painter, has been linked stylistically to Norman Lindsay , for whom she occasionally modelled. Norton’s art usually featured visionary and occult imagery and was influenced by European Vorticism. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 2 October 1917, Norton came to Sydney with her family in June 1925. Her father, Albert, a merchant captain, was a cousin of the composer Vaughan Williams. The youngest of three sisters, Norton was expelled from Chatswood Girls’ Grammar for producing 'depraved’ drawings of vampires, ghouls and werewolves thought likely to corrupt the other girls. She subsequently enrolled at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff for two years. Hoff encouraged her 'pagan’ creativity, but she did not graduate. While still a student, Norton dabbled as a pavement artist near the Sydney GPO. After leaving college, she worked variously as a kitchen maid, night-club waitress, PMG messenger and trainee journalist for Smith’s Weekly . Her first published illustrations – two fantasy works of ghost-like entities and a pencil study, The Borgias – appeared in the monthly Pertinent in October 1941. Through the magazine she met her creative partner and lover, the poet Gavin Greenlees.
Norton first attracted controversy when she exhibited a series of pagan, sexually explicit drawings at the Rowden-White Library, University of Melbourne in August 1949. Police raided the exhibition – which included such works as Lucifer , Witches’ Sabbath and Individuation – and Norton was charged with obscenity. The charges were dismissed after she provided detailed explanations of her occult symbolism to the court. She derived much of her imagery from a type of psychic exploration based on self-hypnosis and what in occult circles has been described as 'wanderings on the astral planes’. Many of her works are based on trance-encounters with archetypal beings whom Norton considered had their own independent existence. She began to compile a series of these mystical drawings with Greenlees providing accompanying poems. Under the sponsorship of the publisher Walter Glover, they appeared in The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1952. This attracted even more controversy than her Melbourne exhibition. Glover was charged with producing an obscene publication and the book could only be distributed in Australia with some of the more controversial – sexually explicit – images blacked out. Export copies were burnt by US Customs, and Glover became bankrupt. Greenlees and Norton, who had been financially assisted by Glover, were forced to scrounge a living by other means.
Norton became well known as an occult artist and bohemian personality in the 1950s and early ’60s and would sell her sketches and paintings to whomever expressed an interest. She acquired a persona as 'The Witch of Kings Cross’, openly advocated her dedication to occult beliefs and the Great God Pan and was falsely accused by the tabloid press of holding Black Masses. This was not without its consequences either. On the basis of a series of confiscated photographs simulating ceremonial rituals, she was charged with 'engaging in unnatural sexual acts’. She unwittingly played a part in the downfall of Sir Eugene Goossens, the first conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a member of Norton’s occult group, who was charged in March 1956 with importing ritual objects and pornographic photographs. His career never recovered from the publicity and he was obliged to return to England, where he soon died.
Norton continued to produce macabre supernatural works until her death from cancer of the colon on 5 December 1979, but these became increasingly lurid and repetitive. Her most accomplished works are the early drawings reproduced in The Art of Rosaleen Norton (1952) and in a small publication released by Walter Glover in 1984, The Supplement to The Art of Rosaleen Norton . Glover reissued The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1982 after emerging from bankruptcy.
- Writers:
- Drury, Nevill
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
