Michael O'Connell (7 August 1898 – 9 December 1976) was an English Modernist artist who worked in Australia between World War I and World War II and then in England. He was a textile artist, with works held in the UK in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, and the collection of National Museums Scotland, and in Australia in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
Early life Michael William O'Connell was the eldest son of Patrick O'Connell and his wife Mary Cecilia, and was born in 1898 in Dalton-in-Furness, Lancashire (Cumbria). After the death of his father from typhoid fever in 1900 he was brought up solely by his mother in Newcastle upon Tyne, and was educated as a lay boy at Ushaw College, a Roman Catholic seminary in County Durham.
In World War I he was sent to the front in 1917 as a junior officer in an Irish regiment and was taken prisoner of war in 1918.
Australia After the war O'Connell took some training in agriculture before emigrating to Australia in 1920 to attend an agricultural college in Wagga Wagga.
He abandoned agriculture and moved to Melbourne. In 1920 to 1923 he travelled around Victoria painting watercolours, which were exhibited in Melbourne and well-received - some of his works were selected for a group exhibition of Victorian artists at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley, London in 1924–25.
Barbizon By 1923 O'Connell was living in a tent on a block of land he had bought in Beaumaris on Port Phillip Bay where a number of painters lived before a health inspector condemned the tent and he had to pull it down and started construction of a house, 'Barbizon'. It was a decision that transformed his life; he became a craftsman-designer and a Modernist.
Through lack of money O'Connell built Barbizon himself, over 1924–25. Without an architect or builder and using the cheapest material he could find, concrete blocks made with sand from the site, he constructed an open-plan cruciform design which gave the minimum chance of the walls falling down. A local commentator observed that he "made it for himself out of bricks he made himself, and fitted it with furniture he made himself and hangings he made himself! The result is perfect."
Named after the French Barbizon school of art, its design and functionalism were born of necessity and looked to Modernism. It was his studio and a gathering place for fellow artists. He became a member and councillor of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, where he met his wife Ella Moody (née Evans-Vaughan) (1900–1981). They married in April 1931 in Melbourne.
The house was lost in a bushfire in 1944 after his 1937 return to England.
Concrete garden furniture Arising from O'Connell's use of concrete for building Barbizon was his development of garden furniture design and pots, 'sculpture for the garden', often painted and dyed, treated so that it could be painted, or impregnated with colour. He built a sunken garden with concrete bird-baths, fountains, and large bowls for hyacinths, and malacoides. Innovative and experimental large-scale pots with relief panels, some painted in fresco, fountains, and birdbaths embellished with animals or figures, he advertised as 'sculpture for the garden'.
O'Connell gained commissions for garden furniture, and Edna Walling, prominent Australian garden designer, collaborated with him for an exhibition for the Arts and Crafts Society in Melbourne in 1927. In 1930-31 for the forecourt of theatre deco Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, he was contracted to supply two cubic planters decorated with panels showing Australian animals cast in artificial stone (crushed rock mixed with cement), in stylist sympathy with Orlando Dutton's figurative relief over the gallery entrance, which is also in artificial stone. The decorative panels were the work of Ella, since O'Connell was by then engrossed in making the Pandemonium textile banner.
Edquist notes that with his sculptural works, unlike his watercolours, O'Connell joined the trajectory of Modernism, not on the scale of the heroic avant-garde, but as domestically focussed craft-based Modernist.
Fabrics O'Connell's success with the concrete garden furniture and his extreme frugality enabled him to afford a visit to England in 1929, passing through Italy and Paris. It is possible that it was in London that he first came across linocuts.
Pandemonium On his return from Europe O'Connell continued with the concrete garden furniture, and in 1929/1930 started experimenting with printing lino-cuts on fabric, notably a long linen frieze, Pandemonium, one of his most significant works; it is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. It consists of twelve individual panels joined to form a continuous sequence with decorative borders above and below depicting a 1920s penthouse party, with stylised figures of diners, dancers, and musicians, the two outermost panels showing sirens lying under a night sky, a motif that he continued to use - as Eve in some late works. O'Connell translates, on fabric, the imagery from the back of a large concrete seat that he exhibited in late 1929.
He reused the blocks from Pandemonium in a variety of ways to create other wall hangings and curtains. He had 'design rules', the first principle of which was 'fill every space with a definitely spaced pattern, e.g. in the case of foliage, say, cover the whole in rhythmical spacing and fill up the detail in between.' Subsequently, O'Connell concentrated on hand-block printing on fabric. He used synthetic dyes, rather than the local vegetable dyes popular with members of the Arts and Craft Society, and had to carry out extensive research into the dyes and the dyeing process, becoming very knowledgeable.
