https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3440-0873
Mark Ledbury, ‘Vale Virginia’
In November 2022 we were delighted to be able to celebrate the life and career of Virginia Spate at the University of Sydney’s MacLaurin Hall. In attendance were hundreds of friends, colleagues and former students. The words from that occasion published below, spoken by those who were closely associated with Virginia for many decades, are a beautiful tribute to what made her so special. I myself won’t add anything except to repeat how fortunate I and my family were to have known such a brilliant, witty, engaged, and caring person. We will miss Virginia a great deal, but remain committed, at the Power Institute as in the AAANZ, to her belief that art matters, and that art and visual culture are vital to political, social, and community life. We will work to ensure that this commitment—and her legacy—are maintained and strengthened through teaching, research and our collective public voice.
Terry Smith
I speak to you as someone who, for forty years, knew Virginia as a scholar with whom I shared many interests, as a close colleague, and as a very dear friend. I valued all of these relationships, deeply. I always will.
My purpose today is to sketch the arc of her achievement as an art historian. Others will remind you of what she built at the University of Sydney as Director of the Power Institute. They will speak of her impact within the Sydney art scene, her feminism, her extraordinary qualities as a teacher, and as a curator.
Let me begin in 1960. Virginia aged twenty-three. For her honours study and master’s thesis at the University of Melbourne, advised by Bernard Smith, she undertook a comprehensive study of the work of our great national artist Tom Roberts, who was also a prolific society portraitist. She told wonderful stories of visiting distant homesteads and remote sites to see where Roberts painted his shearers and bushrangers, of being treated to cups of tea, served in fine China, at those stations—and in the drawing rooms of Toorak. These adventures actually illustrate a serious purpose, new to the writing of art history on Australia: to devote to an Australian artist the depth and detailed research that the art historical profession customarily accorded the great European artists. Track down every painting and drawing, see it, describe its condition, interpret it within the development of the artist’s work, all so as to elucidate its meaning in the larger context of art at the time—in Heidelberg, in Melbourne, within the Empire. Every one of us who subsequently worked on Roberts know that this thesis was, and remains, the foundational study. When it appeared as a book in 1972, it became a model for how Australian artists of consequence should be treated by art historians: with the same methodological rigor as major artists from anywhere else.
At the same time, Virginia produced a small book on John Olsen, one of a series edited by Bernard Smith. This, too, was part of a new maturity in the profession in this country. Focus on your special period in the past history of art but also engage with contemporary art. Franz Philipp, who taught us at Melbourne, and wrote on Poussin and Arthur Boyd, was a model here.
Between 1967 and 1970, enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, in a suburb of Philadelphia, but living mostly in Paris, Virginia worked on her PhD: ‘Orphism, Pure Painting, Simultaneity: The Development of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris 1908–1914’. She was the second Australian, after Bernard, to be awarded a PhD in art historical studies. The subsequent book, published in 1979, quickly became the classic study of this movement. The message: Australian-trained art historians who travel can work on any subject anywhere and do it as well as, or better than, others already there.
This was affirmed when Virginia’s later book, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (Thames & Hudson, 1992), won the Mitchell Prize, the top award in the field. As Roger Benjamin put it in his excellent obituary for the Australian Academy of the Humanities: ‘She combined great scholarly rigour—respect for the detail—with a unique skill in mixing historical and biographical data in a fluid and powerful prose appreciation of the art object.’
