Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson may well get lost in the promotion of other exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, but it is one not to be missed. Charting Crowley and Balson’s artistic journeys from the 1930s to the 1960s and their shared commitment to abstraction, it is an elegant, beautiful show that affords the rare opportunity to experience their work in depth. Beginning with the magical pairing of Crowley’s Abstract Painting, 1947 and Balson’s Constructive Painting, c.1948, the exhibition achieves a carefully balanced display of the two artist’s work despite the fact that Crowley’s surviving oeuvre comprises a relatively small number of works.

Crowley (1890-1979) was renowned for destroying her work and for periods where she created very little. Late in life, after Balson’s death in 1964, she dedicated herself to championing his career at the expense of her own. Yet she is in no way overshadowed by Balson in this exhibition. Instead, the exhibition successfully conveys the intimate and interconnected nature of their practice and their lifelong investigation of abstract form. This resulted in works that share stylistic similarities and intellectual and formal concerns, while remaining distinctly each artist’s own.

Grace Crowley, Abstract painting 1947, oil on cardboard, National Gallery of Australia, Purchased 1959 © Grace Crowley Estate (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria)

Crowley and Balson came to art from dramatically different beginnings. Born into a wealthy grazier family in northwest New South Wales, Crowley convinced her parents to allow her to study art, and she enrolled at Sydney Art School around 1915. (1) There she met fellow students Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black, with Dangar in particular becoming a close friend and influence. The pair travelled to Paris in 1926, studying for a period under André Lhote, whose blocky, representational form of Cubism is clearly echoed in Crowley’s works from the late 1930s. While abroad, Crowley also studied for a brief period with Cubist artist, theorist, and philosopher Albert Gleizes.

Balson, by contrast, was born in England (1890) and migrated to Australia at the age of twenty-three. Largely self-taught, he left school at the age of twelve to work as a plumber and housepainter. He was to work as a housepainter for his entire life, making art on weekends and in his spare time until his retirement, when he could finally practice full-time. He was also married with three children, which makes the nature of his close friendship with Crowley, ‘an enigma’, to use the words of exhibition curator Beckett Rozentals. (2) I, for one, would like to know more.

Balson and Crowley first met when Balson was a student at the Sydney Art School. They were reacquainted in 1932 at the Sketch Club, which was held in the evening at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre in Sydney. They began painting together on weekends from 1934, and after Crowley’s break-up with fellow artist Rah (Fiz) Fizelle, with whom she had run an art school, Crowley and Balson developed their work in tandem. The inclusion in the exhibition of double-sided works that have a Balson on one side and a Crowley on the other are a rare treat to see. These fascinating works pose many questions about the artists’ working methods and how these paintings came to be. The story behind the NGV’s recent discovery of Balson’s Constructive painting, 1941, which was being used as a backing board for Crowley’s Portrait, 1939 – in their collection – is wonderful. However, while I was in the show, many visitors missed the multimedia presentation about this exciting find, given its awkward display on top of a plinth placed in a corner of the gallery.

Ralph Balson, Constructive painting 1941, oil on cardboard, National Gallery of Victoria, Bequest of Grace Crowley, 1981 © Ralph Balson Estate (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria)

The main disappointment of this exhibition, however, is the lack of a catalogue. Given the NGV’s reputation for enormous tomes for contemporary art exhibitions and its recent publishing initiatives unattached to exhibitions (such as Observations: Moments in Design History, 2024 and She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art and Design, 2020), this absence is baffling. The publication for Balson’s only retrospective at Heide Museum of Modern Art (then Heide Park and Art Gallery) in 1989 is now out of print, as is Elena Taylor’s catalogue of her solo exhibition of Crowley’s work at the National Gallery of Australia in 2006, (3) and no publication brings the story of the two artists together in a comprehensive way. The wall texts and extended labels do a good job, but given their required brevity, they only tell us what is already known. If the curator discovered new insights in the course of her travel and research to develop the exhibition (which I’m sure she did), these remain lost to the audience. And given the time that the average person spends in front of an artwork – under thirty seconds (4) – only the most dedicated of visitors will read the text on the walls.

Surely the role of an historical exhibition is to extend and further knowledge? While the ability to study the luscious brushwork and construction of Crowley and Balson’s paintings up-close is reward enough, the exercise and expense of bringing together such a comprehensive loan exhibition seems almost wasted if nothing new is brought to the table. In the way of institutional programming, it will be at least a decade before audiences see the work of Crowley and Balson together again in depth. A publication that documented the works on display and shared new knowledge on these fascinating and important artists would have served as a longstanding record of their achievements and significant contribution to Australia’s art history.

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson (National Gallery of Victoria) is at The Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square until 22 September 2024.

1. There is some confusion about the year that Crowley enrolled. See Elena Taylor, Grace Crowley: Being Modern, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006, p. 9.
2. Beckett Rozentals, “When Crowley Met Balson”, National Gallery of Victoria, 23 May 2024, https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/when-crowley-met-balson/?utm_source=pocket_shared
3. Bruce Adams, Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Bulleen, 1989 and Elena Taylor, Grace Crowley: Being Modern, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006. Taylor’s essay is available online https://nga.gov.au/exhibitions/grace-crowley-being-modern/#introduction
4. This is the outcome of a 2001 study at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York where 150 visitors were observed as they looked at 6 paintings from the Museum’s collection. The mean time spent viewing a work of art was found to be 27.2 seconds, with a median time of 17.0 seconds. Jeffrey K Smith & Lisa F. Smith, “Spending Time on Art”, International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, 19 issue 2, July 2001, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/5MQM-59JH-X21R-JN5J