Barbara Nancy Brash (3 November 1925 – 25 February 1998) was a twentieth-century post-war Australian artist known for her painting and innovative printmaking. In an extensive career she contributed to the Melbourne Modernist art scene, beside other significant women artists including: Mary Macqueen, Dorothy Braund, Anne Marie Graham, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery (artist) and Nancy Grant.
Biography
Barbara Nancy Brash was born in Melbourne on the 3 November 1925 to Elsa and Alfred Brasch. The Brasch family had established Brasch Brothers and Salenger partnership in 1866 and opened Braschs music store at 108 Elizabeth Street. Reacting to prejudice against German names during and after the First World War, Alfred anglicised his surname.
Barbara and her brother Geoffrey went to primary school at St. Margarets, Melbourne after which Barbara attended secondary school at the all-girls college St Catherine's School, Toorak where artist Rosemary Ryan, was a contemporary, both following Sunday Reed's earlier attendance. While Geoffrey inherited Brashs in the 1970’s, Barbara did not join the business, instead caring for her ageing parents at the family home in Toorak until her father’s death, though she produced several record covers for Brashs in the 1980’s. She lived in the Toorak home briefly before moving to her own home in Kooyong in 1967, and lived there for the remainder of her life.
Barbara had family connections in the visual arts; cousin Golda Figa Brasch married Louis Abrahams in 1888, a founding member of the Heidelberg School, and another cousin Reuben Brasch set up Curlew Camp, visited by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton in the early 1880s.
In late 1949 Brash travelled in Europe with Dorothy Braund, returning to Melbourne from London in 1951.
Brash's lifelong concern was for the environment and animals, and she willed large sums from her shares to support animal welfare; Wildlife in Secure Environment, The Animal Welfare League of Victoria, The Lost Dogs Home and Animal Hospital, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare were beneficiaries.
Career
During a 50-year career, Barbara Brash experimented to extend the limits of the graphic medium, working in and combining woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs and screenprints, so that she became a pivotal artist in a post-WWII printmaking revival in Melbourne. Her work attracted the attention of the public as early as 1953; “Unusual grey and silver invitation cards have been designed by Barbara Brash for the "winter dinner" dance the Whernside Junior Auxiliary of the Royal Melbourne Hospital will hold at Ciro's on June 19. Barbara, who is an old St. Catherine's girl, is doing an art course at the Melbourne Technical College."
Brash began printmaking in 1947 when she studied etching in informal classes run by Harold Freedman at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT), simultaneous with her training in painting and drawing at the National Gallery School under its first Modernist instructor, Alan Sumner in 1946, the analytical approach taught by the Gallery School assisted her to find her simplistic, rich, and dynamic style. Furthermore, as an avid student she undertook additional classes with George Bell at his private school, where she formed close relationships with fellow women artists Dorothy Braund and Evelyn Syme. Her work began to reflect the ideas and practices of Modernism including the principle of dynamic symmetry. As part of the George Bell Group, consisting of Russell Drysdale, Geoffrey Jones, Edwin Robinson, Dorothy Braund, Alan Warren, Roma Thompson, Barbara Brash, Peter Cox, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery, Ron Center, Sali Herman, and Alan Sumner, she exhibited frequently in their group shows.
Brash benefitted from revived interest in printmaking among the city's galleries and art schools, and local and émigré artists, including screenprinter Senbergs and etcher Kluge-Pott, transmitted new techniques to eager local practitioners.
The Herald newspaper art reviewer 'L.T.’, surveying the year’s exhibitions of 1949, associates Brash with Alan Warren, Roger Kemp, Arthur Boyd, Keith Nichol, Eric Smith, Wesley Penberthey, Samuel Fullbrook, Robert Grieve, Dorothy Braund, John Brack, Leonard French and Barbara Robertson, as “the nucleus of a new and strong movement.”