Intersecting lines: the constructive paintings of Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson

The story of Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson’s creative partnership is one of profound artistic exchange, and their dynamic collaboration spanning three decades set the scene for the development of abstraction in Australia. The artistic duo’s richb legacy was celebrated in the NGV’s 2024 exhibition Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson. In preparation for display, the NGV’s own holdings of Crowley and Balson paintings underwent a campaign of conservation treatment and reframing, with many works receiving their first substantial interventions since entering the collection.

Among the works prepared for display was Crowley’s semi-abstract Portrait, 1939, which was acquired in 1981 as an bequest of the artist. Portrait still retained its original backing board, which had been painted grey and prominently inscribed with the words ‘Crowley’ and ‘storage’. Closer inspection revealed the word ‘Balson’ mysteriously inscribed in pencil on the back of the frame.

Further scrutiny of the backing board revealed a distinct texture – including ridges and furrows in the grey paint – sparking the realisation that the board was in fact an overpainted composition. The underlying painting was captured using raking light photography, which revealed geometric motifs consistent with Balson’s constructive paintings from the early 1940s, in particular those included in his 1941 solo exhibition at Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Galleries in Sydney. As Crowley and Balson often painted on both sides of their supports, this raised the thrilling prospect of finding another composition on the inward-facing side.

Astonishingly, the subsequent liberation of the backing board from the frame revealed a previously unknown geometric abstract by Balson, which had remained concealed until its fortuitous retrieval more than forty years after entering the NGV Collection. Like the grey painted side, the newly discovered work contained motifs typical of one of Balson’s constructive paintings, yet this example was fully intact and almost certainly intended for display. Significantly, as the unearthed Balson was a purely abstract work, it represented a later stage in their artistic evolution compared to Crowley’s semi-abstract Portrait. This posed the seemingly baffling question of how these two works came to be framed together.

A retrospective note from Crowley’s archive is key to unravelling this mystery. Crowley noted that in 1942, when faced with the threat of an attack on Sydney Harbour during the Second World War, the duo moved a group of their works out of Crowley’s George Street studio for safekeeping. Crowley recorded: ‘Balson’s paintings [and] also mine packed in case [and] sent to his home Maroubra where they remain for 20 yrs’.¹ Grace Crowley Papers, Art Gallery of New South Wales Research and Library Archive, Sydney, MS 1980. Presuming that Portrait was sitting in the studio unstretched at the time, this would explain the makeshift way Crowley had fixed the canvas onto the back of the frame. The inward-facing placement of the Balson painting would have offered maximum protection for the paint surface while the two works were in storage.

The Crowley and Balson paintings stored underneath Balson’s family home were retrieved in the wake of his death in 1964. By this stage, the works had been in Maroubra for over twenty years, making it highly likely that the concealed Balson painting had been forgotten over time. The unification of the two works within a single frame is emblematic of Crowley and Balson’s enduring collaboration, underscoring their intimate sharing of materials as well as their rapid progression from figuration to pure abstraction.

How Balson, a working-class house painter by trade, partnered with Crowley, an affluent, highly educated artist trained in Europe, to forge a new tradition of abstraction in Australia remains one of the great enigmas of Australian art history. Their unique collaboration is a source of ongoing fascination for art historians and curators.² Seminal texts on Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson include Bruce Adams, Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1989; Elena Taylor, Grace Crowley: Being Modern, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006; and Dianne Ottley, Grace Crowley’s Contribution to Australian Modernism and Geometric Abstraction, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2010. Crowley herself complicated the narrative by consistently downplaying her own contribution to the partnership while undertaking a determined campaign to secure Balson’s legacy following his passing.

In 1966, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) mounted Balson, Crowley, Fizelle, Hinder. This recognition from a major institution brought Crowley’s work into the public eye, and she was further acknowledged with retrospectives by the AGNSW in 1975 and a touring exhibition by the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) commencing in 2006. The NGA’s retrospective solidified Crowley and Balson’s transition into complete abstraction as a parallel move – a process of mutual collaboration. Balson has been recognised with one major retrospective to date, held at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 1989.

With over eighty paintings and works on paper included in Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson, the discovery of the previously unknown Balson painting served as the ideal launching point for an in-depth interdisciplinary study of the artists’ intersecting practices. Complementing the exhibition, this research included technical examination on a selection of Crowley and Balson paintings using advanced scientific methods.³ Detailed analysis was undertaken on ten paintings in the NGV Collection and four paintings from the Art Gallery of Ballarat Collection using a variety of in-house analytical techniques, including X-ray fluorescence, X-radiography, infrared photography, raking light photography, Fourier Transform Infrared Reflectography and microscopic examination. In addition, infrared photography was undertaken on five privately owned paintings. Visual examination was undertaken on many of the works included in the exhibition while on display. This enabled the charting of technical and stylistic developments in the artists’ work from the 1930s through to the 1950s, a period in which Crowley and Balson made some of their most experimental and innovative works.

An unlikely duo
Crowley and Balson were both born in 1890, but their upbringings were vastly different. Crowley came from a wealthy grazier family in regional New South Wales. She attended boarding school at the Methodist Ladies College in Burwood in 1905 and, while in Sydney, enrolled one evening a week at the Julian Ashton Art School. Crowley commenced full time at the art school from 1915, before taking up a teaching position there three years later.

Like many determined female artists of her generation, Crowley bravely challenged prevailing social expectations about the primacy of marriage and family life to pursue an adventurous and influential career as an artist. In 1926, Crowley and Anne Dangar, who had met through art school, travelled to Europe to further their academic pursuits. Following a visit to Paul Cézanne’s studio, they made their way to Paris where Crowley studied under celebrated Cubist artists André Lhote and, later, Albert Gleizes. It was during this European sojourn that Crowley became one of the first Australian artists to embrace Cubism. This contrast between Crowley’s privileged upbringing and her groundbreaking artistic explorations in Europe highlights the unique trajectory of her career, setting the stage for her later collaboration with the working-class painter Balson.

