Barbara Brash

Barbara Nancy Brash was born in Melbourne on the 3 November 1925 to Elsa and Alfred Brasch. The Brasch family had established Brasch Brothers and Salenger partnership in 1866 and opened Braschs music store at 108 Elizabeth Street. Reacting to prejudice against German names during and after the First World War, Alfred anglicised his surname.[2]

Barbara and her brother Geoffrey went to primary school at St. Margarets, Melbourne after which Barbara attended secondary school at the all-girls college St Catherine's School, Toorak where artist Rosemary Ryan, was a contemporary, both following Sunday Reed's earlier attendance. While Geoffrey inherited Brashs in the 1970’s, Barbara did not join the business, instead caring for her ageing parents at the family home in Toorak until her father’s death, though she produced several record covers for Brashs in the 1980’s. She lived in the Toorak home briefly before moving to her own home in Kooyong in 1967, and lived there for the remainder of her life.[2]

Barbara had family connections in the visual arts; cousin Golda Figa Brasch married Louis Abrahams in 1888, a founding member of the Heidelberg School, and another cousin Reuben Brasch set up Curlew Camp, visited by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton in the early 1880s.[2]

In late 1949 Brash travelled in Europe with Dorothy Braund, returning to Melbourne from London in 1951.[2]

Brash's lifelong concern was for the environment and animals, and she willed large sums from her shares to support animal welfare; Wildlife in Secure Environment, The Animal Welfare League of Victoria, The Lost Dogs Home and Animal Hospital, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare were beneficiaries.

During a 50-year career, Barbara Brash experimented to extend the limits of the graphic medium, working in and combining woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs and screenprints, so that she became a pivotal artist in a post-WWII printmaking revival in Melbourne. Her work attracted the attention of the public as early as 1953; “Unusual grey and silver invitation cards have been designed by Barbara Brash for the "winter dinner" dance the Whernside Junior Auxiliary of the Royal Melbourne Hospital will hold at Ciro's on June 19. Barbara, who is an old St. Catherine's girl, is doing an art course at the Melbourne Technical College."[3]

Brash began printmaking in 1947 when she studied etching in informal classes run by Harold Freedman at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT), simultaneous with her training in painting and drawing at the National Gallery School under its first Modernist instructor, Alan Sumner in 1946, the analytical approach taught by the Gallery School assisted her to find her simplistic, rich, and dynamic style. Furthermore, as an avid student she undertook additional classes with George Bell at his private school, where she formed close relationships with fellow women artists Dorothy Braund and Evelyn Syme. Her work began to reflect the ideas and practices of Modernism including the principle of dynamic symmetry. As part of the George Bell Group,[4] consisting of Russell Drysdale, Geoffrey Jones, Edwin Robinson, Dorothy Braund, Alan Warren, Roma Thompson, Barbara Brash, Peter Cox, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery, Ron Center, Sali Herman, and Alan Sumner,[5] she exhibited frequently in their group shows.

Brash benefitted from revived interest in printmaking among the city's galleries and art schools, and local and émigré artists, including screenprinter Senbergs and etcher Kluge-Pott, transmitted new techniques to eager local practitioners.

The Herald newspaper art reviewer 'L.T.’, surveying the year’s exhibitions of 1949, associates Brash with Alan Warren, Roger Kemp, Arthur Boyd, Keith Nichol, Eric Smith, Wesley Penberthey, Samuel Fullbrook, Robert Grieve, Dorothy Braund, John Brack, Leonard French and Barbara Robertson, as “the nucleus of a new and strong movement.”[6]

She also was a foundational member of a group, Studio One Printmakers, which formed in Melbourne in 1961 from the Print Studio in the Art School of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT], after head of the art school Victor Greenhalgh had established for selected artists to have access to RMIT's print facilities. Its other members were Tate Adams, Hertha Kluge-Pott, Grahame King, Janet Dawson, Fred Williams, and Jan Senbergs.[7] Tate Adams included her in an exhibition of Studio One Printmakers; Forty Prints by Seven Artists, which during 1963 toured the National Gallery of Victoria, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Castlemaine Gallery, Rudy Komon Gallery (Sydney), Douglas Gallery (Brisbane), Bonython Gallery (Adelaide), Skinner Gallery (Perth) and Yoseido Gallery, Tokyo. Subsequently he opened Crossley Gallery, in Crossley Street, Melbourne, the first private gallery in Australia to be devoted exclusively to showing artists' prints, in 1966, and continued to show her work.[8] Also that year Stuart Purves took on the management of Australian Galleries for the next five decades and during the 1970s, included Brash in its 'stable' alongside George Baldessin, Jeffrey Smart and Brett Whiteley.[9]

