COSMOPOLITAN SPIRITS: Jean Mary Bellette and Paul Haefliger

Abstract

Tasmanian-born New Classical modernist Jean Mary Bellette (1908–91) and her husband, German-Swiss expatriate printmaker, art critic, essayist, and painter Paul Haefliger (Häfliger) (1914–82), were seminal figures in the Sydney art scene during the 1940s to the 1950s. Notwithstanding their illustrious reputations and accomplishments, Bellette's and Haefliger's creative efforts were often deemed “UnAustralian” and subsequently overlooked or sidelined from nationalist histories because their internationalist agendas and artistic eclecticism challenged traditional nationalistic sentiments and narratives. These epithets of “UnAustralianness” intensified after the artist-couple's permanent expatriation to Europe in 1957, culminating in their gradual descent into relative isolation and anonymity in the annals of Australian art. This thesis contests Bellette’s and Haefliger’s marginalisation in Australian art historiography by presenting an alternate “UnAustralian” or transnational twentieth-century art-historical investigation of the impact of expatriatism, cosmopolitanism, and cultural globalisation on their art careers during the modernist era. Specifically, this study chronicles the ‘unwritten’ chapters of the artist-couple's diverse expatriate encounters in England and Europe (1936–39 and 1957–91), reappraising afresh their extensive interdisciplinary métiers and role as the unofficial ‘doyens’ of the transient Australian expatriate artist enclaves they established at Villa Daneo in Bricherasio, Italy and Majorca (Mallorca), Spain, during the late 1950s to the 1970s. This thesis, therefore, seeks to reclaim Bellette’s and Haefliger’s significant legacy as twentieth-century interdisciplinarians and cultural ambassadors within the revisionist art-historical discourse of “UnAustralian” or transnational art.