Life with Danila Vassilieff Jane Sutton

My eldest sister Ormé was named after a horse. Not any old hack, but a winner of the Grand National. It was a ploy by our father Geoffrey for his daughter to share his cousin’s given names: Elizabeth Orme. He gussied it with an é so his wife wouldn’t notice. Freda thought it was fine because it rhymed with gourmet and she was curious about French food.

Ormé was a dreamy, chubby child with an embarrassing stammer. Freda enrolled in literature courses at the CAE, leaving Ormé with a neighbour who happily indulged the girl’s appetite for crumpets with honey. While she was studying “The Novel”, Freda stepped into a lecture on Edvard Munch and realised Geoffrey’s ruse. The lecturer was Elizabeth, Geoffrey’s divorced cousin recently returned from Western Australia. Freda’s subsequent children were given names from Jane Austen’s novels: D’Arcy, Elinor, Jane and Edward. But Ormé grew into her name and was convinced her brothers and sisters were disadvantaged by the nineteenth-century novel.

She was determinedly modern and identified with anyone whose first name had an é. Her great-aunt Renée for one, Salinger’s Esmé for another and Désiree Armfeldt from A Little Night Music as she aged. But no one could surpass Elizabeth Ormé Hamill Vassilieff Wolf née Betty Sutton for verve. The woman had lived. She had rubbed shoulders with Picasso and Paul Robeson at the World Peace Conference in Vienna in 1952.

The only child of Les and Dolly, Betty was born three years before Geoffrey and she used her head start. She was educated at Tintern Girls Grammar and the University of Melbourne before leaving with her first husband, Roy Hamill, for the University of Western Australia. And that is the beginning of the story for Ormé, reading Betty’s papers in the archive at Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Betty’s archive glances at her life—her inclusions in the five-boxed memoir were selected with care. Ormé wonders who the audience was intended to be. (Betty had written that she would deposit it with the Australian National Gallery.) There is a hasty mention of her first husband: “I divorced Roy because he was an adulterer. I went to Kalgoorlie to see for myself—he and a barmaid … He did quite well though, [he] married an American heiress.” A little nod follows to her third husband and none to her fourth partner, the trade unionist known as Pat Mackie. The papers—letters, books and unpublished texts—are directed to her life with the Russian-born artist Danila Vassilieff (1897–1958), her struggles with galleries for exhibition and payment and her nemesis, Danila’s biographer, Felicity St John Moore.

Though Betty had a few misadventures in her life, two are exemplary for censure from others. The first was her separation from Vassilieff. From 1954 to his death in 1958, the couple contested the ownership of his art scrambled with her patronage and his infidelities. The second was her resistance to Moore’s research for Vassilieff and His Art (1982).

Her typewritten copy differs from her “notes to self” marginalia. Agreed, to be expected from a graduate in literature and fine art but the distinction grows as she ages. Her handwriting changes from a loopy script similar to Geoffrey’s to an edgy angular one, circa 1982. She is getting crosser: “Danila was always the TAKER—others were the GIVERS.” Ormé is suspicious of memoir but differences in mood between Betty’s styles—typed and penned—are as interesting as her political and private ingenuousness. On thin pale paper on a typewriter with a fading ribbon, Betty wrote to James Mollison, then Director of the Australian National Gallery, dated 1980. She describes her first meeting with Danila:

[He said], “I have no patrons for my art. Nobody wants them any more. How would you like to be an art patron?” It was said jokingly, but it was sadly true, as time was to show. I am sure Danila would be the first to acknowledge that I was indeed his only “patron”. There were no others …

Betty had placed a deposit for Vassilieff’s house and studio, “Stonygrad”, responding to an advertisement of sale. Danila had decided to quit Australia for South Africa, but now he had met a woman who owned a chequebook. She had bought a man-cave. In a margin, Betty corrects Moore’s version of the first meeting: “No, he did not chase me around the table.” But rather:

he wrote me a proposal of marriage, in practical as well as romantic terms. After staying with him at the property for 8 weeks at his invitation, I accepted his proposal and we were married.

Between the end of her visit to Stonygrad and their marriage, Vassilieff was having second thoughts. Doubtless he saw his imminent marriage as one of financial relief seasoned with sex, but he wrote an oblique “it’s not me, could be you” letter. He was sure they liked each other but were not in love and he was physically more attracted to a younger woman who “came on Mondays”. Ormé read it as a request to bolt written as an opaque Cole Porter lyric (“It’s the wrong lips …”) And Betty? She answered with an elegantly argued typed letter on the nature of love. She signed it in black ink, “Finally, finally, finally! I flatly refuse to ‘forgive and forget you’! I send you my love, for what it is worth. You will be a better judge of that than I, L[isabet].”

