Janet Dawson MBE (born 1935, Sydney) is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960s, having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England while she lived in Europe 1957–1960. She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists, a theatre-set and furniture designer. She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, entitled Michael Boddy Reading.Patrick McCaughey, 'Archibald Prize to Sydney Artist,' The Age, Saturday 19 Jan 1974, p.2 She has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections. In 1977 she was awarded an MBE for services to art.The Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday, 31 Dec 1977, p.5 In 2025-2026, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is dedicating a retrospective to Dawson's work.
Career Dawson was born in Sydney in 1935 and spent her early years in Forbes.Gary Catalano, ‘A Natural History (Interview)’, Art & Australia, Vol. 34, No. 3, 1997, p. 332-341 and illus. cover. She started to take a keen interest in art at age 11 beginning her formal art tuition in Saturday morning classes at H. Septimus Power's private art school from 1946 to 1949, before living in Clarence Street, East Malvern working as a doctor's receptionist while she studied (1952 to 1956) at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne first under William Dargie, who was then replaced by Alan Sumner as head of school. Art critic Robert Hughes in 1962 after Sumner's resignation wrote complaining that "since his appointment as the school's head in 1947, Mr Sumner seems to have produced no young painter whose work is of any significance whatever — except Janet Dawson, whose unquestionable talent comes, in part, from a revolt against the flaccid academism Mr Sumner has preached."Robert S. F. Hughes, art critic, Nation, Sydney, in 'Letters to the Editor', The Age Tuesday 5 Jun 1962, p.2
In 1955 Dawson won Gallery Art School Prizes including the Grace Joel Scholarship (Nude), Hugh Ramsey Portrait Prize, one for an ‘Abstract Painting’, another for 'A Panel of Three Drawings from Life', a 2nd prize for a 'Head study', and the 'National Gallery Society Scholarship for best subject drawing or panel of drawings in exhibition.'’Gallery Art School Prizes,’ The Age, Friday 16 Dec 1955 p.10.
A 1955 newspaper article reports that as an art student "she concentrates mainly on semi-abstracts and enjoys working on large canvases. Murals are her particular interest" and that "her highest ambition is to win the school's travelling scholarship" of £900 for three years study abroad,’Gallery students ready for show,’ The Age, Saturday, 10 December 1955, p.7 then held by West Australian painter Frances Woolley (b.1930). Indeed, the following year she was the joint winner, with friend Kathleen Boyle, of the award;'Girl friends win art prizes,' The Age Thursday 20 Dec 1956, p.3 the National Gallery of Victoria Travelling Scholarship, for a painting of three figures on the Gallery steps, reporting that she; "made a model of plasticine and painted the picture from that." Aged 22, she embarked on the SS Roma.
International study and travel Landing in Genoa in mid July 1957, and stopping at Milan, Bern and Paris, Dawson arrived in London. There she studied at the Slade School of Fine Art between late 1957 and mid-1959. In London, Janet attended an exhibition New American Art at the Tate in 1959 and was impressed by the simplicity and glowing colours of paintings by Rothko, Still, and Motherwell. In Paris she saw the work of Dubuffet and Miro which also had a decisive influence.
Deborah Clark notes; "The influence of European surrealism can be seen in Dawson's use of particular marks and symbols, and her admiration for the warmth and openness of American abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko (whose work she saw at the Tate Gallery in 1959) also emerges, but her use of formal devices of abstraction is embedded in a genuine response to the sensations of the landscape itself."
She loved to draw, so she studied lithography, which allows an artist to draw directly on a printing stone. In 1959 she won the Slade School lithography prize which included a Boise scholarship that enabled her to travel to Italy. There, from late 1959 to early 1960, she took up residence in the hilltop village of Anticoli Corrado where the British School at Rome retained workspaces for artists. During her three months there, Dawson made drawings of the landscape which are held by the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the NGA. Abstraction, which she had once found disturbing, in her Italian landscape drawings appears in "sensual renderings," broad strokes; waves, marks and symbols that covered the paper so that hills and valleys were transformed into sensual lines and motifs. Her art became almost exclusively abstract.
