Notes
- In the last ten years Hester has re-emerged from obscurity thanks to Janine Burke who has written extensively about her work: Janine Burke, Joy Hester, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1981; Janine Burke, Joy Hester, Melbourne: Greenhouse, 1983; Janine Burke (ed.), Dear Sun. The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed, Melbourne: William Heinmann Australia, 1995.
- Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London: Routledge, 1988, p.27.
- Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, London: Seeker & Warburg, 1979, p.11.
- See Burke, Dear Sun..., pp.2–4, for an analysis of Hester's relationship with her mother Louise. See also Romana Koval, ‘Romana Koval interviews Janine Burke about Dear Sun. The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed’, Australian Book Review, no.175, October 1995, pp.34–35, p.34.
- See Luce Irigaray, je, tu, nous. Toward a Culture of Difference, London: Routledge, 1993, pp.107–11. Irigaray discusses the general lack of beauty represented in the works by women as a result of the underlying oppressive forces that taint the creative process.
- See J.J. Matthew, Good and Mad Women, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1984, p.63, for an excellent discussion of the way Australian women were ‘herded’ into ‘low-paying, low-promotion’ occupations coupled with ‘unsubstantiated gender theories of women's domestic nature and low productivity, and men's natural opportunities to keep women in their proper place’.
- See C. Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves. Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman, London: Rider, 1992, pp.233–48. According to Pinkola Estes ‘instinct-injured’ is represented in the ancient fairy tale, The Red Shoes: reading The Red Shoes psychoan- alytically suggests that instinct-injuries are caused by repression of the intuitive self; the ‘wild woman’, the ‘centre self’. This repression occurs as a result of collective pressures, such as, in Hester's case, the dominant patriarchal, conservative, political and social ethos in Australia during her development together with individual repression, such as that caused by her mother, Louise. It can be argued that Hester and her work were quelled in general. However, violent outbursts would erupt unexpectedly. Pinkola Estes states that this is the negative sign of repression.
- Burke, Dear Sun…, pp.61–3. Hester's letters to Sunday Reed, reproduced by Burke, reveal this aspect of her nature.
- Janet Hawley, ‘Inside the hothouse. Women in love’, Good Weekend. The Age Magazine, 23 September 1995, pp.18–27, p.19.
- Koval,‘Romana Koval…’, p.34.
- Virginia Woolf, Professions for Women, (1942), in M.H. Abrams (ed.), Norton Anthology of English Literature, fifth ed., vol.2, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986, pp.2006–10, p.2009.
- Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police, Ringwood: Penguin, 1975.
- Laurence Thomas, ‘Intense feeling’, Herald (Melbourne), 6 February 1950, p.8; and George Bell, ‘Love, sleep and faces’, Sun (Melbourne), 9 February 1950, p.15.
- Modernism was considered the antithesis of the bush; it was constructed in terms of what the Australian pastoral tradition was not. It was considered an affront to the Australian identity: A more direct expression of the conservatives’ fear of ultra-modernism was implicit in their use of the political/revolutionary analogy. For such art appeared to demand the radical displacement of the comfortable ideological hegemony of the conservatives’ (Mark Pennings, ‘Fighting the donkey's tail: Charles Wheeler and “ultra-modernism”’, Journal of Australian Studies, no.32, March 1992, pp.19–25, p.24).
- Max Harris, Angry Penguins and the Realist Paintings in Melbourne in the 1940s, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988, p.20.
- Nikos Stangos, Concepts of Modern Art, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974, p.x. See also Richard Haese, Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Ringwood, Victoria: Allen Lane, 1981: and Michael Heyward, The Em Malley Affair, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993.
- Greer argues that women who are married to artists are often seen as the pupil of the male; that is, inferior and in awe of her ‘master’ (Greer, The Obstacle Race, pp.48–52).
- George Browning, ‘Crimson Joy’, Quadrant, July-August 1993, pp.47–9, p.48.
- Burke, Dear Sun…, p.4.
- Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius. Towards a Feminist Aesthetic, London: Women's Press Ltd, 1989, pp.38–39.
- Browning wrote of Hester, ‘Any artist contemplating a religious subject, and requiring to depict an angel, would have found her a very suitable model’ (Browning, ‘Crimson Joy’, p.48).
- Georg Hegel, Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox (trans.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp.263–64.
- She was the first Australian woman artist before the 1960s to depict sexual gratification, which was of course condemned (Burke, Dear Sun…, p.32).
- As Michael Keon states: ‘Hester, alone, of all the women I can remember in our public life of the 40s and 50s, retained her maiden name of Hester both for herself and for her work. A gesture as full of minor as her whole life was full of major affirmations’ (Michael Keon, Joy Hester. An Unsettling World, Melbourne: Lauraine Diggins, 1971,?.7).
- Battersby's claim that ‘the perspective of woman's Otherness helps obscure the women artists hidden in history by treating them as not fully-individual’ (Battersby, Gender and Genius, p.15) is pertinent in relation to the underlying obstacles Hester faced.
