In the late 1970s, before the National Gallery of Australia opened its doors, the surrealist artist and writer James Gleeson set out across Australia with a microphone and a mission: to build an oral history archive that captured the stories behind key works of art in the national collection, told by the artists themselves.

This month, the National Gallery launches NGA Art Talks: The Gleeson Tapes, a podcast series revisiting key conversations from the James Gleeson Oral History Collection.

In this episode Gleeson visits Grace Crowley, one of the leading figures in modern art in Australia. We meet Crowley in her late 80s, and as the tape starts rolling, she takes us from her childhood memories in regional Australia, to France, where she received on-the-ground training in modern European art. Crowley also shares an endearing portrait of her relationships with the artists Anne Dangar, with whom she made the leap from Sydney to Paris in 1926, and Ralph Balson, who was her close collaborator until his death in 1964.

Just seven months after Gleeson’s visit, Crowley passed away at the age of 88, making this recording a poignant and final testimony from one of Australia’s greatest modernists.

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