The curve of the Bridge

Atomised light, urban scaffoldings, electrified domesticity, city workers regimented by industry, the synchronisation of organic things with the contours of a machined world: this is the language of the end of the twentieth century as much as its beginning. Cossington Smith seemed to believe that daylight illuminated earth from some external spiritual source, but when she painted the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the late 1920s there was a sense of ecstatic delight, in the exploding sun-rays of her brushstrokes, that such a momentous event could be created by mere mortals and their machines.
Barry Pearce¹

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�	Grace Cossington Smith 'The curve of the Bridge' 1928–29 oil on cardboard Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales click to enlarge

For Grace Cossington Smith the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge provided a subject that was both secular and spiritual. As an artist who had honed her skills in drawing over many years, increasingly emphasising dynamic and rhythmic structure, the building of the Bridge was a confirmation and a revelation. As in her early drawings of illumination through doorways, her paintings of the Bridge reveal a structure mirrored and amplified by light, now shown in radiating spheres, like auras, heralding a new beginning. For her, it was the building of the Bridge�– the sense of it coming into being�– that was most exciting.² Bearing witness to the evolution of the massive structure of the Bridge as a work-in-progress was to witness a remarkable feat of human ingenuity. It was also a revelation of energy and passion made visible.

For many people the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a symbol of hope during the depression�– the one spectacular event ‘that really took people’s minds off their immediate problems’.³ The popular press, the quality weeklies and monthlies, and the professional journals (including Art in Australia) all carried stories on the Bridge’s development, ‘amply illustrated with dramatic pictures taken from every angle and at every time of day and night’.⁴ There was also substantial coverage in cinemas and on radio. The responses were not all positive and artists’ views reflected broader community attitudes about change. Lionel Lindsay wrote ‘The Bridge has dwarfed the city and humbled the North Shore. It sets the scale for a new era and a modern Babylon. Old Sydney is now but a memory.’⁵ Many others across the modern-traditional divide embraced the Bridge in their work; including painters, printmakers and photographers such as Roland Wakelin, Jessie Traill, Dorrit Black, Harold Cazneaux and Henri Mallard.

Cossington Smith loved the Harbour Bridge. In an interview fifty years after it was built, she said her strongest memory was seeing the structure from the boat on her return from a visit to England. ‘It was early morning, and it was so lovely�– the Harbour, the water, and my dear old Bridge. Fancy it being 50! It doesn’t seem that many years ago.’⁶

In 1927 her favourite site for viewing the various stages of the Bridge’s construction was at Milson’s Point on the North Shore. In those days she would take her sketchbook down to the point, wearing a large hat, sturdy boots and carrying a gentleman’s black umbrella. Once there, she strapped herself to her equipment in order not to lose it in the blustery waterside winds. ‘My father gave me a lovely Windsor & Newton sketching umbrella’, she said, ‘but unfortunately I could never force it into the ground enough and the wind always blew it over, so I had to end up by using�… an ordinary black [umbrella] which I fixed onto my painting box and to myself and it worked extremely well’.⁷

Cossington Smith’s feeling for architecture and geometry was well suited to the Bridge, with its complex and varied structural components of solid ballasts and the see-through pattern of the bars. Rhythm was important. In her drawing for The curve of the Bridge 1928–29 she wrote ‘rhythm of bars’ and circled it. The patterns of cross-bars animating a large part of the composition are drawn emphatically, with the artist making notes about the perpendicular lines coming off the great curve�– in light and shadow. She also made notes about colour in terms of what she saw and felt. It is probable that the artist took the advice of Beatrice Irwin in New science of colour, to meditate on the scene and allow her intuitive response to colour to come through.⁸ In the sky she wrote ‘sky very light�… blue�+�rose’, and on the front pylon ‘mauve blue’ in the upper shadows, moving down in tones of grey to white and silver.

