My Collection  

Anne Dangar
La Vierge et l’enfant jesu 1934

On Display: QAG, Gallery 12

Born in Kempsey, New South Wales, Anne Dangar enrolled at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School in 1915, where fellow pupil Grace Crowley became a lifelong friend. In 1926, after completing their studies, the friends decided to travel to Europe to explore developments in modern art.

Most significant for Dangar was her discovery of the art and writing of cubist painter Albert Gleizes (1881–1953). Forced to return to Australia to find work, Dangar was dismayed to find little appreciation of the theories she now followed. In 1930, she accepted Gleizes’s invitation to join his community in France and immediately embraced its ideals of creativity and self-sufficiency. After the restrictions of World War Two were lifted, Dangar travelled extensively through the country, reactivating her commitment to the traditional pottery methods she hoped would be part of a revival of popular arts in both France and Australia.

Despite living in France for many years, Dangar was one of a number of influential women artists who played an important part in the development of the modernist style in Sydney, and contributed to that debate in Australia. Her correspondence with Grace Crowley and other Australian artists resulted in a productive exchange of ideas around modern art, and Cubism in particular. She remained a devoted disciple of Gleizes and implemented his theories in her ceramic practice until her death in 1951.