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== Honours ==
== Honours ==
In 2002 Mora was made an ''[[l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres|Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres]]'' by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abc.net.au/tv/agonyoflife/characters/mirka-mora.htm|title=The Agony of Life|website=Australian Broadcasting Corporation|accessdate=27 August 2016}}</ref>
In 2002 Mora was made an ''[[l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres|Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres]]'' by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abc.net.au/tv/agonyoflife/characters/mirka-mora.htm|title=The Agony of Life|website=Australian Broadcasting Corporation|accessdate=27 August 2016}}</ref>
Mirka Lane in St Kilda, off Barkly Street near the intersections of Grey and Inkerman Streets was named after the artist.<ref>https://goo.gl/maps/f7tLp1oZmoH2 Map location, Mirka Lane, St Kilda</ref>


==Exhibitions==
==Exhibitions==

Revision as of 04:33, 29 August 2018

Mirka Mora
Mirka Mora in 1961
Photographer J. Brian McArdle
Born
Mirka Madeleine Zelik

(1928-03-18)18 March 1928
Paris, France
Died27 August 2018(2018-08-27) (aged 90)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
NationalityFrench, Australian
EducationSelf-taught and Heide artist
Known forPainting, Sculpture, Mosaics
AwardsOfficier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
WebsiteMirka Mora

Mirka Madeleine Mora (18 March 1928 – 27 August 2018) was a French-born Australian visual artist and cultural figure who contributed significantly to the development of contemporary art in Australia. Her media included drawing, painting, sculpture and mosaic.

Early life

Mirka Zelik was born in Paris, to a Lithuanian Jewish father, Leon Zelik, and a Romanian Jewish mother, Celia 'Suzanne' Gelbein.[1] She was arrested in 1942 during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv). Her father, Leon, managed to arrange for her release from the concentration camp at Pithiviers (Loiret) before Mora and her mother, Celia, were scheduled to be deported to Auschwitz. The family evaded arrest and deportation from 1942 to 1945 by hiding in the forests of France.[2] After the war, Mora met a wartime resistance fighter Georges Mora in Paris at the age of 17. They married in 1947. In an interview in 2004, Mora said:

I really wanted to make love to him, because I was very humiliated that he didn't because I was 17, and he said, "I know that you are not happy but we have to wait till we get married." "Ah! Married?" So I agreed to get married to lose my virginity. That's true.[3]

Migration to Australia

Having survived the Holocaust, Mora and her husband migrated to Australia in 1951 and settled in Melbourne, where they quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene. Georges became an influential art dealer, and in 1967 he founded one of the first commercial art galleries in Melbourne, the Tolarno Galleries.[4]

The Mora family also owned and operated three of Melbourne's most famous cafés. The Mirka Café was opened in December 1954 at 183 Exhibition Street and was the venue for the first major solo exhibition by Joy Hester. It was followed by the Café Balzac at 62 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne and then by the Tolarno in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which opened in 1966. All three were focal points for Melbourne's bohemian subculture. As Mora's son Philippe recalls, "my parents literally fed artists at our home and in our restaurants". In a 2004 interview Mora stated:

Actually, the Mirka Cafe got too big, because too many people came and couldn't get in. And so we opened the Balzac Restaurant and the Balzac Restaurant was really the toast of Melbourne. It was a beautiful restaurant. But it was my husband's work of art and I only came in the restaurant to help when my husband went overseas. My husband always tried to find a big house so I could have a big studio. So one day my husband came and said, "I have bought a hotel." I did get a big studio for one week, then I had to give it to my husband for his gallery. (Laughs) And then I went on the first floor, where I had the bridal room, which was a beautiful studio.[3]

The Mora family's social circle included many Australian artists who subsequently became world-famous: Ian Sime, Charles Blackman and Barbara Blackman, Fred Williams, John Perceval and Mary Perceval, Albert Tucker, Barrett Reid, Laurence Hope, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Joy Hester. The Mora family were especially close friends with renowned art patrons John and Sunday Reed, and spent many weekends at their famous home and artists' colony "Heide" (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art) in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen,[5] and at the Reeds' beach house[6] next door to the Moras' own in Aspendale.[4]

Mora had three children, actor Tiriel Mora, film director Philippe Mora and art dealer William Mora. They had what Philippe describes as "a culturally privileged childhood".[4] After extramarital relationships on both sides, Mora eventually separated from her husband Georges.[3]

Style

File:Mirka 1963.jpg
An example of a small Mirka Mora charcoal drawing (1963) 170mm(H) x 130mm(W).

