A gift of ten drawings by Allan Mitelman

Allan Mitelman (Polish/Australian bn. 1946) is a printmaker, draughtsman and painter who is also a major contributor to the history of abstraction in Australia. Ten works on paper by the artist have recently been gifted to the Baillieu Library Print Collection through the Cultural Gifts Program. This collection of ten drawings spans fourteen years of the artist’s career and is a window onto his life’s practice, one which has been concerned with reinventing the surface of paper.

The relationship between the artist, the paper and the layers of applied medium are vital in the production of these work of art and all of the gifted works are untitled, thereby inviting the viewer to respond to them free from constrains and conventions. Viewers may also be surprised by the small scale of these drawings which are no more than 20 centimetres in size.

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Allan Mitelman, “S.T.”  1971, lithograph, image: 37.7 x 55.5cm, Baillieu Library Collection, the University of Melbourne. © Allan Mitelman

The way in which media lies on the paper is likewise key to the meaning and interpretation of the Baillieu Library Print Collection. Previously there had only been one example by Allan Mitelman in the collection: a lithograph titled “S.T.” . Therefore this gift contextualises this single abstract print and adds depth to the range of techniques in the collection. Untitled (2000), for example, incorporates a monotype print (a unique impression) the surface of which has been reworked with drawing. This is the first example of a monotype method in the collection.

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Allan Mitelman, Untitled (2000), monotype and ink, sheet: 14.6 x 9.6cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

Other drawings such as Untitled (2012) combine watercolour and pencil and they are executed in such a manner that the viewer never tires of looking at them.

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Allan Mitelman, Untitled , 2012, pencil and watercolour, image: 15.5 x 9.1cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

These works on paper offer wide appeal to students of subjects such as printmaking, art history, curatorship, history and education. They exemplify contemporary working practices, ensure that the collection is alive and  relevant, and they carve a new path into its future growth.

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Allan Mitelman, Untitled, 1990, pencil and watercolour, sheet: 16.5 x 13.7cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

Reference

Allan Mitelman: works on paper 1967-2004 by Elizabeth Cross; with a contribution by Terence Maloon, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2004.

Shakespeare in Steel: exploring links between Edward Dowden’s ‘Shakespeare Scenes & Characters’ and the ‘Gallerie Shakespeare’ portfolio of engravings. Part III.

 

On the 15th July 2016, the University of Melbourne’s highly anticipated After Shakespeare exhibition was officially opened, in the Noel Shaw Gallery of the Baillieu Library. Marking the 400th anniversary of the year of the Bard’s death, the exhibition plays host to a number of artefacts and ephemera that highlight Shakespeare’s lasting legacy throughout the centuries, with particular focus on his reception in Australia.

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Amongst the intriguing stories contained in the cases is a puzzling connection between an 1876 English book of Shakespearian commentaries and engravings, and a separately issued portfolio of 22 engravings with a French title. Helen Kesarios, a student volunteer in the Cultural Collections Projects Program, has been investigating possible connections between the two works, drawing on original correspondence located at the British Library.

Part I told the story of the Shakespearian scholar, Edward Dowden, and the publication of his exquisitely illustrated text, Shakespeare Scenes & Characters (London : Macmillan and Co, 1876). Part II explored the background to the German engravings which feature in Dowden’s text.

The third instalment in this three-part story continues here, investigating links with a separately issued French portfolio of the engravings…

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Part III – The French portfolio of German engravings

Also in Case 6, and accompanying Dowden’s text is a selection of loose prints from Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger’s “Gallerie Shakespeare”, a red folio of twenty-two steel engravings identical to those contained in Dowden’s text, but bearing no publisher’s imprint. It is unknown how they came to be in Grainger’s collection, but their existence therein is unsurprising, given the strong affinity Grainger had with literature from a young age, particularly Nordic literature. As John Bird notes in his biography:

‘From the time Percy was four or five years old a certain period each day was set aside for reading out loud. The writings of Hans Christian Andersen were the first pieces of literature which he thus encountered. Later came the Icelandic Sagas of Njal and ‘Grettir the Strong’ and he was determined that one day he would learn a Scandinavian language so that he could read the Sagas in their original form. From the Sagas he turned to early English history with a strong emphasis on that period when the Nordic influence was greatest due to the Viking invasions. By the age of ten he had devoured a huge array of literature which included such material as Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’.[i]

