Book review: Awakening: Four lives in art by Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller

The creative duo Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller, who brought us the wonderfully documented account of the Herald Exhibition of 1939, Degenerates and perverts, which dispelled numerous myths about the show that "brought modernism" to Australia, have now again combined forces to tell the tale of four modern Australian women, who in the first half of the 20th century, all chose not to call Australia home. The women are not related, other than through their place of birth, Australia, and by the fact that they were involved with the arts and chose to live and work abroad. Dora Ohlfsen resided mainly in Rome, Louise Dyer in Paris, Clarice Zander in London and Mary Cecil Allen in New York. Perhaps with the exception of Ohlfsen, who generally has a passing reference in any account of Australian sculpture, these women have largely been forgotten and have been seen as relatively peripheral figures. The considerable achievement of this book is that it gives each of them a life – a meticulously researched biography. Though I must confess, that particularly in the case of Ohlfsen and Allen, I felt a bit short-changed, their entries were a bit synoptic and I was crying out for more.

The most fascinating character is Dora Ohlfsen, who after studying music in Berlin, suffered a nervous breakdown and met her lifelong partner, the Russian aristocrat Elena von Kügelgen from the Baltic region of the Russian empire. Together they moved to St Petersburg, where Ohlfsen took up sculpture and after six years, together they moved and settled in Rome. I have always found Ohlfsen an enigmatic character, she now remains an enigmatic character about whom I know a great deal more. She was anti-war and wrote to her niece "how men love war! If they did not there would be no wars." Yet she spent much of her life working on war-related themes, including her best known Australian work, her Anzac medal, which we are told was the first commemorative work of art memorialising the Anzacs.

In Italy she was swept up with the cult of Mussolini, who posed for her on several occasions, and with whose help she became the only expatriate sculptor in Italy commissioned with a national war memorial. She noted that her benefactor has been "described as a cross between Beethoven and Napoleon I" and she apparently agreed. Hers was essentially a tragic life, where she received little recognition at home with none of her major projects seeing the light of day, and works which were sent to Australia apparently eventually being discarded. At the age of 71, in 1948, Dora Ohlfsen and her Russian Countess were found dead in a gas-filled studio in Rome.

Mary Cecil Allen, better known in America as Cecil Allen, was a Melbourne-trained painter born in 1893, who was discovered as a brilliant lecturer on art and migrated to New York in 1926, and she remained in America until her death in 1962 at the art colony of Provincetown on the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. A fashionable and charismatic figure, she was a pioneer in explaining and promoting art and promoted, with some success, Australian art in New York. Ultimately, war and the tyranny of distance did not allow these early efforts to fully blossom, while in Australia her views on art were generally considered as too radical for the local art scene.

Her lectures formed the basis of two of her books on art criticism, The Mirror of the Passing World (1928) and Painters of the Modern Mind (1929), which for a time were amongst the most widely read and discussed texts on contemporary art.

Alleyne Clarice Zander's life reads like a Greek tragedy, with bouts of poverty, a husband who was maimed on the battlefields of Fromalles and found an early grave and the man whom she loved, Will Dyson, whom she could never marry due to family resentment. After the death of her husband in 1929, she travelled to London in 1930 and worked as a journalist and later as the manger of the influential Redfern Gallery in Bond Street, where she introduced to the gallery and to English audiences Australian artists, including Sidney Nolan, Loudon Sainthill and Donald Friend. Subsequently, she became the influential curator and publicist for the Royal Academy. She was also responsible for Australia's first important exhibition of contemporary British art and accompanied it to Australia in 1933, where it attracted a considerable amount of press coverage.

I must confess that I only knew of Louise Dyer as a patron who supported the most wonderful of Australian lyrical poets, John Shaw Neilson, and in 1924 enabled him to publish a landmark anthology of his verse. In this book we have presented a picture of a woman born into money, who then married into money and used it mainly in France to bring back to life music publishing and recording. The label identified with her name, Les Éditions de L'Oiseau-Lyre played a key role in the foundations of the modern early music revival.

It is always a treat to have a book which broadens the repertoire of the names involved in the Australian arts, this is such a book.

Sasha Grishin is a Canberra reviewer.