 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A question of influence: the linocuts of Ethleen Palmer
by:
Samantha Littley
Writing in the Sydney Mail in 1936, the art journalist and critic Barbara Goode Matthews recorded that 'Miss Ethleen Palmer ... feels there are in [the linocut] medium two distinct streams flowing side by side which she hopes will eventually mingle ... One stream has its source in Japanese feeling and expression and the other in abstract design, rhythm and colour arrangement'.1 Three years later she published an article on Palmer (1906-1958) in 'Art in Australia' in which she predicted a future for her as the 'Hokusai of Australia'.2
Goode Matthew's pronouncements echoed the remarks of other art critics, including Basil Burdett and Harold Herbert, who had similarly noted the influence of Japanese prints on the artist's work. Reviewers commented on the connection from a variety of perspectives: some subscribed to Palmer's view, that her prints were a reinterpretation, rather than a replication, of the Eastern art form; others, including Burdett who reviewed Palmer's first solo show at the Margaret MacLean Gallery, Melbourne, in 1936, were more dismissive: 'Many of these prints show the inevitable Japanese influence. At times this is obvious enough to amount to imitation-often, unfortunately, of the more banal and prettier side of Japanese print-making.'3
Contemporary commentators have also acknowledged Palmer's debt to Japanese art, prompting questions regarding the nature and extent of this influence.4 An analysis of Palmer's work reveals a complex picture and highlights the originality of her contribution. Her prints clearly reference those of Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849); however, she harnessed his themes and approaches in order to engage with modernism. For her, this meant the reduction of detail and the simplification of form, elements inherent to the linocut process.
Born in South Africa in 1906, Palmer spent the years 1907 to 1919 in England where the taste for things Japanese was well established. Her mother, a lieder singer, had spent seven years in Japan and fostered her appreciation of the culture; her book of Japanese prints was to become Palmer's 'source of inspiration'.5 Migrating to Sydney in 1921, Palmer would also have observed an interest in Japanese art, stimulated to a large degree by printmaker Margaret Preston (1875-1963).6 Given Palmerￕs background and the ethos of the time, it is unsurprising that she chose to embrace the language of the Japanese woodblock print in her work. In this, she was allied to a network of predominantly female printmakers, including Preston, Dorrit Black (1891-1951), Ethel Spowers (1890-1947) and Eveline Syme (1888-1961).
Palmer came to print-making serendipitously. She studied drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture at the East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) from 1924 to 1927, winning a prize for her architectural drawing in 1926. She subsequently accepted a position with a commercial art firm but, reluctant to relinquish hopes of a career as an artist, continued night classes at ESTC. The restrictions commercial art imposed were anathema to her and by 1929 her attempts to balance the requirements of her job with her own work resulted in a complete breakdown. It was during the following four years of convalescence that Palmer discovered the direction that was to consume her over the next ten years. A book on linocuts in Palmer's local municipal library gave her access to a method of art making that she could practise easily and economically.7 Significantly, the effects achieved through the medium paralleled those in the Japanese prints she had known since childhood.
As Goode Matthews remarked, the Japanese artist whose work exerted a prevailing influence on Palmer was Hokusai, a master of ukiyo-e, a form of Japanese printmaking which flourished in Edo period Japan (1600-1868) during a time when the country had limited contact with the outside world. Artists working within the tradition typically depicted the world around them: the life of the theatres and teahouses, as well as courtesans and geisha. Hokusai, however, sought to engage with Western art traditions and the genre of landscape painting. His print series Fugaku sanju rokkei (Thirty six views of Mt Fuji), dated between 1830 and 1835, 'led to the establishment of landscape views as a major late new genre of colour woodblock print within the ukiyo-e school.'8 Indeed, it has been argued that the Western elements in Hokusai's prints helped make them accessible to European audiences and artists.9
Palmer's linocut On the road to Sydney c. 1850 (1937) is one example where the artist deviates little from her source. Although she has produced a kind of colonial fancy in which travellers ride in a coach that has been 'bailed up', the print clearly references Hokusai's Tokaido hodogaya (Fuji from Hodogaya on the Tokaido Road) dated about 1834. Like Hokusai, Palmer has used a line of trees in the mid-ground and a mountain rising in the background to structure her linocut and to imply depth. The mountain in Hokusai's print is the ubiquitous Mount Fuji, the subject of Thirty six views of Mount Fuji and another of his best-known series Fugaku hyakkei (One hundred views of Mount Fuji).
The most famous of these prints, Kanagawa oki nami ura (Under the wave off Kanagawa) dated between 1829 and 1831 also served as a starting point for a linocut by Palmer. Her print Spindrift (1939) is, however, quite different in mood. Abandoning the black outline of a ￔkeyￕ block, she has built her image in a sequence of finely modulated tones. What she has borrowed from Hokusai is the motif of the curving wave. Like him, she has used the white of the paper to signify the salty spray thrown up by the ocean and has employed a range of blues to delineate the water's abstract patterns. In re-working Hokusai's image, Palmer has placed the motif of the mountain to one side and introduced the element of a darting bird, which focuses our attention on the centre of the print and animates the composition. By positioning the bird in foreground of the picture plane Palmer asks us to engage intimately with the scene. Flatness, a key modernist concern, is primary.
