Mary Cockburn MERCER

Australian 1882–1963
worked throughout Europe (1920s) –1937, France 1952–63

Mary Cockburn Mercer was one of a number of Australian women artists working between the wars whose lives extended beyond the traditional expectations of women of their generation. Born into a wealthy farming family from the Western District of Victoria, as a young teenager Mercer went to Europe with her mother in order to finish her education. At the age of seventeen Mercer rebelled and ran away to Paris, where she lived a bohemian life in Montparnasse, counting the artists Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall among her friends.

During the early 1920s Mercer worked at L’Académie Lhote in Paris as a studio assistant, translating André Lhote’s lessons for his English-speaking students. Mercer, along with a number of other Australians including Grace Crowley and Dorrit Black, was strongly influenced by Lhote’s teachings that promoted the principles of Cubism and reduction of subject matter to a combination of basic geometric forms.

After living in Cassis, on the island of Capri, and escaping Spain following the outbreak of the civil war, Mercer lived briefly in Tahiti before returning to Australia in 1938. In Melbourne she rented an apartment in the St James Building in Bourke Street, where she lived and held art classes, her students including Lina Bryans and the New Zealander Colin McCahon during his 1951 visit to Australia. Mercer exhibited her work with the Contemporary Art Society, where her ‘decadent’ nudes, which shocked audiences with their frank sexuality, were often hung behind the doors of the gallery. An understated depiction of the relaxed intimacy between two women, this watercolour, composed of a series of broad, luminous washes detailed with vividly coloured highlights, reveals a lightness of touch that is less evident in much of her work.

All biographical information in this entry was sourced from the article by Anne McDonald, ‘Mary Cockburn Mercer: The epitome of the modern Australian woman’ in Artonview, National Gallery of Australia, issue no. 26, winter 2001, pp. 14–17.

Kirsty M. Grant