Helen Ogilvie
Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie was one of the first women commercial gallery directors in Australia. She ran the Peter Bray Gallery [originally from 1949-1950 the Stanley Coe Gallery], Melbourne from 1949-1955 showing established and emerging artists. Melbourne, was at this time according to Chris Wallace Crabbe 'A man's world ... Women belonged to another, private sphere as a rule, figuring little in our discussion, except as examples of type or tendency'. Stanley Coe’s decision to appoint Helen Ogilvie to transform the upstairs area of his interior design shop at 435 Bourke Street into a commercial exhibition gallery was a serious gesture of acknowledgment for the opposite gender. Ogilvie had become part of an influential arts circle and with advice from her friends Ursula Hoff, Arnold Shore and Alan McCulloch, she organised a program of exhibitions of the avant-garde. The inaugural exhibition, '21 Artists', in February 1950, included works by George Bell, Arthur Boyd, Dorothy Braund, Charles Bush, John Farmer; Leonard French, Raymond Glass, Polly Hurry, Geoff Jones, William Frater, Roger Kemp, Bernard Lawson, Daryl Lindsay, Jan Nigro, Ada May Plante, Arnold Shore, Constance Stokes, Alan Sumner, Francis Ray Thompson, Alan Warren and Phyl Waterhouse. She put on many innovative exhibitions including an early show on Sydney Nolan; Margo Lewers, Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952), Inge King, 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. Joseph Burke [Herald professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, lecturer and major supporter of the arts in Australia] regarded Ogilvie as a 'valued acquaintance' and purchased some of his first Australian art works, an Ian Fairweather gouache 'Hell', and a Constance Stokes, from her gallery. The National Gallery of Victoria also purchased some of its important contemporary works from this gallery including John Brack's The Barber's Shop, 1952 and Collins Street, 5pm, 1956
Helen 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. Whilst at the school she became a member of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors and started exhibiting with them in 1924. In 1928 she was Inspired to take up print making after seeing a book of Claude Flight's Modernist linocuts and went on to produce many linocuts and woodcuts. During WW2 and after, Ogilvie worked in the Red Cross Rehabilitation Service at Heidelberg Military Hospital where she taught patients lino- and wood-cutting, and basketmaking. In 1948 Ogilvie, assisted by Helen Biggs, set up a school to train handicrafts instructors for Red Cross occupational therapy service.
Helen had been painting for many years and after moving on from her directorship, her own oil paintings of abandoned country structures were shown in 1956 at the gallery. Examples of her work were acquired by Hoff for the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, and she purchased a house in South Yarra. In 1956 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..
Whilst living in England she went on sketching tours in the countryside and took trips to Europe. She 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 who had promoted the work of many innovative Australian artists preferred to devote her own work to Australian subjects, determined to create a new tradition of Australian printmaking and artistic practice
Solo Shows:
1948, May: Exhibition of watercolour drawings
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, London
1967, March: Leicester Galleries, Audley Sq., Mayfair, London – where the current paintings were purchased
1968, September: joint solo with David Rose, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney
1968, October: Helen Ogilvie Paintings, Leveson Street Gallery, North Melbourne
1972, from 3 May: Macquarie Galleries (joint solo with Nancy Borlase)
1974, 2–13 June: Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne.
1979, 11–30 July: solo alongside Trevor Weekes and Denese Oates, Macquarie Galleries[
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.
She exhibited in a large number of group shows from the 1920s onwards.
Public Collections:
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, WA
Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, TAS
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, TAS
Castlemaine Art Museum, Castlemaine, VIC
Benalla Art Gallery, Benalla, VIC
City of Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, VIC
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC
La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIC
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT[
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Queensland Art Gallery
Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, VIC
Cruthers Collection of Women's Art at the University of Western Australia