Sybil Craig

(Australia, 18/11/1901 - 09/09/1989)

Self-Portrait (c.1934)

A significant figure in twentieth-century Australian art, Craig’s career illustrates both the persistence of modernist tendencies and the shifting roles of women within Australian artistic and public life. Born in London in 1901, Craig and her family emigrated to Australia the following year and settled in Caulfied in a home designed by her architect father, where she lived for the entirety of her life. Described as a “suburban bohemian household”, the creative atmosphere of her family home was frequented by artists and musicians who immersed her in music, literature and art from an early age which became the foundation of her dedication to art.

Beginning her formal education in 1920, she took lessons with etching artist John Shirlow who introduced her to French modernism, before pursuing further studies at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in 1924 and, in 1935, at Melbourne Technical College (later RMIT). Her education thus placed her within a tradition of academic draftsmanship while also exposing her to the simplified forms and colourism of modernist practice.

Her first solo exhibition, held at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1932, demonstrated her versatility in oil, pastel and watercolour and included both portraits and still lifes. Over the following decades she contributed actively to Melbourne’s artistic networks, exhibiting with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Victorian Artists Society, the Twenty Melbourne Painters Society and the New Melbourne Art Club, where she was a founding member.

Craig’s work during this period reflected a synthesis of modernist colour and form with an intimate, often domestic subject matter. Critics noted the vitality and directness of her vision, qualities that gave her work a distinctive place within the Melbourne art scene of the interwar and immediate postwar years.

In March 1945, Craig the third and final woman to be appointed an official war artist by the Australian War Memorial, and the first woman to be commissioned specifically to record women’s industrial labour. Assigned to document the activities of the Commonwealth Explosives and Ordnance Factories at Maribyrnong, she produced more than 170 paintings and drawings over a six-month period that reveal both the physical demands and the dangers of munitions work. Her portrayal of the seriousness and dignity with which employees undertook their work challenged prevailing stereotypes of women’s capabilities and their wartime roles.

After the war, Craig continued to paint but gradually withdrew from the public sphere in order to care for her aging parents. Nevertheless, her contribution to Australian modernism was recognised in her later years. In 1978 the Important Woman Artists Gallery held a retrospective exhibition and in 1981 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia.

Craig’s works offers a distinctive perspective on Australian modernism, one in which stylistic experimentation intersected with a socially engaged documentation of women’s labour. Today, her works are represented in major public collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and several regional galleries.

Image: Sybil Craig, Self-Portrait (c.1934). Oil on board, 59 x 51 cm. State Library of Victoria, Australia.