George BALDESSIN

Italian 1939–78
emigrated to Australia 1949

From his first exhibition at the age of 26 [Baldessin’s] art possessed a singular visual intelligence, both stylistically and iconographically eloquent and assured.1

George Baldessin, one of the most important artists of his generation, had an impact on Melbourne art that continued long after his tragically early death. Baldessin originally studied painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before turning to printmaking and sculpture, which became his primary media. Under the tutelage of Roy Bisley and then Tate Adams, RMIT’s print workshop focused primarily on etching, the medium in which Baldessin was to excel. The workshop was regularly opened to established printmakers; Fred Williams, in particular, was a great influence on Baldessin and his development of an experimental approach to intaglio printmaking. Following study in London and Milan, Baldessin settled in Melbourne.

Between 1968 and 1969 Baldessin produced a group of etched and aquatinted prints of women in striped garments. These works were, in part, inspired by a brief trip to Japan in 1966, which consolidated the artist’s long-held interest in Japanese art. While these prints continue his representation of the female form, which appeared throughout his oeuvre in many guises, the influence of the popular colour woodblock portraits of courtesans, in particular those in the half-length format by Kitagawa Utamaro, is apparent.

Less disquieting and sexually explicit than much of Baldessin’s work, Personage with striped dress II, 1968, has a gentle eroticism. The light falls upon the woman’s bared chest and the sweeping line of her neck, the opened kimono and its multi-tonal stripes tantalisingly exposing a hint of her breast. While in Utamaro’s prints the eyes are politely averted, here, although her face is in shadow, she stares directly, impersonally, at the viewer.

1 E. Cross, ‘George Baldessin 1939–1978’ in George Baldessin Estate Prints 1963–1978, ed. J. Kolenberg, Melbourne, 1997, p. 9.

Alisa Bunbury