Barbara Brash Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

After a quiescence in the 1980s, Brash was excited anew by the advent of digital printmaking which she experienced while attending the workshops of Bashir Baraki with whom in 1996 she published the collaborative editions comprising their The Image Makers. Works such as Fossilised of 1993 exemplify the freedom afforded her in these highly coloured abstractions. Her 1997 series of digital prints Sludge is intended as an insight into destruction of the environment.

Barbara and her brother Geoffrey went to primary school at St. Margarets, Melbourne after which Barbara attended secondary school at the all-girls college St Catherine’s School, Toorak where artist Rosemary Ryan, was a contemporary, both following Sunday Reed’s earlier attendance. While Geoffrey inherited Brashs in the 1970’s, Barbara did not join the business, instead caring for her ageing parents at the family home in Toorak until her father’s death, though she produced several record covers for Brashs in the 1980’s. She lived in the Toorak home briefly before moving to her own home in Kooyong in 1967, and lived there for the remainder of her life.

On 23 October 1965 in the print room of the National Gallery of Victoria twelve people met with curator prints Dr Ursula Hoff to establish a national body to promote printmaking in Australia. The result was The Print Council of Australia; in 1981 Lillian Wood recorded that ‘from 22 June 1967 the first elected committee took over and it is interesting to note that of this first committee, three members continue to serve…Barbara Brash, Robert Grieve and Grahame King.”

Brash revealed details of her working method in an interview for The Age when she was preparing for a solo show at Australian Galleries in 1965:

She also was a foundational member of a group, Studio One Printmakers, which formed in Melbourne in 1961 from the Print Studio in the Art School of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT], after head of the art school Victor Greenhalgh had established for selected artists to have access to RMIT’s print facilities. Its other members were Tate Adams, Hertha Kluge-Pott, Grahame King, Janet Dawson, Fred Williams, and Jan Senbergs. Tate Adams included her in an exhibition of Studio One Printmakers; Forty Prints by Seven Artists, which during 1963 toured the National Gallery of Victoria, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Castlemaine Gallery, Rudy Komon Gallery (Sydney), Douglas Gallery (Brisbane), Bonython Gallery (Adelaide), Skinner Gallery (Perth) and Yoseido Gallery, Tokyo. Subsequently he opened Crossley Gallery, in Crossley Street, Melbourne, the first private gallery in Australia to be devoted exclusively to showing artists’ prints, in 1966, and continued to show her work. Also that year Stuart Purves took on the management of Australian Galleries for the next five decades and during the 1970s, included Brash in its ‘stable’ alongside George Baldessin, Jeffrey Smart and Brett Whiteley.

Brash’s early output, mostly linocuts and etchings, was in a Classical Modernist style and her love of animals and the environment inspires much of the subject matter. In the 1960s she adopted the new medium of silkscreen, which artists were taking up from industrial applications in which it had been used since the turn of the century, and she explored its effects of solid or translucent colour in boldly graphic abstract works, enhanced with innovations such as embossing and textured inks, as seen in her complex print of 1967 Promontory.

By 1960 the Canberra Times praised innovation; “Barbara Brash illustrates the use of overprinting in lino cut on rice paper, using many strong, transparent colours. The Peacock is a radiating composition with pattern and line assisting the glowing colours to make it most decorative,” and of the same show “Melbourne Prints,” when it traveled to South Australia, The Bulletin’s Geoffrey Dutton was prepared to appreciate her experiments; “Barbara Brash lays on color with the most notable effect in the show, in separate blocks in Lighthouse and in gauzy veils in Peacock.” His appraisal was re-enforced in Arnold Shore’s comment in 1962 that “Brash revels in color in her seriographs […] and there is exquisite quality in her etching Surfaces;” and by Bernard Smith, who had singled out Brash’s contribution to the 1963 Studio One exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria as “colorful and poetic.’ In his review of her 1965 solo show of screen prints and etchings of birds, flowers and gardens at Australian Galleries, Smith rated her works “Intimate, well-designed, craftsmanly,” and considered that “several of the aquatints reveal an exquisite sensitivity to tone and texture, especially the Magic Garden, with its haunting, enigmatic beauty; and the superb formal and tonal control of Composition.”

Modernist developments in 1955 still aroused suspicion in some quarters. Of the December show at Peter Bray of the George Bell Group the traditionalist magazine The Bulletin is typically sardonic; “Barbara Brash’s Landscape with Houses is a little looser [in brushwork], as is her Old Farm, which has two trees, two wheels and a ladder, and which is easily recognisable as contemporary“ Nevertheless, the National Gallery of Victoria purchased one of her works from the Group’s show in 1956 at Peter Bray.

