Send me more paint! Australian art during the Second World War
Dates:
30 August – 29 September 1990
Artists:
Harold Abbott, Dennis Adams, Douglas Annand, Herbert Badham, Stella Bowen, John Brack, George Browning, Ernest Buckmaster, Charles Bush, Ethel Carrick Fox, Colin Colahan, Noel Counihan, Sybil Craig, Edward Cranstone, Robert Emerson Curtis, Lyndon Dadswell, William Dargie, William Dobell, John Dowie, Russell Drysdale, George Duncan, Ray Ewers, James Flett, Ivor Francis, Harold Freedman, Donald Friend, John Goodchild, Murray Griffin, Alex Gurney, Henry Hanke, Sheila Hawkins, Elaine Haxton, Ivor Hele, Harold Herbert, Nora Heysen, Sali Herman, Frank Hinder, Frank Hodgkinson, Roy Hodgkinson, Frank Hurley, Kenneth Jack, Vernon Jones, Francis Lymburner, Frank McNamara, Geoffrey Mainwaring, Daphne Mayo, Frank Medworth, Hal Missingham, Alan Moore, Arthur Murch, Max Newton, Frank Norton, Damien Parer, William Pidgeon, Tony Rafty, Max Ragless, Oliffe Richmond, Reginald Rowed, Elsa Russell, John Santry, George Silk, Alan Sumner, Eric Thake, Barbara Tribe, Albert Tucker, Danila Vassilieff, Ralph Walker, Malcolm Warner, Douglas Watson, James Wigley
Curator:
Anne Gray
Location:
Monash University Gallery
Monash University, Clayton Campus
Opened by:
Sir Edward Dunlop
Acknowledgements:
This exhibition was supported by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation.
About the exhibition
Drawn from the Australian War Memorial’s extensive collection of art produced during the Second World War, Send Me More Paint! reflected the complex and multifaceted nature of wartime experience, as captured by Australian artists. The exhibition’s title refers to the challenges faced by artists working on the front lines, many of whom were relocated without their materials, while others, reliant on supplies from home, often found themselves under-equipped.
Featuring 130 works, the exhibition was structured around seven key themes: portraits, work, dreams, transformations, landscape, waiting, and death and burial.
As curator Anne Gray notes in the exhibition’s introduction, Send Me More Paint! highlighted how the war connected those working in a wide range of styles. Many of the artists—who might not have encountered one another under ordinary circumstances—found themselves sharing ideas and learning from each other:
[The exhibition] demonstrates some of these influences, as in the group of landscapes by Donald Friend, Roy Hodgkinson and Douglas Watson, which reflects a similar choice of subject and stylistic approach. It also shows how artists who are generally regarded as traditional, such as Dennis Adams, shared aspects of the modernist viewpoint of artists like Eric Thake, in focusing upon the war machine and transforming it into a surreal object.
Image: Eric Thake, Kamiri Searchlight 1945, gouache, pencil on paper, 55.5 x 78.2 cm. Australian War Memorial, Canberra