Situated in Montparnasse, the Académie André Lhote was within walking distance of Dangar and Crowley’s apartment in Montrouge. Lhote had joined the Section d’Or group in 1912, and his teaching was based on the principle of planning compositions by reducing form into simplified shapes. Crowley later recollected: ‘For the first time I heard about dynamic symmetry and the section d’or – that it was necessary to make a PLAN for a painting of many figures as an architect does for a building and THEN construct your personages upon it’.⁴ Grace Crowley Papers, Art Gallery of New South Wales Research and Library Archive, Sydney, MS 1980.

Shortly before Crowley’s return to Australia in 1929, she participated in a small number of private classes with Gleizes, whose own Cubist style was more highly abstracted than Lhote’s.⁵ibid. Crowley details that she was first introduced to Gleizes’ practice in a letter from Anne Dangar in 1929. It was through these sessions that Crowley produced some of her first geometric abstract studies. While their time together was brief, Gleizes’ teaching had an ongoing impact on Crowley’s practice and contributed to her later move into pure abstraction. Crowley continued to access his theories via her correspondence with Dangar, who in 1930 moved to Juliette Roche and Gleizes’ artist community, Moly-Sabata, in Sablons in the south of France.

In contrast, Balson was raised in Dorset, England, and both his father and grandfather were bakers. When he was thirteen years old, he was apprenticed to a plumber and house painter. He moved to Sydney in 1913 with his wife, Emelie Kathleen (nee Austin), and commenced work as a house painter. Primarily a self-taught artist, Balson enrolled in evening classes at the Sydney Art School in the early 1920s, where Crowley was one of his teachers. The pair were reacquainted following Crowley’s return to Sydney from Europe.

In 1932, Crowley commenced teaching at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre in Sydney, before establishing the Crowley-Fizelle School with fellow artist Rah Fizelle later that year, located at 215A George Street. By this stage, Crowley had mastered the intricate mathematics of the golden section, and at the school she was able to teach the complex abstract principles she had grasped while abroad. The Crowley-Fizelle School emerged as a leading centre for modernism in Australia during the mid 1930s. The interior of the premises had been painted by Balson, who began using the studio on weekends in 1934.

The same year, Frank Hinder returned to Australia from the United States with his wife, American-born artist Margel, and they also joined the Crowley-Fizelle school. While Crowley introduced French Cubist ideologies to the circle, the Hinders brought to the group an alternate set of international abstract influences. Hinder had studied at the New York School of Fine and Applied Art under Emil Bisttram and Howard Giles, whose teaching centred on Jay Hambidge’s theories of dynamic symmetry and the golden section, and which paralleled Crowley’s own knowledge gained through her studies in France.

Crowley said of her and Fizelle’s approach to teaching that they were ‘united in one belief, the constructive approach to painting, and this insistence on the abstract elements in building a design was the keynote of teaching of both Lhote and Gleizes’.⁶ Crowley quoted in Renee Free’s exhibition catalogue, Balson, Crowley, Fizelle, Hinder, AGNSW, Sydney, 1966. Following the closure of the school in 1937, Crowley invited Balson to paint at her studio apartment at 227 George Street. Although Hinder initially joined them for some of their painting sessions, Crowley and Balson were soon painting exclusively together.⁷ Grace Crowley Papers, Crowley’s handwritten biographical notes.

Throughout this intensely experimental phase, Crowley and Balson became closer in painting style and direction, and the first indications of a shared practice began to emerge. During this period, Crowley signed Balson’s works for him, inscribing his name in her own distinctive script.⁸ William Balson, son of Ralph Balson, in conversation with Elena Taylor, 12 Apr. 2006. Crowley followed a meticulous process for both her own and Balson’s signatures, locating its position in pencil, sometimes to the extent of drawing in each letter before applying the paint layers. This act speaks to the intimate, almost symbiotic nature of their artistic collaboration, which would be manifested in many other aspects of their practice.

Gathering forces
On 17 August 1939, Exhibition 1, the inaugural display of semi-abstract painting and sculpture in Australia, opened at David Jones Gallery in Sydney, just two weeks before the declaration of Australia’s involvement in the Second World War.⁹ Crowley was represented by five paintings, while Balson was represented by seven. Hinder was represented by six works, with his post-Cubist painting Design the closest inclusion in Exhibition 1 to pure abstraction. Launched by politician and judge H. V. Evatt, Exhibition 1 featured numerous members of the Crowley-Fizelle circle, including Balson, Crowley, Fizelle, Frank and Margel Hinder, Eleanor Lange, Frank Medworth and Gerald Lewers. The Exhibition 1 concept was initiated by Lange, a German artist and teacher who had emigrated to Australia in 1930, with group planning meetings commencing at 227 George Street in 1938.¹⁰ Grace Crowley Papers, Crowley’s handwritten notes, c. 1975.

In the lead-up to the exhibition, Crowley and Balson produced a group of highly experimental semi-abstract paintings. While these works maintained a degree of continuity with Lhote’s Cubist teaching, tonal shading and depth was eliminated in favour of a flattened, artificial space composed of facets of unmodulated colour. Although the figure remained the basis of Crowley and Balson’s compositions, the abstract elements of line, shape, colour and pattern dominated, and there was no longer a hierarchy between the figure and background. Of their Exhibition 1 works, Balson’s Three sisters came the closest to pure abstraction in its assimilation of the figure to the point where it is barely recognisable.

Coinciding with this, both artists made the bold move to a high-key palette typified by Crowley’s Portrait, 1938, comprising unmixed colour applied straight from the tube along with luminous pastel-like tints. For Crowley, this marked a significant departure from the reliance on earth colours and more restrained notes of colour as seen in her Cubist paintings. Like their other works from this period, Portrait is technically daring. Crowley laid the paint on swiftly and generously, using a combination of brushes and palette knives to create a richly textured surface composed of rhythmic staccato daubs and delicate overlaid scumbles, whereby undiluted paint is dragged across the surface so that it just catches the peaks of the canvas weave.

