Rah FIZELLE

Australian 1891–1964

During the 1930s in Sydney, Rah Fizelle, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder represented the vanguard of the second wave of modernism in Australia. All except Balson had travelled and studied art overseas and, upon returning home, enthusiastically shared their knowledge of the international developments in contemporary art to which they had been exposed.

The art school that Fizelle and Crowley ran in George Street, Sydney, from 1932 to 1937 was the centre of this activity and, like the George Bell School in Melbourne, provided an alternative to the traditional academic instruction that was otherwise available. Fizelle studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic and Westminster Art School, London, in the late 1920s before travelling through central Europe. In France Crowley was introduced to the principles of Cubism and the practice of abstracting the subject to a series of basic geometric forms through studies with André Lhote and later, Albert Gleizes. Of Fizelle’s and Crowley’s approach to teaching, Crowley wrote:

We were united in one belief, the constructive approach to painting, and this insistence of the abstract elements in building a design was the keynote of teaching with both Lhote and Gleizes … although the model was used in class, the student was discouraged from making merely a faithful record … The abstract elements in line, shape and colour were introduced in order to induce the student to construct from it a design within a given space.1

This red chalk drawing is characteristic of Fizelle’s figurative studies in its careful balance of naturalism and abstraction. The abstraction, achieved by simplifying the subject to what Fizelle described as ‘elementary geometric forms—circle, square, line and triangle’,2 remains extremely subtle however, and reflects his decision not to take ‘the final step that would have led to a complete divorce from figurative art’.3

1 Rah Fizelle, letters, 28 August & 1 September 1966, quoted in Balson, Crowley, Fizelle, Hinder (exh. cat.), R. Free ed., Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1966, p. 6.

2 R. Fizelle, ‘Instinctive expression’, Art in Australia, Sydney, series 4, no. 5, March 1942, p. 53; quoted in Drawing in Australia, A. Sayers, Melbourne, 1989, p. 227.

3 James Gleeson, quoted in Australian Drawings of the Thirties and Forties in the National Gallery of Victoria (exh. cat.), by B. Whitelaw, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1980, p. 8.

Kirsty M. Grant