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Jean Bellette

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Jean Bellette
Born1908
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Died16 March 1991 (aged 82–83)
Majorca, Spain
Education
Known forPainting
Notable work
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls (1942)
  • Iphigenia in Tauris (1944)
AwardsSulman Prize (1942, 1944)

Jean Bellette (occasionally Jean Haefliger; 1908 – 16 March 1991) was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, Bellette was educated in Hobart and subsequently at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where her teachers included Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.

A modernist painter, she was influential in mid-twentieth century Sydney art circles. Bellette regularly painted scenes influenced by the Greek tragedies of Euripedes, Sophocles and Homer. She was twice the winner of the Sulman Prize, in 1942 with For Whom the Bell Tolls, and 1944, with the painting Iphigenia in Tauris. Married to artist and critic Paul Haefliger, Bellette moved to Majorca in 1957. Though she regularly visited and exhibited in Australia thereafter, she did not return to live, and became peripheral to the Australian art scene.

Early life and training

Thea Proctor (as painted by George Lambert), one of Bellette's first art teachers

Bellette was born in Hobart and grew up in rural Tasmania with her artist mother and postmaster father. She had no siblings.[1] She was educated at a Friends School and then at Hobart's technical college.[2][1] She subsequently was a student at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where her teachers included Thea Proctor, and then at the Westminster Art School, where she was taught by figurative painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.[3] Displaying works in the 1934 student art exhibition, her drawings and watercolours attracted favourable comment from The Sydney Morning Herald art writer.[4]

Career

In 1935, Bellette married fellow Australian artist Paul Haefliger. The travelled to Europe, where Bellette studied, returning just before the outbreak of World War II.[1][3] Back in Sydney, the couple became influential members of the Sydney Art Group, a network of "fashionable" moderns whose membership included William Dobell and Russell Drysdale.[5] As well as spending time in Sydney's art community, they were among a group that also worked at Hill End in central New South Wales. Her colleagues there included David Edgar Strachan and Donald Friend.[6]

Bellette painted and held regular shows – "a solo show every second year and a group show every year at the Macquarie Galleries" – while her husband served as art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald for a decade and a half.[1]

In 1942, Bellette won the Sir John Sulman Prize, with her work For Whom the Bell Tolls. She won it again in 1944, with her painting Iphigenia in Tauris.[7] The composition is set in a dry, open landscape, with several riders on horses whose appearance suggests "the Australian present, rather than Greek antiquity".[8] The judge awarding the prize actually preferred another of Bellette's entries in the competition, Electra - but it failed to meet the size requirements.[9] Both Iphigenia in Tauris and Electra were among the many works created by Bellette in the 1940s that were inspired by the tragedies of Euripedes, Sophocles and Homer.[9] Her choice of subject matter, and the approach she took to it, placed her at odds with mainstream modernism. She also seemed to shun explicit links between the classical and the Australian. Bellette reasoned that she preferred to choose her pallette and the spacial arrangements of her compositions to try and evoke a place's atmosphere.[9] Critics identified the influence of European modernists Aristide Maillol and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as Italian Quattrocento painters Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, about some of whom Bellette published writings[9][6] in the journal Art in Australia.[10]

Chorus without Iphigenia, painted circa 1950

Bellette continued to paint classical scenes, and in around 1950 produced the work Chorus without Iphigenia. Purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1976, this oil painting shows five figures, "posed like statues in a tableau vivant, [and who] possess a kind of erotic energy".[6] Anne Gray, the National Gallery's curator, interpreted the scene chosen by Bellette:

Although nothing is happening in this image, we associate the figures with tragedy, with death and mourning – with the classical reference in the painting’s title. Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s daughter, gave her life for her country when the goddess Artemis asked for it in exchange for favourable winds so that the Greek ships could sail to Troy. Bellette’s melancholic painting might be supposed to portray Iphigenia’s friends mourning her death.[6]

In 1951, Bellette came second in the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Competition, beaten by the young Jeffrey Smart.[11] In the following year, she was the winner of a competitive exhibition sponsored by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, with a work Girl With Still Life.[12]

Although Haefleger never critiqued his wife's exhibitions,[1] others occasionally stepped in to provide reviews in the Herald. Describing her 1950 exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, a critic considered it to be "one of the most stimulating and refreshing that has been seen here for a long time" and that "She paints with a strong, sombre palette and her forms are sculptured with great decision. She uses paint sensuously and passionately, as paint, not as so many contemporary Australians do, as mere colour".[13]

