Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1890 South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia

Died: 1947 Melbourne, Australia

Year of Migration to the UK: 1921

Biography

Painter and printmaker Ethel Louise Spowers was born in South Yarra, Melbourne, Australia in 1890, the daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher from New Zealand and an English mother. After attending art school in Paris, between 1911 and 1917, she studied drawing and painting at Melbourne's National Gallery School. She held her first solo exhibition in 1920 at Melbourne's Decoration Galleries, showing fairy tale illustrations influenced by the work of Australian illustrator Ida Outhwaite.

In 1921–24 Spowers worked and studied in Europe: during her first visit to England she studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, and probably visited Durham, executing a woodcut of the cathedral; she also studied at the Académie Ranson in Paris. In 1921 she exhibited at the Macrae Gallery, London with fellow Australian artist Mary Reynolds; two further solo shows followed at the New Gallery, Melbourne, confirming her reputation as an illustrator of fairy tales, although by then she was also producing woodcuts and linocuts inspired by Japanese art and covering a broader range of subjects. Her work changed considerably from 1929, when she studied linocut printmaking under Claude Flight at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Flight promoted and popularised the linocut as a suitable vehicle for celebrating the speed, movement, and modernity of the post-First World War era. Under his tutelage, Spowers's style changed markedly, as she embraced the tenets of modernism. He encouraged her to choose lively, contemporary subjects and to create images in which the forms were simplified and abstracted; colour bright and 'flat' in tones of equal value. She was often inspired by children. Her linocut Wet Afternoon, showing a young child alone in a wet city crowd, becomes a rhythmic arrangement of overlapping umbrella shapes, rigorously reduced to flat decorative colour and basic forms. This print was exhibited, together with other examples of Spowers's new work, at the Second Exhibition of British Linocuts, at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1930, at which she sold all her prints, and separate impressions of Wet Afternoon were purchased by both the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Upon her return to Australia, Spowers acted as Flight's agent and together with his other Australian ex-pupils, Dorrit Black and Eveline Syme, promoted his work and teaching through a number of exhibitions, mainly in Melbourne. She also brought a small collection of Flight's prints from England and loaned them to local exhibitions as examples of modernist art. She briefly revisited the Grosvenor Gallery in 1931 on a subsequent European tour, returning to Australia and, with her friend Syme, who had also been in England, helped set up the Contemporary Art Group in 1932. The Group, with Spowers at its helm, defended the modernist movement against its more conservative detractors. In the magazine Australasian she called on 'all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas, and not to condemn without understanding'. After being diagnosed with cancer in the late 1930s, she stopped practicing art, but became actively involved with voluntary work at Melbourne Children's Hospital. Ethel Spowers died in Melbourne, Australia in 1948. Although she had destroyed many of her paintings, a memorial exhibition of her watercolours, line-drawings, wood-engravings and colour linocuts was held at Georges Gallery, Melbourne, a year later. Art historical rediscovery of her work began in Australia in the mid-1970s, coinciding with a wider reassessment of women artists' contribution to Australian modernism.

Related books

Sally Quinn (ed.), Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art (Nedlands: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2019)
Tracey Lock, 'Relaxing the Line: The Linocuts of the Australian Artists Dorrit Black, Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers', in Gordon Samuel (ed.), Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2019), pp. 68-75
Kirsty Grant and Cathy Leahy (eds.), On Paper: Australian Prints and Drawings in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003)
Gordon Samuel and Nicola Penny (eds.), The Cutting Edge of Modernity: Linocuts of the Grosvenor School (Aldershot and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2002)
Jane Hylton (ed.), Modern Australian Women: Paintings & Prints 1925–1945 (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2000)
Hendrick Kolenberg and Anne Ryan (eds.), Australian Prints from the Gallery's Collection (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998)
Helen Topliss, Modernism and Feminism: Australian Women Artists, 1900–1940 (Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1996)
Stephen Coppel, 'The Australians: Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme', in Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1995)
Stephen Coppel, Claude Flight and His Followers: The Colour Linocut Movement Between the Wars (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1992)
Stephen Coppel, 'Claude Flight and his Australian Pupils', Print Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 4, December 1985, pp. 263-283
Janine Burke, Australian Women Artists, 1840–1940 (Collingwood: Greenhouse Publications, 1980)
Nicholas Draffin, Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s (South Melbourne: Sun Books, 1976)
Exhibition of Colour Linocuts, Wood Engravings and Watercolours by Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers (Sydney: Grosvenor Galleries, 1932)
Ethel L. Spowers (Sydney: Grosvenor Galleries, 1926)

Public collections

Related organisations

Melbourne's National Gallery Schools (student)
Regent Street Polytechnic, London (student)
Grosvenor School of Modern Art, London (student)

Selected exhibitions

Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2019)
Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Crawley, Australia (2019)
Out of the Book and Onto the Wall: the Relief Print (Pt. 1 and 2), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia (1984)
Melbourne Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Ballart Fine Art Gallery, Ballart, Australia (1981)
Colour Linocuts from the Grosvenor School, Ward Gallery, Glebe, Australia (1980)
A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, 1900–1950, Deutsher Galleries, Armadale (1978)
Claude Flight and His Circle, Michale Parkin Fine Art Ltd., London (1975)
Ethel Spowers Memorial Exhibition, Georges Gallery, Melbourne, Australia (1948)
Colour Print Exhibitions, Redfern Gallery, London (1932–1939)
Exhibition of Lino Cuts from the Redfern Gallery, Baillieu Allard's Gallery, Melbourne (1937)
Exhibition of Colour Linocuts, Wood Engravings and Watercolours by Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney (1932)
Modern Colour Prints and Wood Engravings from the Redfern Gallery, The Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, Melbourne (1932)
Exhibition of Linocuts, Everyman's Lending Library, Melbourne (1930)
Second Exhibition of British Linocut, Redfern Gallery, London (1930)
Ethel L. Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney (1926)
Macrae Gallery, London (1921)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ethel Spowers]