From Italy, Dawson travelled to Paris early in 1960. At the Dutch Tachiste Nono Reinhold's Atelier Patris that ran 1957–61 at 26 rue Boulard, where she was the only woman amongst five printers,The Age Friday 25 Nov 1960, p.13 she worked printing for School of Paris artists in Paris, proof printing lithographs by artists Pierre Soulages, Fritz Hundertwasser and Kumi Sugai and others, and translated her Italian drawings into lithographs with bold colours, lines and strokes The five lithographs she made at the Atelier Patris in Paris during 1960 are in the collections of the NGV, the AGNSW and the NGA. Dawson returned to Melbourne in late 1960.de Berg, Hazel. Transcript of Interview with Janet Dawson, Melbourne, 2 December 1965. Canberra: Oral History Section, National Library of Australia, 1965
Gallery A Returning after nearly four years to Australia in late November 1960 Rather than any of the range of fine art galleries in Melbourne, Dawson chose Gallery A, a design and furniture retail space that included an art gallery in Flinders St. for her first solo showArnold Shore, The Age Tuesday 28 Feb 1961, p2'Geometrical', The Age Monday 15 May 1961, p.2 opening 18 May 1961, then was employed by the gallery with responsibilities that included collaborating with dealer Max Hutchinson and furniture designer and sculptor, Clement Meadmore on the gallery's major 1961 exhibition The Bauhaus: Aspects and Influence. Dawson also founded the Gallery A Print Workshop,advertised as "Gallery A Art School" and "Head of School: Janet Dawson", see advertisement in The Age Saturday 22 May 1965, p.25Arnold Shore, 'Old and not so old traditions,' The Age, Tuesday, 25 Sep 1962, p.5 working at the studio as a lithographic proof printer for visiting artists, described by James Gleeson as 'pioneering' Australian graphic arts.James Gleeson, 'The gap in our graphic arts,' The Sydney Morning Herald Sunday 2 Jul 1967, p.92 In this role she introduced Australian artists including John Brack, John Olsen and Fred Williams to lithography. Among her students were Graeme Cohen, Richard Havyatt and Winston Thomas. Also in 1961, in November she issued a call amongst Australian printmakers for works, 10 of which were to be chosen to represent the country in Prints of the World being organised by collector and curator Robert Erskine in London.'Choosing prints for London,' The Age Saturday 11 Nov 1961, p.8 A special September 1963 edition of Meanjin devoted to French writing featured her work on its cover and as illustrations throughout.Advertisement, The Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 14 Sep 1963, p.15
Working as the gallery manager and technical assistant, Dawson's abstraction developed through her adoption of acrylic paint and shaped composition boards. Related to, and influential on her art, was her design of furniture for the gallery, one item of which is in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection from her ‘Living Art’ table top series of 1964 made at the invitation of the Australian Laminex company and fabricated by Steven Davis in Melbourne. Angela Goddard describes Dawson's tables as;
Having shown prints and drawings at Gallery A, she held her first painting solo there in 1964.The Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 3 Dec 1964, p.40
Colour field painting Robert Lindsay notes that; "It was through a group of artists returning to Australia in the early and mid 1960s that the new international style became established. Janet Dawson returned in 1961, Dick Watkins in 1962, Sydney Ball from New York in 1965, and also in 1965 Tony McGillick..."
Artists from this group, including Dawson, were represented 21 August–28 September 1968 in The Field, the exhibition inaugurating the new venue of the NGV on St. Kilda Road Melbourne. Curators of the exhibition John Stringer, Exhibitions Officer, and Brian Finemore, Curator of Australian Art selected two works by Dawson. One of only three women invited, beside Wendy Paramour and Normana Wright, she showed her large-scale recent works; Wall 11, 1968–69, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 184.3 x 184.4 cm., which was soon purchased by the National Gallery of Australia in 1969; and Rollascape 2, 1968, synthetic polymer paint on an irregularly-shaped composition board, 150.0 x 275.0 cm. The latter was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ballarat with assistance of the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council, in 1988.
During the 1970s Dawson moved away from such Hard Edge abstraction to a more 'painterly' style, but maintained her formal vocabulary; at the time of her 1979 survey show Mary Eagle noted "she sees everything in nature blending, flowing together..."
Style and reception James Gleeson, comparing works of Dawson, Rapotec and Coburn in a group show at Hungry Horse Gallery in August 1964, notes "the serenity of spirit that lies behind the vivacious conversation of Janet Dawson's colours," and goes on to predict that;
Dawson was involved in the Colour Field movement; abstraction that used flat, solid and graduated hues to make colour its own subject. Art historian Bernard Smith writes that "Colour painting first began to appear rather hesitantly upon the Australian scene around 1963. Two artists are of special importance for its appearance, Dick Watkins in Sydney and Janet Dawson in Melbourne." She was among the artists exhibited in The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. The exhibition opened too much controversy, but launched the careers of many of the young artists. Dawson was one of only three women artists in the exhibition, (re-staged in 2018). Donald Brook, in year of The Field, reviewed a May exhibition Paintings by Janet Dawson at Gallery A, and described her approach at the time to the painting as an object;
In 1970 Brook expands on this assessment:
Mary Eagle identifies in Dawson's early painting "themes of architectural and atmospheric space and light and images of clouds, moons and rainbows" that continue into her abstract work.
Of Dawson's winning the Archibald Prize which marks a point in her career of departure from pure abstraction, art historian Patrick McCaughey praised the "loose painterly treatment of figure and supports" and considered her success "surprising and deserving" because "Miss Dawson is better known as a sophisticated abstract painter. To find her venturing into the staid area of the Archibald and then carrying all before her is a marvellous reversal of the expected..."