Crowley and Balson also began to take a more experimental approach to their painting supports, often forgoing a preparatory ground layer to explore the inherent textural qualities of their chosen substrates. For instance, Crowley’s Portrait was completed on the back of an abandoned painting on canvas, possibly started while she was in Europe. In this instance, Crowley flipped the canvas over and applied undiluted paint directly onto the unprimed canvas. The many areas of exposed canvas between the brushstrokes reinforces the materiality of the work and its emphatic flatness. Exhibition 1 also marking the beginning of Crowley and Balson’s interest in non–artist grade and industrial painting supports. Balson’s Girl in pink, 1937 (AGNSW), was painted sparsely onto unprimed cardboard, so that the support acts as a common compositional element, synthesising figure with background.

The stylistic and technical developments seen in Crowley and Balson’s Exhibition 1 paintings were precipitated by multiple factors. For Crowley, these works represented the distillation of ideas learned over many years of study in France. While Lhote himself never practised pure abstraction, he remained a critical influence on Crowley’s creative output. A fundamental part of Lhote’s training was to encourage students to look for the abstract ‘skeleton’ of shapes, directions, colours and tones underlying most art.¹¹ Grace Crowley Archive, page 19 of handwritten lecture notes from 1937. Crowley used Lhote’s principles in her own teaching, stating, ‘Every consideration relating to the construction of a picture must in its initial shapes be entirely abstract’. Gleizes’ own highly abstracted approach to Cubism, which emphasised the importance of rhythm and movement, colour and pattern, had a more direct impact on Crowley’s transition into pure abstraction, a progression that was mirrored in Balson’s practice.

This pivotal moment in Crowley and Balson’s stylistic evolution was further hastened by the broader cultural forces and artistic developments that were unfolding on the global stage in the 1930s. While Constructivism began as a modern art movement in Soviet Russia following the 1917 revolution, it quickly moved through Europe and further still across the globe. By the late 1930s, the style was commonly referred to as constructive or non-objective painting. The seminal text on international constructive painting, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, was published in London in 1937 and edited by artists Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo and architect Leslie Martin, with Barbara Hepworth as publication designer. Although no local artists featured in the publication, it was available in Australia from around 1938.¹² For further reading on Constructivism in Australia, refer to Sue Cramer and Lesley Harding’s Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism in Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2017. Shortly afterwards, Crowley, Balson and Hinder introduced the term ‘constructive’, or variations of it, into their own titles.

The articles in Circle advocated for a new mode of art, merging form and content that had arisen from the Cubist movement. Constructive painting was seen as the ultimate expression of its time, with the potential to be fully integrated into daily life and permeate a wide range of creative disciplines. Notably, Circle championed an egalitarian spirit underscored by the prominent role of women artists in the movement, with Hepworth stating: ‘The language of colour and form is universal and not one for a special class (though this may have been in the past) – it is a thought which gives the same life, the same expansion, the same universal freedom to everyone’.¹³ Barbara Hepworth, ‘Sculpture’, in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, J. L. Martin, Ben Nicholson & N. Gabo (eds), Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1937, p. 116. This progressive, inclusive vision aligned with Crowley and Balson’s own shared commitment to pushing the boundaries of painting in Australia.

In 1938, Hinder received from friends in the United States a copy of the second enlarged edition of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings, which had been published the year earlier.¹⁴ Lesley Harding, ‘Part one: 1920–1970’, in Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art, p. 40 Guggenheim’s collection formed the basis of the Museum of Non-Objective Paintings, which opened in New York in 1939 with its inaugural exhibition, Art of Tomorrow. Coincidentally, the opening of the museum – the forerunner of what is known today as the Guggenheim – occurred the same year as Exhibition 1. The publication contained several colour plates, and it is likely that the red circular motif in Rudolf Bauer’s Red circle no. 43, illustrated on the cover, served as inspiration for the similar motif seen in the newly discovered (Constructive painting) by Balson.

The Exhibition 1 project was widely publicised as being the first in a series of exhibitions, with the stated objective of ‘helping the layman to understand the different phases of modern art’.¹⁵ ‘Modern art exhibits’, Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 12 Aug. 1939, p. 2. Had the project not been thwarted by the onset of war, the next logical step was to push semi-abstraction squarely into the realm of pure abstraction. Although purely abstract works had been exhibited, an entire show dedicated to the style was, at this point, unprecedented in Australia.

Pure abstraction
In July 1941, just shy of his fifty-first birthday, Balson mounted a solo show at Anthony Hordern’s Fine Art Gallery in Sydney, which was to be the first exhibition in Australia to exclusively comprise abstract paintings. The exhibition included a series of twenty-one sophisticated paintings featuring flattened geometric motifs, and nearly half of the works included the novel use of metallic paint alongside conventional oil paint. Referred to as his constructive paintings, these works emphasised dynamic compositional elements such as circles, diagonals and oblique shapes, and embodied a sense of exuberant modernity at odds with the prevailing mood of wartime uncertainty.  Although Balson’s solo show was relatively overlooked at the time, it is now recognised as a watershed moment in Australian art history.

While Crowley did not exhibit alongside Balson at Anthony Hordern’s, in a retrospective note she recalled that they were both pursuing pure abstraction by 1940.¹⁶ Grace Crowley Papers, handwritten notes, c. 1975. In 1942, she exhibited Construction in the Society of Artists annual exhibition in Sydney, alongside Balson’s paintings Construction in green, 1942, and The construction – transparent planes, 1942. While the whereabouts of Crowley’s work are now unknown, Balson’s extant works indicate that the duo made a critical breakthrough at this time. Until this point, Balson’s geometric shapes were composed of solid colour; however, his 1942 works saw the introduction of the illusion of transparency, created through mixtures of opaque paint, giving the appearance that the shapes were translucent and light-filtering like panes of glass.

In 1944, Crowley and Balson participated in a group show at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. Crowley exhibited six works titled Linear rhythm, with three priced at 12 guineas and three at 15 guineas, likely indicating that the works varied in scale. As with Crowley’s Construction, (1942), the location of the six Linear rhythm paintings remains unconfirmed. This notable absence of what was clearly a major and ambitious series for Crowley comprises part of a broader gap in signed and dated examples of her work between 1940 and 1946.

