Clarice Beckett

In her mid-thirties, Beckett elucidated her artistic aims in the catalogue accompanying the sixth annual exhibition of the Twenty Melbourne Painters in 1924:

To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.[9]

A critic from The Age wrote later that year:

One would imagine from the little scenes that Miss Beckett has gathered, in the name of Australian art, that Australia was in a continual state of fog – all kinds of fogs – pink, blue, green and grey with an occasional mist that surely was never on land or sea. Miss Beckett is probably feeling her way through the fogs and no doubt she will […] at least rise above the dreariness which characterizes her paintings at present.

Another critic in 1925 took her to task over "a tendency to fuzziness and a certain weakness of drawing," but complimented her on "the best display she has made to date," especially "a view through the trees approaching the city in the twilight of a winter evening," which she as "nailed well."[10]

Passing Trams, 1931, Art Gallery of South Australia

Also writing in 1925, the generally reviled and now discredited Melbourne Herald reviewer James S. MacDonald,[11][12][13] who even into the 1950s despised any Modernism starting with Paul Cézanne, was especially derogatory, favouring, if anything, the flower studies that Beckett regarded as minor in comparison with her landscapes.[14]

By 1931, however, Percy Leason, writing a long review in Table Talk,[15] draws comparison with Rembrandt, Whistler and Corot to say;

Miss Beckett's work has so much in common with them: there is a like success in achieving the first essential, a convincing illusion of actual space and air and light; the same refinement and delicacy of true color; the same regard for true form and character; and the same complete indifference to conventions and the mere clever handling of paint for the sake of it. (Leason in the next issue of Table Talk reiterated his praise, calling the show "one of the best exhibitions of the year."[16]

However, like her female contemporaries, Beckett faced considerable prejudice from conservative male artists. Meldrum, commenting as late as 1939 on Nora Heyson's receiving the Archibald Prize, expressed his opinion on women's capacity to be great artists; "Men and women are differently constituted. Women are more closely attached to the physical things of life, and to expect them to do some things equally as well as men is sheer lunacy [...] A great artist has to tread a lonely road. He becomes great only by exerting himself to the limit of his strength the whole time. I believe that such a life is unnatural and impossible for a women." [17][18] an attitude he qualified in relation to his favourite pupil Beckett,[19] announcing in the event of her death that "Beckett had done work of which any nation should be proud."[20]

During her lifetime no Beckett work was purchased for a public collection, though now almost every major Australian gallery holds examples in their collection. By 2001 her paintings had achieved six figures at auction.[21]

Hawthorn Tea Gardens, 1933, Art Gallery of South Australia

Australian Tonalism is characterised by a particular "misty" or atmospheric quality created by the Meldrum painting method of building "tone on tone". Tonalism developed from Meldrum's "Scientific theory of Impressions." John Christian in a 1999 analysis paraphrases Meldrum's conviction that Art "should be a pure science based on optical analysis; its sole purpose being to place on the canvas the first ordered tonal impressions that the eye received. All adornments and narrative and literary references should be rejected."[22]

Tonalism opposed Post-Impressionism and Modernism, and is now regarded as a precursor to Minimalism and Conceptualism. The whole movement had been under fierce controversy and they were without doubt the most unpopular group of artists, in the eyes of most other artists, in the history of Australian art. Influential Melbourne artist and teacher George Bell described Australian Tonalism as a "cult which muffles everything in a pall of opaque density".[23]

Meldrum blamed social decadence for artists' exaggerated interest in colour over tone and proportion.[22] Beckett's painting however represents a departure from Meldrum's strict principles which dictated that tone should take precedence over colour, as commented upon in a newspaper critique of her 1931 solo exhibition.[24] A reviewer of her 1932 Atheneum show[25] expressed her particular version of this as "an adaptation of art to nature, which belongs neither to the realm of the orthodox normalist or the avowed modern, but is a purely individual expression of certain sensations in light, form and color..." Rosalind Hollinrake, who was largely responsible for Beckett's revival,[26][21] notes a use colour to reinforce form, and more daring design, in the later years of the artist's short life.[3]