Deutscher and Hackett

‘A very free style of drawing of a skill that is the greater for being unobtrusive, is accompanied by a luminous colour scheme, of admirable freshness… [and] perceptive harmony. All this bears witness to the delicate and sensitive temperament of the artist Kathleen O’Connor, whose reputation is already secured and whose successful exhibition is a joy to the eyes for lovers of new and authentic modern art.’¹
 
This is how the critic writing for La Revue Moderne described Kathleen O’Connor’s art in her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1937. Held at Galerie J. Allard and opened by the curator of the Jeu de Paume in the presence of artists including Édouard Vuillard and Lucien Simon, it heralded a significant moment in her career, confirming her place among the ranks of those working in Paris at the time as a contemporary artist of note.
 
Born in New Zealand in 1876, Kathleen O’Connor moved to Australia as a teenager following her father’s appointment as the Western Australian Engineer in Chief. Travelling to Europe with her mother and sister in 1906 and eager to visit Paris, then the centre of the western art world, she experienced the enticing ‘dream life of [the city], the restaurant life, the café life… glasses glittering with reflections, and with it all the music of many voices, the babble of many tongues.’² She attended painting classes in London during the summer of 1908 but by the end of the year was back in Paris, the place that she would call home for most of the next four decades. Although many questions remain about the details of O’Connor’s life there, we know that she studied at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière around 1910, and that she knew fellow-artists Bessie Davidson (lot XX) and Frances Hodgkins (lot XX) – who was also New Zealand-born – attending watercolour classes at her school between 1911 – 12.
 
Janda Gooding has observed that O’Connor’s contribution to the 1921 Salon d’Automne ‘[marked] a transition from the figurative paintings, preoccupied with painterly concerns and impressions of a fleeting moment, towards a commitment to explore the still life.’³ With its focus on familiar domestic objects, this genre became a strong theme in her art and ‘the table top became the site for her explorations of modernism.’⁴ Painted in 1947, Domestic scene is characteristic of O’Connor’s approach, depicting a complex grouping of flowers, fruit, glass bottles and vessels so densely arranged that the surface beneath them is barely visible. We see glimpses of the harlequin pattern that forms the backdrop to the image however and a similar fabric appears in Australian riches, c.1949 – 51 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) and the earlier painting, Between hours, c.1928 – 30 (Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art), a reflection of O’Connor’s interest in pattern and ornament, as well as a nod to her work as a textile designer in Paris and Sydney during the 1920s. Pictorial space is tightly compressed and the prominent texture of the brushstrokes, expressive and energetic, reflects the pleasure O’Connor found in the process of painting and in her medium, as well as the assured way in which she manipulated it across the canvas to create images which are intimate, aesthetically rich and atmospheric.
 
1. Hesset, C., review in La Revue Moderne, no. 5, 15 March 1937, pp. 8 – 9, cited in Gooding, J., Chasing Shadows: The Art of Kathleen O’Connor, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1996, p. 55
2. O’Connor, K., ‘Paris in the Latin Quarter’, The West Australian, Perth, 17 May 1913, cited in Gooding, ibid., p. 25
3. Gooding, ibid, p. 39
4. ibid., p. 49
 
KIRSTY GRANT