Crowley was not a prolific artist. Several factors contributed to this, including her responsibility, as an unmarried daughter, to care for her mother when it became difficult to find a nurse during the war. Additionally, throughout the 1930s, Crowley was focused on her teaching at the Crowley-Fizelle Art School, producing mainly works on paper during this period. Crowley’s already small output was further diminished when she destroyed many of her paintings while closing her studio in 1971 – driven by an artistic temperament that was highly self-critical. Crowley stated: ‘When I left George Street I bashed everything to pieces that I didn’t like … What’s the good of keeping anything you don’t like? Things you’re doubtful about yourself? After you’re dead someone will pick something out of a corner’.¹⁷ Lenore Nicklin, ‘Grace Crowley looks back at a lifetime of art’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 May 1975, p. 11.

Historical circumstances also contributed to the limited number of surviving works by Crowley. Specifically, the materials shortage imposed by the Second World War played a significant role. For both artists, the shift to pure abstraction coincided with a new insistence on using exclusively smooth, rigid supports, evident in Balson’s selection of cardboard supports for all the works included in his 1941 exhibition. As the war continued into 1942, reductions in imports and local production began to have an impact, with many artists’ substrates and industrial building boards becoming increasingly difficult to procure. While hardboard (generically known as masonite) would later become Crowley and Balson’s favoured support material, during the war, the Australian Masonite Factory, established in the town of Raymond Terrace near Newcastle in 1938, geared its operations towards meeting the considerable demand for building materials for the army and air force. This left virtually no supply for civilian purposes, and plywood was equally scarce for similar reasons.¹⁸ Masonite: Today and Tomorrow, Masonite Corporation, Aust Ltd, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, 1943, p. 7. See also Plywood: Its Preparation, Properties and Uses, The Australian Plywood Board and the Plywood Distributors’ Associations of New South Wales, South Australia and West Australia, c. 1947, p. 30. Considering these factors, Crowley and Balson’s intensive use of cardboard supports during these years was largely driven by necessity.

As the hardships of the war continued, these rudimentary sheets of cardboard became a precious commodity, creating an imperative to utilise every available painting surface to maintain creative momentum when supplies were limited. In practice, this saw Crowley and Balson painting over the top of earlier compositions, flipping supports to start a second composition on the other side, or employing a combination of both strategies. This sacrifice and repurposing of earlier compositions has resulted in an extraordinary corpus of double-sided paintings. Often, the rejected non-display side was painted out with grey or white paint; however, it is likely that some of these compositions were finished to an exhibitable standard.¹⁹Constructive painting, 1948 (NGV Collection), has a painted-out composition on the reverse side. Analysis has revealed that the underlying painting bears a varnish layer. This suggests that it was considered finished and was possibly even exhibited. Over time, instances of Crowley and Balson paintings on opposing sides of a single support have also been discovered, reflecting the intertwined nature of their respective studio practices.

Crowley’s ‘lost’ paintings
In recent years, a group of highly important purely abstract paintings by Crowley completed between 1940 and 1946 have come to light, three examples of which were exhibited for the first time in Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson. These momentous discoveries bridge the substantial gap in Crowley’s oeuvre during this period. In the lead-up to the exhibition, a painting found on the verso of Balson’s Constructivist, 1946 (Art Gallery of Ballarat), was identified as an earlier work by Crowley, Untitled, c. 1945. Similarly, another Crowley, (Linear rhythm), c. 1943, was uncovered on the verso of Balson’s Constructive painting, 1946 (Andrew Collection, Melbourne). Freestanding plinths were designed for the exhibition, allowing the audience to walk around and view both the Balson works and the discovered Crowley paintings. The third Crowley painting making an exhibition debut was (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons), c. 1941 (Private collection, Sydney).

Crowley’s (Linear rhythm) and (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons) are united by the inclusion of a ribbon motif superimposed on a loose geometric framework. These dynamic lines create a sense of rhythm, drawing the viewer’s eye across and around the picture plane. Both works closely relate to Crowley’s Linear Rhythm series exhibited at Macquarie Galleries in 1944, which was described by the contemporary press as ‘free arabesques with calligraphic lines’.²⁰ ‘“Constructive paintings” by our art critic’, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 May 1944, p. 4. The press continued to use similar language when referring to the flowing lines contained in later works by Crowley, such as her Abstract painting, 1947 (NGA), which was also described as being based on an ‘arabesque’ form.²¹ ‘Contemporary art show best of year by our art critic’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 Nov. 1947, p. 14.

(Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons) was painted on the verso of an earlier Cubist composition by Crowley, The gold rush 1951–54, 1938.²² Held in the ANGSW Collection is an unframed, double-sided painting by Crowley that features a goldrush composition on one side, and an early 1940s linear work similar to (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons). However, this example does not feature the use of metallic paint. An unusually patriotic subject for Crowley, this work celebrated the Australian goldrush. A likely scenario is that Crowley recycled the painting due to wartime shortages of materials. Notably, (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons) is the only known work by Crowley to feature the use of metallic paint. With no known instances of Balson using metallic paint after 1942, this connects the Crowley painting to the time of Balson’s solo exhibition at Anthony Hordern’s. This is a major work in Crowley’s oeuvre, demonstrating that the use of metallic paints routinely associated with only Balson’s practice was a feature common to both artists’ work.²³ The metallic paint was in fact an inspired afterthought, applied over the top of an earlier iteration of the composition in which the circles and ribbons were rendered in colour. This raises the question of whether Crowley exhibited this work on more than one occasion.

While the absence of a signature or date by Crowley on these three works makes it impossible to confirm whether (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons), (Linear rhythm) or Untitled were exhibited at either the Society of Artists in 1942 or Macquarie Galleries in 1944, these works provide a rare insight into her activities during this critical period. Of note, Untitled is the only one of the three paintings that contains purely geometric forms without the linear motif. This rationally dates Untitled to a different moment in time, likely in the years immediately prior to the Linear Rhythm series of 1944.²⁴Untitled could potentially be the work ambiguously titled ‘Construction’ that Crowley exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1942, given its intriguing visual parallels with the work Balson exhibited that year, Construction in green. While Balson’s painting is characterised by harder edges, they have a similar turbulent compositional flow, and both feature the white ‘L’ form.