Another 1954 exhibition at Peter Bray over November–December prompted Arnold Shore to comment on Brash’s “more exciting colours,” and though Alan McCulloch condemned the show for its ‘absence of ideas,’ he conceded “Barbara Brash’s Woman Seated has the forthright quality of a vividly stencilled fabric design” while Allan David in the Jewish News affirmed its “decorative” “colour and design.” In 1955 Arnold Shore in The Argus starts to see “romantic suggestion” in the “elusive variety of pattern … of a Landscape, by Barbara Brash.”

During a 50-year career, Barbara Brash experimented to extend the limits of the graphic medium, working in and combining woodcuts, linocuts, lithographs and screenprints, so that she became a pivotal artist in a post-WWII printmaking revival in Melbourne. Her work attracted the attention of the public as early as 1953; “Unusual grey and silver invitation cards have been designed by Barbara Brash for the “winter dinner” dance the Whernside Junior Auxiliary of the Royal Melbourne Hospital will hold at Ciro’s on June 19. Barbara, who is an old St. Catherine’s girl, is doing an art course at the Melbourne Technical College.”

It is a reflection of her innovation that Alan McCulloch writing in 1953 in The Herald noted Brash’s application of flat, intense hues in “colorful works after the pattern of cut outs…,” while The Bulletin condemned it; “There is Barbara Brash’s “Seated Woman,” whose flesh and nightdress have all the variety of a coat of whitewash applied to a smooth surface.” In 1954 The Age art critic called attention to the “decorative effect” of two-dimensional pattern in her colored lino-cuts,” an observation that The Herald critic repeated; “Barbara Brash is boldly decorative in a series of color lino-cuts. The Age also drew attention in the same Forty Prints by Ten Artists show at Peter Bray Gallery, opened by Ursula Hoff, to Brash’s spanning of oil and watercolour painting and printing, noting that “she feels this new medium [lithography] has a wide scope for experiment and is something which should be developed.

In late 1949 Brash travelled in Europe with Dorothy Braund, returning to Melbourne from London in 1951.

The Herald newspaper art reviewer ‘L.T.’, surveying the year’s exhibitions of 1949, associates Brash with Alan Warren, Roger Kemp, Arthur Boyd, Keith Nichol, Eric Smith, Wesley Penberthey, Samuel Fullbrook, Robert Grieve, Dorothy Braund, John Brack, Leonard French and Barbara Robertson, as “the nucleus of a new and strong movement.”

Brash began printmaking in 1947 when she studied etching in informal classes run by Harold Freedman at the Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT), simultaneous with her training in painting and drawing at the National Gallery School under its first Modernist instructor, Alan Sumner in 1946, the analytical approach taught by the Gallery School assisted her to find her simplistic, rich, and dynamic style. Furthermore, as an avid student she undertook additional classes with George Bell at his private school, where she formed close relationships with fellow women artists Dorothy Braund and Evelyn Syme. Her work began to reflect the ideas and practices of Modernism including the principle of dynamic symmetry. As part of the George Bell Group, consisting of Russell Drysdale, Geoffrey Jones, Edwin Robinson, Dorothy Braund, Alan Warren, Roma Thompson, Barbara Brash, Peter Cox, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery, Ron Center, Sali Herman, and Alan Sumner, she exhibited frequently in their group shows.

Barbara Nancy Brash (3 November 1925 – 25 February 1998) was a twentieth-century post-war Australian artist known for her painting and innovative printmaking. In an extensive career she contributed to the Melbourne Modernist art scene, beside other significant women artists including: Mary Macqueen, Dorothy Braund, Anne Marie Graham, Constance Stokes, Anne Montgomery (artist) and Nancy Grant.

Barbara Nancy Brash was born in Melbourne on the 3 November 1925 to Elsa and Alfred Brasch. The Brasch family had established Brasch Brothers and Salenger partnership in 1866 and opened Braschs music store at 108 Elizabeth Street. Reacting to prejudice against German names during and after the First World War, Alfred anglicised his surname.

Barbara had family connections in the visual arts; cousin Golda Figa Brasch married Louis Abrahams in 1888, a founding member of the Heidelberg School, and another cousin Reuben Brasch set up Curlew Camp, visited by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton in the early 1880s.