REVIEW | J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde

A new exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum brings overdue attention to this remarkable yet under-recognised Australian artist.

J.W. Power, La Femme à l’ombrelle (Woman with Umbrella), 1926, oil paint, canvas, image: 130 x 79 cm; frame: 142.8 x 92 x 5 cm. Edith Power Bequest, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney.

Australian art history still holds many gaps. The life and work of John Joseph Wardell Power (1881–1943) is one of them. Curated by Ann Stephen, senior curator of art at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, and her collaborator ADS Donaldson, J.W. Power: Art, War and the avant-garde seeks to redress that gap and place Power where he rightfully belongs: as one of the most accomplished Australian artists in the interwar period.

However, it is Power’s philanthropic legacy for which he is best known. Revealed in 1962, nineteen years after he died and following the death of the artist’s widow Edith Mary Power, his bequest, the largest for its time, enabled the establishment of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Power Collection of contemporary art. This legacy has long overshadowed his art.

Installation view details: J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney. Photographed by David James

One reason for Power’s marginal place in the art historical narrative is the scarcity of his paintings held in Australia’s public collections. Relatively few are located outside the University of Sydney which holds more than 1,000 of his paintings and sketches in the Chau Chak Wing Museum. Fifty-four of Power’s sketchbooks and a trove of personal papers and reference books are in the National Library of Australia’s collections, and additional archival material is held in the University’s Fisher Library, some of which is on display to coincide with the exhibition.

Born in Sydney, Power studied at the University of Sydney where he graduated in medicine in 1905 and was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons in London in 1908. He served as a surgeon in Dublin during the First World War. Several works in the exhibition are from this early period.

After the war Power abandoned medicine to study art, moving between Paris and London.  In Paris he studied at the Atelier Araújo and took classes with Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne, settling among the avant-gardists with whom he exhibited in both Paris and London.

Power embraced European modernism. He was fascinated by mathematics and proportion theory, applying his theories about form and colour in his work, a blend of surrealism, cubism, and abstraction, returning again and again to experimenting with geometric structures and harmony.

Installation view details: J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney. Photographed by David James.

This well-curated and beautifully presented exhibition comprises sixty-six rarely seen works, mainly oil on canvas, as well as preparatory sketches and sketchbooks, watercolours and works on glass, covering the breadth of his art career.

Designed by Youssofzay Hart with Matt Nix from Curio Projects, the exhibition installation uses several muted wall colours drawn from Power’s colour palette to good effect, seamlessly dividing the exhibition into four chronological sections: Origins, 1920s London and Paris, 1930s Paris, and Fascism and War 1936–43.

The timeline follows the evolution of Power’s art from the figurative through to the purely abstract. It begins with two delightful portraits of the artist and his wife Edith painted in 1920 and ends with five small but striking abstract double-sided works painted on glass from 1938.

Installation view details: J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney. Photographed by David James

A lovely addition to the exhibition is three pochoir (stencil) prints by Pablo Picasso on loan from the National Library of Australia, originally part of Power’s extensive modernist art collection most of which were sold on his death.

The exhibition provides opportunities to view the artist’s process from initial drawings to worked up preparatory sketches to major large-scale paintings, such is the depth and breadth of the University’s holdings of his work.

Two versions of Power’s major work La Femme à l’ombrelle (Woman with Umbrella) both painted in 1926 and hanging side by side, provide an intriguing juxtaposition. One, large and filled with bright, vibrant colour, the other on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria, far smaller and painted in muted tones. Both are finished works, signed with Power’s distinctive monogram and presented in frames which he designed. Frustratingly there is no comment or explanation about these works provided in the basic label. Artists often return with variations to the same theme, however in this case the works are compositionally identical in virtually every detail.

The last text panel places the exhibition in context. The late Power Professor Virginia Spate noted in 1991 that, “The history of John Power’s paintings has been marked by silences, absences, amnesia and has left his art enigmatic,” and in 1962 art critic Robert Hughes wrote of an exhibition of Power’s work at Sydney University, “had he painted these pictures in Australia between 1927 and 1938 he would possibly be now regarded as the most important figure in our early avant-garde.”

J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde and the accompanying monograph J.W. Power: An Australian Avant-gardist take another step towards recognising J.W. Power’s place in Australia’s art history with this visually rich exhibition.

EXHIBITION
J.W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde
19 July 2025 – 8 February 2026
Chau Chak Wing Museum, Sydney

Images courtesy of the Edith Power Bequest, Chau Chak Wing Museum, The University of Sydney.

David Ellis is the former director of museums at the University of Sydney, leading the establishment of the Chau Chak Wing Museum.

This article was first published in Artist Profile Issue 73