Elise Blumann: Music in motion

This artist in focus exhibition pairs State Art Collection artworks by Elise Blumann with rarely displayed works from her later career.

Elise Blumann was a significant painter in the history of Western Australian Modernism. When Blumann arrived in Perth from Europe as a German émigré in 1938, she brought her experience amongst the European avant-garde to a somewhat lacklustre art scene in Perth that had been dominated by more traditional painters such as George Pitt Morison and James W R Linton until the 1930s. While Blumann’s work may not have been viewed as pioneering in the German Modernist scene, where she had been informed by such movements as the Berlin Secession, her art was seen as highly radical in Perth. Here, she truly came into her own as an artist, applying techniques of European Modern painting to an Australian landscape and iconography.

Blumann’s compositions frequently centre on a single subject: in her early landscapes the featured trees occupy the same role as a human subject. Recurring motifs for Blumann are the figure of a surfer and a conductor. In both these ‘series’ Blumann sought to convey a poetry of motion—she was interested in the energy and aesthetic forms created by these central subjects. In The Surfer series, Blumann takes a common visual theme of Western Australian iconography that was new to her as a recent German immigrant: the surfing subject and the near nude human body on Western Australian beaches. The energy Blumann saw in this figure is also reflected in the subtler, yet no less dramatic, power of motion that she saw in the conductors at the Western Australian Symphony Orchestra that inform her later Conductor series.

Much of the prior scholarship and exhibition of Blumann’s works centre on her works from the 1930s and 1940s, exploring her influence as a European émigré on Modernism in Western Australia. However, in displaying such later works as the Conductor series, this exhibition explores the evolution of her practice, in both style and material. This highlights the significance of a central figure in Blumann’s compositions, and the creation of dynamism in her work, depicting the inherent energy in keenly human activities, displaying music in motion.