A pair of Melbourne artists from the 1930s are finally getting the recognition they deserve

A pair of driven young female artists, sparkling their way through the Roaring Twenties, may not be well known today; such is the lot of countless female artists throughout decades of Australian art.

But, looking at the work of Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme today, it's hard to imagine why.

Nearly a century has passed since they first began finding their respective artistic voices, but in this fresh new light, their vibrant, subtle linocut prints are sensational.

But then, consider the time in which they were working.

It's hard to fathom, as we muddle our way through this global pandemic, just how high spirits were soaring in the 1920s, after the last one had ended.

The weight of World War I was lifting, to be replaced by the excitement of the age of the machine, of jazz, of technology, science, fashion, ocean liners, and a degree of emancipation for women.

The Roaring Twenties was, by all accounts, a great time to be alive and kicking.

It was especially wonderful if you were a creative young woman in Melbourne. Australia may have been largely isolated from the beating heart of the creative scene, but enough people were travelling to and from Europe to bring a sense of excitement to the local art world.

It was into this era that Spowers and Syme would come into themselves as successful artists. The daughters of rival news magnates, they were schoolmates who would become lifelong friends, an unlikely but dynamic duo forging a path through an artistic world that was still hostile to female artists.

Privileged, wealthy, educated and philanthropic, both women were at the heart of Melbourne's cultural scene.

But, like so many women of the time, and indeed throughout Australian art history, their names aren't familiar to us today.

A new travelling show, part of the National Gallery of Australia's Know My Name initiative, should change that; Spowers and Syme both produced works that are exquisite, cutting edge for their time, and surprisingly fresh, almost a century on.

Curator of Australian Prints and Drawings Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax has spent the past couple of years researching the pair, and says they're remarkable both for what they were able to achieve, and for their parallel narratives.

"It was kind of uncanny, all the things that they had in common," she says.

They were also developing their careers at a time when this very concept was novel; the world was opening up and new ideas about the trajectory of an educated woman were swirling.

"All that social change that was happening internationally and a little more slowly in Australia, they really benefited from," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

"It's so interesting to think that even their mother's generation would be very different. They were the first generation of women who were freed from all those expectations of what you would have to do with your life."

While both girls attended Melbourne Girls Grammar, it was Spowers who knew first that she was destined for life as an artist. She took private art lessons, and holidayed in Europe and England with her family. Upon returning, she enrolled at the National Gallery School and, as Noordhuis-Fairfax puts it, committed herself to a career as an artist.

Syme, on the other hand, was passionate about education, and studied classics at Cambridge, at a time when Cambridge did not even award degrees to women.

When she returned to Melbourne, she was caught up in the heady, between-war atmosphere of social clubs and artistic circles, including the women-only Lyceum Club, and the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria.

"I think what was really interesting is that there were very particular women-only clubs that became really safe and supportive spaces for women," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

"For a lot of them, you needed to have a certain level of education or you needed to do a certain degree of philanthropy. So they were really driven and ambitious women who were brought together, and they started changing things."

At the time, there was still a major push against both women's emancipation and modern art. Spowers and Syme were able to sidestep these prevailing winds, and forge artistic careers.

"The art world over in Europe and England was just going nuts, you've got all the things that fit into modernism, you've got cubism - just think how crazy that would look at the time, fragmenting everything - you've got abstraction, you've got futurism, which is all about speed and looking at the future, you've got these new things in British art," says Noordhuis-Fairfax.

"And then people travel over with their families or their friends and they come back and they've got reproductions or postcards, or they write about or draw little sketches of it, and people are just starting to hear all about it. It was so isolated here, [artists] were really reliant on that news coming back."

The Australian art world, meanwhile, was struggling to catch up; new works were described by conservative critics as lazy, degenerative, grotesque and ugly - all in a pointless bid "to be different".

Spowers responded to one such review with eloquence: "I should like to ask all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas, and not to condemn without understanding," she wrote.

