Roy Dalgarno

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Roy Dalgarno is a social realist artist, born in Melbourne, Victoria (Australia) in 1910, died February 2001 in Auckland, New Zealand.

[edit] Education and Training

Secondary education at Ballarat Grammar School.
1926 to 1930 Attended National Gallery Art School in Melbourne, where he met social realists Noel Counihan and Herbert McClintock.
1930 to 1932 attended Academy of Art under Dattilo Rubbo.
1932 to 1934 attended East Sydney Technical College Painting & Drawing.
1951 to 1953 at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, including in 1951–52 William Hayter’s Atelier 17 (etching)
1980 Pratt Graphic Centre, New York. Etching and collography.

[edit] Career

He joined the Communist Party of Australia in the 1930s but, according to art historian Bernard Smith, his bohemian temperament was incompatible with party puritanism. He left the party in 1949. In the late 1930s he travelled to the canefields of North Queensland, where he concentrated on his painting.

He co-founded the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) Sydney in 1946. From 1947 to 1949 he worked as lecturer at the East Sydney Technical College. After studying in Paris, he moved to India, where he co-founded Editions Anarkali, publisher of fine arts in Bombay, while being employed as a visiting lecturer in lithography at the School of Fine Arts.

In 1953 he won the First Prize for Diploma Students, lithography, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1965 he won first prize at the Mahasartra State (India) exhibition.

In 1975 he moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where he worked as a Lecturer in drawing and composition at the Auckland Society of Arts.

Described as a socialist bohemian and a social realist painter, his work commissioned by the Australian maritime and mining trade unions is perhaps the best remembered, for its depiction of Australian workers and working conditions.

The art historian Bernard Smith wrote of Dalgarno: “He belongs to that great generation of social realist Australian artists who flourished during World War II and early post-war years but – in the aftermath of the Cold War – are now largely stored and forgotten by curators.” ('Artist of the Everyday' The Australian, 23 February 2001)