Anne Montgomery (artist)

The first decade of Anne Montgomery's career placed her as one of the most admired emerging artists in 1930s Melbourne, described in 1933 as "one of the white hopes" of Australian art by Harold Herbert,^[6] she exhibited widely in the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Victorian Artists Society, the Arts and Crafts society, the New Melbourne Art Club, the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Twenty Melbourne Painters (as a guest). She established a studio in the Olderfleet buildings with Lucy Newell which became an important meeting place for many young artists in Melbourne including Treania Smith, Constance Coleman, Marna Pestell and Geoff Jones.^[2] William Pate recalled that Anne Montgomery's city studio was the location for sketching and drawing sessions during the 1930s.^[7] Montgomery, Newell and Traill toured Tasmania in 1935.^[8] Another colleague who shared her interest in the fanciful and decorative was potter Klytie Pate and the two women held a well-received joint exhibition at Kozminsky Galleries, Melbourne in 1943 opened by opened by Harold Brown head of the art school at the Technical College.^[9] More unexpected contacts from her early working life were Merle and Roger Kemp. She painted Merle Kemp's portrait c1940 and knew both Merle and Roger Kemp through teaching at the Melbourne Technical College, later RMIT.^[10] By 1940, Montgomery's works had been acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, Castlemaine Art Gallery and the Howard Hinton collection (NERAM). A further purchase by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1940,^[11] has since been deaccessioned.

Montgomery's public visibility rapidly changed in the 1940s. She became increasingly aligned with George Bell and his oppositional stance to the emerging expressionist and free-er aesthetic seen among the most radical Melbourne artists. Her public exhibitions were generally within Bell's circle and among his supporters, including the Melbourne Contemporary Artist group and the invitation-only George Bell group. The styles of Bell's later art school at Selbourne Road, Toorak, with the hard edged pictorial elements and flat synthetic cubism completely overwrote her earlier style. She was an enthusiastic and assiduous student and for most of the "homework" assignments that Bell set, Montgomery produced fully developed artworks, rather than sketches and provisional studies. Her colours became darker. arbitrary and more dramatic, often lending an overtone of surrealism to the Australian landscape. She painted in Victorian alps with Lucy Newell and Mollie Hill,^[12] who was based at Bright, both friends from the National Gallery School, camping in stockmen's and cross-country skier's huts. !n 1954 she was still painting several times a year at Mount Hotham.^[13] She also began to produce pastels in this later abstracting style, often with bright colours on dark-toned paper. The new building of the Lyceum Club in Ridgeway Place Melbourne, designed by Ellison Harvie and completed in 1959 included a large mural by Montgomery of Magnolias.

During the postwar years Montgomery worked alongside and was friend of many of the major classical modernists of the 1950s including Dorothy Mary Braund, Nancy Grant, Guelda Pyke, Constance Stokes, Eveline Syme (part of whose studio contents she inherited), Geoff Jones, Frances Derham, Barbara Brash and Mary Cecil Allen. She also drew portraits of a number of these women artists; the portrait of Pyke is now at the State Library of Victoria. Helen Ogilvie, who was both a gallerist and a classical modernist, also validated Montgomery, who showed at Ogilvie's Peter Bray Gallery during the 1950s. Yet Montgomery and her family were too closely associated with Bernard Hall to enjoy the endorsement that Ogilvie enjoyed from Daryl Lindsay, Ursula Hoff and the Grimwades.

For the final 1965 Melbourne Contemporary Art Society show, Montgomery was in the company of notable members and invitees who included George Bell, Barbara Brash, Bill Coleman, Margaret Dredge, Dorothea Francis, Inez Hutchison, Maidie McGowan, Mary Macqueen, Dorothy Stephen, Harry Rosengrave, Steven Spurrier, Roma Thompson, Edith Wall, and Marjorie Woolcock.^[14] With the death of George Bell in 1966, the promotion of classical modernism dissipated, critics beginning to think the academic cubism of Bell's circle was passé even by the mid 1950s, and thus Anne Montgomery's public status began to dwindle, along with many colleagues.

Stylistically her work slowly defaulted to her earlier decorative style, and she continued to paint until the late 1980s. She returned frequently to her favorite subject, studies of the coastline around Sandringham, where she and her mother lived, Ricketts Point and Half Moon Bay, as well as decorative flower pieces, ti-tree, banksias and studies of Magnolias. These subjects sustained her from the late 1920s to the late 1980s, as she produced her last known works for the Form and Flowers, group exhibition in 1989 and the Alice 125 exhibition in 1990.^[15]

The growing curatorial interest in Bell's students saw Montgomery's work return to public sight. She was featured in the early comprehensive monograph on the George Bell School by Jan Minchin and Mary Eagle, 1981^[16] and in Felicity St John Moore's survey of Bell and his students presented at the National Gallery of Victoria 1992, shortly after her death.^[17] In 1989 her work, along with that of other Bell pupils, Maidie McGowan and Marjorie Woolcock, toured to three Victorian regional galleries in the Form and Flowers Exhibition.

Two posthumous survey exhibitions of Anne Montgomery's work have been held, one in a Melbourne commercial gallery in 1992 which offered a large range of work for sale,^[18] and another loan exhibition at the Lyceum Club in 2008.^[19] Recently works have been acquired by other public collections including Ballarat, Bendigo, Geelong, the State Library of Victoria (gift of the Montgomery family) and the National Gallery of Australia (prints).