Percy PortraitIn correspondence with Macmillan and Co., Dowden repeatedly makes reference to a “Shakespeare-Galerie” or “Shakespeare Gallery”, which provided the prints for use in his book. As exciting as it may be to assume that Grainger’s “Gallerie Shakespeare” is one and the same, such a conclusion is found to be highly unlikely. Upon returning to the Preface, we learn that in fact, the “Shakespeare-Galerie” Dowden refers to is Friedrich Pecht’s “Shakespeare-Galerie: Charakter und Scenen aus Shakespaere’s Dramen”, a publication containing the Dowden prints with accompanying text in German by Pecht, what Dowden refers to as ‘a pleasant and cultured little causerie on each of the plays illustrated by the designers’.[ii] In selecting the text for his own book, Dowden decided ultimately that the essays by Pecht, ‘though bright and genial, seemed more suitable to the German than to the English reader, and it was thought that their place could with some advantage be supplied by a select body of extracts from the best writers, English, American, French and German, who have contributed to the criticism of Shakespeare’.[iii]

Thus, there still remains no definitive answer for how Grainger’s loose prints in the “Gallerie Shakespeare” portfolio came into being, how they fell into his hands, and their exact publication relationship with Dowden’s Shakespeare Scenes & Characters. Throughout my research, I have heard numerous theories on the matter, for example, that the prints actually belonged to Ella Grainger (Percy Grainger’s wife), as they were found in her belongings. Alternatively, it has been suggested hat they may have been a gift to Percy from his father. While we may never know for certain their origin, both they and Dowden’s Shakespeare Scenes and Characters remain two wonderful pieces of Shakespeariana that are definitely worth viewing in person.

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Helen Kesarios, Research Assistant – After Shakespeare exhibition

[i] John Bird, Percy Grainger, Elek Books Ltd, London, 1976, p. 11.

[ii] Dowden, Shakespeare Scenes and Characters, p. viii.

[iii] ibid.

Percy’s tobacco-box contraption: an ingenious experiment for recording musical notation using repurposed materials

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This contraption, ostensibly a small wooden tobacco box, is actually an experiment in musical notation hand-made by Percy Grainger.  Mounted through the lid of the box is a small cotton reel, around which is wound a long strip of paper ruled with 5 musical stave lines to make a continuous blank ‘score’.  This strip of musical score is fed through a slit in the side of the box, then under a cotton “now-line” string nailed to the side of the box.

GM_Tobacco Box_Front_ClosedPresumably, the paper strip is to be pulled past the string at a steady speed, while the composer jots down musical pitches on the score paper in real-time, marking each as the paper passes the string.  In much the same way as a pianola roll records the action of piano keys as temporal events on a strip of paper, here the composer is able to do away with traditional temporal nomenclature, such as bar-lines and time signatures, instead arranging the pitch markings in a kind of graph.  For a musician with a keen ear like Grainger, this would be a much more effective system of notating the highly irregular rhythms of birdsong or the whimsical nuances of folk singers’ performances.

Grainger frequently tested the limitations of conventional notation when trying to capture such irregular rhythms, as is evident in his almost comical use of constantly changing time signatures in some of his scores, such as the 5th movement of the Lincolnshire Posy (where at times he abandons time signature designations entirely).  This contraption illustrates beautifully his frustration with established musical conventions, but also his determination and ingenuity in taking readily available materials and creatively transforming them into forward-thinking (if not entirely practical) solutions to such problems.

‘Tobacco-box notation experiment. Probably London, c.1900-1901′ (taken from cataloguing notes prepared by Ella Grainger)

Jon Drews (Exhibitions Officer) – Grainger Museum

 

 

Discovering the musette: a 17th century treatise on a little known musical instrument

The Rare Music Collection includes a number of early instrumental methods and treatise, volumes which offer instruction on how to play a musical instrument and how to interpret musical notation, and/or information about the instrument’s history and technical development. Notable early treatises in the Collection for Spanish guitar and flute respectively are Gaspar Sanz’s Instruccion de musica sobre la guitarra Española… (Zargosa, 1674) and Jacques Hotteterre, Méthode pour apprendre a jouer en très peu de tems de la flûte traversière … (Lyon, 1765, 1781 issue).