Crowley’s (Linear rhythm) and the purely geometric Untitled reflect the highly experimental approaches to composition that Crowley and Balson had begun to pursue in tandem, as observed by members of the Crowley-Fizelle circle. Mary Alice Evatt, a student at the Crowley-Fizelle school who went on to become a lifelong friend of Crowley, recalled: ‘For many years they planned their paintings helped by pieces of coloured paper and even slivers of string on paper’.²⁵Mary Alice Evatt, ‘The Crowley Fizelle Art School’, in The Art Gallery of New South Wales Quarterly, vol 8, no. 1, Oct. 1966, pg. 314–16. Mary Alice and her husband, H. V. Evatt, were major supporters of Crowley’s work. With their indistinct, overlapping forms tilted at unpredictable angles, these three works by Crowley have a distinct collage-like quality consistent with their method of conception. Other constructive artists working in Europe and America used similar compositional techniques as a cornerstone of their practice. For instance, Piet Mondrian worked out his Neoplastic compositions by arranging strips of paper on top of stretched canvas.²⁶ Pia Gottschaller, ‘From ruler to tape: stops and starts in the history of painted abstraction’, Getty Research Journal, no. 10, 2018, p. 6. Matisse developed the idea of moving around paper cutouts coloured with gouache to plan his large-scale mural The dance, 1932–33, for the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and was pursuing collage as an autonomous art form by around 1946.²⁷Gilles Neret, Matisse, Taschen, Cologne, 1996, p. 147.

These relatively free and intuitive modes of planning compositions represent a turning point from the more structured modes of composition Crowley had learned from her Cubist teachers, including Lhote’s emphasis on using the geometry of the golden mean to create rhythmic compositional flow, and Gleizes’ theory of rotation and translation whereby shapes pivot around a fixed axis. In particular, the Linear Rhythm series represented an important breakthrough to a new mode of imparting rhythm through the device of a dominant organic line with a lyrical, flowing trajectory. This deviated from Balson’s more reductive form of constructive painting based on fundamental rectilinear shapes referencing the built form.

Crowley and Balson’s pursuit of these distinct yet parallel directions was likely framed by their identification with broader international trends in constructive painting, including the ‘two main traditions of abstract art’ identified in Alfred Barr’s catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art held in New York in 1936. While Balson’s work tended towards the ‘intellectual, structural, architectonic, rectilinear and classical’ stream typified by Mondrian, whose work was introduced to Balson by Frank Hinder, Crowley’s exploration of the ribboned form led her to a highly idiosyncratic style of constructive painting that incorporated elements of the ‘intuitive, emotional, organic or biomorphic, curvilinear’ reflected in works by Kandinsky and Miro.²⁸ A.H. Barr Jr, Cubism and Abstract Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936, p. 19. Crowley would pursue the ribbon motif into the 1950s, creating variations in tempo and mood through the inclusion of more angular turns and zigzags.

The creative process
Balson’s full-time work as a house painter left him only the weekends to dedicate to his artistic painting practice, which brought a sense of urgency to his shared time in the studio with Crowley. Following Balson’s death, Crowley recounted his words: ‘I look forward all the week to this one morning when I am free to paint. I have trained myself to visualise and record what I see quickly, for no sooner has the moment arrived than it is gone’.²⁹ Hazel de Berg, ‘Interview with Grace Crowley’, tape recording, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 1966. With their shift to a purely abstract style, Crowley and Balson continued to push the boundaries of conventional studio practice in pursuit of more direct painting techniques that honoured the immediacy and momentum of their shared vision.

It is notable that the cardboard supports used in Balson’s 1941 exhibition lacked any consistency in size, with each having unique dimensions. Additionally, examination of extant works has revealed irregular, often jagged edges, with traces of registration lines inscribed in pencil. This suggests that the supports were cut to size in the studio, possibly from general-purpose stationers’ cardboard that would normally find use in household and decorative crafts. By this stage, Balson was routinely choosing to forego a preparatory ground layer in favour of painting directly onto the cardboard support, which gave these works an improvised, industrial ethos. Based on (Abstract painting with gold and silver ribbons), Crowley also adopted this unconventional approach for a period, which was an especially rebellious act considering her comprehensive schooling in established painting conventions.

Prior to painting, Crowley and Balson would draw their designs onto their supports, typically in graphite pencil, although Crowley also used dilute brown paint on occasion. While normally hidden beneath the paint layers, underdrawings in carbon-based media can often be successfully imaged using infrared reflectography.³⁰Infrared reflectographs were captured by the NGV’s Photographic Services team using an Apollo infrared camera, manufactured by Opus Instruments. As illustrated below in the infrared reflectographs of Crowley’s (Linear rhythm) and Balson’s Painting no. 14, 1941, the drawings have a level of precision that can only be achieved with compasses and a straight edge. Notably, surplus lines and erasures can be seen running between and beyond forms, indicating that rather than making a precise transfer of a complete preliminary drawing, Crowley and Balson both worked out their constructive compositions in a dynamic way, directly onto the support. This approach likely came naturally to Balson, who Crowley recalled had never made a sketch for a painting.³¹ De Berg. However, for Crowley, it represented a fundamental departure from the laborious preparatory drawings of her Cubist period.³²Interestingly no evidence was found of a network of ruled diagonal lines characteristic of the golden section schematic, although this does not mean that it no longer influenced their work. Both artists, and particularly Crowley, were likely well versed enough in the golden section to be able to visualise the network of diagonal lines in their heads.

