Until this exhibition, Beckett had principally been seen as a surprising, even eccentric member of Melbourne’s influential interwar Meldrum ‘School’ (the followers of the tonal painter and teacher Max Meldrum). Put simply, Beckett’s colour was always far brighter than that of typical Meldrumites. Now Tracey Lock brings fresh, compelling insights to the work. Her emphasis on Beckett’s interest in the new spiritual beliefs of the time, such as Theosophy, makes sense of the unusually brilliant colour; taken together with her love of Oriental art and philosophy, including Buddhism, Beckett’s emphasis on the transient makes sense. In closely argued essays, Lock shows how, for example, Beckett seems to have understood Rudolph Steiner’s ideas about colour being the gateway to understanding. She argues that the magnificent Tea gardens (c.1935) exemplifies the harmony between vertical and horizontal that the theosophist Helena Blavatsky proposed as a meeting between truth and beauty in her book The Secret Doctrine (1888). This argument is supported by the lifelong research by art historian Rosalind Hollinrake, who first rediscovered Beckett just over fifty years ago. It is the final answer to the mystery of Beckett’s long neglect: dismissive family attitudes, a negative response to her work during her short lifetime, and the long decay of hundreds of paintings stored in a country shed for more than thirty years.

Clarice Beckett, Australia, 1887–1935, Evening, after Whistler, c.1931, Melbourne, oil on board; Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

One of the strengths of Lock’s attentive reading of Beckett’s works is her willingness to jettison conventional art-historical ideas, such as the notion that realism is necessarily opposed to abstraction. Emphasising ‘the quality of feeling’, she repositions Beckett’s paintings in ‘dialogue with international modernism and considers the artist as a visionary mystic, driven by spiritual impulses’. Indeed, Beckett was exceptionally driven, quiet by all accounts, educated, determined. She was clearly well informed, and stubbornly independent; she studied drawing with Fred McCubbin for three years, had the wit to turn down an invitation from Bernard Hall to become his painting student, then migrated to Meldrum’s provocative classes. Beckett was very sure of conventional composition, but equally she drew on the innovations of Japanese ukiyo-e printmaking, with its asymmetries and high horizons. This was a thoughtful artist, clear about her project, as Lock demonstrates. And all this despite a life constrained by the conventions of the times, and her spinster status in an establishment family.

What we see in The Present Moment is a substantial glimpse of Beckett’s world. She is the poetic interpreter of Melbourne – bayside Beaumaris with its famous bathing boxes, Luna Park, Collins Street in the rain. The paintings are mostly unpeopled, but the few figures who do appear are sharply observed: in Beach scene (1932–33), a woman in black slumped under an umbrella, an Australian auntie from the past; the formidable standing woman in Bay Road (1930); and the probing Hilda (1923), a portrait of Beckett’s sister and the earliest work in the exhibition. Her idiosyncratic technique was an amalgam of contemporary technologies of looking and recording, which include late Impressionism – or rather the picturesque modification of naturalism that apes Impression – and perhaps even Pictorialist photography. Beckett’s affinity with Pictorialist photography was criticised in her lifetime, but Lock rightly mentions her ‘photographic sensibility’ and that she was known as the family photographer. Whatever their sources, these stylistic tools sustain a distinctive, dreamy, solitary life of looking. Perhaps not surprisingly, the results are often unpredictable: the astonishing Summer fields (1926) is so summary and original that it prompted Fred Williams’s spontaneous tribute on first viewing: ‘She got there before me.’

Clarice Beckett, Australia, 1887–1935, Summer fields, 1926, Naringal, Western District, Victoria, oil on board; Gift of Alastair Hunter OAM and the late Tom Hunter in memory of Elizabeth through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Now back to the ‘bell and whistles’, this time the framing of the project. Unusually for these times, Tracey Lock had the entire carriage of this exhibition: research, exhibition concept and design, catalogue. Perhaps that is why The Present Moment is an unusual hybrid, serious scholarship marked by occasional excesses. The exhibition is a transcendent experience, each part of the day identified by wall colours fading gently into each other at the thematic junctures; my one demur is a sunset pink that rivals the glow in Beckett’s skies, a pity since that particular Victorian coastal glow is already astonishing. And I take issue with both the vertiginous introductory video-scape and some redundant domestic set-dressing. (Enough!) This odd hybridity continues with the substantial and highly informative catalogue, with its excellent essays, good illustrations, and valuable, old-style illustrated list of works; unhappily it is marred by an ugly cover that reproduces one of Beckett’s original frames and its reverse, in an inexplicable lapse of judgement.

That will fade. What I will remember from The Present Moment is the serene stillness of the paintings, the peculiarly intense colour, the intelligence of Clarice Beckett’s looking. I saw blissed-out smiles on the faces of other visitors, and I know I am not alone.

Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment continues at the Art Gallery of South Australia until 16 May 2021.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.