually back to England. It took her from a provincial Australian city into the literary milieu of England and France, which expanded her horizons beyond anything she could have imagined. It also allowed her to break all the social conventions previously imposed on her by falling in love with a married man nineteen years her senior and having his daughter. Despite all the difficulties and hardships she endured, Bowen remained true to herself and to her passion for art and life.Since the Second World War, the largest collection of Bowens work has been housed at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, the legacy of her time as an official war artist.  xiv, 364 p., [24] p. of col. plates : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 24 cm. (THIS COPY HAS NO DUSTJACKET!)

pp.xiv, 364 illusts #0318/0819/0821/0821/070223/070423/220523/010623/190623/101123/250224

Smith, Grace Cossington, 1892-1984.  |  Bowen, Stella.  |  Painters — Australia — Biography.