| Przez szereg lat nazwisko Glorii Strzeleckiej kojarzyło się z określeniem: piosenkarka.Pamiętam, jak jeszcze w Radiu SBS robiłam wywiady z kilkunastoletnią panieneczką z Adelajdy, która już wtedy pięknie śpiewała... a nawet grała na perkusji.Co jakiś czas rodzice przysyłali nam płyty Glorii z nowymi nagraniami piosenek, często kolęd.
Bywała w Sydney, występowała m.in. w Darling Harbour na festynie Polish Christmas. Aż nagle wiadomość, że Gloria rzuciła śpiewanie! Coś zaatakowało jej struny głosowe, więc przestała śpiewać. Chyba się tym zbytnio nie przejęła, bo studiowała arts i bardzo ją ciągnęło do pracy w galerii. Jeszcze tylko - dwa lata temu - dała się namówić, aby wystąpić na festiwalu kościuszkowskim; wykonała tam przepiękną Balladę o Górze Kościuszki, specjalnie dla niej napisaną i skomponowaną w Krakowie.
Muzykę do "Ballady o Górze Kościuszki" skomponował Jan Wojdak, który następnie piosenkę tę włączył do repertuaru Waweli. Piosenka znajduje się na nowo wydanej płycie "Ballady z walizki". Oto recenzja Adama Ciesielskiego:
Wawele od paru dziesiątków lat imponują formą koncertową i nagraniami. Specjalnością grupy są barwne, wpadające w ucho melodie ze słowami cenionych krakowskich poetów: Ewy Lipskiej, Elżbiety Zechenter-Spławińskiej, Tadeusza Śliwiaka, a także autorów warszawskich, takich jak Marek Dutkiewicz. Ich kompozytor i interpretator – Jan Wojdak, to człowiek o wyjątkowej wielości talentów. Mało kto wie, że ma na koncie kilkanaście książek dla dzieci i jest kawalerem Orderu Uśmiechu. Z wykształcenia to inżynier od ciężkich maszyn drogowych, ale jego przeznaczeniem była lekka muza. Obdarzony nie mniejszą łatwością tworzenia szlagierów niż Seweryn Krajewski, ma na koncie blisko 400 piosenek, wykonywanych zarówno przez Wawele, jak też m.in. przez Andrzeja Dąbrowskiego czy Czecha Jiriego Korna. Listę przebojów Wojdaka powiększa repertuar najnowszej, studyjnej płyty „Ballady z walizki“. Zgodnie z tytułem są to utwory inspirowane licznymi koncertowymi trasami Waweli po środowiskach polonijnych w Anglii, Skandynawii, USA, Australii. Najefektowniejsze z nich – „Chicago takie jest“, „Irlandia mi się śni“ i „Ballada o Górze Kościuszki“ – trafiają do serca pogodnym nastrojem. Idealne do słuchania i śpiewania.
Z tego co wiem, Gloria już nigdy więcej nie śpiewała. Natomiast "śpiewająco" zaczynała karierę w galeriach sztuki. Ostatnio zgromadziła obrazy słynnej malarki Kathleen Sauerbier, bardzo znanej i popularnej artystki w Adelejdzie w latach 30. ubiegłego wieku. Zgromadziła obrazy i w Art Gallery of South Australia zorganizowała wystawę, której jest kuratorem. Tropiąc mniej znane epizody z życia malarki, Gloria zgromadziła masę ciekawych materiałów, na podstawie których napisała o niej książkę. Poniżej - relacja z otwarcia wystawy i recenzja z książki w Adelaide Now z dnia 16 kwietnia 2011.
Kathleen Sauerbier's long way home
A NEW exhibition at Carrick Hill shows a long-forgotten Adelaide painter was more influential than realised.
In 1937 Adelaide artist Kathleen Sauerbier married a chemist, became a Melbourne housewife, and more or less disappeared off the face of the earth. Or at least that is what everyone in Adelaide's art world supposed.
But all was not as it seemed. Far from dropping her art, the talented and influential South Australian embraced it across her life, from her garden to her domestic world, even as she continued to paint. It is only now, though, that the larger story is emerging.
A new book and a new exhibition - the first dedicated to Sauerbier since her death 20 years ago - reveals previously unknown sides to the artist's life, strengthening her case for wider recognition.
Today, there are just three paintings by Sauerbier held in the Art Gallery of South Australia collection, and the standard references to Australian artists do not include her.
Yet that seems odd for a woman who achieved distinction as an SA artist of the early 1930s. She exhibited, had a big impact on the development of modernist art techniques and innovations in Australia and she was a key player in making the McLaren Vale region a landscape artist’s paradise.
In a new book from Wakefield Press, Kathleen Sauerbier: A Modern Pursuit, curator Gloria Strzelecki retraces some of the well-known parts of Sauerbier's history, but then looks more closely at her later life "when she went off the radar," as Strzelecki puts it.
Sauerbier was among the third generation of German settlers in SA. Aberfoyle Park is named after one of her uncles who changed his surname in World War I. She was educated at St Peter's Girls and went to the School of Fine Arts in Tynte St, North Adelaide from 1922.
There, it is thought that her tutor Frederick Millward Grey encouraged her to go to London and study at the Central School of Art where he had been a student.
With her parents, she went to London in 1924, as did her good friend Audrey Hardy, of the Hardy wine family based in McLaren Vale. Both Kathleen and Audrey were able to tour Europe, and France in particular, over the next few years and caught up with the rapid development of modern art, as well as the classics.
