Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie (4 May 1902, in Corowa – 1 August 1993, in Melbourne) was a twentieth-century Australian artist and gallery director, illustrator, 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 Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie was born 4 May 1902 in Corowa and grew up in surrounding 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 and prescriptive teaching methods. In her last year her style was influenced by George Bell while he briefly was the drawing master.Amelia Saward, 'Helen Ogilvie: Australian modernism and a changing sense of place,' in While at the school she became a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and started exhibiting in 1924.
Early career Inspired by seeing a book of Claude Flight's Modernist linocuts in 1928, Ogilvie produced many linocuts and woodcuts from the 1930s onwards. Her work in a 1932 group show is praised, with that of other exhibitors, for skills in cutting and "an intimate artistic facility for illustrative design". She was one of many women artists who took up relief printing but, unlike Eveline Syme and Ethel Spowers, Ogilvie could not afford to study it overseas, and when she took up wood engraving in the 1930s it was her friend, the artist and printmaker Eric Thake who provided instruction. She focussed on subject matter familiar to her, including farm animals, rural landscapes and Australian flora and fauna. Curator Sheridan Palmer in the catalogue for a 1995 Art Gallery of Ballarat retrospective described her as;
She exhibited frequently, but in an effort to survive in the Depression years she also produced bookplates, greeting cards,'Original art on Christmas cards,' The Age Thursday 23 Dec 1954, p.5'Hand-designed',The Age, Thursday 27 Oct 1955, p.10 and calendars.The Age, Tuesday 26 Dec 1933, p.5 In 1933 she showed in a joint exhibition with printmaker Anne Montgomery.
She enjoyed good connections at Melbourne University and the National Gallery of Victoria, with art historians Joseph Burke, Ursula Hoff, and with Russell Grimwade, producing illustrations for the latter's book Flinders Lane: recollections of Alfred Felton (Melbourne University Press,Carlton, 1947)'The story of a benefactor', The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday, 10 Jan 1948, p.8 and Sir John Medley's Stolne and surreptitious verses (Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1952).Illustrations mentioned in Peter Ryan review 'A well-carved cherry-stone', of a memoir of Medley by Geoffrey Serle and John Marginson in The Age, Saturday 21 Aug 1993, p.151 Buttons bearing her designs were sold for a shilling to raise funds for the 1955 building program at Melbourne University.The Age Monday 25 Apr 1955, p.2
War years During WW2 and after, 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.'Craftwork for soldiers,' The Age Saturday, 14 Nov 1942, p.4'Rushes ready for basketmaking,' The Age Tuesday 28 Dec 1943, p.3 In 1948 Ogilvie, assisted by Helen Biggs, set up a school to train handicrafts instructors for Red Cross occupational therapy services.'Handcrafts school to open,' The Age Tuesday 20 Jan 1948, p.5
Gallerist Ogilvie was a generous mentor of emerging artists, and in 1949 Stanley Coe appointed her as one of Australia's first women gallery directors to create a commercial exhibition space on the upper floor of his interior design shop at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne.'New gallery' The Age Wednesday 07 Dec 1949, p.7 Artist Tate Adams dubbed it "the lone beacon in town for contemporary art." For the period until 1955, and with advice from her friends Ursula Hoff, Arnold Shore and Alan McCulloch, she organised a program of exhibitions of the avant-garde; John Brack,Shore, Arnold (1955). 'Artist stresses human values'. (8 March 1955). The Argus (Melbourne, Victoria: 1848–1957), p. 13. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71637449 Margo Lewers, Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952),Johnson, George & Heathcote, C. R. (Christopher Robin) & Zimmer, Jenny, (editor.) (2006). George Johnson : world view. South Yarra, Vic. Macmillan Art Publishing Inge King,Inge King's art has "the gadget air". (21 October 1952). The Argus (Melbourne, Victoria: 1848–1957), p. 5. Retrieved 8 July 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article23217241 Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman (whose radical 'schoolgirl' series was 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,'Show by twenty Victorian artists,' The Age Tuesday 14 Feb 1950, p.2 and was followed by a survey show of contemporary art from Sydney. The National Gallery of Victoria purchased important contemporary works from Stanley Coe Gallery between 1950 and 1963. In 1954 however, the dominance of the gallery for emerging artists was being challenged, a fact signalled by the Contemporary Art Society's massive exhibition at Tye's Gallery at 100 Burke Street in 1954 and the ascendancy of their Gallery of Contemporary Art on Flinders Street.
