Anne Dangar's letter to Grace Crowley, 1930 - 1951
Anne Dangar was an artist who had studied under Julian Ashton in Sydney, as had Grace Crowley and Dorrit Black. She was invited to join a new community at Moly Sabata, in the Isere district of France. Moly Sabata was established as an artisan's centre, to decentralise art from the cities, then in turn to stimulate culture in the countryside. Dangar was 40 years old when she arrived, and found the life at Moly Sabata far more gruelling than she could have anticipated. The winters were hard and the house, though gracious and beautiful, was also crumbling and lacked basic amenities like running water. She was expected to earn her own living from her work and through growing food, keeping bees etc.
There were, of course, rivalries and disputes amongst the artists of Moly, and most dropped out of the experiment after a month or a year. Dangar and her faithful friend Lucie, a weaver, were the only ones to hang in. The war made life even harder than previously at Moly, but Dangar was undeterred, and filled with admiration for the French resistance. In 1948 she was finally able to realise her dream of establishing a pottery studio.
Dangar writes with a disingenuous, breathless enthusiasm on subjects ranging through painting, potting, Medieval and modern art, colour and light and form, other artists, poverty, Celtic design, spiritual belief, clothes, cats, mysticism, the life of surrounding villages, her pupils, their work, her work, the seasons, vegetables, St Augustine. It is clear that her loneliness, to which she freely and frequently confesses, leads her to pour out her heart to Crowley without inhibition, with the rambling quality of a conversation. Many of the letters are positively lover-like in tone.