Betty began her married life with “My Journal Entries”; she was besotted. The first is dated April 11, 1947, three weeks after their wedding:

I am starting this journal because I am so happy … that I would like to make a record of it. I am not sure why. I do not expect anyone else ever to read it, but I shall write it as though I do, so that in later times when I am … another person, I shall understand it. I might show it to Danila—I will see, as it goes on, whether it will be worth showing him.

Did she? Six entries follow, the last on May 11, around the time she had to pay £350 to settle his grocery bill. Still, Danila painted her portrait many times in 1947; it must have been a good year.

Several key letters in Betty’s archive reflect her pride and goodwill, his bohemian nature, and the conflict between the two. A further two from her cousin, the late law professor Robin Sharwood, deal with her pique towards Felicity St John Moore. But the most damaging to their fledgling marriage was from Helen Macdonald, his former lover, to Danila in 1947. In the late 1930s, after his arrival in Melbourne from Sydney, Vassilieff was embraced by Sunday and John Reed into the Heide set, one of many men and women invited into the chosen group. He may have been considered a possible locum for Sunday’s lover, Sid Nolan, when he was conscripted into the army. Given Vassilieff’s legendary sex life, it is remarkable that he sidestepped this offer.

He and Helen moved to Warrandyte, where both taught at the Koornang experimental school. According to Moore, Helen purchased nearby land with funds from her brother for Vassilieff’s boulder house, Stonygrad. He established a quarry; the rocks were rolled down to the creek and hauled up to the building site. When the couple separated in 1944, the title for the land remained with Helen. And there was an oral agreement that she would share in any future sale of the house. Remarkably she had relinquished the title to Danila after their estrangement. Helen wrote to him when she heard of his marriage and the sale of the house to Elizabeth:

You will recall that I signed the transfer of the land from my name to yours under considerable pressure from you when I was too ill to know what I was doing … but I still resent the way you went about it and the terms in which the transfer was couched, also your oft reiterated assertion that I did nothing to help the house or you. After all it was built when we lived on a joint salary, which was not infrequently augmented by gifts from my family.

Helen visited Stonygrad later in the year to be welcomed by Betty into her kitchen, where Helen’s pots were in situ. Years later, Betty typed, “It is hardly a coincidence that the 2 women Danila chose as longterm companions, Helen & myself were BOTH ‘gently brought up’, idealistic, romantic & unworldly in a material sense.”

Reflecting on her marriage in the letter to Mollison in 1980, she wrote:

For the rest of his life, I was in the position of being Danila’s everyday moral and emotional mainstay, and I supported both of us from my earnings [as a lecturer] … I was also his financial source in paying substantial medical and dental bills, for materials for all his paintings, for a utility to cart marble from Lilydale Quarries and for machines for grinding stone sculptures. I accepted these expenses as necessary and inevitable, in view of the fact that throughout those years of our marriage, Danila actually sold and received payment for, to my knowledge, just two paintings.

Ormé rearranged the furniture in her head—a correction is due here. Betty’s earnings were not her sole income. In the first year of the marriage, her mother had paid for plumbing and other building at Stonygrad. From cousin Shirley’s records, she was the principal beneficiary of her mother’s estate with an annual dividend cheque of £200 from the shares in the family company. After her mother’s death she discharged his mortgage on the property, and the title to Stonygrad was hers on September 16, 1949. But for day-to-day expenses, that’s another matter. Vassilieff spent £200 between January and March 1948, “funded by overdraft, obtained from my National bank manager, using my Sutton’s shares & Mother’s house as collateral”.

In 1949, Betty wrote to her husband, the letter hinting at trouble among the boulders. She was considering having some quiet time to herself in a Melbourne guesthouse, the Victoria Coffee Palace, and would like him to “come and get her”. In a pencilled annotation, she re-thought the scheme—he might not, after all, fetch her back. And a diary entry in 1951 tells Ormé that Danila has “deserted the marital bed”.

As heroic adventure stories go, Betty shifts from the known (marriage, Stonygrad, rock rolling) to the mysterious unknown (travel to Peking and Moscow in 1952). She was a member of the proposed delegation to the Peking Peace Conference when she came under the Menzies government’s passport ban and the Labor Party expelled the peace delegates. No longer a member of a political party, Betty became a delegate of the Victorian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers to the World Peace Congress in Vienna in December 1952. (The Soviets funded “peace congresses” in the West as part of their Cold War policy.)