As Crowley and Balson embraced a purely abstract style, they continued to exploit the inherent textural properties of artist’s oil paint, with many of the works in Balson’s 1941 exhibition containing surprisingly animated and expressive brushwork.³³ The dominant paint media is deemed to be oil paint based on the distinctive physical properties of the paint, along with the presence of high-quality pigments, which were not typically used in commercial house paints (see Paula Dredge, ‘Sidney Nolan and paint: a study of an artist’s use of commercial, ready-made paints in Australia 1938–1953’, [PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2023], p. 158). Balson’s paint media is a topic worthy of further investigation. The artist archives of the Art Gallery of New South Wales contain vials of coloured powder pigments that once belonged to the artist, which raises the question of whether Balson modified commercial oil paints, or perhaps even made some of his own paints. A notable exception was their brief experimentation with metallic paint, which saw both artists incorporate self-levelling non–artist grade media, possibly informed by Balson’s commercial work. Metallic paint was popular in household and decorative applications, and during this period was available for purchase ready-mixed and in specialised kits comprising separate powder and binder. Nitrocellulose binder has been detected in Balson’s metallic paints, along with various metals including brass, copper, aluminium and bismuth, indicating a sophisticated use of high-quality commercial products coupled with additional metal powders and pigments.³⁴ Louise Allen et al., ‘The use and characterisation of aluminium-based metallic paints in Australian paintings of the first half of the twentieth century’, in Smithsonian Contributions to Museum Conservation, pp. 137–41. Balson typically applied the metallic paint directly to the unprimed cardboard, the rough surface of which tempers its inherent flatness and reflectivity, which might otherwise prove jarring against the more painterly passages rendered in oil.

Crowley and Balson consistently chose to execute their purely abstract paintings freehand, despite the invention of pressure-sensitive adhesive tape in the 1930s. While masking tape would later facilitate the precise edges that defined hard-edge painting of the 1950s and 1960s, in the early decades of the twentieth century it had powerful connotations of being allied with the mechanical, which was at odds with the emphatically handmade quality of Crowley and Balson’s work.³⁵ Gottschaller, p. 150. Tape would have also resulted in unwanted delays in the painting process, due to the need for drying time between layers. Instead, both artists used the sides and tip of a flat-headed brush to form straight edges. Balson’s earliest constructive paintings are often characterised by narrow reserves separating each colour. However, as time progressed, Balson and Crowley both became increasingly adept at seamlessly joining colour regions without any margins.

Crowley was in awe of Balson’s confident and instinctive working method, recalling that his ‘house painting job accustomed him to handle large areas of paint with dexterity and ease’.³⁶ De Berg. In fact, both artists worked with relative speed and fluidity, as evidenced by the subtle mingling of colours commonly observable under the stereomicroscope at the edges of shapes, where wet paint has connected with wet paint. After the paint had dried, Crowley and Balson would, on occasion, adjust the contours of shapes or even overpaint entire colour regions in a different colour. This idiosyncratic practice, mirrored in the work of both artists, suggests they reviewed their paintings together and critiqued one another’s compositions.

With their striking colouristic synergy, Crowley’s Portrait and Balson’s (Constructive painting) illustrate the continuity between the modern palette used in both their semi-abstracts and purely abstract paintings. Elemental analysis has confirmed the use of modern pigments of high chromatic purity in both paintings, including Prussian blue, chrome-based yellows, iron oxide browns, and a proprietary mixture of chrome yellow and Prussian blue known as chrome green. Portrait additionally contains ultramarine (a deep blue), while (Constructive painting) contains one of the many organic red pigments introduced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on the analysis of a total of five Crowley and five Balson paintings completed between 1939 and 1954, the combined pigment data points to a common pool of pigments. With only a few exceptions, all pigments detected have been documented in the work of both artists, reflecting the alignment of their practice to the extent that they were likely sharing paint tubes.³⁷Pigment analysis was undertaken using non-destructive X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis using a Bruker Tracer III-V Portable XRF with rhodium detector. Where necessary, this was supplemented with Fourier Transform Infrared Reflectography (FTIR) analysis using a Perkin Elmer Spectrum 400 with UATR sampling accessory (diamond/ZnSe). Spectra were the sum of 8 scans at a resolution of 4cm-1 650 – 4000 cm-1.

As they embraced a purely abstract style, Crowley and Balson used colour in increasingly nuanced and sophisticated ways, drawing on the knowledge Crowley had grained in France. Although Lhote’s teaching focused on representative painting, his fundamental precepts about colour had an ongoing influence on Crowley, and by extension Balson. In his Treatise on Landscape Painting, published in 1939, Lhote describes strategies for achieving harmony within a composition, notably the restrained use of colour and the repetition of similar hues in the foreground and background. Lhote also argues for the necessity of neutrals such as grey as a means of ‘isolating the pure tones and opposing themselves to any formidable interferences’.³⁸ André Lhote, Treatise on Landscape Painting, trans. W. J. Strachan, A. Zwemmer Limited, London, 1950 [1939], p. 24 To animate the composition, harmony was to be accompanied by an element of discord, achieved by placing a ‘violent colour’ at the greatest point of interest.³⁹ ibid., p. 8.

The works from Balson’s 1941 exhibition exemplify Lhote’s principles in their use of small areas of pure colour balanced with closely related tints applied to larger areas of the compositions. Balson often incorporated neutral hues such as grey and brown to surround or punctuate shapes rendered in vibrant colour, which act as a compositional anchor, creating a sense of poise and spaciousness in the composition. Although these paintings are based on simple solid shapes, there is a dynamic tension between the flat picture plane and implied space, as if the planes are advancing and receding, created through subtle variations in colour temperature and tone.

Based on the principle that cool colours appear to recede visually while warm colours appear to advance, Crowley and Balson exploited similar pigments with different colour temperatures. For instance, ultramarine provided a warm, purplish blue, while Prussian blue provided a cool, more greenish blue. Chrome yellows, including ‘lemon’ variants based on barium, strontium and zinc, were favoured by both artists, allowing them to achieve a full spectrum of hues, from warm yellow to cool primrose. While organic reds provided a range of cool pinks and magentas, fiery cadmium-based reds were reserved for bold, advancing forms.

As oil paint dries, different pigments yield varying levels of surface gloss depending on their oil-absorbing properties. Crowley and Balson’s preference for a more unified surface, free of local gloss variations, is evidenced by the prevalence of thin varnish layers on their constructive paintings from the early 1940s. Analysis of a selection of varnishes has revealed instances of virtually identical chemical signatures between contemporaneous works by the two artists, indicating that they were likely sharing a common varnish supply.⁴⁰ Varnish samples removed from seven Crowley and Balson paintings in the NGV Collection (ranging from 1941 to 1954) were analysed using Fourier Transform Infrared Reflectography. Five of the varnishes correlated with reference samples for natural resin and beeswax. The varnishes on the remaining two paintings, Crowley’s Painting, 1950, and Balson’s Constructive painting, 1950, closely match one another but have a different formulation to the other five varnishes, possibly natural resin with an oil component.

