Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson

Top of my list, so far, for favourite exhibition of 2024 is Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson’s sublime pairing at NGV’s Ian Potter Centre. A third, unseen, hand that guides its presentation is that of curator Beckett Rozentals who has assembled it, and thoroughly researched its contents, with what I can only describe as “love veering towards joy.”

Working as closely together as Picasso and Braque ever did, Crowley’s and Balson’s work metaphorically unfolds before your colour-saturated eyes. Moving from figuration to abstraction, then confidently entering areas of the non-referential, it is a physical experience that simultaneously lifts your spirits and has you hopping about in excitement. Eventually, the exhilarated viewer ends up with Balson’s late, great black and white works that predate the neo-expressionism of Anselm Kiefer, or Julian Schnabel at his occasional best.

Between the lone artist working in the studio—from Giacometti in the past to Chelsea Lehmann or David Eastwood in the unfolding present—and artists working together as pairs, threesomes, or huge ensembles—Ulay and Marina Abramovic, Gilbert & George, The Telepathy Project (Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent), DAMP, or IRWIN—there is a third grouping of artists who work incredibly closely on separate, pioneering practices. Crowley and Balson sit comfortably in this category. Although they appear to have been life-long partners in close creative alignment rather than in a physical sense, I would place their relationship as parallel to Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, or Anni and Joseph Albers. I think Anni Albers would have enjoyed this show as she once said “art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness.”

It’s difficult to write about pure abstraction without resorting to talking, often impotently, about brushstrokes or “gravitational pull.” The alternative is to employ simile and metaphor, as the late great Peter Schjeldahl did in his 1994 Village Voice review of Willem De Kooning’s career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. “The effect was like a plane taking off, when the acceleration presses you against the seat. The painting’s violent intelligence detonated pleasure after pleasure. When I turned around, everything in the show was singing its lungs out. Half an hour later I was beaten to a pulp of joy. I’ll rest and go back for more . . .” I was similarly affected by the Crowley and Balson exhibition. Suspended somewhere between acid trip and orgasm, I went back for my dose of “more and more,” and have currently viewed it five times. I will feel genuine loss when the paintings are eventually removed from the walls and crated back to their fortunate lenders or (unforgivably) various museum storage areas.

Yet behind the colour-saturated crescendo of the final exhibition as we see it today, there is another even more compelling story of how two sentient beings on opposite sides of the planet, Grace Crowley (she always insisted it should rhyme with slowly) and Ralph Balson, navigated oceans and educational systems to find a creative attraction as forceful as a magnetic field.

Grace Crowley was born in Barraba, New South Wales, on 28 May, 1890. A few months later, on 12 August, 1890, Ralph Balson came into the world in the equally remote village of Bothenhampton in Dorset, England. What were the chances of them both meeting, both developing the same artistic passions, and both forming a many-decades-long relationship that, as I say, seemed to be more aesthetic than physical.

Balson left school at thirteen and was apprenticed to a plumber and house painter. Ten years later, by now a passionate self-taught artist, he moved to Australia. He continued to paint houses (for many decades) he also enrolled in night classes at Julian Ashton’s Sydney art school, where Crowley was one of his teachers. She left for Paris with fellow painter Anne Dangar a few years later. They would not be reacquainted until her return.

According to the esteemed curator, art historian, and bon vivant Daniel Thomas, “Crowley’s four years in Paris were the most enjoyable of her life.”

Returning to Australia was not so collegial. Crowley had left as a fairly conservative painter and returned a revolutionary experimenter. Flash forward two decades and the reception of the new ideas she’d brought back with her could only be described as “still frosty,” or even non-existent. In a letter written on 30 June 1947 she says, “we find the path of an abstract painter an exceedingly difficult one here in Australia. In fact, Ralph Balson and I are the only two painters I am aware of who think seriously about abstract painting at all.” And this was not a grumpy letter sent to a fellow artist or critic within Australia, it was a clear-eyed message to Albert Gleizes with whom she had studied briefly in Paris and whose ideas were a massive inspiration to her. So too was André Lhote, whose art school in Montparnasse she attended, as she did his summer school in the South of France, along with Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black—all three women sharing a room in the local butcher’s shop.

Gleizes and Lhote had both been at the forefront of the cubist movement as artists and theoreticians. Gleizes’ writings even predated Apollinaire’s lecture The Quartering of Cubism in 1912. Imagine a trio of Australian women artists working today in Berlin or London, then returning with first-hand knowledge of what is now the most cutting-edge art, only to be ignored by museums, dealers, and collectors. Sadly, it’s not hard to do.

Several galleries on the top floor of the Ian Potter Centre are filled with Crowley’s and Balson’s paintings, and on many occasions it’s difficult to tell who painted what, particularly the two masterpieces hanging next to each other at the start of the show. From there, we enter the first gallery showing the early work of Crowley, this rite of passage reminded me of the career retrospective of Bridget Riley (still painting at ninety-three) that was shown in Edinburgh and London just before the COVID years. It began with Riley’s teenage portraits, and then progressed through her landscape and tree paintings, which themselves echo the early works of Mondrian in their development.

Then we enter the main suite of galleries where Crowley and Balson are often hung side-by-side, but more often their work is given a very organic academy hang with multiple small canvases rising like bubbles in thermal waters, towards the ceiling. Some I spoke to found this the only aspect of the exhibition they did not like. I, for one, loved it. As you walk around, gradually you notice there is another element, so subtle, hovering over the entire show. It was about fifteen minutes before I noticed it, but I slowly became aware that the entire exhibition space had been painted with an overlying skin of pale geometric patterns that, for me, nodded towards the late works of Agnes Martin.

My only complaint was that there was no catalogue—apparently funds did not permit. Yet when the NGV regularly produce bigger-than-a-phonebook (if you remember those things) catalogues for triennials and Melbourne Now blockbusters, you’d think a few pages could be lost from them to produce a thin volume on these two great artists. By way of compensation, Rozentals has an essay about the exhibition in the NGV Magazine 46 (May–June, 2024). It is plump with new knowledge on this revolutionary pair of Australian artists, and I hope one day she turns it into a book. It would also make a great movie.

Before Balson died, they spent two years travelling the world together, living in New York, London, Paris, and elsewhere, constantly visiting galleries and museums. Rozentals writes (and you can see some of these works in the final room), “Their return saw another shift in Balson’s work, the beginning of his Matter Paintings. These paintings showed the influence of his first-hand experience with international abstraction, such as the work by American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, and Informalist European artists, in particular Antoni Tàpies and Alberto Burri. Working with large pieces of hardboard, Balson employed a semiautomatic pouring technique, letting the paint glide across the picture plane.”

As Goethe said in his Theory of Colours, 1810, “The greatest brightness, short of dazzling, acts near the greatest darkness.”

This review was originally published in issue 68, Artist Profile

EXHIBITION
Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson
23 May – 22 September 2024
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne