Plate with cubist designs

Anne Dangar is renowned for her innovative pottery designs that fuse traditional techniques with modernist motifs. An early exponent of cubism in Australia, she moved to France in 1930 where she became a highly esteemed figure in an artists’ colony established by French cubist painter Albert Gleizes.

Despite her lack of success in Australia during her lifetime Dangar has been posthumously recognised as a highly important figure in the modern art movement and her ceramic output attests to her skills as a potter and decorator. Dangar's great ability was in adapting cubist, Celtic and other historical symbols for use on functional forms in ways which was both aesthetically pleasing and artistically satisfying through use of Gleizes' formal principles.

Despite the physical distance, Dangar played an important role in Sydney’s cultural landscape by sending books and excerpts from Gleizes’ lessons on cubist principles to her friend Grace Crowley, who disseminated them to her students, including Ralph Balson, at the Crowley-Fizelle school, providing the foundation for progressive modernist instruction in this country.