Hotteterre frontispiece (17xx)
Frontispiece engraving in Hotteterre flute method

A third2016035-Hill-Music-40454 early treatise is the Traite de la musette … (Lyon, 1672), the full title of which translates as “Treatise of the musette with a new method for learning to teach yourself to play this instrument easily and quickly”. The musette is no longer well-known, but this beautiful leather-bound volume, with its own marbled slipcase, invites the curious to explore.

Neither the bucolic frontispiece nor the full title page, with its vignette of three putti with bunches of grapes, has the elusive musette at front and centre. The frontispiece was engraved by Nicolas Auroux after drawings by eminent French painter Thomas Blanchet (1614-89) as were, mostly likely, the putti. [1]
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The frontispiece shows a shepherd/musician seated near a ruined aqueduct playing an hautboy (oboe). Seven other wind instruments are somewhat improbably propped up or scattered around him. [2] At some distance we see another shepherd playing another oboe to his herd of goats. In order to locate the musette in the engraving we must look at the left foreground where it sits on a low, flat rock. The musette of the treatise’s title, then, is a type of small bagpipe. You can see its cylindrical drone (to the left), the bag in the middle with separate bellows tucked underneath and a chanter (or chalumeau) attached. A chalumeau simple (with windcap) is propped up above the drone. [3]

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The author of this treatise was Pierre Borjon de Scellery (1633-91), a lawyer, parliamentarian and amateur musician. While he promises to leave his readers able to teach themselves to play, de Scellery instead spends much of his short volume expounding on the instrument’s history and antecedents. At the back of the volume there are, however, some dances and popular tunes to play on the musette, notated with both conventional five-line stave notation and in tablature, where numbers indicate which holes should be covered by the fingers; the instrument has a “closed” fingering system.

Gueidan bagpipe playing image
Public domain image https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspard_de_Gueidan

Evidence of how the musette de cour was held and played, and by whom, is found in a portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud of nobleman and lawyer, Gaspard de Gueidan (1738; held Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence). The instrument, here richly decorated, was held with the bellows tucked under the forearm and pumped to inflate the bag and sound both the drone and the melody played on the chanter; we know that the instrument’s sound was neither harsh nor overly loud. The musette then was played by noble amateurs as well as the musicians at the royal court; it was also, unquestionably, an instrument compatible with courtly elegance.

Jennifer Hill, Curator, Music

[1] Lucie Galactéros-de Boissier, Thomas Blanchet (1614-1689), Paris: Arthéna, 1991, 476-478.

[2] To identify all the instruments see, for example, http://www.rimab.ch/content/bilddokumente/GE/borjon-de-scellery-pierre-1633-1691-traite-de-la-musette-frontispiz-1672

[3] James B. Copp, “Before Borjon: The French Court Musette to 1672”, Galpin Society Journal, 58 (May 2015), 3-5.

Fletcher Jones: How the 1956 Melbourne Olympics skirt changed everything!

It is 2016 and once again Olympic fever has taken hold across the country. Australia is a sporting nation which has always taken a keen interest in its athletes, their victories and of course what they are wearing! In recognition of the sixtieth anniversary of the Melbourne Games in 1956, many of Victoria’s collecting institutions are running public programs to celebrate the occasion, and in a moment of timely serendipity the ladies skirt made by Fletcher Jones worn at the opening of the games has recently been uncovered at the University of Melbourne Archives. Little has changed since the 1956 Olympics and if anything our fascination with fashion and sport has grown during that time.

The media coverage of the 1956 Melbourne Games and its athletes was extensive and many artifacts and objects eventually found their way into the archive, a testimony to their popularity and significance. This is the story of the FJ skirt.

The public, have long been fascinated with the Olympic uniform and its media unveiling has become an integral part of the excitement leading up to the opening ceremony. Top Australian fashion designers are especially selected by the Australian Olympic Federation (AOF) to produce the green and gold attire for our sporting greats. In 1956 the AOF was well aware of the fanfare and intense public attention associated with the outfitting of our national sporting heroes. So in the lead up to the Melbourne Games, AOF Secretary Sir Edgar Tanner approached well-respected, Victorian garment manufacturer Fletcher Jones with a proposal to produce both the men’s and women’s Olympic uniform. Fletcher Jones accepted the commission and publically acknowledged what a great honour it is for a ‘country factory’[1] to be selected.

Jones circulated an advice to his staff, excitedly announcing the news about the Olympic uniform commission;

‘Yes. It is official!’

‘We have GOT the Games Contract.’