On 23 October 1965 in the print room of the National Gallery of Victoria twelve people met with curator prints Dr Ursula Hoff to establish a national body to promote printmaking in Australia. The result was The Print Council of Australia; in 1981 Lillian Wood recorded that 'from 22 June 1967 the first elected committee took over and it is interesting to note that of this first committee, three members continue to serve...Barbara Brash, Robert Grieve and Grahame King."[10]

Brash often combined or modified existing techniques and materials,[11] developing and exploiting a proficiency that encompassed a broad gamut of technical printmaking processes, such as screenprints which she adopted earlier than most of her contemporaries and exploited for its intensity of opaque or transparent colour. She continued to work into her seventies and embraced the nascent field of digital printmaking technologies as enthusiastically as traditional media.

Brash's early output, mostly linocuts and etchings, was in a Classical Modernist style[12] and her love of animals and the environment inspires much of the subject matter. In the 1960s she adopted the new medium of silkscreen, which artists were taking up from industrial applications in which it had been used since the turn of the century, and she explored its effects of solid or translucent colour in boldly graphic abstract works, enhanced with innovations such as embossing and textured inks, as seen in her complex print of 1967 Promontory.[13]

Brash revealed details of her working method in an interview for The Age when she was preparing for a solo show at Australian Galleries in 1965:

"I had wanted a printing press for a long time," Miss Brash said yesterday, "but always seemed to miss out to junk yards. Then I found this mangle and had it converted. It's too big to fit into the house, so I keep it in the garage." Previously, Miss Brash said, she had depended on the hospitality of the art school of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to do her printing. The forthcoming exhibition will be her first one-woman show of screen prints and etchings...20 pieces [representing] about two years' work. Miss Brash said she had given all her time lately to this work and had not done any painting. She enjoyed exploring the possibilities of a medium to the limit of the material, she said, and had been translating all her ideas into this medium so each print was a work in Its own right, not just a reproduction of a picture. Miss Brash said she had one plastic print in the exhibition. This was an experimental work which had turned out more successful than she had hoped. She had used plastic for the plate in an endeavour to get a higher relief and has chosen a thick Japanese paper, like blotting paper, she said. The paper had held its form well and the result has a sculptured effect with a translucent quality about the ink. "I was afraid It might break the press but although the plate is cracking the press has not suffered,...”[14]

After a quiescence in the 1980s, Brash was excited anew by the advent of digital printmaking which she experienced while attending the workshops of Bashir Baraki with whom in 1996 she published the collaborative editions comprising their The Image Makers.[2] Works such as Fossilised of 1993 exemplify the freedom afforded her in these highly coloured abstractions.[15] Her 1997 series of digital prints Sludge is intended as an insight into destruction of the environment.

It is a reflection of her innovation that Alan McCulloch writing in 1953 in The Herald noted Brash's application of flat, intense hues in "colorful works after the pattern of cut outs…,"[16] while The Bulletin condemned it; “There is Barbara Brash’s “Seated Woman,” whose flesh and nightdress have all the variety of a coat of whitewash applied to a smooth surface.”[17] In 1954 The Age art critic called attention to the "decorative effect" of two-dimensional pattern in her colored lino-cuts,”[18] an observation that The Herald critic repeated; “Barbara Brash is boldly decorative in a series of color lino-cuts.[19] The Age also drew attention in the same Forty Prints by Ten Artists show at Peter Bray Gallery, opened by Ursula Hoff, to Brash's spanning of oil and watercolour painting and printing, noting that "she feels this new medium [lithography] has a wide scope for experiment and is something which should be developed.[20]

The same show traveled to Brisbane where Courier-Mail critic Gertrude Langer recognised "exceptional gifts" that in Brash's "colour linocut Native Dancer (which the group used as their poster), could not be bettered in composition and colour."[21] Another Brisbane report noted that “This lithograph exhibition — the first of its kind in Australia — has aroused considerable interest, buyers coming from as-far afield as New Zealand and Tasmania. Particularly noteworthy is the work of Barbara Brash, Kenneth Jack and Walter Gheradin, although all 10 artists excel at individualised style arid skilful handling of their media.”

