FANTASTIC! MELBOURNE'S GOTHIC MONTSALVAT

[Bronteboy]

Started in 1934, the Montsalvat Artist's Community in the bushland suburb of Eltham is styled on a the French vilages of Burgundy, with a great Gothic baronial hall at its heart.



dshole, flickr



I guess I have been coming here all my life. At time, years ago, when Melbourne didn't seem to have too many weekend attractions, Justus Jorgensen's bushland arts colony was something to see.


dshole flickr



On 14 acres, rambling up a wooded hill from the old Eltham cemetery, its a place where the towers of the CBD now don't seem that distant. The Great Hall has three floors, and an incredible warren of passages and stairs between them.





selv1a flickr


As a young guy i think I had the mixed feelings that conservative Melbourne had about it. There were the stories of artists living wildly immoral lives here, which never bothered me ... but there was this other thing.


How real was this, where did these forms fit into the fabric of Melbourne?



Big Ted, flickr

Jorgensen and his community built and adorned their structures mainly with building materials given to them by Whelan The Wrecker.


This is the Great Hall, over which Justus Jorgensen (1893-1975) ruled with benign but feudal splendour.



Pentax Pete, flickr


Justus Jorgensen, the third of six children of a Norwegian master mariner, was born in East Brighton, and initially started out as an architect. While training as a draftsman, he fell under the influence of his teacher Max Meldrum, and turned to painting.






Jorgensen remains far more famous as the creator of Montsalvat than as an artist. He only ever exhibited three times, and - being rather non-commercial - was reluctant always to sell, or even show anyone his own work.




Big Ted Flickr




His wife, Lilya Smith, who had been a medical student, acquired the land at Eltham in 1934, and they started to build a cottage, initially conceived as an artists retreat for them and their their friends. Jorgensen had a studio in the city, and a room at the Mitre Tavern in Bank Place (perhaps when it was owned by our Gappa's family?)





It became a haven for artists and poets and thinkers,
it seems centered around two big family groups, the Jorgensen's and the Skippers, but i can remember once talking to the classical guitarist John Williams, and him telling me how his father was connected with the group, and how he spent much time there as a child. Sebastion Skipper was John Williams's best childhood friend.



Big Ted, flickr


Oddly - and i don't know why this was so - I have read and seen very little sign that the more celebrated Heidelberg School artists - Roberts, Fred Williams, Streeton and Co - spent much if any time at Montsalvat.


Jorgensen and Lilya had lived in London and France in the early 1920s, and Jorgensen became fascinated with the village forms of Provence. That's where the structure of Montsalvat comes from, and - have started more than 70 years ago now - I think it has now cemented its place, and gained real acceptance in Melbourne.





It is in fact one of the most fascinating places in the city area.




Yvonne Warneke, flickr


Jorgensen's eye for detail shows everywhere in amazing variety of buildings, linked by narrow winding corridors and and arches. He was assisted by his sons Max Jorgensen and Sebastian and Sigmund Skipper, his sons by Helen Skipper, a follower who became his life-long mistress.

[EDIT: Just in case any real art scholars come on this thread, i have just been re-reading Betty Roland's book (post above) and have a few Jorgensen details wrong i.e. he was born in Mordialloc, and came under Max Meldrum's influence at the National Gallery School, and joined Meldrum's break-away movement from there. I'm seriously wrong, however, when i say somewhere Jorgensen was more architect than artist - his dedication to art was total, and he was highly appraised in the Meldrum style he followed. He was successful in London and invited to exhibit at thge Royal Academy. I think that will do for the purposes here. Oh, his sons by Helen Skipper used the name Jorgensen].


I'm not sure which, but I'm pretty sure at least one of the Skippers, a sculptor, still lives in the small Monsalvat community. It is now open to the public.


In fact all kinds of events now take place there: art classes, functions, weddings. I once turned up and found a medieval festival in progress. This is a Gothic film, called Chainsaw Ride (I think) being made there.







the thrilling climax:


these 3photos GJMartin (Dwev) flickr


A fairly large chapel on the hill - not very bohemian, but ... after all, he was copying a French village.



dshole, flickr



mediahorse, flickr


with just a little Australian vernacular thrown in:


vanintas, flickr


But there are all kinds of buildings: a large Reception Center with a modern art gallery.






I'm not sure how many artists still live there, or keep studios there now. Some, but it obviously varies. They come and go. Anyway, there's something I'm frightened to say... but I'm going to say it anyway.





In the permanent portrait gallery of people who lived at or frequented Montsalvat in its real art colony days, long ago, it has always struck me (my opinion only, but with some art background in my family ) that the art is not very good. Maybe its the way they are presented: the portraits lined up in a group, somehow competing with each other. But maybe that's why the Heidelberg School luminaries seemed to be not there.

