Joy Hester: Darkness Under the Sun
Joy Hester, Face in Close Up, 1947.
Joy Hester was born in Elsternwick, Melbourne, in 1920. She is responsible for some of the most psychologically penetrating images in Australian art. Hester was the only female member of the Angry Penguins, a modernist literary and artistic movement active in the 1940s, comprising poets, artists and intellectuals, but until comparatively recently she has been largely overlooked in published art histories.
Her expressionistic drawings were made rapidly on paper, with brush and ink, usually as she sat on the floor. She would complete sometimes a dozen works in a sitting, one after the other, in a stream of consciousness reverie, one image suggesting the next. Her pictures are direct and compelling; sometimes they are bleak or tragic. Various motifs are recurrent: a lone female head; a woman with her brooding, shadowy male lover positioned behind her; faces with mismatched, bulging eyes. Her stark, uncompromising images of love, grief, loss and despair are timeless. She had plenty of raw personal subject matter on hand on which to base them.
Hester’s chaotic personal life was propelled in part by her close association with the raffish, artistic demi-monde which collected around art patrons John and Sunday Reed at their property, Heide, in Bulleen, Melbourne (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art).
Much has been written about Heide - this
open-house, creative enclave of artists, which included, amongst others, Sidney
Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Percival, and Hester’s first husband, Albert Tucker.
It is usually portrayed as a kind of artistic nirvana – and it did nurture certain
artists within the cluster. But its freewheeling sexual ambience was often the source
of painful, long-drawn-out psychodramas. It was a rarefied hothouse of emotion,
in which emotional casualties were unavoidable, marooned as they were on the treacherous
rocks of brief affairs, disintegrating marriages, professional jealousies and
capriciously tossed-aside friendships. Not the least of these casualties was
Hester’s son, Sweeney, whom she left in the variable care of the Reeds when he
was three-years old, to enable her to move to Sydney to conduct an affair with
artist Gray Smith (the Reeds eventually adopted the young boy). This abrupt
change in Hester’s life was precipitated by a diagnosis of terminal Hodgkin
lymphoma and her desire to bolster her last remaining couple of years with some
personal fulfillment and happiness. This must have been of little comfort to
young Sweeney, who, for the remainder of his short life, never shook the
overwhelming burden of maternal abandonment. His sense of rejection was not
alleviated by the fact that Hester gave birth to two subsequent children whom
she kept with her. Sweeney grew up to be an isolated, troubled adolescent and
young man. He took his own life in 1979, aged thirty-five.
It has recently been revealed that Sweeney was probably not Albert Tucker’s son, which was likely the reason for Tucker’s apparent ambivalence towards the boy. Sweeney features in a number of photographs which show he and his mother together, and in several work on paper, made by Hester during his first few years of life - the only period in which she had meaningful contact with him.
A sobering ink drawing from 1945, titled ‘Mother and Child’, made when Sweeney was one-year old, features the limp, dead bodies of the eponymous figures hanging by the neck, side by side. Undoubtedly, her relationship with Sweeney, with his ambiguous paternity, filled Hester with anxiety, even before her illness was diagnosed. Her ink drawings, such as ‘Sweeney With Fan’ and ‘Sweeney’ (both from 1945) arguably seem to indicate the tension of mother towards son.
The former depicts an inscrutable, rather sinister homunculus with jagged, claw-like fingers, sitting in a scruffy pool of shadow, an ornamental fan spread out behind him like an insect’s wing.The second shows a wild, long-haired being, seemingly older than his one-year-old self, who stares at his mother/the viewer with aloof disdain, even frank disapproval.
The images of sexual congress in Hester’s work are no less burdened with ambivalence, guilt and regret. In many of her self-portrait drawings of lovers, Hester depicts the faces of male and female figures mashed into each other, often attached by a single, cyclopean eye. In these images, the female figure (Hester) appears subsumed and overwhelmed by the presence and disposition of the male and, due to the wild, almost shocked expression of trepidation, it is not altogether certain whether she is necessarily a willing participant in the event. Indeed, her drawing, ‘Grief’, from 1955, depicts a similar arrangement of figures to her ‘Lovers ll’ (1956). In both images, the woman’s face is turned to the sky, while a male figure - with sphinx-like inscrutability - stands behind her. The fact that for Hester, love and grief were inextricably linked, speaks volumes.
It is now almost 60 years since Hester’s death. It is surely now time to shed the romanticised version of her comparatively short life and begin to view her work in the spotlight of its actuality – raw, unvarnished, fierce and intense – a living document of guilt, self-doubt and pain.
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