Another 1954 exhibition at Peter Bray over November–December prompted Arnold Shore to comment on Brash's "more exciting colours,"[22] and though Alan McCulloch condemned the show for its ‘absence of ideas,’ he conceded “Barbara Brash's Woman Seated has the forthright quality of a vividly stencilled fabric design”[23] while Allan David in the Jewish News affirmed its "decorative" "colour and design.” In 1955 Arnold Shore in The Argus starts to see "romantic suggestion" in the “elusive variety of pattern ... of a Landscape, by Barbara Brash.”[24]

Modernist developments in 1955 still aroused suspicion in some quarters. Of the December show at Peter Bray of the George Bell Group the traditionalist magazine The Bulletin is typically sardonic; "Barbara Brash’s Landscape with Houses is a little looser [in brushwork], as is her Old Farm, which has two trees, two wheels and a ladder, and which is easily recognisable as contemporary“[25] Nevertheless, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased one of her works from the Group's show in 1956 at Peter Bray.[26]

By 1960 the Canberra Times praised innovation; “Barbara Brash illustrates the use of overprinting in lino cut on rice paper, using many strong, transparent colours. The Peacock is a radiating composition with pattern and line assisting the glowing colours to make it most decorative,"[27] and of the same show "Melbourne Prints," when it traveled to South Australia, The Bulletin's Geoffrey Dutton was prepared to appreciate her experiments; “Barbara Brash lays on color with the most notable effect in the show, in separate blocks in Lighthouse and in gauzy veils in Peacock."[28] His appraisal was re-enforced in Arnold Shore's comment in 1962 that "Brash revels in color in her seriographs [...] and there is exquisite quality in her etching Surfaces;"[29] and by Bernard Smith, who had singled out Brash's contribution to the 1963 Studio One exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria as "colorful and poetic.'[30] In his review of her 1965 solo show of screen prints and etchings of birds, flowers and gardens at Australian Galleries, Smith rated her works "Intimate, well-designed, craftsmanly," and considered that "several of the aquatints reveal an exquisite sensitivity to tone and texture, especially the Magic Garden, with its haunting, enigmatic beauty; and the superb formal and tonal control of Composition."[31]

Patrick McCaughey in a review of Barbara Brash's silk screen prints at Crossley Gallery considered them "lively, decorative and unpretentious. When she cuts the color into another color instead of laying it neatly alongside, her work takes on a quiet distinction.[32]

• 1948: 2nd prize (a landscape) Jewish Competitions Society series of competitions[33]
• 1949: Sara Seri Scholarship, judged by A.M.E. Bale, Eric Thake, Douglas Dundas and Daryl Lindsay[34][35]
• 1951: Victorian Jewish Competitions Society 1at Prize, Art Division[36]
• 1975: Warrnambool[37]
• 1980: Stanthorpe[37]
• 1981: Mornington[37]
• 1984: Victor Harbor Drawing Prize[38]
• 1988: selected award, 5th International Miniature Print Exhibition, Seoul, Sth Korea[37]

• Baraki, Bashir; Knox, Jean; Brash, Barbara (1996). Images: a selection of twelve Canon laser colour prints. Melbourne: Copier Publications. ISBN 978-0-646-27826-1. OCLC 222183970.
• Eastgate Gallery (1991). Works on paper: November 28th - December 18th 1991. Hawthorn, Vic.: Eastgate Gallery. ISBN 978-1-875517-05-3. OCLC 781543843.
• Peter Bray Gallery; Melbourne Graphic Artists (1956). Prints by the Melbourne Graphic Artists, Peter Bray Gallery, Bourke Street, 25th September till 4th October [1956. Melbourne: Peter Bray Gallery. OCLC 897205464.
• Gowing, Ainslie; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (2006). From Tuesday to Tuesday: Barbara Brash, Nancy Clifton, Mary Macqueen, Lesbia Thorpe. Mornington, Vic: Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. ISBN 978-0-9757825-2-1. OCLC 225190077.

• Kempf, Franz (1976). Contemporary Australian Printmakers. Melbourne: Lansdowne Editions. OCLC 470182588.
• Eagle, Mary; Minchin, Jan (1981). The George Bell School: students, friends, influences. Melbourne; Sydney: Deutscher Art ; Resolution Press. ISBN 978-0-908180-05-9. OCLC 780688464.
• Peers, Juliet; Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors (1993). More than just gumtrees: a personal, social, and artistic history of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. Melbourne: The Society in association with Dawn Revival Press. ISBN 978-0-646-16033-7. OCLC 31524737.
• Moore, Felicity St. John; Bell, George, 1878-1966; National Gallery of Victoria (1992), Classical modernism : the George Bell circle, National Gallery of Victoria, ISBN 978-0-7241-0155-9{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Germaine, Max (1991). A dictionary of women artists of Australia. Roseville East: Craftsman House. ISBN 978-976-8097-13-2. OCLC 832428564.