After coming to Australia in 1951, three years later Mora had become well known in art circles in Melbourne and was operative in reviving the Contemporary Art Society there. Since 1956 she exhibited mainly with the Contemporary Art Society[7] and in the Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Galleries and Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, and with the Watters Galleries in Sydney.[8]

Mora used a wide range of media and numbers of her works feature in the permanent collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art and as a tile mural prominently displayed at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne.[9] She was a noted colourist and symbolist, her paintings often bright and bold, constantly reinventing a repertoire of recurring motifs—innocent, wide-eyed children, angels, dogs, cats, snakes and birds.

Critical Assessment

Robin Wallace-Crabbe in his 1968 Canberra Times critique 'Giving away high-mindedness' of Mora's show at the Australian Sculpture Gallery, Narrabundah, hints that though entertaining, her work is light and naïve, "like a mixture of May Gibbs' 'Snugglepot and Cuddlepie' and the prevailing Melbourne style in the early fifties",[10] while later, in 1981, Sonja Kaleski is more favourably analytical in her review 'Vibrant, Volatile Artist', in The Canberra Times;[11]

"[Mora's] own artistic style has had little to do with contemporary art movements, but has grown out of a need to explore her own life through the medium of fantastic imagery. She became widely known to the public after her exhibition of dolls in 1971 at Realities Gallery, Melbourne, and the dolls have been a major means of expression for her since that time. But these dolls are more than just a means of artistic expression—they are her friends and mentors and she can hardly bear to sell them."

Mora's works and commentary on them have appeared in Australian Drawings by Elwyn Lynn,[12] New painting, 1952-62 by John Reed,[13] The Vital Decade by co-authors Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris,[14] and the Encyclopedia of Australian Art by Alan McCulloch.[15][8]

When Mora showed with Jean Dubuffet and Francois Mezzapelle in In Pursuit of Fantasy opening 18 October, 1997 at George Gallery 129 Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda, Melbourne, the French language Le Courrier Australien reported[16] that the vernissage was attended by 800 people, and described her work;

[For] Mirka Mora, already well known widely in Australia the themes of the relations between humans and the duality between animality and humanity seem to be her constant preoccupations. Paintings of great sensitivity where humour, too, is often present, undoubtedly reflecting the exceptional personality of this great artist Mirka Mora. Numerous paintings from 1957 to 1992 and notably Little Lovers (1970), are emblematic representations of the animal fusion of lovers that is also found in Love Quarrel (1991)

Teaching

For many years Mora conducted workshops[17] in painting, soft sculpture[18] and mosaics, where countless Australians learned from her unique approach to teaching art.[19]

Later life

Mora lived and worked in a number of studios in Melbourne, including Rankins Lane.[20] In 2016 Mora collaborated with Australian fashion company Gorman to launch a 23 piece collection based on four artworks.[21] Her murals survive on the walls of the Tolarno restaurant and gallery she previously owned in St. Kilda.[22] In 2016, a Melbourne bar-owner uncovered a lost mural on the wall of his bar, previously the Café Balzac in East Melbourne.[23]

Mora died, aged 90, in Melbourne on 27 August 2018.[24]

Honours

In 2002 Mora was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and Communication.[25] Mirka Lane in St Kilda, off Barkly Street near the intersections of Grey and Inkerman Streets was named after the artist.[26]

Exhibitions

Mora had more than 35 solo exhibitions throughout her career, including a retrospective Mirka Mora: where angels fear to tread: 50 years of art 1948-1998 at Heide Museum of Art 1999-2000 to celebrate 50 years of her work. Mirka Mora: Charcoals 1958-1965 featured in the Melbourne Art Fair 2018, from August 1-5, just prior to her death.

Other exhibitions include:

  • Women at Watters, 22 February 1995 - 11 March 1995, Watters Gallery, East Sydney, NSW
  • Mirka Mora, 1990, Arthouse, Launceston, TAS, An exhibition of 42 oil paintings, drawings and embroideries.
  • Embroideries of Mirka Mora, 1978, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, VIC
  • Project 20: Fabric Art, September 1977 - 9 October 1977, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW
  • Mirka Mora: Paintings: 'The Finding of Erichthonius' June 1968 - 22 June 1968, Watters Gallery, Sydney, NSW
  • Drawings by Mirka Mora. November 1968, Australian Sculpture Gallery, 1 Finniss Crescent, Narrabundah, NSW.[10][27]