Let me give you just one instance. Monet himself famously said: ‘One does not paint a landscape. A seascape, a figure. One paints an impression of an hour of the day.’Footnote1 Bring to your mind his Rouen Cathedral series—there are thirty of them, twenty-eight from the same angle. We tend to think of them as if they were units in a photographic sequence, snapshots showing the light conditions at particular moments during a day. But Monet said: ‘an impression of an hour of the day’. We know that he worked on several paintings at once in his rented studio opposite the cathedral. Virginia saw something that no one else had seen: ‘…the more intensely [Monet] focused on changing light, the more the stable reality of the cathedral disintegrated’.Footnote2
The more he added layers of colour to these paintings, the more impasto they became, the more the cathedral as a historical object evaporates before our eyes. The nature of several kinds of time is being revealed to us, through colour. Monet takes us to a ‘dream-world’ (as she called it) of sensuous abundance, a world trembling on the cusp of disappearing into the past, while, paradoxically, being preserved in its very evanescence. She concludes that Monet sees things in the world ‘as pure objects of sight, inaccessible to other modes of experience’.Footnote3 The artist as observer is merging with what is being observed. So do we, when guided by Virginia’s prose. No surprise that Sebastian Smee cites her several times in his recent article about these paintings in The Washington Post.Footnote4 A former student of Virginia’s, his Pulitzer Prize-winning criticism enacts her mode of looking.
Virginia had the best ‘eye’ of any art historian I have known. To stand next to her looking at a picture—to talk through its genesis, to decipher its intentionality—was an unmatched delight. Purposeful searching of this kind is at the core of our profession, and few could do it with such subtlety, precision, and care.
For all the joys—and the sometimes bracing challenges—of being Virginia’s close colleague and friend, it is this that I miss most of all.
It is deeply regrettable that her late illnesses prevented her from completing her book on Cézanne. The greatest modernist painter, the most difficult to interpret; Virginia spoke often of ‘arm-wresting’ with him. Art history as arm-wrestling with the best artists. Such was her ambition.
Cézanne (in)famously said of Monet that he was ‘only an eye…But what an eye!’ Virginia was much more than a great eye, as you all know, and as will be affirmed in the talks tonight. Her legacy lives on, in her books, in our practice, and in our memories.
Janet Laurence, ‘My words for Virginia’
I am utterly humbled and honoured to be asked to speak about Virginia, whom I admired so much. Sadly, I was never officially one of her students. I was, however, able to absorb some of her teaching, as I snuck into occasional lectures at the Power Institute. The occasions when I learnt most from Virginia was when, to my surprise and delight, she would visit my exhibitions. She would deeply engage with the work and enlighten me about it and its associations.
Virginia was well known for teaching her students about really looking at art. In her book Orphism: The Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910–1914, she wrote about how through close observation of an artwork’s form and content, one can receive the consciousness of the artist in the process of its creation.
It was amazing to have such a highly regarded professor of art spend time with my work and with me, as the bridge between the academic world of art history and that of existing artistic practice is so rarely crossed. Virginia, however, kept company with a great range of artists, and genuinely loved and cared about all art. In the early 1980s she was on the first board of Sydney’s Artspace, fighting to get contemporary art its own space for recognition—something so badly needed at the time.
In 2016, Virginia even ventured to my wild Water Bar in the Paddington Reservoir. There, we tasted waters and talked about the importance of art as activism and its ability to speak about the environment. This became a subject we talked about often, and we shared a faith in art’s potential as a force for environmental consciousness, engaging its audience emotionally and speaking to their hearts and souls.
Virginia was very much an environmental activist and conservationist, and fought very hard to save parts of her beloved Pyrmont, the Sydney suburb where she lived. We often took walks there, and looked at the extraordinary fig trees that grow near the huge sandstone walls. Being once a quarry, Pyrmont is full of beautiful sandstone spaces. We would wander these together, enjoying the trees and reveling in their importance as great signals of change. We shared a dismay at the continued clearance of such trees, when we needed more than ever to be planting them. It was wonderful to find an art professor as colleague and friend. This felt all the more important at a time when art felt so separated from our ailing natural world.
In Virginia’s later years she would come to talks linked to my exhibitions, sometimes with a bunch of flowers. I was so humbled by this. She was so beautiful, sweet and gentle, and still sharp and receptive, although of course having the occasional cloudy times.