Two years later, the same reviewer, again attending one of the artist's solo Sydney shows, observed that Bellette:

is one of the few Australian artists here who combines a firm technique with a sensitive and rich emotion. In some of the lighter landscapes in this exhibition, Miss Bellette seems to have been trying to solve some of the particular difficulties of painting Australian landscapes. The clear, strong light tends to flatten the form and bleach the colour; a problem that doesn't lend itself to the dramatic tensions and dark moods that are characteristic of her work. It requires a colder and more dispassionate approach. But when she finds landscapes to her taste, such as the rugged hills and beetling clouds in No. 8, the earth decaying with erosion in No. 19, or the prickly desolation of "Rough Country," No. 14, she handles them with great skill and effectiveness. Her figure drawings are decisively drawn and firmly modelled. The girls have a pensive dignity as though they are pondering the burdens and joylessncss of a future to be spent as caryatids. The still lives and the interior are admirable exercises in formal organisation, the colours being sombre yet rich.[14]

Paintings by Bellette were included in the 1953 Arts Council of Great Britain exhibition in London.[3] Bellette and her husband in 1957 left Australia intending to divorce quietly. Instead, they reconciled and, after a year in Paris, settled on Majorca, where they lived and worked for the rest of their lives.[1][5] Bellette painted landscapes and still lifes that reflected a Spanish influence, and these were exhibited regularly in Australia through the 1960s.[3] The couple visited Australia frequently, though Bellette became an "onlooker" to the local art scene.[1] Friends such as artists Jeffrey Smart and John Olsen visited them regularly in Europe.[1] Paul died in March 1982; Bellette on 16 March 1991.[3]

Legacy

As of 2013, Bellette is the only woman to have won the Sulman Prize on more than one occasion.[7] A large number of Bellette's works are held by Art Gallery of New South Wales;[15] other galleries that have examples of her ouevre are the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Bendigo Art Gallery, Geelong Art Gallery,[3] the National Gallery of Australia,[16] and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.[2]

Bellette is generally regarded as an influential figure in the modern art movement in Sydney in the mid-twentieth century. Art historian Janine Burke described Bellette as "a leader of the post-war art world",[17] while the University of Queensland Art Museum's curator placed her as "a seminal figure in the visual arts from the 1930s until her death in Majorca in 1991".[18] Of her paintings, opinions vary. Burke described her as "arguably the best painter" of the Sydney circle.[19] However, art historian and writer Sasha Grishin had a different view. Commenting on her paintings of Greek mythological subjects created in the 1940s, he wrote, "they were neither very convincing as paintings, nor works that had a particular resonance in Sydney or Australian art at the time".[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Hall 1995, p. 310.
  2. ^ a b Hodgson, Shirley (2006). "Jean Bellette". The Companion to Tasmanian History. Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Germaine 1991, p. 31.
  4. ^ "Sydney Art School". The Sydney Morning Herald. NSW: National Library of Australia. 25 September 1934. p. 5. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  5. ^ a b c Grishin 2013, p. 312.
  6. ^ a b c d Gray, Anne (purchased 1976). "Jean Bellette - Chorus without Iphigenia". Collection search. National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 8 June 2014. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  7. ^ a b "Sir John Sulman Prize". Art Gallery of New South Wales. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  8. ^ Hall 2013, p. 285.
  9. ^ a b c d Edwards 1995, p. 238.
  10. ^ Burke.
  11. ^ "£500 Art Prize Awarded". The Sydney Morning Herald. NSW: National Library of Australia. 18 August 1951. p. 1. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  12. ^ "M.G.M. art contest". The Canberra Times. ACT: National Library of Australia. 29 May 1952. p. 4. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  13. ^ "One-man Show By Jean Bellette". The Sydney Morning Herald. NSW: National Library of Australia. 8 March 1950. p. 2. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  14. ^ "Drawings By Jean Bellette". The Sydney Morning Herald. NSW: National Library of Australia. 20 March 1952. p. 7. Retrieved 29 May 2014.
  15. ^ "Jean Bellette". Collection search. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  16. ^ Bellette, Jean (Purchased 1976). "Girl's Head". Collection search. National Gallery of Australia. Retrieved 18 May 2014. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. ^ Burke 1980, p. 72.
  18. ^ France, Christine (2005). "Jean Bellette Retrospective". University of Queensland Art Museum. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  19. ^ Burke 1980, p. 71.

Bibliography

  • Burke, Janine (1980). Australian Women Artists 1840–1940. Richmond, VIC: Greenhouse Publications. ISBN 0909104301. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Edwards, Deborah (1995). "Jean Bellette - Electra (1944)". In Joan Kerr and Anita Callaway (ed.). Heritage: The National Women's Art Book. Roseville East, NSW: G + B Arts International / Craftsman House. pp. 238–239. ISBN 976-641-045-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Germaine, Max (1991). A Dictionary of Women Artists of Australia. Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House. ISBN 9768097132. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Grishin, Sasha (2013). Australian Art: A History. Carlton, VIC: The Miegunyah Press. ISBN 978-0-522-85652-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Hall, Barbara (1995). "Bellette, Jean". In Joan Kerr and Anita Callaway (ed.). Heritage: The National Women's Art Book. Roseville East, NSW: G + B Arts International / Craftsman House. pp. 310–311. ISBN 976-641-045-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Hall, Edith (2013). Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris: A Cultural History of Euripides' Black Sea Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195392890. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

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