Nora Heysen - Artist
Frank Spancer
Renowned artist Nora Heysen has died in Sydney at the age of 92.
The daughter of artist Sir Hans Heysen, Heysen was tutored by her father
in still life and portraiture.
Her talent was obvious at an early age - by 20-years-old she had works
hanging in three state galleries.
In 1938, Heysen became the first woman to win the Archibald portraiture
prize.
Her win sparked controversy, with Max Meldrum remarking that "to expect
them [women] to do some things equally as well as men is sheer lunacy."
But Heysen continued to do things equally as well, in 1943 becoming the
first female war correspondent.
The appointment took her to New Guinea, Lae, Finchhafen, Morotai and Borneo.
While she was in New Guinea she met Dr Robert Black, whom she married in
1953.
She wrote to her father that the union was "a wish of ten year's standing".
Travelling with her husband through the 1950s and 1960s kept Heysen from
being a very active painter, however, she continued to enjoy drawing and
painting the local people she met.
Such works feature prominently in her oeuvre of that time, and some hang
in Australian galleries.
Heysen's love of depicting figures never left her.
In later years she also began working in pastels.
The curator of the Nora Heysen collection at Hahndorf's Cedars Heysen
Home and Gallery, Allan Campbell, says she was a very talented artist.
"After that very early success, particularly when she won the Archibald
and then the war appointment, she was almost overlooked for the next 40
years," Mr Campbell said.
"It's only the last 10 years they've started to reassess her and realise
what a very fine artist she is."
Heysen's talent has been recognised a number of times other than the
Archibald win - she received the Australia Council's Award for
Achievement in the Arts in 1993 and was awarded an Order of Australia in
1998.
Mr Campbell says Heysen continued to draw in her last days.
"She was still actually working," he said.
"Her eye sight has been deteriorating the last eight years or so and she
actually stopped painting out of respect for her standards but she still
had this wonderful discipline to draw."
Source: ABC
Hyfler/Rosner
"Frank Spancer" <Nom...@address.com> wrote in message
news:3ff14827$0$18391$afc3...@news.optusnet.com.au...
>
http://www.optusnet.com.au/news/story/abc/20031230/20/entertainment/1018167.inp
>
> Renowned artist Nora Heysen has died in Sydney at the age of 92.
>
The Australian obit:
Nora Heysen
Artist. Born Hahndorf, South Australia, January 11, 1911. Died Sydney,
December 30, aged 92.
NORA Heysen, who died on Tuesday, 12 days short of her 93rd birthday, was
not just the talented daughter of Hans Heysen but also a fine artist in her
own right. It grieved her that in recent years her work commanded more
attention than that of her father, whom she revered all her life.
Nora Heysen was the fourth of eight children. Born in 1911 and reared in
Hahndorf, South Australia, she lived in an environment devoted to art, with
a constant flow of distinguished visitors such as Sydney Ure Smith, Lionel
Lindsay and Nellie Melba. It was Nora who inherited her father's talent and
she decided that she, too, would be an artist.
Evidence of her precocious talent impressed visitors and it prompted Melba
to present her with a palette when she was 16; she used it all her life. How
talented she was at 16 can be seen in her still life Eggs. In the Howard
Hinton Collection at the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale, NSW,
it was used on the catalogue cover of the National Library's 2000
retrospective of her work, which proved to be the culmination of a decade of
newly found fame.
Heysen's life at the Cedars, where the family lived from 1912, was an
idyllic existence that remained the source of inspiration for the artist all
through her life. Her father encouraged her to exhibit and by the time she
was 20 she had paintings in three state galleries. In 1933, age 22, she held
her first solo exhibition in Adelaide. It was among the most important
exhibitions of her career, surpassed only by two retrospectives late in
life. She sold almost all the paintings and made pound stg. 1000, which
financed her four years' study in London -- first at the Central School,
then at the Byam Shaw School.
In London she befriended Orovida Pissarro. Like Heysen, Pissarro was an
artist with a famous father, Lucien Pissarro, son of impressionist painter
Camille Pissarro. Lucien Pissarro advised Heysen not to mix colours so much
and to allow light and atmosphere to enter her work. It was good advice. The
period overseas was difficult for a quiet, reticent person -- she said no
one spoke to her for six months -- but it transformed her. She had gone
there as a talented painter; she came back an artist in her own right.
To keep her independence, she moved to Sydney in 1938 and lived there for
the rest of her life. In 1938, at 27, she won an Archibald Prize, the first
woman to do so. It gave her a brief period of notoriety, but she had already
learned not to depend on the opinions of others. She questioned the validity
of the award, as earlier she had questioned the success of her 1933
exhibition: was it for her ability or because she was the daughter of Hans
Heysen? It was a question that persisted in her mind; she discovered the
answer only in the last decade of her life.
World War II interrupted her career, which was by then firmly established.
She was the first woman appointed an official war artist. In New Guinea, she
fell in love with Robert Black. It was a difficult romance; he was already
married and it was not until 1953 that they were able to marry. In 1954,
they moved into a grand old 1850s house with a large garden at Hunters Hill
that became Nora's paradise -- her Sydney version of the Cedars. With her
husband, who was professor of tropical medicine at the University of Sydney,
she travelled overseas frequently until they separated in 1972.
Few painters have shown the same dogged persistence in direction. Her values
remained constant, but her reticence worked against her. In the 62 years she
lived in Sydney, she never had a solo exhibition there. Asked why not, she
replied: "No one asked me and I am not one to push myself forward."
After her brief moment of fame with the Archibald, she worked on at Hunters
Hill in comfortable obscurity for almost four decades. In 1987, when I
discovered what a fine painter she was and offered to arrange an exhibition
of her work, she demurred at first but finally agreed.
In 1989 a retrospective, coinciding with the publication of a small book
about her, was shown first at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney and later at
Carrick Hill in Adelaide. Her work became sought after and she enjoyed the
genuine admiration for it.
For the past 12 years she and a group of artist friends met on the first
Monday of each month at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. The circle was called the
Pens and Pencils and included Judy Cassab and Margaret Woodward, with whom
she regularly drew from a life model.
She was admired for her achievement, strong and unbending character and
great dignity. She became more handsome as she aged, a truly beautiful
person in all respects. She was loved by her friends but adored by her
animals. Cello the Siamese cat and Bosie the human dog have become legends.
When Bosie died, Heysen's friends worried that she may not get over it, but
she did and went on living as she had always done, immersed in the present
and the issues of the day.
Her 2000 retrospective at the National Library of Australia in Canberra gave
her so much pleasure, she went back, incognito, to look at her paintings
undisturbed. Perhaps her most rewarding moment came in 1998 when she
received a letter from Thames and Hudson in London, asking permission to
reproduce one of her self-portraits in Frances Borzello's book Seeing
Ourselves: Self-Portraits by Women Artists Throughout the Ages. A second
letter came asking permission to reproduce her painting on the cover. This
pleased her immensely because she knew it was reproduced for the quality of
her work, not because she was the daughter of Hans Heysen.
In 1993 she received the Australia Council Award for Achievement in the Arts
and in 1998 was appointed a member of the Order of Australia. She is
survived by two brothers and a sister.
Art historian and publisher Lou Klepac curated the two Nora Heysen
retrospectives.