Success
O'Connell's fabrics rapidly became very successful in artistic circles in Melbourne. In 1934 an art critic wrote: As a master craftsman in the production of hand block-printed textiles, curtains, and fabrics, Michael O'Connell ranks among the best artists in Australia. The range and variety of his designs show that he has rare powers of invention; and his sense of colour is very evident. One gets more stimulus from a display of his fabrics than from many an exhibition of pictures. In 1936 he exhibited fabrics in the Rocke salon at the Myer Emporium, and The Age critic reported that There is amazing variety in both design and colour in this exhibition, which proves how far the artist has gone in his experiments, in which he has the valuable assistance of his wife. Although for the most part his designs are essentially modern, they have still that quality of "liveableness" which appeals to the person who cannot afford frequent changes in home furnishing...In these block-printed linens there are lovely sweeping lines in restful colours, deep blues, soft greens, glowing brick pinks, cool lemon yellows and greens, olive, beige, rust, and crimson. Sometimes the design is small and circumscribed, yet the choice and combination of colours gives it a spacious air when used for a deep armchair or a luxurious couch. Many of these linens are beautiful in themselves, because of the nature of the designs and the quality of colour...others would depend to a considerable extent for their effect on the use that was made of them, the circumstances in which they were used, whether for hangings or coverings, and so belong to the second fabric class. But they are all the work of an artist with a true feeling for line and colour.O'Connell was established at Barbizon, his Modernist residence that secured his place within Melbourne's avant-grade community while serving as the operational base for his concrete garden furniture business. As his fabric design business expanded, the house evolved into a prominent studio space and cultural hub. It regularly hosted artists, clients, journalists and events for the Arts and Crafts Society, while frequently being featured and photographed in contemporary design journals.
He worked with garden designer Edna Walling, sculptor Ola Cohn, furniture designer Frederick Ward, Modernist shop-owner Cynthia Reed, then young editor and publisher Harry Tatlock Miller, and patron of the arts Maie Casey.
However, in the view of John McPhee, one time curator of Australian Decorative Arts at the National Gallery of Australia and Prof. Harriet Edquist, author of his biography, O'Connell's role in the development of Modernism in Australia has been largely overlooked. She has written: there has emerged a consensus ... [that] Australian Modernism began in Sydney in the 1920s and was only taken up in Melbourne in the 1930s. O'Connell's role in articulating a Modernist position through his craft practice in the 1920s, initially in the building of Barbizon and later with his cement furniture and figures, has remained outside this historical purview, as has his practice as a printmaker independent of textile design. ... Yet in his time, the innovative nature of O'Connell's work was recognised by fellow artists, designers, architects, critics, clients and retailers. Edquist called the biography The Lost Modernist.
Britain O'Connell and Ella moved to England in May 1937 taking fabric designs, patriotically themed to encourage sales during the coronation of George VI. They built their new home, The Chase, at Perry Green, near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire next to sculptor Henry Moore, living meanwhile in a tent on site and producing some work to pay for its completion.
Though wanting to build the house using concrete blocks as at Beaumaris, O'Connell instead had to use conventional brick and timber to comply with building regulations. The second-hand bricks were old and uneven, from nearby demolished cottages, giving the house an aged hand-wrought character. As at Beaunaris, the house was set in a clearing edged by concrete pots, and again, it was a studio house. It had a low lath and plaster workshop attached to the brick house, a large room for showing work at the far end with a ladder/stair up to a small bedroom under the eaves, and the living room with large fireplace, kitchen and primitive bathroom between. Meanwhile, Ella turned The Chase into a smallholding with goats, chickens, vegetables, and an orchard, assisted by Tom Perry of Perry Green and produced linocut postcards depicting villages in the area.
O'Connell held a number of exhibitions and received commissions in Britain before the war, among them the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at Burlington House; the Daily Mail's Ideal Home Exhibition; Edinburgh Weavers, Harrods; and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. At this time he met Christopher Heal, of Heal's store in London, who said:it was the first time I had met a craftsman who could handle vat dyes producing fabrics in colours that would not fade. The designs were striking, of a kind unlike any I had seen. I quickly decided to buy some and hold a small exhibition of Michael's work in the Fabric Dept; so began a long lasting friendship.'
World War II In World War II O'Connell served in the artillery at Dover and then was moved to the Royal Ordnance as an Inspector of Dangerous Buildings at a munitions factory in Chorley, Lancashire. He exhibited stage curtains and backcloths for theatre and ballet at Heal's galleries. Due to war-time economies, the designs were block-printed on inexpensive, rough-textured fabrics of cotton and jute, unbleached linen and hessian. A Birmingham Post reviewer noted burlesques and fantasies on period themes, and in keeping with the war, an early English design showing St. George, triumphing over dragons. Drawings by Sheila Hawkins showed the application of the fabrics to costume design and fashion.