Clarice Beckett

Beckett, aged 18

Clarice Beckett painting in the garden at St Enoch's, Beaumaris, 1930s

Beckett was born in 1887 in Casterton, Victoria, the eldest daughter of Elizabeth Kate, née Brown (c.1855-1934),[5] and Joseph Clifden Beckett (c.1852-1936),[6] Freemason and organist[7] and manager of the town's Colonial Bank[8] in which Beckett was born.[9] She was sister of Hilda Raby, who married Thomas Mangan, 2 November 1922.[10] Her grandfather was John Brown, a Scottish master builder, who had designed and built Como House, and its gardens, in South Yarra, Victoria.[11]

Undertaking her primary education in Casterton, for secondary school Beckett was a boarder at Queen's College, Ballarat, until 1903, where she revealed strong drawing ability and wrote a play, including a part for herself, which was performed by the students,[12] and in 1905 won a competition for writing on the moral lessons of Walter Melville's play A Girl's Cross Roads.[13] To foster her artistic skill, she took private lessons in charcoal drawing in Ballarat.

After her family's relocation to 22 Kensington Road, South Yarra,[13] she finished her final year of school at the nearby Merton Hall campus of Melbourne Church of England Girls' Grammar School. In 1914, she attended Melbourne's National Gallery School, completing three years of study under Frederick McCubbin, before continuing her studies under Max Meldrum, whose controversial theories became a pivotal factor in her own art practice.[14]

In 1919, her parents moved from Bendigo, where Beckett and her sister Hilda were of the class whose social engagements were noted in the papers,[15][16] to the then undeveloped Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris into an existing dwelling on a double block at 14 Dalgetty Road on the corner of Tramway Parade,[3] which they named St. Enoch's after their Barkly Place, Bendigo house where they had settled in 1917.[17][18]

With her parents' health failing, and after her sister's marriage in 1922,[10] Beckett assumed household responsibilities that dictated the structure of the rest of her life, limiting her artistic endeavours[19] though she joined painting and camping excursions with groups of other Tonalists, including the artists Lily and Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason and Colin Colahan and their families into the hills of Eltham, Olinda, and to Anglesea (c.1929), Lorne and San Remo (c.1930s) on the coast, as her paintings of these locations attest, and she met with them at the Café Latin in Exhibition Street. In 1926 Beckett painted during a six month sojourn in the Western District using as a studio the upper level of a shearing shed at the Naringal property of the brother of her good friend, Maud Rowe. [3] At home in Beaumaris, Beckett could only go out during the dawn and dusk to paint as most of her day was spent caring for her parents, more intensively from 1932 when her mother became seriously ill, before dying in 1934.[11][3] Beckett's father, though becoming frail, moved from Beaumaris, after burning her paintings he considered were 'unfinished,' and died 12 June 1936 in St Kilda,[20] leaving an estate of £2520 to Hilda.[21]

View Across the Yarra, c. 1931

After joining Meldrum's school, Beckett adopted aspects of his unique tonalist system of painting, the "Scientific Order of Impressions", which resulted in a style now known as Australian tonalism, characterised by a particular "misty" or atmospheric quality created by building "tone on tone". In a 1999 analysis, John Christian paraphrases Meldrum's conviction that art "should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received. All adornments and narrative and literary references should be rejected".[22] The Australian tonalists opposed impressionism and modernist art styles,[23][24] The whole movement had been the subject of fierce controversy. Its practitioners were unpopular amongst other artists, and derided as "Meldrumites".[25][26][27] Influential Melbourne modernist artist and teacher George Bell, founder of the Contemporary Art Society, described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".[28]

Beckett persistently and diligently painted, extending Meldrum's principles to subjects en plein air, and was highly productive, mounting a solo show every year from 1923 to 1933. Her subjects were sea and beachscapes, and rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Early critical appraisal of her paintings was mixed, with members of the conservative art establishment often finding fault in their "opaque" quality. Surveying her work in 1931 'A.C.' of The Age recalled that;

When Miss Clarice Beckett held her first show at the Athenæum gallery in 1923 her work certainly found admirers, but the admiration was by no means general, and there was a good deal of confusion in the public mind as to whether she was a futurist, or only a new and dangerous variety of Meldrumite.[29]

Reviewing one of her shows, an earlier critic from The Age wrote that "one would imagine from the little scenes that Miss Beckett has gathered, in the name of Australian art, that Australia was in a continual state of fog—all kinds of fogs—pink, blue, green and grey with an occasional mist that surely was never on land or sea."[30]

In 1925, Herald reviewer and staunch anti-modernist James S. MacDonald[31] was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes.[32] By 1931, however, her friend and colleague among the Tonalists Percy Leason,[33] writing a long review in Table Talk,[34] said that Beckett's work showed "a convincing illusion of actual space and air and light; the same refinement and delicacy of true color; the same regard for true form and character; and the same complete indifference to conventions and the mere clever handling of paint for the sake of it."

Meldrum himself asserted that 'There would never be a great woman artist and there never had been'[35][36] but recognised Beckett as his most skilled pupil, saying that 'she worked like a man', that she had done work 'of which any nation would be proud,' and that she 'ranked as a great artist.'[37][38]

Tranquility, 1933, Art Gallery of South Australia

As recognised in a newspaper critique of her 1931 solo exhibition Beckett's painting departs from Meldrum's dictum that tone should take precedence over colour.[39] While Meldrum blamed social decadence for 'modern' artists' exaggerated interest in colour over tone and proportion,[22] a uncredited Age reviewer of her 1932 Atheneum show[40] expressed her particular version of his principles as being "an adaptation of art to nature, which belongs neither to the realm of the orthodox normalist or the avowed modern, but is a purely individual expression of certain sensations in light, form and color..."

Rosalind Hollinrake, who was largely responsible for Beckett's revival in 1970,[41][42] notes a use of colour to reinforce form, and more daring design, in the later years of the artist's short life.[11] In 1971 The Age critic Patrick McCaughey considered Beckett "a remarkable modernist,"[43] situating her as an equal to Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston, and "both a Meldrumite and a pioneering modernist."[44] Artist and critic Nancy Borlase wrote on the occasion of Beckett's 1979 Macquarie Galleries retrospective that launched Hollinrake's Clarice Beckett-The Artist and Her Circle. Her review draws attention to Beckett's reductionism that "presage the work of Barnett Newman and [Jules] Olitski," of forty years later, and "solitude and stillness" as her leitmotif.[45]

However, even in 2001, Tim Bonyhady, discussing the "Modern Australian Women" exhibition in which Beckett was included at the Art Gallery of South Australia, acknowledges its director Ron Radford's observation that women artists Margaret Preston, Clarice Beckett, Grace Cossington Smith, Grace Crowley, Dorrit Black and Kathleen O'Connor were "more adventurous than their male counterparts in what and how they painted," but baulks at his notion that they were "the major Australian artists of the 1920s and 1930s."[46]

While painting the sea off Beaumaris during a storm in 1935, Beckett developed pneumonia and died four days later, aged 48, in a hospital at Sandringham.[47] She was buried in the Cheltenham Memorial Park.[48]