Historian Dr Edith Ziegler, will be speaking about her new book, The Worlds and Work of Clarice Beckett. This is a biographical study of the early Modernist artist whose work was frequently criticised when she was alive and almost completely forgotten after her early death. It was only by sheer chance that her work was rediscovered thirty years later and now occupies a canonical place in Australian art.
Beckett is today recognised as an important innovator who explored philosophical, psychological and spiritual themes in her paintings and found a creative stimulus in ideas she gleaned from her metaphysical enquiries. Some of her work moved in the direction of abstraction; all of it has grown in popularity over the last fifty years. An important retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2021 cemented further the admiration of the public for her paintings. This heavily illustrated talk explores the context in which her work was created by describing her family and forebears, her schooling, her art education, her teachers, her influences and influencers, the principal critics of her work, her friends and milieu, and the places that were important to her and provided the inspiration for her paintings. Several slides of her paintings will demonstrate the points being made about the ideas informing her work.
2pm sharp, Sunday 2nd April, 2023
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