It is interesting to note that Hokusai himself frequently borrowed from both his own tradition and from Western art. Kanagawa oki nami ura pays homage to a hanging scroll by Ikeno Taiga (1723-1776), Impressive view of the Go River (1769) and an eight-fold screen attributed to Tawaraya Sotatsu
(c. 1600-1640), Rough seas (early Edo period, 1620-1640).10 Additionally, Hokusai's use of gradated colour to inflect depth, rather than as a stylised element providing emphasis, represents an innovation indicating that he has considered Western notions of perspective. The Prussian blue used to great effect throughout the print was a colour similarly imported from Europe.11
Palmer's linocut Granite peaks (1938) also references Hokusai's prints of Mount Fuji, in particular, Soshu Shichirigahama (Shichirigahama in Sagami Province), dated about 1831. Obvious Japonaiserie elements include the blossoming cherry tree, the use of zigzagging planar recession and the artist's monogram. The linocut is compositionally similar, with the mountain serving as a backdrop to a scene in which a dwelling nestles at the base of a stand of trees. In Hokusai's woodcut, however, the emphasis falls on the expanses of white paper which the artist has left untouched.12 In Palmer's print, the mountain, Mount Kembla, near Wollongong, has been brought forward into the mid-ground of the work, serving to compress the space and allowing us to experience the scene on a more personal level. With none of the multi-layered meanings associated with Mount Fuji, the peak becomes a decorative element in Palmer's overall design. She reinforces this modernist aesthetic in her choice of palette: the red of the tree and the vibrant, non-representational green of the grass are a contemporary combination.
An examination of Ethleen Palmer's linocuts shows that she actively recast the tradition of ukiyo-e through a modernist idiom. Her prints Granite peaks (1938) and Spindrift (1939) are eloquent demonstrations of the artist's increasingly confident, mature style, denoting her modernist sensibilities and her appreciation of natural form.13 These prints mark her as one of a number of influential modernist women artists who subtly subverted the Australian landscape tradition through use of the linocut medium, taking a personal, rather than an iconic approach to their subject.
Notes
1. Barbara Goode Matthews, 'Ethleen Palmer and her work'. Sydney Mail, 5 August 1936, p. 22.
2. Barbara Goode Matthews, 'An Australian Hokusai', in Art in Australia, vol. 3, no. 76, (15 August 1939), p. 29. Palmer designed the cover of the magazine, which featured a reproduction of her linocut Spindrift (1939).
3. Basil Burdett, 'Lino cuts and oils: women artists show variety', Herald (Melbourne),
17 August 1936.
4. See Anne Watson, Ethleen Palmer: printmaker of the 1930s, (Glebe: The Ward Gallery, 1980); Anne Watson, 'Ethleen Mary Palmer' and 'Ethleen Palmer Spindrift 1939', in Heritage: the national women's art book, ed. by Joan Kerr, (Roseville East, NSW: Craftsman House, 1995); Alan Dwight, 'The Asian interface: Australian artists and the Far East', Arts of Asia, vol. 14, no. 2, (March-April 1984), pp. 130-131.
5. Art Gallery of New South Wales archives, Ethleen Palmer, 'Details of art career of Ethleen Palmer', unpublished manuscript, undated, unpaginated.
6. When Preston returned to Sydney from the United Kingdom in 1919 she made an immediate impression with her modern woodblock prints, which were frequently Japonaiserie in style. Her woodcut Black swans, Wallis Lake (1923), for example, was based on a carved wood panel by Honￕami Koyestsu (1558-1637).
7. It is likely that a book by the Grosvenor School modernist Claude Flight served as primary source of information both on the technique and its use as a medium well suited to the aims of modern art. See: Claude Flight, Lino-cuts; a hand-book of linoleum-cut colour printing, (London: John Lane, 1927).
8. Timothy Clark, 100 views of Mount Fuji, (London: British Museum Press, 2001), p. 20.
9. Gary Hickey, 'Waves of influence: Japan and the West', in Monet and Japan, (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2001), p. 174.
10. Virginia Spate and David Bromfield, 'A new and strange beauty; Monet and Japanese art', in Ibid., p. 32.
11. Hickey, p. 176.
12. Gary Hickey has noted that 'The Japanese had long appreciated the inherently expressive potential of indeterminate space, referred to as yohaku no bi, literally 'the beauty of plenitude white'. See: Hickey, p.179.
13. Palmer reached the pinnacle of her thirty year printmaking career in the late 1930s-by this time, all major state galleries had acquired examples of her work. In 1938, her linocut Egrets (1937) won its division in the 150th Anniversary Art Competition, Sydney and shortly afterwards she was appointed lecturer/demonstrator in colour printing and linocut at the East Sydney Technical College. |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 1
|
Figure 2
|
Figure 3
|
Figure 4
|
Figure 5
|
|
|
|
|
