2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

Although it is unlikely that the expatriates Power, Dangar and
Webb ever met each other, each maintained accomplished
professional lives in France with careers which overlapped from
the 1930s until the 1950s. Working across fields in painting,
ceramics and collage, each of them contributed significantly to
important avant garde collectivist efforts: Power to Abstraction
Creation, Dangar to Moly-Sabata and Webb to the Salon
des Réalités Nouvelles. Additionally, both Power and Webb
exhibited with the most important galleries of their time: Power
with Léonce Rosenberg and at Jeanne Bucher, Webb with
Colette Allendy and at Galerie Creuze. While Power, Dangar
and Webb were, and are, recognised in France, each holds a
marginal or near non-existent place in ‘Australianist’ art histories.
Nevertheless, as this paper will reveal, all five, Power, Dangar,
Webb, Balson and Crowley, were known to the Paris-based
doyen of twentieth century abstraction, Michel Seuphor.
By focusing upon the touchstone figure of Seuphor, this paper
will draw out the chain of expatriate Sydney modernist artists
working in France before, during and after the Second World War
and how the lives and work of Power, Dangar, Webb, Crowley
and Balson became interrelated. Elsewhere I have written of a
new conception of Australian art history in the twentieth century,
one that seeks to understand their experiences as much from
the outside-in, as from the inside-out. From the outside in-then,
this paper will examine the nature of the Australian contribution
to the international avant-garde in France from the 1930s until
the 1950s. In so doing, it will reveal some of the networks in
the mid twentieth century that characterised the European
interaction with Australian artists in Paris and vice versa.
A.D.S. Donaldson is an artist, art historian and curator. He
studied at Sydney College of the Arts, the Kunstakademie
Düsseldorf, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts,
Copenhagen and the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He lives in
Sydney.
from the manuscript, catering to their respective audiences on
both sides of the Atlantic. When the influential critic, Harold
Rosenberg, reviewed Diary of an Art Dealer in 1967 for the New
Yorker, he concluded stingingly: “The clatter of the cash register
resounds throughout The Diary as the monotonous undertone of
its anecdotes and reflections.” Yet Rosenberg and others failed
to consider that Diary had been edited for its readership both by
the author and by its editors and publishers, which entailed cuts
made on the advice of legal counsel.
In this paper I will argue that Gimpel’s important manuscript
charts the demise of the market for the French eighteenthcentury,
the demise of Impressionism, the unpopularity of Art
Nouveau and the rise of the modern decorative arts. As a
second world war became increasingly inevitable, this paper
will reveal how the author, who I would describe as a romantic
modernist, gradually came to terms with a new democracy in the
arts.
Diana Kostyrko is a Visiting Scholar in the School of
Humanities, The Australian National University. She wrote
her PhD thesis on René Gimpel’s journal, the subject of a
forthcoming publication with Ashgate Publishing.
9. Round Table Discussion of all Speakers
8. “There is only one man who can save France …”: René
Gimpel
Dr Diana Kostyrko
War invariably changes the trajectory of art’s production and
reception. One of the most significant Paris art dealers during
the interwar period was René Gimpel (1881-1945). Gimpel
specialised in the French eighteenth-century and Italian
‘primitives’. Like his contemporaries, he bought in Europe and
sought North American buyers. Unlike his contemporaries,
he kept a journal that recorded the flux of the art market
during its most formative period. The journal was published
posthumously in France in 1963, and in New York and London
three years later (Gimpel died in Neuengamme concentration
camp). Both versions of the journal were heavily abridged
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