Tree strawberry

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

The colour linocut movement enjoyed considerable international popularity in the years between the two world wars. Propagated by the English artist Claude Flight and his followers at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London, the simplicity and directness of this new printmaking technique were especially well suited to the depiction of modern life.

While the subject matter of Adele Younghusband’s Tree strawberry is somewhat restrained compared with the images of speed and dynamism favoured by Flight and his followers, the print nonetheless shows the global reach of the movement. Using the same subject that provided her contemporary Rata Lovell-Smith with one of her most memorable images, Younghusband lends it the strong linearity, localised colour and overall sense of pattern and rhythmic design typical of the medium.

Illuminations, Sydney dates from Younghusband’s Australian sojourn of 1937–40. By then well established as a painter — she had been a regular exhibitor at the Auckland Society of Arts and a founding member of the Waikato Society of Arts — Younghusband moved to Australia at the age of fifty-nine in order to pursue further study and new experiences. After a brief stay in Sydney she settled in Melbourne. There she joined the Contemporary Group of Eveline Shaw and George Bell, both of whom had studied at Grosvenor and shared an interest in the linocut. The Contemporary Group also provided an important outlet for progressively minded artists to exhibit work.

The stimulus of Younghusband’s new environment is apparent in Illuminations, Sydney. The print depicts the lights of the city, the harbour, a passenger liner and the recently completed Sydney Harbour Bridge — a potent symbol of modernity in the work of a number of Australian artists — with a scale and confidence that shows the artist making the most of the linocut technique. Celebrating Younghusband’s return to New Zealand, critic Arthur Hipwell stressed the need for artists to have ‘contact with new movements overseas’. Such contact, as Younghusband’s experience showed, could help awaken ‘a new aesthetic consciousness’, and promote ‘a simplified vision’ and ‘consideration of pattern and design’.1

William McAloon

1 Arthur Hipwell, ‘Adele Younghusband — A New Zealand surrealist’, Art in New Zealand, vol. 14, no. 2, December 1941, p. 83.