Highly respected art curator Barry Pearce provides a personal tour of 100 of his favourite Australian paintings from the walls and vaults of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including these two works by Grace Cossington Smith.

Of the three most creative students studying under Antonio Datillo-Rubbo in Sydney during the First World War – Roland Wakelin, Roy de Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith – Cossington Smith produced an ongoing mystical vision in the practice of painting that stood apart. Her mind’s eye was of a different nature from any of her colleagues.

From the outset she had no interest in breaking new ground for the sake of modernism, developing an approach to painting based on resilient structure, but fundamentally at the behest of instinct; happy merely to be absorbed in the joy of depicting the world she loved. Early on she was influenced by the English Camden Town school style then filtering through to Sydney, and also reproductions of French post-impressionism. And she was surely informed about the broken brushwork of Emanuel Phillips Fox, exhibited in Sydney in 1913, even though she was away in Europe at that time. 

She was fortunate to be nurtured by a supportive family with highly civilised, English-born parents, whose devout Anglican faith was probably a source of her inclination towards mysticism. After showing early promise with drawing, young Grace returned from a two-year trip abroad in 1914, resuming classes with Datillo-Rubbo and coming back to a new family home in Sydney’s North Shore, where her father had built her a studio at the bottom of the garden.

After a brief period of dark tonalism advocated by Max Meldrum in the early 1920s, her paintings began to fluoresce with light as the binding source of all things. Some of her most spectacular subjects in that decade were urban, and nothing exemplifies her transition from one phase to another than comparison of her two climactic works Centre of a city c1925 and The curve of the bridge 1928–29, painted within just a few years of each other. 

Datillo-Rubbo’s classes in Rowe Street had given Grace proximity to social incident and architecture – processions, crowds at rush hour in summer and winter – prelude to the visionary conceptions of Centre of a city and The curve of the bridge.

Martin Place – then known as Moore Street – was one of the artist’s favorite parts of Sydney. A stone’s throw from Datillo-Rubbo’s classroom, she had a sudden revelation in 1925 to make a painting of it, with a view looking west, towards the colonnaded bank building on George Street, which drew the gaze past the Post Office clock tower thrusting itself upwards. Out of a series of sketchbook images she gridded one for the main composition. Her palette was subdued with bituminous blacks countered by sunlit sandstone and deep purple shadows, echoing that of George Lambert, now back in Sydney and wielding an influence to match that of Meldrum.

The real miracle of this painting, however, is the sky, which exudes an upward rush of energy through radiating strokes that reach for infinity. Cossington Smith took this effect to another level four years later in one of the most exuberant paintings of the modern era in Australia, The curve of the bridge.

She seemed to believe that daylight illuminated Earth from some spiritual source far beyond the city and its inhabitants. But when she painted the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge a few years before its completion, she invested in the image a feeling of ecstatic surprise, symbolised by the exploding sunrays of her brushwork, that such a momentous event could be created by mere mortals and their machines.

This is an excerpt from 100 Moments in Australian Painting, out now from NewSouth.