In the painting The curve of the Bridge, there are many subtle shifts of colour and tone, from warm to cool and intense to delicate. In transferring the initial map of the drawing, Cossington Smith’s painting went beyond the drawing, in both the colour and the way that she gradually applied small touches of paint across the entire surface, while retaining a feeling of the dramatic impact of the structure itself. As in her other Bridge paintings, constructed forms coexist with earth, trees, sea and radiating luminous bands of sky. The interactions of the Bridge with the harbour are amplified by details such as a ferry on the water viewed between two pylons. In this masterful, tautly structured work the artist attained the substance and feeling she aimed for, of forms and colours imbued with luminosity. As she said, ‘I think form is the most important thing�… colour expresses form and I think colour must have light in it for our whole creation exists in light.’⁹

�	Grace Cossington Smith 'Circular Quay from Milson's Point' 1929 coloured pencil and crayon Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales click to enlarge

The curve of the Bridge was one of Cossington Smith’s largest paintings before 1928, the same size as the centrepiece of her first solo exhibition, The gully 1928. It was first shown in the £1000 Australian Art Quest in May 1929, organised by the State Theatre of Sydney in association with the Sun newspaper. Priced at fifty guineas, it was one of hundreds of works submitted and although it was shown in the exhibition, it was not acquired for the State Theatre. If the organisers did not quite ‘get’ the long-term significance of the painting, the strength of the work was recognised by the collector Gladys McDermot who also purchased Cossington Smith’s The gully and works by Roland Wakelin and Roy De Maistre.¹⁰

The curve of the Bridge was taken out of Australia by McDermot and it re-appeared as a loan to an exhibition of paintings and drawings that included Cossington Smith’s work at the Walker Galleries in London, in April 1932.¹¹ It was almost sixty years before the painting returned to Australia, where it was ultimately acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales; recognised at last in this country for the great painting that it is.¹² When the Gallery’s Head of Australian Art, Barry Pearce, first saw the work he found it ‘staggering in its authority and sense of scale, a painting that may well be to the first half of the 20th century what Arthur Streeton’s Fire’s on is to the last half of the 19th century in Australian art.’ He also wrote, ‘I felt then�– and I have not changed my mind since�– that I was probably looking at the greatest modern Australian painting of its period, pace Margaret Preston, Roland Wakelin, Roy de Maistre and all those other worthy souls trying collectively to drag Australia into the domain of modern 20th century art.’¹³

Deborah Hart
Exhibition Curator and Senior Curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture

Notes
1 Barry Pearce, ‘Australian icons’, Look Magazine, Art Gallery of New South Wales, April 2000, p.25.
2 See Daniel Thomas, Grace Cossington Smith: a life from drawings in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1993, p.28.
3 Peter Spearritt, Sydney since the twenties, Neutral Bay, New South Wales: Hale & Iremonger, 1978, p.62.
4 Peter Spearritt, p.62.
5 Lionel Lindsay quoted in John Slater, Through artists’ eyes: Australian suburbs and their cities, 1919–1945, Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, p.54.
6 Geraldine Brooks, ‘Fancy my dear old Bridge being 50!’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 1982, n.p.
7 Grace Cossington Smith, interview with Alan Roberts at Cossington, Sydney, 9 February 1970.
8 In 1924 Cossington Smith transcribed Beatrice Irwin’s text New science of colour, William Rider and son, London, 1923.
9 Grace Cossington Smith, interview with Alan Roberts, 9 February 1970.
10 Peter Cochrane, ‘When Irish eyes were discerning’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1990, p.4.
11 An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Lionel T Crawshaw, Mrs Lionel Crawshaw and Grace Cossington Smith (of Sydney NSW), Walker’s Galleries, London, 22 April until 12 May 1932, cat.no.160.
12 Bruce James and Robyn Brady played an important part in bringing the work to the attention of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and promoting its importance for the state collection. Once he had seen the painting, Barry Pearce recognised its significance and recommended the work highly to the Director, Edmund Capon. The work was purchased with funds from the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales and James Fairfax in February 1991.
13 Barry Pearce, ‘Gift to the Gallery�– Grace Cossington Smith’s “The curve of the Bridge”’, Look Magazine, Art Gallery of New South Wales, May 1991, pp.12–13.