I have very fond memories of our times in Paris, the city she knew so well and loved. We would take long walks, beginning on Rue Rambuteau, finding delicious pastries and setting off through the Marais, down Rue Saint Martin. We would visit the gardens of Anne Frank and make our way to Place de Vosges, where we’d sit and talk about gardens as heartlands, as art forms of personal spaces where the wondrous and surprising takes place and connects us to a web of life.
We loved exploring Paris’s famous passages— beautiful arcades—and of course we found great bars and restaurants, an absinthe bar being a favourite. Another much loved path took us around and within Ile Saint Louis, where she would point out the house Cézanne lived in. Then we would walk down to the Jardin des Plantes and the Mosque for tea.
Virginia really brought me into Paris and its depths. As we walked, she regaled me with stories of the special places, their stories and their art. Her outstanding knowledge of Paris—like her knowledge of art—was felt, embodied beautifully, and generously shared.
Mary Roberts, ‘A Tribute to Virginia’
I had the honour of speaking about Virginia Spate’s legacy in 2018 at the Power Institute’s celebration of fifty years of teaching in the Department of Art History. It was a wonderful opportunity to reflect upon Virginia’s legacy and to acknowledge her formative impact upon my life, initially as one her students, and then as a scholar whose intellectual formation was shaped by the department she worked to form. At the fifty-year anniversary event, Virginia was seated in the front row when she spontaneously stood and responded to my speech. By then, Virginia was frail but poised as she extemporised to the crowd. It was a deeply moving moment. Virginia was not one to stand by in silence. Towards the end of her life, she even left instructions for her posthumous event—it was, she insisted, to be a celebration and a party. We honour Virginia by doing just that.
In 1984, I moved to Sydney to study art history at the Power Institute, entering a department under Virginia’s leadership and an arts faculty that was bristling with disputes about the proper objects of study in the humanities. It was a tremendous intellectual adventure. We were the beneficiaries of a newly expansive approach to our discipline that was being shaped by Virginia’s vision and honed in collaboration with the scholars she had brought into the department. Her scholarship was always a model of rigour and writerly elegance. As well as her exemplary scholarship and inspiring teaching, Virginia was a public intellectual supporting our small discipline nationally.
Virginia was the second Power Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney. When she took on that role in 1978, she was one of very few female professors across the university. She has been a model of leadership throughout my professional life. For a young woman entering the department as an undergraduate, she was a bit intimidating, even magisterial. I remember my first interview in the department: I was in my early twenties, and it was for a position as Power Public Education Programme Officer. I walked into the interview room, Virginia’s office, and I was extremely nervous. Joan Kerr and Virginia were regaling each other with tales of their own rookie interviews. The story I recall most vividly involved using a stapler to fix the hem of a skirt before rushing into an interview. I was immediately put at ease. As I would come to know better in the years ahead, Virginia combined gravitas with a great sense of fun.
Virginia was a luminary in the study of nineteenth-century French art. For all of us, she was a role model of scholarly brilliance. As a young scholar of nineteenth-century art, she set a standard I aspired to. The Colour of Time: Claude Monet is a book, as Virginia put it so beautifully, that was ‘begun by the Seine and finished by the Southern Ocean’. Sceptical of a view that Monet’s art was a type of ‘false consciousness’, she refused its designation as a body of ‘lovely but deceitful objects’. Virginia insists that this conclusion ‘does not allow one to ask whether such paintings can bring any forms of understanding specific to them, any knowledges one does not have already from non-pictorial sources’. Her tarrying with these paintings is a subtle meditation on time and death. Reading it recently brought back a memory of Virginia’s final lecture in the Art History Department when, as a group, we walked with her to celebrate this last lecture. She carried lecture notes: some sections were hand-written, some typed, bits of it were cut and stapled, it was patchworked together in seeming chaos. But when she took to the podium, Virginia’s visual poetry began. At the end of that lecture, she showed an image of her own childhood drawing, a bridge over a pond—remarkably similar to the famous Japanese bridge in Monet’s garden at Giverny. An ending of sorts, via a beginning, a lifetime returning to the power and poetry of art.
