Design and Art Australia Online

Joan Kerr
Painter, printmaker and theatre set designer, was born in Melbourne on 3 November 1925. She worked in Melbourne and produced etchings, linocuts, lithographs, screenprints and woodcuts. The NGA has 74 prints dating from c.1948 ( Beach Box ) to 1991 (the computer-generated Still Life with Fruit ) – though most are of the 1960s, including the abstract colour screenprint, Portrait Group 1965. See also Eveline Syme .

Brash produced early figurative prints which became more abstract.

Emma Mills
Barbara Nancy Brash was an Australian printmaker, painter and designer, who practiced between 1946 and 1997. Brash was born in Melbourne on the 3rd November 1925 to Alfred and Elsa Brasch. The Brasch family were a well-established presence within Melbourne society.

Barbara’s grandfather Marcus Brasch had originally emigrated from Prussia to the United Kingdom in 1848. He quickly established himself as a piano merchant, who traded his wares overseas to Australia and New Zealand. Marcus and his brother Woolf moved to Australia in 1866 to found Brasch Brothers and Salenger. The brothers went on to open the first Braschs store at 108 Elizabeth Street. The Brashs’ also had ties to the Australian Impressionist movement. Woolf Brasch’s first daughter Golda Figa Brasch married Louis Abrahams in 1888, who became a founding member of the Heidelberg School. One of Woolf’s sons Reuben Brasch established the Curlew Camp, visited by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton between 1881 and 1882.

After the death of Marcus in 1894, his son Alfred inherited the family business. After the First World War, Alfred anglicised his surname to ensure his family’s assimilation into an increasingly xenophobic Australian society. Barbara and her brother Geoffrey went to primary school at St Margaret’s Melbourne. Barbara attended secondary school at the all-girls college St. Catherine’s. Geoffrey eventually inherited his father’s company in the 1970’s, introducing vinyl records, audio systems and later compact discs. Although Barbara produced several record labels for Brashs during the 1980’s, she was not an active participant in the business. Barbara lived at her family home in Toorak until her father’s death, where she presumably cared for her ageing parents. In 1963 at the age of 38, Brash lived briefly at in Toorak, before moving to her own home in Kooyong in 1967, where she lived for the remainder of her life.

Brash enrolled at the National Gallery School to study a Diploma of Art in 1946 at the age of 21. Brash was taught painting by Alan Sumner, the first Modernist instructor at the NGS, who is also known for his pioneering work as a screen printer. She went on to additionally enrol at the George Bell School, where she attended Friday afternoon classes on the principles of modernist painting. It was here that she met painter Dorothy Braund, who also simultaneously studied under Sumner at the Gallery School. During her time at the Bell School, Brash was also in contact with older artist Evelyn Syme, of whom she drew a portrait of. Brash also enrolled in Saturday morning etching classes run by Ben Crosskell at the Melbourne Technical College in 1946.

Brash left Australia to travel Europe with Braund, returning to Melbourne from London in 1951. On her return, Brash became involved with circle of artists based at the Melbourne Technical College called the Melbourne Printmakers Group or Freedman Group. Brash attended the Tuesday evening classes with a number of others, including Mary Macqueen, Lesbia Thorpe, Nancy Clifton, Charles Blackman and Kenneth Jack. Brash joined the Studio One Printmakers group in 1963, alongside Tate Adams, Janet Dawson, Grahame King, Hertha Kluge-Pott, Jan Senbergs and Fred Williams. Brash was also closely involved in the Print Council of Australia, acting as the treasurer in the 1970’s and early 80’s. In 1965 Barbara became a member of the Lyceum Club. She was originally sponsored by artists Constance Stokes and Anne Montgomery. After experiencing a lapse in productivity during the late 1980’s, Brash’s practice was reinvigorated in the 1990’s by digital media. Brash attended workshops run by notable digital printmaker Bashir Baraki to learn the Canon Laser Photocopy technique. In 1996, Brash published her first collaborative print portfolio, alongside Bashir Baraki and Jean Knox, titled The Image Makers.

Brash died in February 1998 at the age of 74. In her will, she left a considerable amount of her shares to animal welfare groups, including Wildlife in Secure Environment, The Animal Welfare League of Victoria, The Lost Dogs Home and Animal Hospital and The International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Brash’s work spans a variety of printmaking media and subject matter. Her early prints are largely linocuts or etchings, which are aesthetically within the Classical Modernist tradition. Her lifelong interest in environmental and animal subject matter can be observed in her early work. Brash adopted the screen-printing method during the 1960’s and 70’s. She began to produce more abstract prints, experimenting with textural effects like embossing. Her digital work in the 1990’s is particularly interesting; she began to engage with notably more political subject matter than her previous work. Brash’s 1997 Sludge series explores the theme of environmental damage. Brash was a deeply experimental artist, who embraced new technology and aesthetics throughout her career. Her masterful use of translucent and layered colour permeates her entire oeuvre.

Brash won the Sara Levi Scholarship from the NGS in 1947 and a further award for her final year painting Half Nude (1949). Brash was included in a number of important early modernist print exhibitions, including Studio One Prints ’63 and Australian Print Survey 1963/4. Brash’s early work toured the United States; she was included in Australian Prints Today at the Smithsonian Institution and The Philadelphia Print Club in 1966. In the 1970s, her prints toured South East Asia in Australian Prints; Poland, India and New York in Images; Japan in three different exhibitions, and the Western Pacific. Regionally, she was exhibited in Printmaking in Australia 1812-1972 at the Newcastle City Art Gallery, and Printmaking in Australia: Colonial to Contemporary at the Queensland Art Gallery. She has had three major solo exhibitions; in 1965 at the Australian Galleries, 1966 at the Design Arts Centre Brisbane, and 1989 at the Eastgate Gallery.

Brash’s work is represented in a number of major state and regional galleries. The most notable of which include; National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, The Warrnambool Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and The Ian Potter Museum of Art.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan
Emma Mills

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2019