Helen Ogilvie

Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie (4 May 1902, in Corowa – 1 August 1993, in Melbourne) was a twentieth-century Australian artist and gallery director, cartoonist, painter, printmaker and craftworker, best known for her early linocuts and woodcuts, and her later oil paintings of vernacular colonial buildings.

Helen Elizabeth Ogilvie was born 4 May 1902 in Corowa and grew up in surrounding rural New South Wales where she would go sketching with her mother, Henrietta, a watercolourist, before her family moved to Melbourne in 1920.

Curator Sheridan Palmer in the catalogue for a 1995 Art Gallery of Ballarat retrospective described her as; "a fiercely independent and resourceful woman, who was sophisticated in a simple way.

[14] During WW2 and after, Ogilvie worked in the Red Cross Rehabilitation Service at Heidelberg Military Hospital under Frances Wade, where she taught patients lino- and wood-cutting, and basketmaking using locally harvested European and Australian native rushes.

[18] Ogilvie was a generous mentor of emerging artists,[19] and in 1949 Stanley Coe appointed her as one of Australia's first women gallery directors to create a commercial exhibition space on the upper floor of his interior design shop at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne.

"[21] For the period until 1955, and with advice from her friends Ursula Hoff, Arnold Shore and Alan McCulloch, she organised a program of exhibitions of the avant-garde;[19][22] John Brack,[23] Margo Lewers, Leonard French (who showed his Illiad series, amongst his earliest experiments with enamel house paint on Masonite, October 1952),[24] Inge King,[25] Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman (whose radical 'schoolgirl' series was shown there in May 1953), Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (whose first Australian show in a commercial gallery was there in 1953), Helen Maudsley, Clifton Pugh,[26] Michael Shannon and others.

The opening show in February 1950 of a group twenty Victorian artists associated with George Bell, whose work was also shown, included Alan Warren, Alan Sumner, Constance Stokes, Roger Kemp, William Frater, Charles Bush, Daryl Lindsay, Phyl Waterhouse, Ada May Plante, Francis Roy Thompson, and Arnold Shore,[27] and was followed by a survey show of contemporary art from Sydney.

[7] Reception of her paintings in Australia however, as opposed to her earlier prints, was lukewarm; Donald Brook in reviewing her 1968 Macquarie Galleries solo describes them as 'sweet and stiff'.