Thea PROCTOR

Australian 1879–1966
worked in England 1914–21

Her presence evoked an epoch already vanished by the First World War. Yet to Sydney of the early twenties, stagnant and isolated, she was a crusader for new ideas in art.1

Thea Proctor was a major figure in the Australian art world of the 1920s, actively promoting modernism in the arts and everyday life through her own watercolours, drawings and prints, her ideas about art and design, which were communicated via popular and widely-read publications such as The Home, and her teaching.

Proctor’s printmaking occurred in two phases: the production of lithographs between 1915 and 1921, and that of woodcuts and linocuts between 1925 and 1938. Proctor studied lithography part-time at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London from 1915 and, after her return to Australia in the early twenties, played an important role in introducing local artists to the technical requirements and creative possibilities of the medium, through practical demonstrations and exhibitions of Australian and British lithographs. Her first woodcuts were made using blocks supplied by Margaret Preston and, in their graphic simplicity and boldness of design, signalled a radical change of direction from the careful drawing of her lithographs.

While Proctor’s relief prints reveal an emphasis on colour, design and the decorative principles of modernism, their subject is never reduced to abstract form. They are also rarely overtly modern in their imagery and instead, frequently depict romanticised scenes of a bygone era. Women with fans is something of an exception to this rule, depicting two elegantly dressed women against a lively backdrop of boats on a bay in Sydney Harbour, surrounded by modern, high-rise apartment buildings. Women with fans was issued in black and white, without the vivid hand-applied colour of many of Proctor’s relief prints, a feature which serves to amplify the graphic effect of its contrasting patterns and linear forms.

1 D. Dundas, ‘Thea Proctor—An appreciation by Dorothy Dundas’, Art and Australia, Sydney, March 1967, p. 266; quoted in J. Minchin & R. Butler, Thea Proctor—The Prints, Sydney, 1980, p. 6.

Kirsty M. Grant