It was back in Melbourne that Syme made the fateful discovery of a small book by the artist Claude Flight, in the shop of the Arts and Craft Society of Victoria. It was a handbook on linocut printing, then a new and progressive artform that, for printmakers, was revolutionising the practice.

"Lino-cutting was a really weird, modern new medium," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

"Obviously, everyone knew it as a really durable industrial floor covering, but then artists, in their beautiful way, started to realise, oh it's really much easier to cut into compared with wood blocks. It's really durable, you can print a really large edition of prints off it, so people started experimenting with it."

Spowers and Syme travelled to London together to study with Flight, at the Grosvenor School, a period that would change both of their artistic trajectories. Until then, Spowers had been focused on painting and watercolours, and mainly worked on illustrations for children's books and fairytales.

Flight taught his students that art "should say something vital about the changing urban world with its increased speed and mechanisation as if accelerating towards the future".

"He just revolutionised British modern printmaking - he was drawing from a whole lot of modern styles into his own vernacular," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

Spowers and Syme worked alongside each other in Melbourne - a cool, edgy and independent pair of artists who eschewed the traditional life of marriage and children, in favour of their art.

Theirs was a lifelong artistic friendship that was collaborative, rather than competitive. Both their works attracted attention in the 1930s, and later on, as distinct, but quite different, examples of the Grosvenor School.

But it was a friendship that would be cut short. Spowers mounted her last exhibition in 1936, around the time she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Noordhuis-Fairfax says Spowers doesn't seem to have made many prints after that - her techniques were too labour-intensive, and she turned instead to children's books and illustrations.

Her only published book, Cuthbert and the Dogs, featured in the exhibition, came out in 1947, the year of her death at the age of 56.

Syme made only four more prints after this - the beautiful "Beginners Class", of skiers clustered on the top of a slope, made in 1957, would be one of her last.

"Printmaking was something that they did together," says Noordhuis-Fairfax. "I think once Ethel wasn't there anymore, she really didn't make many more prints, even though she was such a great printmaker - she did a lot more painting."

These paintings were remarkable in themselves, highly influenced by her time studying in Paris. She also increased her charity work, and became more involved with the University of Melbourne's University College, the women's college she had helped establish in the 1930s. She left a large part of her estate to it when she died in 1961, at the age of 72.

Today, both women's works are recognised and admired, but generally only by those in the know. They are both represented in major collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, and their prints fetch auction prices in the thousands.

But it's another thing altogether for them to be able to take their place within the established canon of Australian artists. In their heyday, they exhibited with the likes of Margaret Preston, Thea Procter and Dorrit Black, as well as holding several solo shows. But, despite the quality and distinctiveness of their works, their names have been obscured over the years.

"I think it's also probably a lot to do with galleries, really," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

The reputations of Preston, Jessie Trail and Clarice Beckett, for example, have all been rescued - or enhanced - by large-scale, focused exhibitions.

"It's such a huge opportunity to show you these people who were there all along, but have been forgotten," she says.

James Mollison, the NGA's founding director, bought Spowers' School's Out in 1976, before the national collection had its own building. Around the same time, there was a revision of the career of Claude Flight, and of the artists who were his key students; names like Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews and Lill Tschudi would become synonymous with Flight and the Grosvenor School, while the Australian cohort were subsumed into a single category.

But unlike, say, Beckett, who worked in obscurity, and whose works were unearthed long after her death, Spowers and Syme were firmly part of the Australian scene during their lifetime.

"Ethel and Eveline were were appreciated at the time," Noordhuis-Fairfax says.

"Their works were collected by the British Museum and the Victorian and Albert Museum during the 30s. The earliest work that we have was acquired in the 1940s, when the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board was starting to make a collection for the idea of maybe one day having a national gallery. So we have a work from the 40s and then James Mollison and all the successive directors after that, and the curators, worked together to build it up.

"We've got an incredible collection, the most authoritative collection, I guess, in the world."

But until now, the pair have been appreciated only by those who go looking. It's time to see them firmly cemented in the Australian canon.