Ethel L Spowers
Australia, b.1890, d.1947
Gust Of Wind
- 1931
- Linocut
- Presented by Mr Rex Nan Kivell, 1953
- 320 x 225mm
- 94/212
Location: Monica Richards Gallery
Tags: advertisements, buses, mailboxes, newspapers, people (agents), rain, umbrellas, urban landscapes, wind (weather phenomena)
Ethel Spowers studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in the late 1920s along with fellow Australian artists Dorrit Black and Eveline Syme. Tutored by Claude Flight in 1928 and 1929, her work often focused on people in busy streets or children in playgrounds, and sensitively conveyed rhythm, repeated forms and patterns. Spowers, Black and Syme quickly became key members of Flight’s linocut group and on their return to Australia in 1930 both Spowers and Syme did much to promote the linocut, including arranging the first Australian exhibition of linocuts in late 1930. Unfortunately no examples of Syme’s linocuts were included in Nan Kivell’s gift and her work remains absent from New Zealand public art collections.
(One O'Clock Jump: British Linocuts from the Jazz Age, 7 December 2024 - 11 May 2025)
Exhibition History
Turn, Turn, Turn, 29 July 2019 – 8 March 2020
Born in Melbourne, Ethel Spowers attended the Grosvenor School of Modern Art between 1928 and 1929 and again in 1931. She studied linocuts under Claude Flight and participated in the British Linocut exhibitions. In 1930 Spowers organised an exhibition of Australian linocut artists in Melbourne and helped to promote the medium in Australia. This print, one of four by Spowers given to the city in 1953 by Rex Nan Kivell, shows a figure losing control of a stack of papers on a wet and windy day – a subject that must have appealed to the artist for its sense of movement and drama.