Helen Ogilvie

William Pate (c.1930–39) Portrait drawing of Helen Ogilvie, in Anne Montgomery's studio in the Rialto Building, Collins Street. Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie (4 May 1902, Corowa–1 August 1993, Melbourne) was a twentieth-century Australian artist and gallery director, cartoonist, painter, printmaker and craftworker, best known for her early linocuts and woodcuts, and her later oil paintings of vernacular colonial buildings.

Early life and education

Ogilvie was born in Corowa and grew up in rural New South Wales where she would go sketching with her mother, Henrietta, a watercolourist, before her family moved to Melbourne in 1920. There Helen attended the National Gallery School in 1922–25. Though she did not enjoy its conservative approach, in her last year her style was influenced by George Bell while he briefly was the drawing master. While at the school she became a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and started exhibiting in 1924.

Career

Inspired by seeing a book of Claude Flight’s Modernist linocuts in 1928, Ogilvie produced many linocuts and woodcuts from the 1930s onwards, and subsequently, wood-engravings. Many were exhibited, but in an effort to survive in the Depression years she also produced bookplates, greeting cards, calendars, and later, illustrations for books including Russell Grimwade’s Flinders Lane: recollections of Alfred Felton (Melbourne University Press,Carlton, 1947) and J.D.G. Medley's Stolne and surreptitious verses (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1952). Buttons bearing her designs were sold for a shilling to raise funds for the 1955 building program at Melbourne University.

During WW2 Ogilvie worked in the Red Cross Rehabilitation Service at Heidelberg Military Hospital under Frances Wade, where she taught patients lino- and wood-cutting, and basketmaking using locally harvested European and Australian native rushes.

Gallerist

After the war, in 1948 Ogilvie, assisted by Helen Biggs, set up a school to train handicrafts instructors for Red Cross occupational therapy services.

In late 1949 she became director of Stanley Coe Gallery at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne, for the period until 1955, and organised a program of exhibitions of the avant-garde; John Brack, Margo Lewers, Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952), Inge King, Arthur Boyd (15–24 September 1953), Charles Blackman, whose radical series of schoolgirl paintings were shown there in May 1953, Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (whose first Australian show in a commercial gallery was there in 1953), Helen Maudsley, Clifton Pugh, Michael Shannon and others. The opening show in February 1950 of a group twenty Victorian artists associated with George Bell, whose work was also shown, included Alan Warren, Alan Sumner, Constance Stokes, Roger Kemp, William Frater, Charles Bush, Daryl Lindsay, Phyl Waterhouse, Ada May Plante, Francis Roy Thompson, and Arnold Shore, and was followed by a survey show of contemporary art from Sydney.

During her period as gallery director, work by Ogilvie was among others selected in 1950 to decorate the liner Oronsay, and in 1954 her work was show together with that of Tate Adams and Kenneth Hood at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

London

After moving on from her directorship, her own oil paintings of abandoned country structures, were shown in 1956 at the gallery, which had been renamed Peter Bray. She had purchased a house in South Yarra, but that year she moved to London, where she was engaged with the Crafts Revival of the 1950s and 60s and, because, as she complained in an interview, "art doesn't pay" made a living designing modernist lampshades of Japanese papers and parchment for a period, selling them to the high society customers of interior designer David Hicks, of Knightsbridge and Oxfordshire. During her stay overseas, she visited and sketched the English countryside, and with Melbourne friend Hattie Alexander, toured Italy over 11 weeks. Though she produced sketches of European sites, she did not exhibit them but continued to paint small studies of Australian rural buildings, from memory and from sketches, holding two successful solo exhibitions of them in London, including one of 34 canvases, which sold out.

Return to Australia and late career

Ogilvie returned to Australia in 1963 where the subjects of her paintings and drawings continued to be humble rural buildings which she was aware were disappearing; in an interview she bemoaned the lack of protection given such relics in Australia, compared to the UK. By the late 1970s she was producing little work but remained interested in the art world. She attended her last solo exhibition opened at aGOG (Australian Girls' Own Gallery), Canberra, on her 89th birthday, 4 May 1991.

Ogilvie died suddenly in Melbourne on 1 August 1993.

