Biography/Art
Book Details

Lina Bryans

Rare Modern 1909–2000

Gillian Forwood

Lina Bryans—beautiful, generous and unconventional—was a significant and influential artist of the modernist movement in Australia.

Opinion

Lina Bryans ‘is a substantial and well-researched book and will, undoubtedly, serve to establish that Bryans’s art . . . is as equally pioneering and modernist as that of [her] more recognised—male— peers.’ (Age, 12/7/2003)

Lina Bryans ‘is a lively and scholarly addition to Australian art history. Clearly a labour of love for the author, it brings to life a strong and engaging woman whose dedication to art over a period of some seventy years should at last bring her the attention that she deserves.’ (Australian Book Review, August 2003)

About this Title

Lina Bryans—unconventional, generous and beautiful—was an influential artist of the modernist movement in Australia, and a key player in the cultural life of Melbourne. Often overlooked in her own time, Bryans is now being recognised as a significant figure in Australian art.

Bryans was untrained, and her painting is spontaneous, intuitive and expressive. She was a superb colourist, and brought an abstract lyricism and spirituality to her work, reinterpreting the Australian landscape.

To understand the full extent of Bryans' contribution to Australian cultural life, however, Gillian Forwood argues that we must turn to her portraits. Painted between 1937 and 1974, these portraits—all of friends—form a striking and intimate gallery of the most influential figures in Melbourne's cultural landscape. Collectively, they create a pictorial biography of Bryans herself, revealing her rare gift for friendship, her dynamic and generous temperament, and her international outlook.

Bryans' personal life was marked by upheavals: relationships flourished and foundered; she moved from city to country and back. In the idiom of her day she was a New Woman, a free spirit.

In the early 1940s, she bought an old hotel, Darebin Bridge House, which became a cultural hub for the artists and intellectuals of the day. Like the Reeds at Heide, she played a singular role in the Melbourne art world, befriending and nurturing artists, supporting exhibitions of unrecognised painters and creating opportunities for others.

In this lavishly illustrated book—the first devoted to the artist—Gillian Forwood brings to light the vibrancy of Bryans' life and work.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
1 A European hertiage 1909–1936
2 Early Melbourne modernists 1936–1940
3 Darebin Bridge House and the Art Establishment 1940–1945
4 Postwar art and letters 1945–1948
5 Harkaway to Provence 1948–1955
6 Towards abstraction 1955–1973
Appendix: exhibitions and representation
List of illustrations
Notes
Sources
Index

About the Author

Gillian Forwood holds a Masters degree in Fine Arts from the University of Melbourne, where her research subjects have included Roger Kemp and the Ballets Russes. She is an Associate of the Australian Library and Information Association, and she prepared the catalogue, The Babe is Wise: Lina Bryans and her Portraits, for a major retrospective exhibition at the Ian Potter Gallery.

Book Preview

978-0-522-85037-6