Mirka Mora


Mirka Madeleine Mora was a French-born Australian visual artist and cultural figure who contributed significantly to the development of contemporary art in Australia. Her media included drawing, painting, sculpture and mosaic.

Early life

Mirka Mora was born in Paris, to a Lithuanian Jewish father, Leon Zelik, and a Romanian Jewish mother, Celia Gelbein. She was arrested in 1942 during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Her father, Leon, managed to arrange for her release from the concentration camp at Pithiviers before Mora and her mother, Celia, were scheduled to be deported to Auschwitz. The family evaded arrest and deportation from 1942 to 1945 by hiding in the forests of France. After the war, Mora met a wartime resistance fighter Georges Mora in Paris at the age of 17. They married in 1947. In an interview in 2004, Mora said:

Migration to Australia

Having survived the Holocaust, Mora and her husband migrated to Australia in 1951 in order to settle in Melbourne. They chose Melbourne over Casablanca or Saigon because Mirka had read about it in Henri Murger's novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, in which a young Parisian photographer makes regular trips to Melbourne to make his fortune. They occupied studios in Grosvenor Chambers in the 'Paris End' of Collins Street, and quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene. Georges became an influential art dealer, and in 1967 he founded one of the first commercial art galleries in Melbourne, the Tolarno Galleries.
The Mora family also owned and operated three significant Melbourne cafés. The Mirka Café was opened by Jean Sablon in December 1954 at 183 Exhibition Street and was the venue for the first major solo exhibition by Joy Hester. It was followed by the Café Balzac at 62 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne and then by the Tolarno in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which opened in 1966, and where Mirka created a bas-relief behind the bar and painted murals on walls and windows of the restaurant and bistro, hallway and toilets, over the period 1965 to 1978. All three were focal points for Melbourne's bohemian subculture. As Mora's son Philippe recalls, "my parents literally fed artists at our home and in our restaurants". In a 2004 interview Mora stated:
The Mora family's social circle included many progressive Australian artists and writers: Charles Blackman and Barbara Blackman, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, Barrett Reid, Laurence Hope, Arthur Boyd and Joy Hester. The Mora family were especially close friends with renowned art patrons John and Sunday Reed, and spent many weekends at their famous home and artists' colony "Heide" in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen, and at the Reeds' beach house next door to the Moras' own in Aspendale.
Mora had three children, actor Tiriel Mora, film director Philippe Mora and art dealer William Mora. They had what Philippe describes as "a culturally privileged childhood". After extramarital relationships on both sides, Mora eventually separated from her husband Georges.

Art: style and reception

After coming to Australia in 1951, three years later Mora had become well known in art circles in Melbourne and, with patron friends John and Sunday Reed, was operative in reviving the Contemporary Art Society there. Mirka and Georges Mora, through the Contemporary Art Society and with Italian Gino Nibbi who showed Tucker and Nolan at his Galleria di Quattro Venti in Rome, made strenuous efforts to have Australia accepted for the first time into the Venice Biennale, urging the inclusion of contemporary art to promote its alignment with Modernist practice of Australian immigrant artists from Europe and their influence on a reinvigoration of the country's art.
Though they secured an exhibition, it was not a success, as the conservative Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board maintained control over the entries, sending outdated examples of the Heidelberg School and a few Arthur Boyd landscapes. The episode exacerbated the split between the traditionalist and modernist groups and was not until 1978 that Australia was finally represented at Venice under the auspices of the Australian Arts Council.
Since 1954, Mora exhibited mainly with the CAS and in the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Galleries and Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, and with in Sydney.
Mora innovatively used a wide range of media and large numbers of her works are in the permanent collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, in the National Gallery of Australia in the National Gallery of Victoria. They are also available to view in public places; in an external mural in Acland Street, St Kilda, a mosaic seat on the St Kilda foreshore, and as a mixed-media mural prominently displayed at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. The latter is nine metres long and about four meters high in three different techniques in the same artwork: painting in the upper register, mosaic in the middle, larger one, and painted low relief at the pavement level. Completed in 1986, in 1998, Mora restored the eroded lower part of the mural.
Mora participated with Bruce Petty, Reg Mombassa, Ginger Riley and others in the production of the in Melbourne Museum coordinated by artist Murray Walker and executed by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop to mark the Australian Centenary of Federation in 2001. In the sixth panel, she portrays Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins conversing with three white Australians. Other major commissions include a painted Melbourne tram, sets, costumes and masks for the ballet, Ivan the Terrible, and the operas Medea and Bacchae, and 85 1.5m puppets for the opera Bennelong.
A noted colourist and symbolist, Mora's paintings are often bright and bold, constantly reinventing a repertoire of recurring motifs—innocent, wide-eyed children, angels, dogs, cats, snakes and birds, and hybrids of animals and humans.

Critical assessment

Perceptions of Mora's work have evolved against the background of the Australian art scene and its changing levels of sophistication. Donald Brook, in reviewing the 1964 Paintings by the Aleph Group describes Mora's work as one of only two that were 'distinctively Jewish'. Robin Wallace-Crabbe, in his 1968 Canberra Times, critique 'Giving away high-mindedness' of Mora's show at the Australian Sculpture Gallery, Narrabundah, hints that though 'delightful' her work is naïve, "like a mixture of May Gibbs' 'Snugglepot and Cuddlepie' and the prevailing Melbourne style in the early fifties", while later, in 1981, Sonja Kaleski is more favourably analytical in her review 'Vibrant, Volatile Artist', in The Canberra Times:
Mora's works and commentary on them have appeared in Australian Drawings by Elwyn Lynn, New painting, 1952-62 by John Reed, The Vital Decade by co-authors Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris, and the Encyclopedia of Australian Art by Alan McCulloch.
When Mora showed with Jean Dubuffet and Francois Mezzapelle in In Pursuit of Fantasy opening 18 October 1997 at George Gallery 129 Fitzroy Street, St. Kilda, Melbourne, the French language Le Courrier Australien reported that the vernissage was attended by 800 people, and described her work;
Heidi curator Kendrah Morgan in a 2011 education kit listed Mora's wide range of influences:

Teaching

For many years Mora conducted workshops in painting, soft sculpture and mosaics, where countless Australians learned from her unique approach to teaching art. She travelled also to France, the USA and Japan to present her workshops.

Later life and death

Mora lived and worked in a number of studios in Melbourne, including Rankins Lane. Mora appeared as an interviewee on the ABC's conversational television programs Agony Aunts and The Agony of Life in 2012 and 2013. In 2016 Mora, for a long time a contributor of design to the fashion industry, collaborated with Australian fashion company Gorman to launch a 23 piece collection based on four artworks. Her murals survive on the walls of the Tolarno restaurant and gallery she previously owned in St. Kilda.
In 2016, an East Melbourne bar-owner uncovered a lost mural on the wall of his establishment, previously the Café Balzac.
Mora died, aged 90, at her home in Melbourne on 27 August 2018.

Honours

In 2002, Mora was made an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture and Communication. Mirka Lane in St Kilda, off Barkly Street near the intersections of Grey and Inkerman Streets was named after the artist.

Exhibitions

Mora had more than 35 solo exhibitions throughout her career, most in five galleries; the Contemporary Art Society, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Galleries, Tolarno Galleries, and Watters Gallery. An important retrospective Mirka Mora: where angels fear to tread: 50 years of art 1948-1998 was held at Heide Museum of Art 1999-2000 to celebrate 50 years of her work. Mirka Mora: Charcoals 1958-1965 featured in the Melbourne Art Fair 2018, from 2–5 August, just prior to her death.
Other exhibitions include: