Design and Art Australia Online

painter and potter, was born in East Kempsey (New South Wales) on 1 December 1885 to parents of Irish origin; she was known in the family as Nancy. After initial lessons in Kempsey, probably with a Miss Gabrielle, and in Sydney with Horace Moore Jones, Dangar studied then taught at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School, at the same time as Grace Crowley . The two friends went to France together in January 1926. After a pilgrimage to Cézanne’s house at Aix-en-Provence, Dangar and Crowley studied painting in Paris, joining Colarossi’s and working briefly under the Beaux-Arts painter Louis Roger, then at the cubist André Lhôte’s Parisian academy and summer school at Mirmande (1927-28). Anne also took lessons in design from Mme Né and attended M. Henri Bernier’s pottery classes at Viroflay, near Sévres. Bernier considered that her hands 'were made for holding pots’.

After touring Italy with Crowley, Dangar returned to Sydney. An advertisement in Undergrowth announced:

Miss Anne Dangar, who will arrive in Sydney in November [1928], after a three years’ study abroad, will take a class of students to the country for one month in January. She proposes a series of vivid and interesting lectures, illustrated with reproductions of the works of European masters as part of this adventure.

The group was to be limited to twenty-five students paying three guineas each. They sketched at Wamberal on the coast north of Sydney, and the classes were a great success. Dangar opened a studio in Bridge Street and taught at Ashton’s again for a short time, but Sydney and Ashton were not ready for modern art. She returned to France in 1930 and settled at Albert Gleizes’s art colony, Moly-Sabata, near Ardêche in southern France, where she became immersed in pottery. Her mark 'MSD’, painted on early pots produced at the local pottery of St Dézirat, stands for 'Moly-Sabata Dangar’. Later pots were fired at Roussillion.

Her pottery was well received in France. She had two exhibitions at the end of 1932, the first at the Musée d’Annonay, which purchased ten pots. Several French collections hold examples of her work, including the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and the Fondation Albert Gleizes, Paris. She sent a batch of her pottery back to Crowley in 1932, which to her distress was sold ( see Margaret Jaye ). More followed in 1935 and 1937, but the high rate of breakages discouraged further exports. Her pots and her rich and abundant correspondence with Crowley (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney), as well as with Dorrit Black and others, were a tangible connection with European modernism for Sydney artists at the Crowley-Fizelle School. She often sent copies of articles and lectures by Gleizes and others, as well as her own design and colour exercises.

Dangar remained at Moly-Sabata and eventually (in 1947) had a pottery built for her there, but illness increasingly limited her output. In her work Dangar both taught and learned from the villagers around her. She became friendly with the Benedictine monks at St Marie de la Pierre Qui Vivre, converting to Roman Catholicism just before she died of cancer on 4 September 1951.

Writers:

Maxwell, Helen

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992