Angela Bennie

The Australian, July 11, 2009

The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love

By Anne Summers

Melbourne University Press, 354pp, $34.99

WHEN her mother died in 2005, Anne Summers was given a painting from her estate.

It had hung on a wall in her parents’ house for as long as she could remember. It was a portrait of her mother, painted when she was 10, her hair braided into two long plaits, dressed in a red beret, blue jumper and brown pleated skirt. Her startling blue eyes gaze calmly at the viewer.

Summers was, of course, familiar with the work, as was the whole family: it had hung prominently in her parents’ living room, a silent witness to the family’s comings and goings, sorrows and celebrations.

At some stage before her mother’s death, Summers recalls that she asked her mother to write an account of how the painting had come about, who the artist was and how the work had come into the family’s possession.

She knew, therefore, that the artist was a Constance Stokes, that the work had been in the collection of a Mrs Mortill and that her grandmother had eventually bought it as a gift for her daughter, the portrait’s subject.

Now here it was in Summers’s house in Sydney. Summers would stand before it, entranced. The more she looked at it, the more enthralled she became. There was a luminance about it, a tenderness, yet also something undefined beneath its surface, undefined, a kind of power exuding from it.

And the more she looked, the more the questions came. How did this come about? Why was it that particular young girl? Summers returned to the few notes her mother had made for her about the work’s provenance and a discovery propelled her into action.

She found in the notes something she had overlooked or forgotten: her mother had recorded that two portraits were painted; the second had her draped in a long shawl like aMadonna.

Where was the second painting? Who was Stokes? What was it that she saw in this particular subject? And who was Mrs Mortill, the art collector who bought the work? Did she also buy the second painting?

The questions began to exert an urgent pull, stirring something deep within Summers that demanded some kind of resolution. She decided to find some answers. She put to one side her thraldom, picked up the thread and moved with determination into the labyrinth. The result is this fascinating, beautifully realised book.

Using her prodigious skills as a journalist, aresearcher and historian, with her quick intelligence alert to possibilities, and paying minute attention to detail and nuance, Summers began to reconstruct not just the lives of the people who populate this intriguing story but the lifeofthe painting, its antecedents and its consequences.

Her journey through the labyrinth, following her “vagrant strands” of thread, as she calls them, takes her into sometimes extraordinary territory and at other times into the ordinary, the everyday circumstances of its characters.

Her tale moves across continents and into small back gardens, into intelligence back rooms and the blood-drenched fields of the Somme, into the past and back into the present, down roads that seem to lead nowhere and around corners that reveal new perspectives. Its characters are remarkable for their variety and idiosyncrasies: even Stalin, a figure far removed from her mother’s world, has his place, playing his sulphurous part with finesse.

In her prologue, Summers confesses that she did not have much knowledge of art and artists. This book proves her wrong.

In its construction, its mosaic-like structures, its criss-crossing paths of cause and effect, what The Lost Mother ultimately reveals, thanks to Summers’s skill, is that a painting — or a book, or any work of art — is not just an accumulation or manipulation of paints or pencil or words on a page. It is an object capable of absorbing or reflecting all kinds of meanings that we, the viewers, put into it. It is not a static object; it shimmers with a life we perceive, or think we perceive, within it.

Summers ends her work of art by saying she looks at her painting every day: “The painting was, I realised now, not just about my mother.”

It was also about Summers. Through the painting, its presence, the steady gaze that locks her into its heart, she has come at last to mourn her mother with understanding and tenderness. For she comes to know with certainty that a work of art is also an object capable of offering solace, the solace her mother’s portrait continues to give her.

Angela Bennie is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.

(c) The Australian

Mary Alice Evatt & Australian modernist art

Melissa Boyde tells the remarkable story about modern art and Australia’s country towns.

Speaking in New York just after the war Mary Alice emphasised the importance of government recognition that:

“art is able to crystallize emotions, intellectual trends, moments in the past, moments in the future, for its people, thus clarifying their views on life, and in making critical or appreciative art viewers also people capable of a larger and more complete life as citizens of a modern state.”

In Paris she spent time with Picasso at his studio looking at his wartime paintings and hearing about the details of his involvement in the Resistance.

As a result, she and Bert invited him to attend the UN Assembly, where he received a standing ovation.

In his autobiography art historian Bernard Smith recounts how, as a young art teacher posted to a school at Murraguldrie in country New South Wales (NSW) in the mid 1930s, he tried unsuccessfully to borrow books on modern art from the country lending service of the State Public Library.

On a visit to Sydney he made an appointment to see the NSW Chief Librarian W.H. Ifould, “a man of considerable power and influence in New South Wales” who was also a trustee of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW).

Smith took to the meeting the small catalogue listing the art books in the country section and “asked, as discreetly as he could manage, why it offered no books on modern art”. Ifould was very clear: “There are no books on modern art in the Country Reference Section … because to the best of my knowledge no one in the country is interested in modern art”.

This essay explores the history of taking modern art to country towns in NSW, particularly the contribution of one woman, Mary Alice Evatt.

Mary Alice was involved in the modernist art movement both locally and overseas. Through her international connections she was also well-informed on the ‘Art for the People’ movement: in America the Federal Art Project, established under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1932, emphasised the central role of the arts in a democracy and in Britain the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts was established in 1939 on principles of opportunity and participation for all citizens.

In Australia, Mary Alice promoted similar ideals focusing on arts access, education and participation as part of the modern state.

These views, combined with her advocacy of principles of social equity, led to her becoming a key broker in the delivery of one of the main ‘Art for the People’ initiatives in Australia, the AGNSW’s Country Art Exhibition Scheme.

It was through this scheme that modern art found its way not only into library catalogues but into the heartland of NSW country towns.

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