Exhibitions

Solo

• 1948, May: Exhibition of watercolour drawings
• 1956, April: Paintings, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne1956
• 1963, February/March: Australian Country Dwellings, shown with The Landscapes of Lucien Pissarro at Leicester Galleries Gallery, Audley Sq., Mayfair, London
• 1974, 2–13 June: Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne.
• 1982, 1 October - 31 October: Project 39: Women's imprint, part of Women and the Arts Festival, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales
• 1991, May 1991: australian Girls Own Gallery, Canberra, ACT

Group

• 1924, 18–27 November: An Exhibition Of Etchings & Drawings, with Hans Heysen, John D. Moor, Lionel Lindsay, John Goodchild, John L. Berry, Frank H. Molony, R. J. Waterhouse, Fred. C. Brltten, Lloyd Rees, d’A. Boxall, J. Barclay Godson, Arthur Reed, H. Van Raake, B. E. Minns, Harold D. Herbert, James S. MacDonald, Norman Carter, Thea Proctor, Alfred T. Clint, Margaret Preston, A. Henry Fullwood, Raymond H. McGrath, Don Finley, Hamilton Mack, Adrian Feint, F. M. Grey, Montague White, Audrey Hardy, K. Sauerbier, Professor Leslie Wilkinson, Hardy Wilson, Daryl Lindsay, Sydney Ure Smith. Exhibition Hall, Sixth Floor, Farmer & Company, department store, cnr. Pitt, Market & George Streets, Sydney
• 1932, 5–16 April: with Sybil Andrews, Cyril Power, Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme, Eric Thake, John Dick, Christian Waller, Dorrit Block, Ron Meadows, Marjorie Wood, Michael O’Connell. Everyman's Library, 332 Collins Street
• 1932, to 29 October: Helen Ogilvie, Peggie Crombie, Helen Boyd, paintings and prints. Collins House, Melbourne.
• 1933, 16–23 October: The Arts and Crafts Society Annual Exhibition, Melbourne Town Hall
• 1936, 14–25 July: New Melbourne Art Club exhibition, Athenaeum Gallery
• 1937, from 12 July: New Melbourne Art Club exhibition, Athenaeum Gallery
• 1939, 21 August – 2 September: New Melbourne Art Club Seventh Annual Show
• 1953, October: Flowerdale CWA annual exhibition
• 1954, November: Helen Ogilvie, Tate Adams, Kenneth Hood, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• 1956, June: with Dorothy Braund, Barbara Brash, Guelda Pyke, Roma Thomson, Phyl Waterhouse, and six male artists, Paintings for Seven Guineas, Peter Bray Gallery
• 1964, August: with Lady Williams (President) Geoff Jones, Guelda Pyke, Edith Wall, Bill Coleman, Dorothy Braund, Guelda Gude, Madge Freeman Davis, and others of the Melbourne Contemporary Artists, Argus Gallery

Posthumous

Solo:

• 1995: All this I knew", Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, VIC. and travelling

Inclusions in:

• 1995, 5 March - 30 April: Australian Women Printmakers 1910-1940, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Castlemaine, VIC
• 1995, 8 March - 2 April: The Women's View: Australian women artists in the Bendigo Art Gallery, 1888-1995, Bendigo Art Gallery, Bendigo, Vic
• 1995, 8 March - 8 June: National Women's Art Exhibition, with Speaking of Women, four guest lectures; by Nancy Underhill, Ann Thomson, Margo Neale, Joan Kerr; held over successive Fridays, 10-31 March 1995, by the Art Gallery Society, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW
• 1995, 4 August - 5 August: Women and Art auction preview for Dalia Stanley Auctioneers, auction held 6 August 1995, Mary Place Gallery, Paddington, NSW
• 2000/1, 24 November 2000 - 25 February 2001: Modern Australian Women: paintings and prints 1925-1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA. Then national tour.
• 2011/12, 20 October 2011 - 15 December 2012: Look, Look Again, highlights from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art (CCWA), gifted to the University of Western Australia in 2007, with publication titled Into the Light and symposium Are we there yet?. Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA

Collections

• Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA
• Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, TAS
• Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, TAS
• Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Castlemaine, VIC
• Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla, VIC
• City of Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, VIC
• University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC
• La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
• Queensland Art Gallery
• Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, VIC
• Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia

Publications

• Maxwell, Helen (1995), Helen Ogilvie : Wood engravings, Brindabella Press, ISBN 978-0-909422-24-0
• Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum; McKay, Kirsten; Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum (1995), Women printmakers 1910 to 1940 in the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, The Gallery and Museum, ISBN 978-0-646-23161-7
• Ogilvie, Helen; Palmer, Sheridan; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery (1995), All this I knew : Helen Ogilvie retrospective exhibition, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, ISBN 978-0-949063-07-6