Lina Bryans: Rare Modern 1909-2000

Lina Bryans--unconventional, generous and beautiful--was an influential artist of the modernist movement in Australia, and a key player in the cultural life of Melbourne. Often overlooked in her own time, Bryans is now being recognised as a significant figure in Australian art.

Bryans was untrained, and her painting is spontaneous, intuitive and expressive. She was a superb colourist, and brought an abstract lyricism and spirituality to her work, reinterpreting the Australian landscape.

To understand the full extent of Bryans' contribution to Australian cultural life, however, Gillian Forwood argues that we must turn to her portraits. Painted between 1937 and 1974, these portraits--all of friends--form a striking and intimate gallery of the most influential figures in Melbourne's cultural landscape. Collectively, they create a pictorial biography of Bryans herself, revealing her rare gift for friendship, her dynamic and generous temperament, and her international outlook.

Bryans' personal life was marked by upheavals: relationships flourished and foundered; she moved from city to country and back. In the idiom of her day she was a New Woman, a free spirit.

In the early 1940s, she bought an old hotel, Darebin Bridge House, which became a cultural hub for the artists and intellectuals of the day. Like the Reeds at Heide, she played a singular role in the Melbourne art world, befriending and nurturing artists, supporting exhibitions of unrecognised painters and creating opportunities for others.

In this lavishly illustrated book--the first devoted to the artist--Gillian Forwood brings to light the vibrancy of Bryans' life and work.