I suspect it had more to do with the somewhat didactic and dictatorial way Jorgensen ran his community.

Anyway, Monsalvat itself is a true work of art: it is Jorgensen's real masterpiece, and I think he remained more architect than artist. I always think of Monsalvat as a combination of an Arts village and an Arts Monastery. A kind of early commune, I guess.





GJMartin (Dwev) flickr




same source



Lots of different building forms and materials, but the style always French Provincial:



Yvonne Warneke, flickr



The courtyard next to the pool is called The Long Gallery:


mediahorse, flickr


This is the ticket centre with resident artists gallery:



this and next two, namthanh, flickr to come









Hallway under the roof of the Great Hall

dshole, flickr


And that's my Monsalvat story. Bronte

PS my photo skills were not up to Montsalvat last time I was there - but it needs the variety of views and moods to be found on flickr anyway. Glad if any forumers have pictures!












.

[Alibaba]

great

i shall visit this place someday!

[gappa]

I actually didn't realize that Montsalvat was open to the public; will have to visit some weekend soon.

It's somewhat ironic that Whelans helped produce some of Melbourne's most iconic structures - whilst also helping to produce the distruction of others.

Thanks Bronte.

[Qantas743]

The drive there is also beautiful. Going through Melbourne's hilly, leafy north-eastern suburbs is something I love doing.

[Bronteboy]

Originally Posted by gappa

I actually didn't realize that Montsalvat was open to the public; will have to visit some weekend soon.

Yes, Montsalvat was opened to the public in 1969 - amid immense opposition from the Board of Works and Eltham residents. Although it has somewhat changed the atmosphere of the place, it has flourished.

You can read a superb insiders account of Justus Jorgensen and his community in Betty Roland's The Eye Of The Beholder (Hale and Ironmonger, 1984). It's also a tale of the bohemian life of Melbourne in the 20s, the mix of artists, thinkers and underworld figures.

Aha, at last, i find the book provides some photos of Justus Jorgensen:






Jorgensen and his followers completed the Great Hall at Monsalvat in 1938. This is a later photograph of course (courtesy of The Herald and Weekly Times)




And I THINK Matcham Skipper is the sculptor I spoke of as one of the artists still in residence. Huge bear of a man, I bumped into him there several times - but that was a long time ago.

[Bronteboy]

putting this together, i was also wondering how many buildings were there: seems to be more than a dozen, but all higgledy-piggeldy, and linked up. Its sort of rustic too, with not only peacocks, but farm animals wandering around the place.

The road up there isn't, or wasn't that well sign-posted. Its at 7 Hillcrest Ave, Eltham, Tel 94397712,

[uewepuep]

Wow. What an odd place.

[The Collector]

In my younger years I used to hang out at Montsalvat a lot, thought that some of the bohemian ambience would ooze into me.



When the Royal Insurance building (pic above) in Collins Street was demolished, the windows were saved to be reused at Montsalvat (pic below).

[auslankan]

Great tour of one of Melbournes hidden gems. Thanks.

[Yardmaster]

Well done! I must have first visited it the year it was opened to the public: it had a steam-roller in the court-yard then.

[isoboy]

Wow, thanks for that little tour. I'd never even heard of the place before! Looks really interesting, will have to check it out next time I'm in Melb.

[shooter]

And here is a pic of the Royal Insurance Building minus a couple of storeys as it is gettting pulled down, Wheelan sign in the window and all. Dated 30/08/1938......

[CULWULLA]

bizzare world.
intresting mix

[Bronteboy]

edit

[Bronteboy]

Yes it was a bizarre world: a bit like an art cult centered entirely on the complex character of Justus Jorgensen - and one in which, like cults today, some people stayed, and some strived to escape.




It was more than 20 years since I had read Betty Roland's The Eye of The Beholder, and I have now edited in a few corrections in Post #1.

The main one is my dismissive appreciation of Jorgensen as an artist, as he was a much more considerable figure in that respect than I remembered.


Richard Higgs

This is the gallery of portraits of former Monsalvat habitues that I also riskily criticised in Post #1 as not very distinguished art. I hold to the point, however, and while
Montsalvat is itself a kind of masterpiece, its true art colony days never produced a famous painting.


Richard Higgs

But perhaps that will come from the separate residents artists gallery now there today. Some of these works look superb.


A big follow-up here is maybe excessive, but several posters have declared their intention to visit Monsalvat, and partly for my own interest, and their benefit, I'd like to give a bit of historical appreciation of what they would be seeing.