Moore records her departure from Sydney: “Vassilieff was dropped with his friend the photographer Edward Cranstone and wife Vera, with instructions to ‘Look after him, he’s had a heart attack’.” The house had one liveable room so “Vassilieff volunteered to sleep in a large packing case with the dog”. The elderly Cranstone confused the dates in his 1979 interview with Moore. Danila may have stayed with the couple at other times, but not October 1952. From a letter on Trans Australian Airways paper addressed to Warrandyte, she records the first leg of her journey to Peking:

Dearest Danila,

Just a note to say [I have] arrived [in] Sydney safely [from Melbourne] … perfect trip … We were sent off from Essendon by about 20 of Clive’s relations and friends … I wish you were here. Never mind—see you in Moscow. I have made up my mind, so those Russians will have to look out.

All my love Betty xxxxx

He didn’t meet her in Moscow, but had an affair with a local barmaid. On her trip into the unknown she journeyed from Hong Kong to Canton and Peking across China to Vienna and on to Moscow:

We went straight from the Opera House to catch the midnight train to Moscow. And I slept and dreamed of Byzantine domes and towers, and vaulted ceilings, and fateful intrigues of mighty monks and boyars in jewel-encrusted silk embroidery robes.

She took out another overdraft on her return to reality:

I left Danila with one brand new cheque book from my own bank account filled with signed blanks. He bought everything he wanted, always, & took it as his due … I was never free of this overdraft until after [his] death.

They struggled financially through another year. Danila left Stonygrad early in 1954 on fishing trips to Mildura and by May was teaching art at Mildura High School. Later in the year, Elizabeth was in Western Australia on a lecture tour with Katharine Susannah Prichard. While she was away, Danila planned with Charles and Barbara Blackman to remove his sculptures from Stonygrad for “safe keeping”. The stone carvings were stored in the Blackmans’ coach house and later deposited with John Reed at Heide, Helen Macdonald’s and other artists’ studios. This art tranche formed the core of his retrospective in the months before his death.

Danila planned a return trip in the September holidays the following year. He had lined up some neighbours and eager young women for a party without Elizabeth’s knowledge. A well-meaning neighbour had sprung the news to her. The hurt seeps into the text written to her husband: “I am aware, for example, that while I was abroad, your affair with the woman in the pub and the ending of it with her husband’s appearance.” Moore writes of Vassilieff’s womanising, and Betty’s letter adds detail: “you are planning a holiday which involves making a fool of me (not to speak of yourself) in my own house, and probably also, if the past is any guide, in my own bed”. She softens: “My first impulse was to call off the whole idea of your coming back to Stonygrad, but on second thoughts that seems rather hard on you.” Danila cancelled the party but there was a distance between them:

I don’t know what to do with myself. Last week we had some frosty weather and I nearly died. Doesn’t look as I will ever be able to get to England … If I am all right end of August, I will come to Melb, will stay with John [Perceval].

Vassilieff believed that Elizabeth would sell Stonygrad and that he would share in the resultant funds. But the sale was becoming less sure as the year rolled towards Christmas. Vassilieff asked Betty directly in December 1955, “Are you still thinking of selling it?” The answer must have been vague, and he was aligning himself with John Reed at Heide. There are no letters from Betty but a thin-lipped note from Danila, “I have sent your fishing rod as was requested by you … to you at Richmond r. station. Did you get it? Now I have none at all.”

From Moore’s text, Vassilieff returned to Stonygrad to remove further art and tools from the house, and Betty prevented him from entering the property. This episode is undocumented in their letters and is referenced in Moore’s footnotes from an interview with a former colleague of Vassilieff’s, Mr Fitzgerald, from Swan Hill High School. According to Betty’s 1982 records, he removed “his stuff” in January 1956 without impediment. Her letter from the period denies any impasse:

My dear Danila,

Thank you for letting me know how you feel about things. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t communicate in this way on a friendly and understanding basis. I wish you nothing but good, and I want to do whatever I can do to help you live in any way you decide. I want to say that if you do want to go to England, I will help you with money. A bit more overdraft won’t make much difference!

Cheerio, Betty.

Instructed by Vassilieff, John Reed arranged for a new will to be drawn up for Danila, witnessed by Fitzgerald, dated September 25, 1956. Reed was appointed executor and trustee. Those who held the paintings and objects were to keep them and the residue of the estate was to go to the Gallery of Contemporary Art, of which John Reed was the director.