Publications

  • Mora, Mirka (1987), Mirka Mora : works 1957-1987, William Mora Galleries
  • Mora, Mirka; Delany, Max; White, Murray (Murray F.); Museum of Modern Art at Heide (1999), Mirka Mora : where angels fear to tread : 50 years of art 1948 - 1998, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, ISBN 978-0-947104-53-5
  • Mora, Mirka (2000), Wicked but virtuous : my life, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-670-88039-3[28]
  • Mora, Mirka; Carter, Earl (2003), Love and clutter, Viking, ISBN 978-0-670-04064-3[29]
  • Beier, Ulli; Cox, Paul, 1940-2016 (1980), Mirka, Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-333-29932-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)

Motion pictures and audio

Collections

See also

References

  1. ^ Madeleine 'Mirka' Zelik Article
  2. ^ Langsam, D., 1999, Mirka Mora - Still a naughty girl
  3. ^ a b c Negus, George (15 July 2004). "Mirka Mora". GNT Profiles. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  4. ^ a b c Mora, Mirka (2002). Wicked but Virtuous: My Life. Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140294835.
  5. ^ Janine Burke (2004). The heart garden: Sunday Reed and Heide. Knopf. see Pages 321, 348, 435.
  6. ^ Perkin, Corrie (9 December 2007), "Bohemia by the sea [The beach houses of Georges and Mirka Mora and Sunday and John Reed in Aspendale, Melbourne, were a magnet for Australia's most famous artists]", Weekend Australian Magazine (8-9 Dec 2007): 46–49, ISSN 1038-8761
  7. ^ "'The essential woman'". The Argus (Melbourne). Victoria, Australia. 6 April 1954. p. 8. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.
  8. ^ a b "LEISURE THE ARTS Exhibition of Melbourne drawings". The Canberra Times. Vol. 43, , no. 12, 152. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 8 November 1968. p. 13. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  9. ^ Victorian Heritage Database Report: Mirka Mora Mural
  10. ^ a b "ART Giving away high-mindedness". The Canberra Times. Vol. 43, , no. 12, 157. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 14 November 1968. p. 33. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  11. ^ "VIBRANT, VOLATILE ARTIST". The Canberra Times. Vol. 55, , no. 16, 598. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 7 March 1981. p. 17. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  12. ^ Lynn, Elwyn (1963), Contemporary drawing, Longmans
  13. ^ Reed, John; Reed, John, 1901-1981 (1963), New painting, 1952-62, Longmans{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  14. ^ Dutton, Geoffrey; Dutton, Geoffrey, 1922-1998; Harris, Max, 1921-1995 (1968), The vital decade : ten year of Australian art and letters, Sun Books in association with Australian Letters{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  15. ^ McCulloch, Alan; Nodrum, Charles (1984), Encyclopedia of Australian art (Updated and corr ed.), Hutchinson of Australia, ISBN 978-0-09-148250-3
  16. ^ 'Dubuffet, Mezzapelle and Mora:in pursuit of fantasy'. In Le Courrier Australien, Monday 10 November 1997, page 21
  17. ^ "Much more than an artistic catalyst". The Canberra Times. Vol. 58, , no. 17, 605. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 11 December 1983. p. 3 (SUNDAY EDITION). Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  18. ^ "MELBOURNE". Le Courrier Australien. Vol. , , no. 12. New South Wales, Australia. 1 December 1976. p. 9. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  19. ^ "Art workshop". The Canberra Times. Vol. 57, , no. 17, 206. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 6 November 1982. p. 3. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  20. ^ https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/in-pictures-the-life-of-mirka-mora-20180824-h14gd2.html
  21. ^ Rychter, Tacey (12 July 2016). "Gorman's New Collaboration with Mirka Mora". Broadsheet. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  22. ^ Coslovich, Gabriella (6 March 2007). "St Kilda restaurant row takes a priceless turn". The Age. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  23. ^ "Lost Mirka Mora mural uncovered at Melbourne bar, preserved under plaster". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. ABC News. 17 August 2016. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  24. ^ Cuthbertson, Debbie (27 August 2018). "Much-loved Melbourne artist Mirka Mora dies aged 90". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 27 August 2018.
  25. ^ "The Agony of Life". Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 27 August 2016.
  26. ^ https://goo.gl/maps/f7tLp1oZmoH2 Map location, Mirka Lane, St Kilda
  27. ^ "LEISURE THE ARTS Exhibition of Melbourne drawings". The Canberra Times. Vol. 43, , no. 12, 152. Australian Capital Territory, Australia. 8 November 1968. p. 13. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)
  28. ^ Heathcote, C. (2000). Bibliofile: Mirka Mora, Wicked but Virtuous: My Life. Art Monthly Australia, 136, 32.
  29. ^ "MIRKA MORA". Le Courrier Australien. New South Wales, Australia. 1 October 2003. p. 36. Retrieved 28 August 2018 – via National Library of Australia.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mirka_Mora&oldid=857037202"