‘Hooray, all 400 Aussie athletes will march in the grand Olympic parades wearing immaculate cream coverdines.’

‘Plus 8 greys have also been chosen to “steal the show” for Australia.’[2]

However this jubilation at being offered the job is not all as it seems. Accepting the trouser commission was fine, but moving into ladies skirts and slacks was uncharted territory for the company. Jones initially demurred on the offer and reasoned that he had ‘enough on his plate’[3] and worried about how to produce a flattering feminine pleat. He also had concerns about how the move into ladies wear would affect his brand and the company slogan ‘no man is hard to fit!’[4] Not deterred by Jones’ reservations Tanner persisted and in a move that would ensure the company’s place in Australia’s fashion history, Fletcher Jones finally conceded to public demand and entered the skirt market. Thus Tanner’s proposal provided the ideal opportunity for the company to expand its product range beyond the traditional trousers.

Sixty years later a vintage pleated pale grey skirt was unearthed from deep within the repository at the University of Melbourne Archives (UMA) by Archivists working on the Fletcher Jones collection transferred to UMA in 2012. With care the skirt was unpacked revealing a pink label zigzag stitched to the inside pocket which showed the unmistakable five interlocking coloured rings of the Olympic brand. A memo called ‘Tale of a Skirt’[5] pinned to the item confirmed that it was indeed the ‘first skirt made for the 1956 Olympic team’. Over the course of many decades the original purpose of this mustard yellow office circular has been transformed into a chronicle about skirt’s journey. Told in Jones’s upbeat, colloquial style it documents changing fashions and how the skirt travelled around the countryside, before it finally arrived at UMA.

In a letter dated 16 October 1956, Fletcher Jones asked Barbara Cunningham, a Melbourne based gymnast[6] with the Australian Olympic team, to model the first skirt produced by the FJ factory in Warrnambool. Jones writes; ‘This is the first skirt that has been completed and we are anxious to inspect this one on you, before completing the other orders we have on hand’[7]. Very little correspondence survives in archives about what became of Barbara Cunningham after 1956, but we do know that she kept the company’s first skirt for many years. When she returned it to the company, it was in a faded state with its hem line shortened and ragged. The inside of the skirt is in good condition having retained its original colour and the styling features that the company is known for. The pleating, shape and adjustable waist highlight the quality of this garment. Carefully stitched on to the inside of the skirt are the distinctive/descriptive FJ labels, which provide insight into the unique materials and methods used to make the skirt. The ‘Fabrilastic Comfort Waist’ and ‘Coverdine styled by Fletcher Jones’ were essential to the finished product worn by Olympians such as Betty Cuthbert and Lorraine Crapp at the opening ceremony, which was televised for the first time into Australian homes at the Melbourne Games. In characteristic style, an inscription on the label carrying the Olympic insignia implores the athlete to ‘care for this skirt always’.

In a memo to staff dated 17 December 1956, Jones reports on his encounter with Olympic Gold medalist Dawn Fraser on a flight to Adelaide. He describes how Fraser and ‘the girls were all most impressed with the high quality finish of the skirts, and the way they draped beautifully.’[8]

After the 1956 games the skirt went on to become a well-regarded staple in the Fletcher Jones product range. Today Fletcher Jones skirts can still be found in vintage shopping outlets and are still popular. Even now the mere mention of Fletcher Jones evokes a flood of memories and reminiscing about quality fitted garments, designed to last.

References

[1] Fletcher Jones. (1956a) ‘Yes, It is Official!, Do You Know, 2012.0031.00456, Fletcher Jones Family and Business Records, University of Melbourne Archives.

[2] Jones (1956a)

[3] Fletcher Jones. (1977) Not by myself, The Wentworth Press, NSW, p. 141.

[4] Jones (1977) p. 141.

[5] Fletcher Jones. (c. 1956b) ‘Tale of a Skirt’, 2012.0031.01141, Fletcher Jones Family and Business records, University of Melbourne Archives.

[6] SR/Olympic Sport. ‘Barbara Cunningham’, http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/cu/barbara-cunningham-1.html, accessed on 1 July 2016.

[7] Jones (1977) p. 144.

[8] Fletcher Jones. ‘Further Olympic Congratulations!, Do You Know, 17 December 1956, 2012.0031.00456, Fletcher Jones Family and Business Records, University of Melbourne Archives.

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