Vassilieff died at Heide in December 1958. Betty thought she had a claim to her late husband’s artworks. Malleson and Stewart, acting for Vassilieff’s estate, noted this possibility in a letter to Reed. Betty wrote to artists and collectors who she thought had Danila’s work in storage, and placed a caveat on the will to prevent it from being passed by probate. But it came down to negotiation—she received the car she had promised to help him purchase and legal costs. No art as chattels.

A letter from Robin Sharwood to Betty is a masterstroke of tact. He had been approached by Moore as a go-between to arrange an interview with Betty for access to her papers:

Can I urge you to reconsider and meet Felicity? … This letter will irritate you, I know, but do take seriously and think about it. It is written as much as anything out of cousinly concern and with real affection.

Betty had collected an oral memoir from Vassilieff into a loose biography and an unwieldy catalogue. Her typed document was deposited at the Mitchell and La Trobe libraries as “Soldier into Artist: Notes for a Biography of Danila Vassilieff”. From her “notes to self” annotations, she was peeved that they were accessed and cited by others without acknowledgment:

every writer of every line on Vassilieff has depended on this sole source for central, basic guidance. Without this document, Moore and all the others (including Bernard Smith, Robert Hughes) could have got nowhere at all on Vassilieff. The others have used & vilely abused it where they haven’t shamelessly plagiarised it … And she still wants to access my documents.

Elizabeth was damned if she was going to be co-operative:

the fullest disclosure could only be good for me, but would spot DANILA, as liar, slanderer & adulterer. I have preferred to let bygones be bygones, NOBODY in the world but me knows of these skeletons. DANILA WAS main AUTHOR of the “malicious lies” [that] Sharwood mentions.

But Betty had misunderstood intellectual property law and the limits of her documents. Not only did she relinquish her literary copyright by lodging unpublished documents, but she also believed she had copyright of Vassilieff’s works. It was a reasonable error. But the nub of it was her silent regret not to have written the definitive biography with the catalogue raisonné.

Moore’s book was published in 1982; it was too late to have the text corrected. A sympathetic letter from Robin Sharwood followed:

I do certainly feel that she [Moore] has made no real attempt to convey anything of the warmth and generous hospitality and mutual creativeness, sheer exuberant fun which you and Danila shared together for so many years at “Stonygrad” and I think that is mean of her and unfair to both D. & to you.

There were piddling errors too. Betty did not have a brother and her deposit cheque to Danila for the house was £350, not £1200. The first has not been amended in the later edition. The second was altered, though it still leads to a false impression of Betty’s financial position. Her bank receipts, signed E. Hamill, were for £350, and two for £50. A further £675 paid off Vassilieff’s mortgage on the property. The transaction of sale, not deposit, was around £1200. This lapse and others sprinkled in the text came from hearsay or interviews that had not been verified by kindlier bystanders.

Ormé reached for the last box in the archive. She thought about a café lunch—roasted vegetables with an airy butter sauce that would slick her fingers. But it had to wait. This is where she should have started—at the end with box five. It contained Betty’s passionate letters from the early days of her marriage, her four published books, a private lexicon of words starting with a and the formal paper of her life with Vassilieff. This was the detailed material that Moore could have accessed. The dates and narrative are fiercely exact. It was written for her Supreme Court defamation cases, Vassilieff Wolf v St John Moore (1987–89) and Vassilieff Wolf v Oxford University Press (1982–86). The decisions were in her favour and costs were awarded to her. Moore apologised for any hurt she may have caused and agreed to desist from making any statement or publishing further about Elizabeth or her relationship with Vassilieff without her consent.

The five boxes contain a story about love with unusual demands from both sides. Betty was keen on charismatic men, not so much on Lotharios. There is a whiff of the grammar girl—an interest in decorum, an approval of the orderliness of totalitarian states and a belief of the superiority of the humanities over the sciences. She wanted Vassilieff to be grateful, but there were no thanks, no presents, ever. She may have been guileless, but not blinkered: “he was just ready to ‘move on’ from me”. Recalling the ups and downs of her second marriage, she said:

Danila was not essentially a man in search of peace, or an idealist in the philosophical sense. He was a man in search of life, and a sometimes ruthless materialist. He had no time for sentimental romanticism.

Yet he wrote in November 1954:

Dearest Betty,

I still refer to you as dearest as I have none other dearer than you.