Difference between revisions of "Person - Jean Devanny"

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JANE DEVANNY (1894 - 1962)

Always known as Jean, she claimed to have established and named the Workers Art Club (WAC) and to have been its first director, moving from obscure premises to a large hall with offices and a make up room at 36A Pitt St. Her ideas for the club were modelled on proletarian art and theatre groups she had seen in Berlin when she travelled to Germany and the Soviet Union as a Workers’ International Relief delegate in 1931. She adhered to Stalin right-hand-man Andrei Zhdanov’s cultural doctrine of socialist realism and that artists were "engineers of the human soul". George Finey joined the WAC, hanging some of his drawings and caricatures on the walls, and set up an art section which went well. After the drama section was established, Jean Devanny would sometimes interrupt a performance to call for volunteers to help when people were being evicted.

Devanny and Finey left the WAC after being taken to task by the CPA, Finey for allowing "undesirables and artistic freaks" to join the club, and Devanny for writing “petit-bourgeois tripe” and staging non-leftist plays like Pygmalion. She switched allegiance to the Friends Of The Soviet Union (FOSU) where she gave talks and helped stage their plays. Her daughter played piano for Jean's lecture on great composers. A proposed talk on “companionate marriage” was banned.

Devanny had a difficult relationship with the CPA. While the official Party line was that the working class should have as many children as they wanted (in real life, women through networking knew where the abortionists were), Devanny wanted birth control information to be readily available. After being gang raped in 1941 at a communist bush camp and protesting to the Cairns district committee, she was expelled from the CPA for “infamous conduct” (but was readmitted after she threatened to publish letters from J B Miles with whom she'd had a long affair). She resigned from the CPA in 1950 because of its criticism of her portrayal of race relations in her work Cindie.

In the 1930s Devanny reviewed capitalist films in the Workers' Weekly through the prism of the class struggle. The Scarlet Pimpernel portrayed the masses as beastly, Andrew Foulkes was a rotten actor with a low appearance, and “after the revolution” some good work should be found for Merle Oberon who had found it hard to resist marriage with an old, ugly but rich Hollywood director. The French Revolution should not be glamorised but portrayed through the sufferings and collective grandeur of the people that led to overthrow of the monarchy.

With time she became more reflective, stating that the biggest fault with young worker dramatists was that they hung slabs of propaganda on the barest of dramatic threads, and that much of own play Paradise Flow was propaganda and needed drastic pruning. With the isolation of Australia from overseas contacts during World War 11 she advocated the staging of local plays. She was a supporter of a national theatre housing opera, ballet and theatre.

Jane Crook was born in New Zealand, the eighth of ten children. Her father was a boilermaker and miner. She left school at 13 to care for her mother but read voraciously. At a dance in 1911 she met miner Francis Harold “Hal” Devanny (1888-1966) and married him that year; their children were Karl (after Marx) born 1912, Patricia 1913 (as Patricia Hurd she died in 1980) and Erin 1915 (who died aged four of peritonitis, after which Jean never again played piano and violin). The Devannys were active in the miners’ union and in Marxist study circles, and Jean began writing novels, always about women’s economic and sexual equality in marriage. The Butcher Shop was a literary sensation in 1926.

In 1929 they crossed the Tasman, hoping a warmer climate would help Karl’s weak heart (but he died in 1934). Jean’s first impressions of Sydney were razor gangs, shootings, bashings, bag snatchings, the White Australia Policy and dagoes, timber and mining strikes, and bohemians like Dulcie Deamer. Jean joined the CPA in 1931. As publisher of the Workers’ Weekly Hal was sentenced to six months’ gaol in 1932 for soliciting contributions to the CPA. Jean was also charged for collecting in the Domain, and in 1935 served time for selling working-class literature. At Long Bay she was issued with shoes that didn't fit and slept in a hammock in a flea-plagued cell.

A woman of enormous energy, Jean was always on the move, marching and public speaking, travelling abroad and interstate. George Farwell said she was masculine and long-striding; Leslie Rees that she was a strident speaker drawing big Sunday afternoon crowds in the Domain, but an amiable collector of sixpences for tea money for Sunday night meetings of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. An advocate of sexual freedom she made an arrangement with her husband absolving each other of marital obligations. She admired the rippling muscles of the Russian peasant in the wheat fields and said women had as much right to enjoy sex as men.

