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Helen Lempriere
Helen Lempriere (1907–1991) was a leading Australian painter, who was most prolific between the 1930s and the 1970s. Lempriere was born into a wealthy and cultivated Melbourne family and was related both to the Tasmanian portraitist Thomas Lempriere and to Dame Nellie Melba.
When Lempriere decided on art as a career, she elected to follow the precepts of the antimodernist school of dark tonal painting inspired by Max Meldrum (1875–1955). She studied initially with Archibald (A. D.) Colquhoun and in 1930 with Justus Jorgensen, subsequently playing an active role in the building of the first stage of Jorgensen’s artists’ colony, Montsalvat, with which she was closely associated for ten years. During that period, apart from painting, she made a number of sculptures, including a female torso that was to be located in a fountain, a gargoyle, and two stone cherubs on the Montsalvat Great Hall.
Lempriere also made prints (a number of which have been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia), painted lively watercolours, and made many pencil sketches of birds and animals.
Lempriere painted her first significant tonal picture in 1935. By 1938, however, when she executed plein air landscapes in the drought-stricken region of Yea, her palette was brighter, her style more impressionistic. A July 1940 painting of the family house and garden at Lilydale revealed the artist’s continuing preference for strong, bright colours and a more developed interest in the fall of light on the subject. Lempriere was by now deeply attracted to impressionism for plein air studies, although she continued to paint tonal portraits.
On 15 June 1945 Lempriere married Keith Wood, moving with him to Sydney in 1946 after his discharge from the army. The artist’s work was by this time confident and distinctive. A 1945 self-portrait, while exhibiting characteristically ‘Meldrumite’ dark tonalities, was also charged with a striking realism.
Over the next forty years Lempriere’s paintings and works on paper were acquired not only by the National Gallery of Australia but also by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, not to mention many private collectors in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia. Indeed, Lempriere is one of the few Australian painters to establish an international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s. Even so, the relatively limited acceptance of women artists in this country in the years following World War II saw her paintings rarely exhibited in Australia during this period, though she mounted more than twenty solo exhibitions in Europe, England and the United States.
Lempriere produced a considerable body of paintings during the extended periods she spent overseas. Many of these pictures addressed issues of Australian national identity, through references to Aboriginal themes and narratives. Lempriere was particularly interested in the relationships between the protagonists in these narratives and the land. The unsigned preface to the catalogue for a 1963 exhibition of Lempriere’s work, at Galerie Furstenberg, Paris, reads:
‘It is most important to note that she does not attempt to illustrate [A]boriginal cults or legends … She seeks to emphasise their mystic qualities and to translate them into [European] visual experiences’.
In 1966, after many years of travel and working abroad, Lempriere and Keith Wood settled permanently in Sydney. Lempriere continued to paint and exhibit, in 1976 mounting at David Jones’s Art Gallery an extensive exhibition of energetic and intensely coloured marine abstractions, their subject matter drawn from Heron and
After several years of serious illness, Helen Lempriere died on 25 November 1991. The Helen Lempriere Bequest, established five years later from the estate of Keith Wood, has made possible The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, dedicated to the advancement of Australian sculptors.
Source: Prof. Joan Kerr