- Hester's recollection of Heide, the Reeds’ property, was a fond memory that she maintained during difficult times. She stated in a letter to Sunday: ‘… I know deeply that I'll always hold this little mirror before me, for it is mine and my Heide and it is probably one of the very few things one can ever own, is one's own personal mirror, and there is unfortunately no one in the world who can even glimpse into even a corner of it and see its captured beauty—it is not say of the beauty of my soul or anything. It's an “internal” external…It's something from outside that has been grafted, immovable, onto my “inside”…’ (quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, pp.121–22).
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.51.
- Greer, The Obstacle Race, p. 11.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.51.
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1981, p.5.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.195.
- Burke, Dear Sun, p.34.
- Quoted in Burke, Joy Hester, p.37.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun..., pp.119–20.
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1981, p. 9. Hester also appeared to be influenced by John Shaw Nelson, Judith Wright and Dylan Thomas. She named her daughter Fern, presumably taken from Fern Hill, a poem by Thomas which contrasts and opposes the experiences of youth, fertility and decay (Norton Anthology of English Literature, p.2318).
- Evidence of such references can be found in Hester's letter to Sunday Reed, 26 December 1947, thanking her for a Christmas Hamper: ‘…I felt like things Eliot talks about in “Little Gidding” about “beginnings and ends”…joined together—making no beginning or end—and that is how I felt. Because the day before I had felt sick and was inclined to see things in “parts”…’ (quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.131).
- Four Quartets is a poem of which ‘Little Gidding’ was the last part (‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Cocker’, ‘Dry Savages’ and ‘Little Gidding’). Recollections of flowers, gardens and children with their implicit equation to the state of being, and at the same time that sense of circuitry is present in the ‘Little Gidding’: for example, ‘What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. /The end is where we start from.’ (T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 1942–43, Norton Anthology of English Literature, p.2205).
- Quoted in Burke, Joy Hester, 1981, p.53.
- In this poem Eliot referred to Dante's Divine Comedy, specifically, book three, ‘Paridisio’, and the image of the multifoliate rose where the blessed Saints sit. In Dante's version it was when the eyes beheld the rose that the viewer was reunited with God. For Dante, the rose represented a vision of God, whereas Eliot referred to the vision of the multifoliate rose as the ‘hope only of empty men’; that is, paradise was unattainable because men were considered as ‘headpiece[s] filled with straw’ (T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber, 1954, p.75).
- ibid, p.79.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.240.
- As Michael Keon reveals, the artistic coterie in Melbourne, for example, felt alienated not only in terms of geographical isolation but also ‘a whole system of beliefs and assurances…’ became estranged (Keon, Joy Hester…, 1971, p.4).
- During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s classical verse dominated the Australian literary scene; modernist poetry was rejected and ‘T.S. Eliot was referred to with arch derision’ (Brian Kiernan, ‘Criticism’, in his Australian Writers and their Work. Criticism, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1974, p.29). Hester obviously had little chance of recognition at the time.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.52.
- See W. Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, (1802), Norton Anthology of English Literature, pp.168–70, pp.168–69.
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1981, p.15.
- Burke, Dear Sun…, p.4.
- Sunday Reed considered Hester a ‘work of art’ (see Koval, ‘Romana Koval…’, p.34).
- Jung quotes from Herbert Read's A Concise History of Modern Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959, p.180): ‘metaphysical anxiety is no longer Germanic and northern; it now characterizes the whole of the modern world’ (Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, London: Aldus Books, 1964, p.311).
- Cited in Jung, Man and his Symbols, p.311.
- This was the name of the doll Sunday Reed created and adopted metaphorically as her daughter; and was the source of Hester's Gethsemane series. Hester later adopted-out her two-year-old son, Sweeney, to the Reeds (Hawley, ‘Inside the hot house…’ p.23).
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1981, p.6.
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1983, pp. 85–86.
- Oil on tin, 44.5 × 57.2 cm, Reed Estate, Melbourne.
- This painting shares a similar style to that of the German expressionist, Gabriele Münter; for example, Oil auf Pappe, 1909 (Murnauerin, Germany) (see P. Lahnstein, Gabriele Münter, Munich: Buch-Kunstverlag Ettal, 1977, pp. 5–38).
- Brush, ink, watercolour, charcoal and pastel on card, 41 × 30 cm, University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane.
- Oil on plywood, 92 × 61cm, private collection.
- Burke, Joy Hester, 1983, p.65.
- Burke, Dear Sun…, p.20.
- Brush and ink, water colour over pencil, 27 × 37.4 cm, private collection.
- Hester had seen a number of films of the concentration camps in Germany and this painting is probably a reflection on a Nazi victim (Burke, Dear Sun…, p.20).
- Barret Reid, ‘Joy Hester: draftsman of identity’, Art and Australia, vol.4, no.1, June 1966, pp.45–53. p.45.
- Quoted in Burke, Dear Sun…, p.34.
- Burke, Dear Sun…, p.34.