This is an old pic of the refectory table in the Great Hall
where Jorgensen conducted his monologues for his followers and Sunday night guests.


But I think the table was once twice this length.


Jorgensen always sat at the head of the table, was always served first and got the best and largest portions, while his wife Iilya sat with the other women at the bottlom of the table, and got what was left.

Jorgensen's monologues were often witty, philosophical, charming, abrasive and cruel.

For years Mervyn Skipper, the Melbourne correspondent of The Bulletin, who had more or less given over his life, family and daughters to Jorgensen, sat here taking notes of every pearl that dropped from the master's lips - and was often ridiculed before the group for his efforts.

When Skipper's lovely daughter Helen - Jorgensen's mistress and mother of two of his sons - once came to the refectory table with a sore back, and drew up a chair - Jorgensen insisted she sit on the benches. Said he wouldn't have her spoiling the look of the place just because she had a sore back.




Jorgensen and Helen Skipper in later days, but she's still at the master's knee. She had been an absolutely luscious teenager when he took her in hand in his city studios (which were in Queen Street, where the RACV Club stands now).


Richard Higgs

One of the people who was often tongue-lashed by Jorgensen (and by Helen) was Betty Roland, the one-time
playwright and radio script writer who wrote the book.
With independent means, she often broke away for years, but was always drawn back in her times of trouble.

In the period when she was always being ridiculed in front of the group, Betty Roland lived in this cottage (above, and below). Through one of her many lovers (64 she counts in the book) Roland was involved with the Communist Party at the time, but was put down at Montsalvat as a complacent middle-class housewife.


Richard Higgs


Matcham Skipper, Mervyn's son - and maybe the person who did more than anyone else in the actual construction and adornment of the Montsalvat buildings - lived opposite her in this house (below) Maybe still does - he was the huge bear-like person I mentioned in Post 1# whom I think is still around there, or it may be Sigmund Jorgensen - one of Justus Jorgensen and Helen Skipper's two sons - who certainly is.






This is Matcham's House today (below)


Big Ted, flickr


A sculptor and jewellery maker, he operated the Foundry,
made many of the stained glass windows out of old photographic plates, carved the stone corbels etc.

Matcham in 1940:




This little place, shown much in Post #1, was occupied on a weekend basis by Sue Vanderkelen, the Toorak daughter of a wealthy businessman who became one of Jorgensen's followers.

Then:




Now: (Lilya Jorgensen, the patriarch's devoted but long-suffering wife, lived in the steep-pitched house on the right of the tower).


GJ Martin, flickr


Being from Toorak, Sue Vanderkelen was always trying to clean up....




The fact is, with its arts group disregard for conventional values, conditions at Montsalvat were often filthy and unsanitary. The kids went to bed dirty, and the pristine swimming pool we've seen was full of rubbish in the early days.

This is one of the artists workshops today, when Monsalvat is open to the public, and kept as a pristine place:



Richard Higgs

The entrance buildings today :


Richard Higgs



Richard Higgs


My memory was correct when I said (post #1) that the classical guitarist John Williams had told me that his father (Len Williams) had been a Jorgensen follower, and that John Williams had spent much time there as a child.


Jorgensen also treated Williams's father, an intellectual musician, with some derision. John Williams is of course now world famous, along with Julian Bream probably the world's most eminent classical guitarist - both were master class students of Andre Segovia, the ultimate master of the classical guitar. John Williams's childhood best friend, whom I had guessed at earlier, was actually Sebastian Jorgensen, one of Helen's sons, and also an exceptionally talented guitarist.

Both boys used to play for the assembled groups at Monsalvat during the Great Hall dinners.

This is the guitar workshop at Monsalvat today (and there is a lovely little violin workshop also at the place, nearby).



Richard Higgs


Richard Higgs

One of the things that was an iron rule at Monsalvat was that followers had to turn up right on time at the Great Hall for dinner when this bell was rung. Helen Skipper once copped an all-evening harangue in front of everybody from Jorgensen when, tending their unsettled children, she had turned up for dinner late.




Jorgensen believed, stubbornly, that all physical ailments were psychological. His wife Lilya, who finally got her medical degree in London, but ended up practising as a psychologist in Little Collins Street, and suffered MS almost all her adult life. But Jorgensen would never allow her to be treated.

In later years there were times when she literally had to crawl on hands and knees up the steep steps to or from Great Hall. When she collapsed from her chair at the diningtable once everyone sat silent and mortified, while Jorgensen went on with one of his rambling tales.

Eventually she dragged herself up, so he was right - everything was okay.

