Grace Crowley

Bio

Grace Crowley (1890-1979) was a key Sydney Modernist painter in the inter-war period who studied in Paris under the cubist artists André Lhôte and Albert Gleizes. Her paintings have been categorised as modified academic cubism based on planar geometry and dynamic symmetry. Together with her collaborator and close friend Ralph Balson, she is often credited with introducing abstract painting to Australia. In 1907 Crowley moved to Sydney to study painting part-time at the Julian Ashton Art School, where from 1915 she studied and taught alongside Anne Dangar. In their many letters, Dangar referred to Crowley affectionately as her "dear Smudge", and the pair were believed to have been in a relationship between 1915 and 1929. They spend several years together in France from 1926 and 1929, where they both studied painting. Peter DiScascio notes that "Dangar’s niece, Norah Singleton, recalled their parodies of conventional gender roles both in private conversation and public appearances.”

In 1930 Crowley returned to Sydney and held her first solo exhibition at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre in 1932. Crowley exhibited her first fully abstract painting in 1942, later becoming an internationally recognised abstract painter with her work being included in Dictionary of Abstract Painting by the Belgian art historian Michel Seuphor in 1957. In 1971 Crowley was forced to vacate her George Street studio in Sydney, consequently, only a small body of her work exists, many of which are held in public collections. Crowley’s paintings have been recognised in retrospectives at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney in 1975 and in 2006 at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Crowley died on 21 April 1979 in Sydney.