Ralph BALSON

English 1890–1964
worked in Australia 1913–64

By day Ralph Balson worked as a house painter, yet he is known as one of Australia’s first purely abstract painters. Balson was one of the small group of Sydney artists who, in 1932, exhibited under the name Progressive. He was painting at weekends at the Crowley Fizelle School. There Grace Crowley and Rah Fizelle introduced dynamic compositional techniques of Synthetic Cubism taught in France by artists who devised formulas for using this style, although by the 1920s it had become intellectually weak and conventional. Grace Crowley had learnt this theoretical approach when she studied in Paris and at summer schools in France under the two theoreticians, Albert Gleizes and André Lhote. This was strengthened by letters Anne Dangar, the expatriate Australian artist, sent from the Gleizes artists’ colony at Moly-Sabata. Balson took and developed these into his own style.

As Anne Dangar wrote from France, apropos of Gleizes’ Cubist theories, ‘The surface is our fundamental truth and is two-dimensional, we ought as much as possible to eliminate all three dimensional effect which break the flatness of the surface’.1 Balson painted increasingly cubistic figurative paintings in the 1930s. He read Mondrian’s writings on art, including his essay ‘Plastic art and pure plastic art’, available in English translation from 1937. Frank and Margel Hinder, arriving from America, brought with them Jay Hambridge’s book on the theory of dynamic symmetry found in mathematics, in the spiral found in geometry and in nature, in shells and flowers. Behind Balson’s art is the anthroposophical idea of conveying visually the unity of all beliefs in one. Looking at this painting, the planar geometric forms are suspended in the cubist space within the composition. However simple it looks, and the colours are dark and quiet to chalky pastels, the composition is vertiginous, rotating around a centre intersection, in harmony with dynamic symmetry. The red rectangle, centre right, is bright and clear in colour, around which all other forms in the painting move.

1 Grace Crowley papers, 1935, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

Jennifer Phipps