Grace Crowley

Grace Crowley (28 May 1890 – 21 April 1979) was an Australian artist and modernist painter.Crowley studied in Paris in 1927 with the Cubist André Lhote,and took part in Exhibition I in 1939, the self-proclaimed first show of abstract art in Australia. Others in her circle included Ralph Balsom, Dorrit Black, Rah Fizelle, Frank Hinder and her best friend, ceramicist Anne Dangar. "The Artist and his model" The subject of Crowley's painting is fellow artist Ralph Balson, painting an elegantly posed model on the roof terrace of Crowley's studio in George Street, Sydney. Revealing a disintegration of figurative forms and division of the pictorial space into decorative areas, this work signalled a growing commitment, shared by both artists, towards complete abstraction. In 1939 Crowley and Balson participated in the important Exhibition I at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney which summarised the concerns of local painters of the 1930s, then moving towards geometric abstraction.

 During a period of study in Europe, Crowley was influenced particularly by her studies with French Cubist painter André Lhote whose teaching emphasised the importance of subsuming colour to geometric structure. The Crowley-Fizelle school, subsequently established with Rah Fizelle to teach the principles and practice of modern art according to these constructionist, cubist-inspired principles, became the principle centre for modernist painting in Sydney until its closure in 1937.
There was an exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Australia in December 2006 to May 2007 called Grace Crowley.Wikipedia