Cover Image: Elise Blumann, On the Swan, Crawley (1938). A fine example of Blumann’s early landscapes, where rhythmic verticals and horizontals evoke both music and dance. The State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia.

It’s been a decade since Bauhaus on the Swan, Sally Quin’s superb Elise Blumann exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. And while there have been a smattering of smaller shows featuring Blumann’s work since then, this current exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which draws mostly on its own collection, is to be welcomed not just for its compactness and thematic coherence, but for the inclusion of some rarely-seen works.

The latter include her Conductor series which, when juxtaposed with the more familiar Surfer series, examples of which are also on display here, emphasis Blumann’s interest in conveying a sense of energy and movement via paint. Even in her earlier landscapes, of which On the Swan, Crawley, is a fine example, the contrapuntal rhythms of soft verticals and horizontals evoke both music and dance.

Much has been made of Berlin-trained Blumann’s transplanting of an essentially European Modernism in the context of a more reactionary interwar climate (born in Germany in 1897, she emigrated to Western Australia in 1938, where she died in 1990). And while she apparently disliked the “Expressionist” epithet, one can see similarities between her work throughout her career and the dynamism, expressive abstraction and more decorative elements of earlier artists such as Kandinsky, Macke, Marc and Mueller.

But by embracing Western Australia’s unique climate and flora, as well as those aspects of culture, such as attending rehearsals and concerts with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, which were also transplants, Blumann’s work likewise evolved into a unique language comprising repeated gestures and motifs coalescing in a supple, poetical phantasmagoria uniting the human and natural worlds.

For example, the serrated edges of the banksia leaves in Gooseberry Hill (1948) and the crosshatching on the tree trunk behind them find their apotheosis in the Conductor series of the 1970s, the conductor rising tree-like above the simplified shapes of the string instruments in the same way that the naked surf skier rides the strangely rib-like waves in Surfer (c.1940). 

Blumann’s use of colour is similarly coherently yet organically employed, thus the reds, browns, violets and greens in the Conductor series resonating with the palettes employed in her earlier landscapes as though making a conscious link between the woods employed to make violins or cellos and living trees in their natural habitat. 

I don’t quite understand what the phrase “music in motion” means, since all music IS motion. Maybe it’s a kind of “Architecture is frozen music” kind of thing? Nevertheless, this exhibition, which also includes drawings and a display of some of Blumann’s tools of the trade, is a must-see for anyone interested in the history of West Australian art. Or for anyone who simply derives pleasure from seeing beautiful paintings.

Elise Blumann: Music in Motion is on at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 30 November. Entry is free.