Nancy Borlase

The late Jack Lynn—an old friend and collaborator—would sometimes say that to get ahead in the art world it is important not to be too independent or too adventurous or too avant-garde or too unpredictable. It also helps, he said, to pick a hero like, say, Ned Kelly. You may break some of these rules, but if you break all of them, dealers don’t know what to do with you. It is even harder if you are a woman.

I don’t know to what extent Jack was ironically pondering his own artistic trajectory, but he could easily have been thinking of Nancy Borlase. Nancy was above all independent. She never belonged to a group. She was of course open to influences and to enthusiasms. She was often ahead of her contemporaries. But it was not until her first retrospective in 1994 that people realised what an astonishing artist we had living and working among us. She was then about eighty years old. She had always listened to her own voices, her daemons, as artist, critic and observer. In her often quoted quip, she was like the tortoise in the fable; the hare was far quicker but she beat him in the end.

As a girl in New Zealand, she committed herself to a life in art, although not yet in painting. It led her to run away from her rather genteel home to study sculpture in Christchurch. There she famously earned a living as Madame Rosa reading tea leaves in the Frascati tea rooms—an experience that later helped her bring her native scepticism to the consideration of those abstractionists who saw art as reading entrails, painting as divination. Before sailing off to Sydney and Kings Cross —then the Promised Land!—with little more than two pounds and a letter of introduction to Eric Baume, she characteristically went, by herself, on a six-week hiking tour of the South Island Alps with only, some say, her trusty copy of R.H. Wilenski’s The Modern Movement in Art, still hot off the press, for company!

In her early Sydney and Melbourne years she moved in bohemian, radical, anarchist, Trotskyist circles. Politically she stood with her husband Laurie Short in his epic contest in the 1940s with the Stalinist ballot-riggers of his union, the Ironworkers. But she toed no party line. As she said in an Oral History interview at the National Library in 1962: “I refused to take a great deal of advice.” All her life she refused to take lots of advice.

When she finally decided that painting, not sculpture, was her vocation, she shunned the academies and the fashions of the day—the Charm School or social realism or nationalism.

Her earlier work—the lovely Balmain paintings of the 1940s and the edgy, geometric Blake Prize entries of the 1950s—like her latest, was more figurative than abstract. But in the mid-1950s, in New York, she was bowled over by the abstract expressionists. There were later influences but her work from now on, including many of her most exciting paintings, was increasingly abstract. But note that Peter Pinson calls Nancy’s paintings of the 1960s works of Expressive Abstraction, not Abstract Expressionism. They are not New York paintings, they do not represent or illustrate a school. They are personal, but with more shape than gesture, often experimental but unmistakably Nancy’s. (Her daughter Susanna recalls, as a Mosman schoolgirl, collecting bird feathers for her mother to paint with.) Nancy was at the height of her powers. She always said that the paintings on exhibition today are her best work.

The 1960s were turbulent years. They were not only the years of Vietnam and Moratorium marches. They also saw the flourishing of avant-garde galleries, dealers, investors, arts bureaucrats and arts prizes. There was Rudi Komon and his stable, and Christo wrapping up Little Bay. Artists were put on trial in the courts, as when Mike Brown was sentenced to four months’ hard labour (reduced on appeal to a $20 fine) and Martin Sharp got three months’ hard labour (quashed on appeal).

Amid the big names of the time—Olsen, Rapotec, Lynn—Nancy’s work was often coolly respected and often ignored. The critical response so discouraged her that she suspended full-time painting for a few years and concentrated on art criticism (for the Bulletin and the Sydney Morning Herald). It was not until the 1980s that she returned to more-or-less full-time painting and gradually to more figurative work, including those challenging portraits of the now ageing Trotskyists of her youth.

Back in 1992 Nancy’s daughter Susanna published a fine biography of her father—Laurie Short: A Political Life. When I reviewed it at the time I made two ill-advised suggestions. One was that a film be made of Laurie’s political battles. I recall discussing the idea with Clyde Packer and we agreed that the story had everything—violence, corruption, troops on the coalfields, courtroom confrontations, the little Aussie battler versus the Stalinist mafia—and a happy ending. We cast Chris Haywood as Laurie, Ray Barrett as Ernie Thornton, John Laws as “Diamond” Jim McClelland and Jackie Weaver as Nancy. Susanna liked the idea of a film and even had talks with a script writer. But nothing came of it. Its moment has passed. Let me come back to it in a second.

The other equally ill-fated idea was that Susanna’s next book be a biography of her mother. She actually started writing it, but as she explained in later interviews she and Nancy—both strong-willed women—had so many rows about what to put in and what to leave out that they dropped the whole thing. For her part Nancy said she had thought of painting Susanna but was too frightened to do it: Susanna, she said, is too good-looking.

In any case I still think that, suitably adapted, my two ideas—the film and the biography—may yet have legs. Why not a bioflic, a film biography—not of Laurie but of Nancy, telling the dramatic story of Sydney and Australian art (and politics) from the 1930s to today as experienced by Nancy Borlase? The forthcoming retrospective at the Mosman Art Gallery would be a guide. But at the heart of it would be these exciting and mould-breaking works of expressive abstraction which we celebrate today.

With these nostalgic reflections I congratulate Peter Pinson for mounting this exhibition and I have great pleasure in declaring it open.

Peter Coleman opened the exhibition “Nancy Borlase: Expressive Abstraction 1960–1968” at the Peter Pinson Gallery, Woollahra, in February. Mosman Art Gallery is holding a retrospective exhibition, “From Balmain to Mosman: Nancy Borlase in Retrospect”, until May 3.