The Promise of the Rainbow: Anne Dangar at Moly-Sabata 1930-1951

Abstract

This thesis examines the life and work of the Australian artist Anne Dangar at Moly-Sabata, an artisanal community founded in rural France in 1927 by the Cubist painter Albert Gleizes.

Strongly influenced by Gleizes’ art and cultural theory, Moly-Sabata incorporated the antindividualistic idealism of early modernism yet was vehemently anti-modernist in its critiques of 20th century urbanisation and industrialism. It saw itself as an experimental model for a future post-industrial society based on collective, organic principles. Like other manifestations of the period’s retour a la terre, it deemed the folkloric traditions associated with agrarian and artisanal production to be the authentic signifiers of an “eternal” France of the soil. Accordingly, at Moly-Sabata Dangar set about reviving local forms of village pottery, fusing their vernacular elements with Gleizes’ analytical design system to arrive at a type of rustic Cubism. The thesis looks at the ideological and cultural shifts that enabled her and other followers of Gleizes to engage in a form of regional activism which not only linked Cubism to the interwar nostalgia for rural traditions, but steered it towards the politics of reaction in the 1930s/40s.

Informing the social, artistic and political principles of Moly-Sabata was a religious faith founded on the universality of the sacred. This idea was derived from the esoteric metaphysics of Rene Guénon as well as Gleizes’ Celtic-medieval view of the Christian West, and it culminated in a pro-Catholic religious engagement among Gleizes’ followers in the late 1940s. In examining the sources of Moly-Sabata’s orientation towards religious medievalism, the thesis notes the implicit debt to Bergsonian philosophy in both Gleizes’ theories about history’s cyclical dynamism and Dangar’s correlations between the spirituality of place and the sanctity of earthly labour.

The visual application of the above concepts is traced through the documentation and analysis of Dangar’s craft practice, her interpretation of Gleizes’ Cubist principles and her appropriations of traditional artisanal design.

On a biographical level, the thesis is an observation about cross-cultural practice and the search for identity in 20th century art and craft. Dangar’s Australian origins qualified her adopted French values in ways which brought considerable tension to her position as an expatriate artist in Europe. Her crisis of identity was one of the dissonant social factors that compounded the many levels of paradox engendered by Moly-Sabata’s utopian pursuit of a culturally homogenous, religious culture, based upon the distant past.