Postwar developments
In 1947, Albert Gleizes wrote to Crowley, inviting her and Balson to exhibit with him in Paris. Crowley replied, stating they were aware of the very great honour of Gleizes’ invitation; however, a persistent shipping strike prevented them from participating.⁴¹Grace Crowley, letter to Albert Gleizes dated 1947, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, the Centre Pompidou, France. It is unfortunate that this opportunity could not be realised, as both Crowley and Balson were producing some of the most avant-garde paintings in Australia at this time. However, the Australian art world was relatively hostile towards abstraction, and Crowley and Balson’s work received a lukewarm reception. Crowley confided in Gleizes: ‘We find the path of an abstract painter an exceedingly difficult one here in Australia. In fact, Ralph Balson and I are the only two painters I am aware of who think seriously about abstract painting at all.’⁴²ibid. While they all but disconnected from the local art scene, this period represents a major turning point in their output. For Crowley, there is an increase in the number of her surviving works from 1947, perhaps in part due to a boost in confidence following the invitation to exhibit in France.

Coinciding with Crowley’s accelerated practice, Balson began to sign his own paintings with his own distinctive signature. This defining moment in Balson’s practice occurred simultaneously with a major development in his Constructive paintings. Although his compositions still maintained the illusion of transparency, from 1946, Balson no longer included circular or oblique forms. Instead, his works of this period feature a reduction of form towards serene right-angled geometry, more closely aligned with Mondrian’s work. The use of rectilinear forms was to become fundamental to Balson’s work, a keynote of his practice well into the next decade.

It was during the early 1950s, when both Crowley and Balson were in their sixties, that their styles aligned most closely. Crowley’s exploration of rhythmic lines gave way to a new focus, with her shifting to predominantly geometric abstracts compositions. The rectilinear forms characteristic of Balson’s Constructive paintings from 1946 developed further still, with the introduction of asymmetrical angles within his compositions, akin to the more relaxed collage-like geometric forms Crowley had been employing since the early 1940s. This convergence of Balson and Crowley’s formal priorities brought the two artists momentarily into tandem.

From a technical perspective, the late 1940s to early 1950s marked a distinct turning point in Crowley and Balson’s studio practice. The conclusion of the Second World War in September 1945 saw the gradual resumption of reliable artist supplies, although shortages of some materials, including paints and brushes, persisted for a few years.⁴³ Newspaper articles of the time include: ‘Adelaide artists have no paints’, News, Adelaide, 26 Apr. 1947, p. 2; and ‘Canberra artists make brushes from human hair’, Canberra Times, 25 Oct. 1946, p. 3. The masonite plant in Newcastle had met the surge in demand related to defence needs and was able to quickly pivot to meet the appetite for modern building materials arising from immigration in the postwar period. The company’s doubling of infrastructure and machinery by 1947 is consistent with the appearance of hardboard as support material in Crowley and Balson’s work around the same year.⁴⁴ ‘Masonite profits smaller,’ Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 3 Sep. 1947, p. 7. Roughly coinciding with the transition to hardboard, both artists took a more consistent approach to preparatory layers, typically opting to apply a reflective white ground layer which brought enhanced luminosity to their colour palette. Parallel to this, Crowley and Balson began to explore a wider range of pigments, coinciding with the resumption of reliable paint supplies by the turn of the decade.

Crowley’s Painting, 1952, and Balson’s Painting, 1954, both held in the NGV Collection, exemplify the duo’s stylistic convergence, as well as their elaborate palette. Multiple blues appear in both works, with Crowley incorporating ultramarine and Prussian blue, and Balson Prussian blue and cobalt blue. In addition, both artists have employed two true green pigments, chrome-based viridian and copper- and arsenic-based emerald green, with Balson incorporating a single note of a third moss-like green, likely chromium oxide. A striking feature of Crowley’s colour scheme is the intense, almost fluorescent, magenta hue. Based on the detection of the element bromine, which is rarely found in paintings, this is likely to be the controversial red pigment geranium lake, which was a daring and controversial choice given its known tendency to fade. Balson’s colour scheme evidently took longer to finalise, as evidenced by the overpainting of at least ten areas in an alternative colour compared to Crowley’s two small colour edits.

Despite the adoption of similar motifs, paints and varnishes, there are subtle differences in Crowley and Balson’s technique and paint application, which can be best appreciated in the raking light photographs above. Balson’s brushwork is characterised by meticulous attention to articulating the perpendicular edge, which is defined with a fine brush before blocking the shape in with carefully aligned parallel strokes ending in the flat head of the brush. In contrast, Crowley has used the brush end to form more imperfect stepped edges, creating a pulsating effect along the margins of each colour. Although both works have a prominent surface texture, Crowley’s brushwork is more curvilinear and animated, and at times punctuated with a subtle quiver, as if each paint stroke had its own life force. This is consistent with her ongoing preoccupation with creating highly charged paint surfaces bursting with dynamic movement.

However, there are exceptions to Crowley’s looser style of brushwork, notably her most formal abstract work Painting, 1950. This work is rendered using precisely aligned parallel paint strokes that evoke an austere, serene mood echoing the extreme formalism of the compositional structure. In this work, the placement of each shape was determined using the mathematical formula phi, reflecting Crowley’s renewed interest in the geometry of the golden mean.⁴⁵ Wayne Roberts provides a detailed geometric and mathematical analysis in ‘Appendix B’, in Ottley, Grace Crowley’s Contribution to Australian Modernism and Geometric Abstraction.The straight edges in Painting are delineated with a level of precision and finesse rivalling Balson’s technique, and this approach is echoed in similar formalist works by Crowley such as Painting, 1951 (NGA). If not for the presence of a signature, it may be difficult to determine to differentiate these works visually from Balson’s contemporaneous works.

