Design and Art Australia Online

painter, printmaker, cartoonist and art teacher, was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 13 November 1904, daughter of Arnold Wall (who wrote articles that were published in Lone Hand 1907-8) and E.K.M. Curnow. After initial art studies at Christchurch, Edith studied in Rome and London (Westminster Polytechnic). In 1933 she married Oscar A. Bayne, an architect; they had one daughter, Cosima. Wall came to Sydney in 1939 when her husband was appointed director of the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station; later the family lived in Balwyn, Melbourne.

Wall regularly exhibited watercolours and drawings with Sydney’s Society of Artists, the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS), the Contemporary Art Society (Vic.) and elsewhere. Strawberry Ices (two very fat women in fox stoles), shown with the Society of Artists in 1943, was illustrated in their catalogue; Woman with Cinerarias (a nasty Sydney socialite) was included in 1945. Alan McCulloch praised her satiric drawings in 'Contemporary Art Displayed’, Herald (Melbourne) 11 May 1955, 21.

Between 1940 and 1950 Wall worked primarily as a cartoonist, producing trenchant, witty and occasionally bleak cartoons for the Ure Smith publications Australia National Journal and its companion annual Australia Weekend Book . The fifth (1946) volume of the latter published a portfolio of her cartoons, all signed with the gender-neutral signature 'Wall’. Many were acid comments on wartime society, women and businessmen, but it was her military cartoons in particular that encouraged the belief that 'Wall’ was a man. The joke frequently lay in the incongruity of soldiers and situation. Hence a tough digger deep in the New Guinea jungle in 1942 reads a romantic novel to two even beefier mates ('Now, we’d just got to the part where Gervaise, suspecting Lady Irma’s infidelity, slips from the conservatory’), or else four hideous Hun officers worry in January 1945, 'Mein vriends, if things go on like this ve vill all become pure ornaments’. The artist’s gender was revealed in Australia National Journal in June 1945 with the publication of a photograph of her by Olive Cotton .

Wall’s 12 joke cartoons in Australia Week-end Book 1 (1942) include the ludicrous “Playtogs?” and [2 effeminate male dancers] “Well, frankly, I think that bow on top makes your costume look slightly silly” . She was the most prolific cartoonist in the book. Vol.2 (1943) contained 15 cartoons by Wall, equal to (but reproduced larger than) those by “Wiz” .They include: “Doctor’s sorry he can’t come; he says would you mind if the local man had a look at you?” (i.e. witch doctor), “I’m tired of this war – aren’t you?” , “I love the [Sydney] harbour trip – must be my seafaring blood coming out” , and “Now, we’d just got to the part where Gervaise, suspecting Lady Irma’s infidelity, slips from the conservatory” . Vol.3 (1944) has 17 Wall examples, again the same number as “Wiz”. They include The Drawing Lesson , cheese /furniture polish cartoons and “George is with the Eighth Army…” Vol.4 (1945) had 10 cartoons (just less than Wiz). Vol.5 included a 'Portfolio of Wall’s Drawings’, pp.161-76 (Wiz got a portfolio too).

In 1956-70 Wall taught art, worked as an illustrator and publicist and designed an Australian exhibition display for Britain. She was a committee member of the NSW Contemporary Art Society in 1944-50 (and exhibited with it 11 times up to 1959: see Paula Furby, PhD pp.157-58) and of the Melbourne CAS in 1960-64. She held a solo exhibition in 1954 (see McCulloch, 'Satirical Intentions’, Herald 4 August 1954, 16), won the VAS drawing prize in 1956 and the Minnie Crouch prize at Bendigo Art Gallery in 1971 – the year she had a solo exhibition of her small-scale satirical works at Melbourne’s Leveson Street Gallery. Her last solo show, held at Melbourne in 1996, apparently consisted mainly of watercolour landscape paintings. She told JK in 1994 that she did few satiric works because people only bought landscapes.

Wall’s other interests were 'history, languages, cooking’, she wrote in 1982, adding:

I started drawing at the age of two, and so my ideals had to be invented later. I am a descriptive, not abstract, artist; I am continually hunting the adjustments between colour and space, shadow and substance, finite form and infinite ambience. Colour and line are the weapons I use to attack reality. My main object is to paint a picture that has not been seen before. This is difficult as it necessitates a many-fronted approach.

Wall also drew cartoons for Man .

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992