During her period as gallery director, work by Ogilvie was among others selected in 1950 to decorate the liner Oronsay,'Australian art will decorate new Oronsay,' The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday 26 Oct 1950, p.6 and in 1954 her work was show together with that of Tate Adams and Kenneth Hood at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, encouraging her change of attention to Europe and back to her own art-making.
London After moving on from her directorship, Ogilvie's own oil paintings of abandoned country structures were shown in 1956 at the gallery, which had been renamed the Peter Bray.The Age Tuesday 10 Apr 1956, p.2 She had firmly established her reputation in Australia, with works already acquired by Hoff for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, and had purchased a house in South Yarra.'Artist home after six years abroad', The Age Saturday 22 Jun 1963, p.8 That year she moved to London, where she was engaged with the Crafts Revival of the 1950s and 60s and because, as she joked in an interview, "art doesn't pay", she 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, described as her 'companion', toured Italy over 11 weeks.Interview, 'Australian plans London art show', The Age Friday 05 Jun 1959, p.8 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. While many Australian artists continued to follow European and international trends, Ogilvie devoted her art to Australian subjects, determined to create a new tradition of Australian printmaking and artistic practice. Reception of her paintings in Australia however, as opposed to her earlier prints, was lukewarm; Donald Brook in reviewing her 1968 Macquarie Galleries solo describes them as 'sweet and stiff'.Donald Brook, 'Painters demonstrate', The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday 03 Oct 1968, p.9 By the late 1970s she was producing little work but remained interested in the art world. The last of her solo exhibitions that she was able to attend opened at aGOG (Australian Girls' Own Gallery), Canberra, on her 89th birthday, 4 May 1991.
Ogilvie died suddenly in Melbourne on 1 August 1993.
Legacy Critical response to Ogilvie's work was sparse, limited mainly to the prints and to vague praise or her 'fine impressions in line and colour' or of lino-cutting skills, 'the work of a sound craftsman [sic]', 'decorative' and with a sense of colour that is 'agreeable and harmonious'. By the time of curator Sheridan Palmer's touring Ballarat Art Gallery Ogilvie 1995 retrospective, The Age critic Robert Nelson in his review highlighted;
Nevertheless, her work, especially her printmaking, has since enjoyed a renewed interest and reevaluation, and has featured in seven major surveys of Australian women's art (see section 'Posthumous exhibitions', below).
Exhibitions Solo 1948, May: Exhibition of watercolour drawingsThe AgeWednesday, 19 May 1948, p.5 1956, April: Paintings, Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne 1963, February/March: Australian Country Dwellings, shown with The Landscapes of Lucien Pissarro at Leicester Galleries Gallery, Audley Sq., Mayfair, Londoncatalogue, Helen Ogilvie: Australian country dwellings, London: Leicester Galleries, 1963The Observer Sunday 10 Mar 1963, p.27 1967, March: Leicester Galleries, Audley Sq., Mayfair, London 1967, October: Helen Ogilvie Paintings, Leveson Street Gallery, North MelbourneListing, The Age, Friday 09 Oct 1970, p.15 1968, September: joint solo with David Rose, Macquarie Galleries, SydneyListing, The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 28 Sep 1968, p.206 1970, 15-26 October: "Australian Country Buildings" Leveson Street Gallery 1972, from 3 May: Macquarie Galleries (joint solo with Nancy Borlase)Listing, The Sydney Morning Herald Sunday, 30 Apr 1972, p.107 1974, 2–13 June: Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne. 1979, 11–30 July: solo alongside Trevor Weekes and Denese Oates, Macquarie GalleriesListing, The Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 9 July 1979, p.10 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. Britten, 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.Advertisement, The Sydney Morning Herald, Tue, Nov 18, 1924, p.6 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’Designs in Lino Cut’, The Age, Tue, Apr 5, 1932, p.8