Author(s): Henry R Lew

Art

A very personal, detailed and fascinating dive into the lives and works of two little-known and unfairly neglected Australian artists, Derwent Lees and Horace Brodzky. Author Henry Lew has studied both of these artists in depth for over 5 decades and has written several books about them: Horace Brodzky in 1987, In Search of Derwent Lees in 1996, The Five Walking Sticks: The story of Maurice Brodzky investigative journalist extraordinaire in 2000, and Imaging the World in 2018. Both born in the mid-1880s, Lees and Brodzky became the first two Australian-born artists to embrace and immerse themselves in early 20th century European modernist ideas and techniques, and they did so prior to the onset of World War I. Lees’s main painting styles embraced Victorian, impressionist, post-impressionist, fauvist and neoclassical techniques, but despite these stylistic changes, his drawing style, which he taught at the Slade School, remained essentially academic. Brodzky painted in a style some 30 or 40 years ahead of his time. He worked in oils, watercolours, linocuts and drawing. Both left Australia in the early 1900s and worked in London. Their work has been shown in many international galleries. Despite that, Lees and Brodzky are nowadays appreciated by only very few Australians. This book aims to correct the lack of knowledge about them. It includes 152 full-colour plates.