Virginia Spate is a towering figure in the field of art history in Australia. She leaves a prodigious and diverse legacy as scholar, teacher and advocate for the arts. Thank you, Virginia, for all you have given to our discipline and how you have inspired us in its pursuit.
Chiara O’Reilly
I had Virginia as lecturer, supervisor, mentor and colleague. Like so many here, as a student at the University of Sydney I was entranced by her lectures. She made paintings come to life, and I was hooked from week one. Her lectures were works of beauty. The hard copy she held in her hands was always covered in handwritten notes, and appended with extra bits of paper stapled on or pinned with sewing pins—a collage that was a very a physical reminder of her always bubbling mind.
As my PhD supervisor, Virginia led me in conversations about France in the nineteenth century. Her knowledge was inexhaustible, while mine was under construction. Her feedback on drafts would send me to bed for days, but it was always close and attentive. I still think of ‘clarity’ in the margins as the ultimate in Virginiaisms when I’m commenting on my students work. She always demanded more from her students. The two volume readers she would set for her classes were master texts—with a Daumier on the cover, they were a Virginian capture of the nineteenth century.
In her role as a mentor Virginia was an advocate. She supported me, and so many others. She did so as I weathered my first academic jobs at other universities and her home institution of the University of Sydney, as well as for my work in art galleries. Although she had an elegant ‘non disturbare’ sign on her office door, I’d always manage to muster the courage and tentatively knock, and most times she would find the time to chat.
I worked with Virginia as a tutor for her last subject at Sydney, and I remember how we shared a lunch in her office that I’d made to celebrate. Her final teaching lecture was a tour de force. I remember some of the last paintings were by Monet, pictures of his daughters in a rowboat on the waterlily pond. I remember one that showed just the boat, and here she took us deep into the reflections and the reeds in the water, as if we were falling into the water that she and Monet had focused on for decades.
The lecture finished with a child’s drawing, not by Monet but by Virginia herself. A lovely childish picture of a pond featuring something very like Monet’s red bridge. She seemed shocked to think that his bridge had followed her around, but for me it was more evidence that Virginia didn’t just teach art history—she inhabited it. Her gift was the bridges that she built for generations of students, bridges that made art come alive in the dark tutorial room, in her office or in the public lecture hall. Her beautiful ideas bridged time and place, and provoked us to always think again.
Virginia also built bridges between here and France. On my first research trip there, Virginia sent me off with detailed instructions on how to access the Bibliothèque nationale de France, where I found a new home. She even provided instructions on where to eat in Paris, insisting that you sit at the table under the dome, or that you visit another to see the nineteenth-century tiles. Another time she had me round to dinner in her Paris flat where she was so happy, and regaled me with stories of staying up all night dancing at the Fireman’s Ball for the 14th of July.
When I got a job in Museum Studies at the University of Sydney I needed an office, and so Virginia and I became roommates. I took over her desk and she set up at a table behind me, which we stole from a tutorial room. In this office we sat together swearing, sighing about another email, having lunches, swapping family stories, discussing Cézanne and everything in between. These activities all contained moments of kindness that were at the heart of who she was.
Looking at my bookshelves I see Virginia. Looking at art I see with Virginia. While teaching I hear her, and while reading our beloved writers from the nineteenth century I remember Virginia and think of the many bridges she built.
Merci Virginia pour votre courage et cœur.
Notes
1 Quoted in Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 21.
2 Virginia Spate, The Colour of Time: Claude Monet (London: Thames & Hudson, 1992), 231.
3 Ibid., 9.
4 Sebastian Smee, ‘Monet’s Towering Obsession: Rouen Cathedral in Normandy was the Painter’s most Radical Fixation’, The Washington Post, 22 July 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2022/monet-rouen-cathedral-paintings/.