Ethel Carrick’s 1910 painting Sur la Plage (On the Beach).

A plate in the Canberra exhibition by Anne Dangar.

A selection of Anne Dangar’s work at the National Gallery.

Ethel Carrick’s Watching the Australian Fleet Coming Through Sydney Heads (1913).

A pot with lid and handles by ceramist Anne Dangar.

Colonnades of Canberra’s Civic Centre (1942-44) by Ethel Carrick.

For its twin summer exhibitions, the National Gallery of Australia has chosen to look at two female artists partly lost in the shadows of art history.

The two substantial exhibitions, free to the public, have involved five years of research by curators Deborah Hart and Rebecca Edwards and are simply titled, Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar, part of the Know My Name initiative which aims at recognising our women artists. 

It’s an apt choice, for while these are separate exhibitions, the artists have much in common, notably that both became considerable figures in the French art scene and were considered radical in their own time.

Dangar, born in Kempsey and trained at the Julian Ashton School in Sydney until she got so fed up with Australia’s arts scene and headed for France in the late 1920s, hooked into the rage for Cubism then sweeping Europe. 

She went on to settle in an artistic community, Moly-Sabata, in Sablons, southern France, where her kiln is still fully operational at the centre of an arts residency.

Best-known as a potter and one of the very few Australian artists to form part of the European avant-garde in the 20th century, Dangar was a disciple of Albert Gleizes, one of the self-proclaimed founders of Cubism. 

By contrast, Carrick was not born in Australia, but lived here during both World Wars and died in Melbourne in 1952. 

Trained at the Slade School in London, she had married Australian Impressionist painter Emanuel Phillips Fox in 1905, soon moving with him to Montmartre, Paris, where, curator Hart says, “it was as if the windows had been flung open”. 

Fox, who snorted at Carrick’s forays into Post Impressionism, reputedly saying: “God help us”, is now sometimes rated the lesser artist. Carrick is still admired for her scenes of fleeting moments showing people in outdoor settings, so much so that in recent times her paintings have achieved more than $1 million at sale. 

By no means obscure, in Paris Carrick became a jury member at the Salon d’Automne and was, for a time, vice-president of the International Union of Women Artists. A Theosophist and a mighty traveller, she painted scenes in France, North Africa, Spain, India and Australia.

She also travelled many times to Australia to live and exhibit, first with her husband, who died in 1915, and daringly for a woman, on many en plein air (outdoor) painting expeditions, including to Canberra, where from 1942 to 1944 she painted a colonnade in Civic, a park with Old Parliament House at the rear, St John’s Church in Reid, the Molonglo River and women canteen workers at the Canberra Services Club.

More or less grouped chronologically, the Carrick show features more than 140 of brilliantly-coloured paintings, mostly exhibiting the use of bold brushstrokes to capture life in outdoor settings, although there is a section of still-life flower paintings.

The Dangar exhibition, immediately accessible from the final Carrick room, presents mostly three-dimensional ceramics works, set against elegant light green walls, with more than 180 works including art by Dangar and her contemporaries and a great deal of archival material, including notebooks and the sketches showing the schematic planning for the sophisticated designs on her ceramic objects.

In the mid-1930s Dangar had begun working in potteries in the Sablons area to make money, embracing traditional methods using glazed terracotta.

She started with utilitarian vessels but then moved into the large decorative plaques, panels and vessels that proved to be ideal supports for the imagery of the Cubist movement. 

She wrote in 1941: “A little honey pot with its two handles and a lid can possess all the fundamental necessities of a huge cubist composition.”

Both of these prominent women artists were making their mark on the world art scene at a time when Australia, mainly out of ignorance, was considered a complete cultural desert – the exhibitions put them and us on the map.

Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar, National Gallery of Australia, until April 27. Free admission.