Grace Cossington Smith - National Gallery of Australia

INTERIORS
Grace Cossington Smith
Interior in yellow 1962, 1964
oil on composition board
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1965
Since 1911, in her earliest sketchbooks Grace Cossington Smith had
been interested in doorways, creating suggestions of space beyond.
She exhibited small paintings of interiors intermittently in the 1930s and
regularly in the 1940s. Her 1947 exhibition included 10 interior views of
her home. Their signifi cance lies in the opportunities they offered for
experimentation and as a precursor to the great interiors of her later
life. The framing device of a doorway creates an immediate illusion
of depth, a feature of the work of Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings
Cossington Smith would have seen on her last visit overseas, between
1948 and 1951. However, she states that it was Cézanne who was more
important to her; his use of unstable compositions and form-defi ning
brushstrokes can be seen as an inspiration for many of her paintings.
In her later years the artist’s use of brighter, more fragmented colour
may have refl ected her sense of liberation, freed from the pressures
of having to prove herself. These late interiors with their brilliant use
of colour, especially yellow, represent an emphasis on the emotional
aspects of colour. For Cossington Smith seeing and feeling were
inseparable. As she said in an interview with Alan Roberts in 1970, ‘I see something and it makes
me feel a colour and that is what I try to get’. In fact the interior rooms of Cossington were not
particularly bright, the verandahs obstructing most of the direct sunlight that seems to permeate
these paintings.
While painting Interior in yellow Cossington Smith fell and broke her hip. She fi nished the painting
two years after beginning it, and it is tempting to read into the enclosed feel of the room something
of her confi nement during this time.
Visual analysis
The angled bed and chair dominate the foreground of this dramatically glowing painting, with
the strong diagonal of the fl oor and walls leading the viewer’s eye to the far corner of the work.
Another spatial illusion is created with the sunny refection of the verandah and garden seen in the
mirrored door of the wardrobe. Completed almost nine years after Interior with wardrobe mirror,
the composition is more stable and the brushstrokes are invariably vertical. This device creates a
dynamic tension between the surface of the painting and the illusion of space created by the
diagonal forms.
Discussion points
•Discuss the artist’s feeling for and use of colour in her art.
•How did the work of Cézanne infl uence Cossington Smith?
Study for A passageway at
Church Cottage, Bowral 1911–12
pencil on paper sketchbook 2
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra Purchased 1976