Beyond constructive painting
Abstraction was to become more broadly accepted by the Australian art world in the 1950s, and in 1953 Balson received a great accolade when two of his paintings were selected for Twelve Australian Artists. Organised by the then NGV director Daryl Lindsay, it was one of the first exhibitions dedicated to contemporary Australian art to tour overseas. However, by this stage, Balson and Crowley were both sixty-three years of age, with Balson soon eligible for the pension. In 1954, Crowley purchased High Hill, a property in Mittagong, New South Wales, and in preparation for Balson’s retirement in 1955, the garage was converted into a studio. From this point, Crowley painted very little, writing, ‘I become expert at digging up weeds but it finishes my painting life’.⁴⁶ Grace Crowley Papers, Crowley’s handwritten notes, c. 1975. Conversely, this was a prolific period for Balson, who was now able to fully dedicate himself to his art.

Balson began to embrace a more expressionist, painterly style of abstraction, which featured elegant shifting areas of dappled colour, created using a complex overlaid network of dabs, stipples and scumbles. Crowley recollected that his ‘inward vison became more urgent and clear and his work loosened up to a more joyous spontaneity and freedom’.⁴⁷ De Berg. Referred to as his Non-objective paintings, these works privileged the role of chance and intuition, extending an idea that Crowley and Balson had first explored through their collage experiments of the early 1940s. While Balson’s hand had always been present in his works, in these works the artist’s gesture and the physicality of the paint assumed a central role. The commencement of this series coincided with Balson’s emerging interest in more immediate fast-drying paint media, such as commercial house paints and synthetic polymer paint, which became widely used by artists in Australia in the late 1950s.

In 1960 and 1961, Balson and Crowley travelled extensively overseas to France, the United Kingdom and the United States; this was the first time Balson had travelled internationally since his move to Australia in 1913. Both artists were inspired by their firsthand experience of international abstract expressionism, including Jackson Pollock’s use of industrial paint media and novel application techniques. While overseas, Crowley and Balson both experimented with semiautomatic pouring techniques, with Crowley subsequently destroying all of her examples.⁴⁸ Nicklin. On their return to Australia, Balson continued to experiment with gloss house paints on hardboard, using the ‘the technique of pouring paint to see, as he expressed it, what paint itself would do’.⁴⁹ De Berg.

While preparing for a second trip overseas in 1964, Balson passed away after contracting pneumonia following cancer surgery. After his death, Crowley promoted Balson’s legacy and oversaw the acquisition of his work by major institutions and regional galleries. Despite Crowley’s significant role in their artistic partnership, she went on to underplay her contribution. The extent of her involvement was further obscured by the large gaps in her oeuvre, and her destruction of many of her own paintings.

Reflections
The newly discovered Crowley paintings showcased in Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson mark an important advancement in the contemporary understanding of Crowley’s oeuvre during the war years. These works illustrate that although the artists followed a corresponding path, Crowley’s stylistic trajectory and priorities throughout the 1940s were somewhat different to that of Balson’s. The overall picture is of two remarkably diverse and experimental bodies of work that reflect their ongoing engagement with international artistic developments. As the duo explored the tradition of constructive painting, their artistic styles constantly oscillated between divergence and intersection.

The close collaboration between Crowley and Balson is embodied in the materiality of each of their paintings. Sharing a common palette and painting supports, the duo developed new techniques for composing, planning and executing their constructive paintings, with the boundaries between their individual practices at times becoming blurred. Crowley and Balson embraced everything modern – the built form, industrial materials, new paint technologies and novel application methods – yet they ultimately resisted adopting a mechanised, mass-produced aesthetic. Instead, they were united by an insistence on honouring a tradition of manual craftsmanship. The resulting tension between structured form and expressive brushwork gives their work a unique presence and vitality.

While the material shortages inflicted by the Second World War and in its aftermath had an impact on Crowley and Balson’s artistic practice, on balance, surprisingly few aesthetic compromises were made. Both artists continued to employ high-quality chromatically pure colours throughout the 1940s, including, on occasion, the most expensive pigments such as cerulean blue and cadmium orange. While the dynamics of how they procured their art materials is unknown, Crowley was unwaveringly generous to her artistic allies, as evidenced by the act of gifting Balson her discarded compositions, her continuing commitment to providing Balson with a studio space, and her ongoing financial support of Anne Dangar, who remained in France throughout the war. It is likely that Crowley’s informal patronage played a crucial role in ensuring that Balson was able to maintain a continuous practice throughout the 1940s.

Ultimately, Crowley and Balson’s partnership was one defined by selfless exchange, as they spurred each other towards new heights of artistic innovation. Their shared vision and thoroughly intertwined studio practice is unique in the history of Australian art. Although the exact nature of their relationship – whether platonic or romantic – is not fully understood, their true legacy is the powerful body of works they produced together. The longevity of their collaboration, ended only by Balson’s passing, undoubtedly relied on a fundamental alignment of artistic temperaments. Central to this was their commitment to continually refine and renew their individual practices and a dogged belief in abstraction in the face of adversity, paired with an irrepressible sense of curiosity. In her 1966 interview with Hazel de Berg, Crowley made an eloquent summation of Balson’s ability to make a complex composition appear effortless – a skill she had also so clearly mastered:

I feel that the inward life pulsating in the vibrant surface of what at first glance seems just one pale sheet of delicate colour, but on examination reveals itself as a tightly packed interrelation of many colours and rhythms is due not only to long experience in constructing a given space but to the painter’s effort to express his wonder of this changing ever-expanding universe not in words nor by mathematics but through the medium he knew so well and had become part of himself: paint. That’s all I can say.⁵⁰ De Berg.

Beckett Rozentals is Curator, Australian Art and Raye Collins is Conservator of Paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Authors’ note: In the spirit of close collaboration, both authors contributed equally to this paper. The authors would like to thank the Art Gallery of Ballarat for its participation in this project, with its four key works forming an integral part of the technical research presented. The authors are also grateful to the Andrew Collection, Candice Bruce and Ian Cornford for their continuing insights and support throughout the project, and for allowing us to publish technical images and observations based on works from their collections. The infrared and raking light images were captured by NGV photographer Predrag Cancar, and we are grateful to Garry Sommerfeld and the Photographic Services team for their ongoing support for this project.

Notes