At the Central School fellow students included Australians Jimmie Lynton and Hal Missingham, and Strzelecki says Sauerbier lived the life of a fashionable and independent woman in London. There are surviving photographs and her own sketches in London and France that point to a buoyant and enjoyable time.
Gloria Strzelecka singing her 2009 hit - "Ballada o Górze Kościuszki" (by Jan Wojdak)
By the time she returned to Adelaide in 1927 she was a very different woman from the one who had set out from the family home in Malvern in 1924.
She was in poor health, felt stifled by Adelaide's provincialism, and when she exhibited, her modernist ideas were poorly received.
Strzelecki says it might have been these factors that encouraged her to spend more and more time at Port Willunga, moving there in 1932.
The old two-storey building, built in 1845, that she took over and restored still stands on the downhill side of the Port Willunga road. Other artists attracted to Port Willunga, like John Dowie and Ivor Hele, would drop in for lunch, sowing the seeds of an artists' community.
That Christmas, in 1932, she invited artists including Horace Trenerry, who had studied with her at Tynte St in the early 1920s, to a party. Strzelecki thinks that it was there that Sauerbier suggested Trenerry should move to Port Willunga from the Adelaide Hills.
What happened next has already been recorded by Betty Snowden, who curated an exhibition of Trenerry's and Sauerbier's art in 1998. Trenerry, who had never had the advantage of going to Europe, moved to Port Willunga in 1934 and his style quickly changed to reflect Sauerbier's aesthetic.
"Moving away from a rich use of colour, Trenerry's paintings embraced Sauerbier's muted palette of mauves, pinks and greys," Strzelecki writes. "He also introduced freer and more expressive line work similar to that which Sauerbier had readily embraced."
Trenerry is today acknowledged as one of Australia's finest landscape artists of the 20th century, and his paintings of the McLaren Vale region in the modernist vein are his great works. The two artists painted and spent a lot of time together, with Trenerry, who had little income and poor health, squatting in or renting empty houses around Port Willunga.
It is thought Sauerbier helped him financially. She had her first solo exhibition, and showed her Port Willunga landscapes for the first time, at the Royal South Australia Society of Arts in 1934. The exhibition sold well, although the reviews were mixed, if not hostile. Adelaide was still under the sway of more conservative art critics like Hans Heysen and Lionel Lindsay.
Sauerbier's exhibition was held a year before Adelaide was given its first exposure to the international modernist style, when an exhibition of British modernists like Duncan Grant - who Sauerbier knew - Vanessa Bell and Walter Sickert was brought to the Art Gallery of SA. Sauerbier’s next solo exhibition would be another 50 years away.
After her exhibition she was invited to become a fellow of the RSASA, then top of the tree in terms of South Australian visual art, and by 1935 she was exhibiting in both Adelaide and in Melbourne with the Group Twelve at the Athenaeum Gallery.
Strzelecki thinks that the invitation to exhibit with Melbourne's Group Twelve in 1935, and again in 1936, might have precipitated her move to Melbourne in 1937. Sauerbier loved travel and in 1937 she visited Singapore, Java and Bali. Her sketchbook survives that trip, but so far no completed works have been found.
Another factor in her move to Melbourne emerged in December of that year when she and Melbourne industrial chemist John Bryce suddenly married, without telling their parents, in a church ceremony attended only by the verger.
The change of city was a watershed, and while Sauerbier continued to return to Port Willunga every year, she became less visible in the SA visual arts world. Her visits became less frequent after 1947 when she was badly burned in a house fire at Port Willunga and spent nine months in the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
"She never stopped creating. That’s the thing," Strzelecki says. "She settled in Melbourne and exhibited there a few times, got married, which is the common story, and then ended up not just becoming a house-maker but focusing on 'the other side' of art, with fabric design, and clothing."
Strzelecki found that much of the work - including paintings - that she had made in Melbourne was never exhibited at all. "She fell off the radar a bit - she moved to Melbourne," she says.
There were Melbourne streetscapes, still lifes, and more abstracted paintings of the Port Willunga settings painted on her trips home. But she also turned to designing and printing her own fabrics, and landscaping her garden at her new Donvale home in accordance with Edna Walling’s principles. She also designed the fit-out of a new Melbourne boutique, Silhouette. Strzelecki believes Sauerbier was strongly influenced by her London days.
The Omega Workshops had been established by the Bloomsbury Group, and used designs by artists she admired such as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. "She took on the other side of the Bloomsbury Group, of home creation," she says. "Its philosophy was that art and life are inseparable and that artistic output should be expressed not only in paintings and sculptures but also in domestic objects."
It was not until the wider interest in South Australian women artists in the 1970s and 1980s that attention once again returned to the 80-year-old Sauerbier, and a one-person retrospective was organised for her at Beehive Corner Gallery in Adelaide. Even then, John Dowie bemoaned her small output and her preference to discard unsatisfactory works.
Strzelecki has been able to track down many privately held paintings for a new look at the artist at an exhibition at Carrick Hill. But in addition to the paintings she has been able to include examples of fabrics and clothes made by Sauerbier. It means that for the first time there is a more complete view of the artist and her life.
"Having been given the opportunity to write a book, I could focus on her life and practices, from her painting to her fabric designs and landscaping," Strzelecki says. "The book is about how she didn't stop creating; she was able to do it in a different way."
* Kathleen Sauerbier: A Modern Pursuit, until June 26 at Carrick Hill.
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