Jean Devanny, who died of leukemia at Townsville on 8 March 1962, has Wikipedia and Australian Dictionary of Biography entries. Her papers are held by James Cook University. Her autobiography Point of Departure was published posthumously in 1986.

GEORGE EDMOND FINEY (1895 - 1987)

Described by Norman Lindsay as the world’s greatest black-and-white artist, New Zealand born George Finey was first president of the Workers Art Club (WAC) and its main art tutor. His wife Nat (typist and artist’s model Nellie Phoebe Murray whom he married first in a mock ceremony performed by Percy Lindsay, then officially at St Clement’s C of E Mosman on 25 March 1922) modelled and directed there. Under Finey's presidency the WAC was first set up in August 1932 at 273 Pitt Street, in an annex of the Sydney School of Arts. Fashioned after workers’ clubs abroad, it comprised a small library and club room for lectures, music recitals and art classes. Although summer camps were also planned for members plus classes in French and German, activity became centred on the visual arts.

By October 1932 the club had moved to bigger premises at 36A Pitt Street. The first two public events were a display of international posters and an exhibition of Finey's work, opened by J S MacDonald, director of the National Art Gallery, who praised the artist’s technique, originality and sardonic bitterness. In contrast, the Workers Weekly condemned Finey's cartoons as dangerous defeatist propaganda. His “Workers lined up for the dole” were miserable, spiritless derelicts not true to the reality of their struggle. To the critic's contention that the masses should always be stirred to revolt, Finey responded that graphic art should be just that – to show the horrors of war. His next big project was for an 8 April 1933 anti-war conference: “Saga”, a protest in linocuts, by WAC students including Frank Beck, Clive Guthrie, John Harvey, Stan Clements, Adrienne Parkes and Geoff Litchfield.

On 18 April 1933 Finey started art classes at 147A King Street above a speakeasy. There was no seating so borrowed forms were hauled by rope up an empty liftwell, often bumping the night club's patrons. The People’s Art Club was formally opened with four one-act plays on 18 May 1933; Finey helped design the sets. On 31 May 1933 The Importance Of Being Earnest directed by Ian Vallentine was staged there. The People’s Art Club seems to have had a short life at King Street.

Mounting disagreement with the CPA and the WAC management committee led to Finey's resignation from the WAC. Jean Devanny also resigned.

Finey’s memories of bohemian Sydney are recalled in his book The Mangle Wheel: places where you could get a drink were raided by Constable Chuck (he disguised himself as a sheikh to get into a Black and White Artists’ Ball at the Bondi Beach Casino); one- act plays were staged at Pakies 219 Elizabeth Street, patronised by intellectuals and bohemians from 1929 to 1966 (Augusta "Pakie" established the club after her marriage breakup with theatre entrepreneur Duncan Macdougall); Madame Pura's; Miss Joseph’s in Pitt Street; The Greeks in Castlereagh Street. Finey and other cartoonists formed an “incestuous artistic community” at the Journalists’ Club. With Eric Jolliffe he drank at the Phillip Hotel in Phillip Street opposite the CIB, and at the Black and White Club in the Bulletin building. A casual dresser (open-neck shirt, white trousers, sandals, no hat or socks), Finey was sometimes asked to leave upmarket venues.

Finey is well known as a visual artist. He was also a scribbler of occasional verse, such as this tribute to George Bernard Shaw:

I love flowers, said the garrulous man

With gimlet eyes

And whiskered chin.

Their place is in the garden.

So; Please; Don’t

Bring them in.

The female keeper of the house

Who thought she kept him too

Filled the rooms with florals

As she was wont to do.

He threw some out the window

And others through the door

Then acidly instructed her

To bring them in no more.

I dearly love small boys

And girls, He told

The angry char

But I never cut their heads off

And stick them in a jar.

George Finey, who died on 8 June 1987 in his home at Lawson, has Wikipedia and Australian Dictionary of Biography entries.

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  Jean Devanny (right) with Katharine Susannah Pritchard