Anne Garvin Dangar was an Australian-born painter and potter who lived for most of her life in France. Through her correspondence, particularly with her close friend and fellow artist, Grace Crowley, the occasional exhibition of some of her works and her brief periods teaching in Sydney, she influenced the birth of modernism in Australian art and the development of abstraction from the 1930s onwards. Her reputation as an artist was much better known in France than in her own country, where her work was initially dismissed as not conforming to the traditional conservative taste of the art establishment, and subsequently ignored. It was not until the 1970s, twenty years after her death, that any of her work was acquired by a public collection in Australia and it is only in recent years that her position in Australian art history has been recognised. Two exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia —the first in 2001 and the second in 2025—have celebrated her work and legacy.
Anne Dangar was born in 1885 in Kempsey, NSW, the daughter of Otho Orde Dangar and Elizabeth, née Garvin. She was educated in Kempsey and appears to have been active in local social life (Edwards 2024, 27). When she was nineteen, she went to Sydney where she studied under the New Zealand painter Horace Moore-Jones. Over the next few years she continued her own painting and held art classes for children back in Kempsey, exhibiting their work, along with her own, in a couple of exhibitions.
In 1915 she began studying at the Sydney Art School under the guidance of the British-born Julian Ashton. It was here that she met fellow student and artist, Grace Crowley. Their loving and mutually supportive relationship was to last throughout their lives. By 1920, both Crowley and Dangar were teaching at Ashton’s school. Ashton’s health was not good and the two women effectively ran the school in his absences. Dangar’s own work during the early 1920s did not deviate from Ashton’s teaching, focussing on ‘plein air’ landscapes. However, there were stirrings of modernism in the Sydney art world. Roland Wakelin had returned after two years in Europe in late 1924 and he spoke of the influence of Cézanne and his theories of the importance of structure and design. Dangar started to incorporate these ideas into her classes, unlike other artists in Sydney at the time. She set her sights on going to Europe to study ‘modern art’. Grace Crowley had been planning to go to London to the Slade School of Art, but Dangar’s destination was Paris and when Crowley did not receive the travelling scholarship she had hoped for, she decided that she, too, would go to Paris. They left together, arriving in Marseille in January 1926, where their first stop was to visit Cézanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence.
In Paris they enrolled in Académie André Lhote. Lhote was a Cubist and both Dangar and Crowley attended his classes over the next two years integrating his methods of pictorial composition into their work. During a brief holiday in Brittany, Dangar was inspired by the traditional pottery of Brittany; returning to Paris, she took lessons from Henri Bernier, in Viroflay near Sèvres, as well as from a porcelain painter, applying the same design skills in her ceramic decorations as in her painting.
In December 1928, Dangar had to return to Sydney. Her meagre savings had run out and she needed to earn a living. She was eager to share what she had learnt in Paris and her belief, as she wrote in her essay entitled ‘Today’ in Undergrowth (January–February, 1929), in ‘the laws of composition’ and ‘the exquisite conceptions of rhythm, form and colour that give the modern mind a satisfaction.’ (cited in Edwards 2024, 38). She found that the Julian Ashton School was not receptive to her new ideas and she set up her own art classes at 12 Bridge St. where she started to teach her students principles of Cubism. The Sydney art scene continued to be a disappointment to Dangar and she lamented her situation in letters to Crowley who was still in Paris. She particularly asked Grace to send anything written by Albert Gleizes, whose work Dangar had seen at an exhibition during her final months in Paris.
Crowley went one step further and approached Gleizes in person. Gleizes immediately invited Dangar to join the Moly-Sabata community at Sablons, on the Rhone river south of Lyon, and proposed she set up a pottery studio there. Within four months, Dangar was on a boat back to France and to Moly-Sabata, which was to be her home for the rest of her life.
Without a kiln at Moly-Sabata and lacking the funds to have one built, Dangar worked with several potteries in the local region. Over the following years she exhibited and sold work locally as well as sending works back to Australia for sale, initially through a commercial store and then later through displays at Grace Crowley’s studio. Her work was gaining recognition and esteem in France. In 1937 she exhibited at the Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne in Paris where she received a gold medal for her pottery. Her work was included in the Salon d’automne in 1938, and was positively reviewed in Beaux-Arts magazine by Renée Moutard-Uldry. The following year she exhibited with various artists including Marcel Duchamp at a private gallery in Paris. Throughout these years Dangar supplemented her income by teaching local children in a weekly class.
From time to time during the 1930s, Dangar thought about returning to Australia and setting up a pottery studio near Sydney. Funds were very tight for Dangar and she relied often on friends; the lure of an easier life back in Australia was tempting. While Gleizes was an inspiring teacher and mentor, he was in no way practical and the logistics of keeping the Moly-Sabata community functioning was left entirely up to Dangar.
All through the 1930s, she sent lessons based on Gleizes’s theories to Grace Crowley who had set up an art school with Rah Fizelle in Sydney. Dangar’s letters also contained sketches of her own work, demonstrating the application of Gleizes’s theories. The works she sent back complemented the lessons, building a body of aesthetic theories and practical application that helped to bridge the distance between Europe and Australia for those Australian artists interested to understand and be part of the modernist art movement.
In May 1939 Dangar had a break from Moly-Sabata when she travelled to Morocco at the invitation of the French colonial government as a craft adviser. She had an immediate rapport with the work of the local potters and saw Gleizes’s theories manifest in the interlaced designs in the mosques and their decorative work. This was the non-representational art to which she had been aspiring. Unfortunately the outbreak of war in Europe brought her stay in Morocco to an end and she returned to Moly-Sabata in December of that year.
Given the situation in France, Dangar was advised to return to Australia and was offered free passage by the Australian government. Gleizes did not want her to leave and she turned down this offer to stay on to ensure the future survival of Moly-Sabata. The war years in France were very challenging. She was seen as an outsider and found herself no longer in sympathy with Gleizes who was aligning himself increasingly with Vichy France. She felt abandoned by her mentor Gleizes, and left to survive as best she could.
When peace finally returned to Europe, she once again found herself unable to return to Australia. She had contracted diphtheria. At the end of 1946, she dismissed all idea of ever returning to Australia, believing she had been away for too long. She was selling work regularly and her work was being acquired by regional galleries. Finally, in 1947, she achieved her goal of setting up a pottery with kiln at Moly-Sabata.
Influenced by Gleizes and others, her thoughts increasingly turned to Catholicism. Spirituality was an important part of her aesthetic, which drew on both Christian and other symbols and motifs.
After a fall in late 1950 her health deteriorated and she suffered a stroke. On 4 September 1951, she died. Her funeral was attended by many people and she was interred in the cemetery of Serrières. At her funeral Lyon-based modern art critic and writer René Deroudille pronounced her to be ‘the greatest potter in France’ (cited in Edwards 2024, 195).
Her legacy in France is assured through the revival of the community at Moly-Sabata where her kiln and workshop host contemporary artists from around the world. There are a street and two schools named after her in Sablons. She had become a much-loved and respected figure in her adopted home where she had lived and worked for twenty years. Her work has featured in many exhibitions and publications on both Cubism and ceramics from 1953 onwards.
Whilst Dangar loved the colours and forms of Australia, and had on many occasions thought that she would return, she could not see her place in what she considered to be the crass commercialism of the small Australian art world and the lack of understanding of the importance of the spiritual in art. Moly-Sabata, she had written in the first lecture she had sent back to the Crowley-Fizelle school, ‘is a protest against the artificial degrading state Art has fallen to in our period’. There, amongst the ‘old hills (…) covered with the marks of man’s labour with his hands’ (letter to Grace Crowley, 2 June 1935), she had found her spiritual home.
Today she is recognised as being ‘among a small number of Australian artists who can be said to have truly responded to the call of modern art’. (…) … as an advocate and teacher, she exerted an irrevocable influence upon modern art in Australia and actively encouraged the development of pure abstraction’ (Edwards 2024, 183).
Image: photograph of Anne Dangar, nd. Centre Pompidou, out of copyright
Author: Jane Gilmour, Melbourne, April 2026
References
Adams, Bruce. 2005. Rustic Cubism: Anne Dangar and the Art Colony at Moly-Sabata. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
Edwards, Rebecca, ed. 2024. Anne Dangar, exhibition catalogue. Canberra, National Gallery of Australia.
Freak, Elle, Tracey Locke, Wayne Tunnicliffe, eds. 2025. Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940, exhibition catalogue. Sydney and Adelaide, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Art Gallery of South Australia.
Maxwell, Helen. 1993. Anne Garvin Dangar (1885–1951). Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dangar-anne-garvin-9899, published first in hardcopy 1993, accessed online 25 August, 2025.
Topliss, Helen. 2000. Earth, Fire, Water, Air: Anne Dangar’s letters to Grace Crowley. St Leonards, NSW, Allen & Unwin.
Grace Crowley papers, 1927–1974. MLMSS 3252/vols 2–7, MLMSS 3252, vol. IX, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Keywords
Australian art, ceramics, modernism, Grace Crowley, Albert Gleizes, Moly-Sabata, Catholicism.