My reading was also correct when I said that Whelan The Wrecker, semi-illiterate workman from Stawello who founded a wrecking business fortune, had somehow become intrigued by Jorgensen's Monsalvat project, and provided many materials and old adornments for the buildings there. I guess this was one of them, or maybe it came later...


Richard Higgs


This is Sigmund Jorgensen's studio at Monsalvat today:





I made an earlier suggestion that there was some link between the Meldrum-Jorgensen group, the intellectuals who followed them, and the underworld of the day.
Wrong. It was a misconception based on the murder of Molly Dean, one of the group's early followers (before Monsalvat was built) in an Elwood laneway in 1930.

It was a famous case, made sensational by the bohemian group she mixed with. It was never officially solved, but the killer was probably a quite young guy involved in some relationship with her mother.


If you go to Montsalvat, always look in the workshop windows. There's always art objects in them, and others scattered around the place..



Memorial service for Jorgensen at Montsalvat's chapel, May 1975.

The plan was that he would be buried there, but I'm not sure if that happened. Many followers are just across the fence, down in Eltham cemetery.




BTW I did realize why there appears to have been no connection between Montsalvat and the nearby Heidelberg School luminaries, Roberts, Streeton etc. The origins of the Jorgensen School, and their first teacher Max Meldrum, was violently opposed to Impressionism, and although Jorgensen later modified his own views on that after living in Paris, it was a rupture that probably never healed.

One of Jorgensen's last paintings, never shown to anyone - but Betty Roland secretly stole into his studio and saw it - was a Crucifixion Scene, with Jorgensen himself on The Cross, and two women on the Golgotha crosses beside him. I wonder if they were meant to be his wife Lilya, and Helen Skipper?


Big collection of Richard Higg's Montsalvat photos here:

http://images.google.com.au/imgres?i...%3Den%26sa%3DN



Well, end of tour 2. Bronte

[Yardmaster]

Another fascinating post, Bronteboy ...

perhaps you also witnessed the ABC Documentary I saw back in the late '60's or early 70's or so, on Montsalvat & the Jorgensen family? There was a bit of family drama ...

[The Collector]

Bravo Bronteboy!

[Bronteboy]

Originally Posted by Yardmaster

Another fascinating post, Bronteboy ...

perhaps you also witnessed the ABC Documentary I saw back in the late '60's or early 70's or so, on Montsalvat & the Jorgensen family? There was a bit of family drama ...

Thanks Yardmaster and Collector ; no I never saw that ABC doco you mention Yardie, , but I was away much of the 70s.

But there were several public fiascos that wracked the Montsalvat group in the 1960s-early 70s.

* An Exhibition marking Eltham's Centenary was held in the Great Hall, and the Prime Minister - I think Harold Holt and his wife - attended. Sebastion Jorgensen, returning from London that very day, raised up a group of anti-Vietnam protestors and went out, gatecrashing the event, and causing a big fuss, striking booming chords on the grand piano and haranguing Holt before he was wrestled away (Justus Jorgensen was away at the group's beach camp at San Remo at the time).

A 1949 photo of the Montsalvat kids: Matcham skipper in the middle in hat, Sebastion on his left; Sigmund left of Seb.



*The Monsalvat kids sometimes rebelled. One night Jorgensen was holding court as usual in the Great Hall when one of them brought a group of Eltham kids up to stone the roof. They kept it up, and eventually Jorgensen had the police called - and when they were caught down in the cemetery Jorgensen found it was one of his own kids arrested. Can't recall now which one it was.


*The saddest scandal of all was the neglect of Jorgensen's failing wife Lill, who had MS. Towards the end of her time at Montsalvat, she was left laying filthy, incontinent and almost helpless in her bed, and barely fed.

So much for the sensitive artists. Eventually Professor MacMahon Ball of Melbourne Uni and his wife Katrin, occasional visitors, intervened - and, while Jorgensen was away, had a district nurse called in to attend her needs.

When Jorgensen got back from San Remo he went ballistic, and banned everyone connected with the intervention. Finally Lill Jorgensen was taken away to be cared for in the Brighton home of her son Max and his wife, and ended up in an old folks home eventually.

Drove everyone in it to distraction. She died in 1977, having out-lived Jorgensen by two years.

It wouldn't have happened when this lady was there. Lena Skipper, wife of the unfortunate Mervyn, was a person of formidable character and intellect, going on her published letters.

Somehow I fancy I saw her, looking just like this, on early visits to Monsalvat, although there can't have been much chance for that.

It opened in 1969 and she died in 1970. Buried, along with the others, in Eltham Cemetery.




BTW Yardie, sorry I failed to acknowledge your Maribrynong River photo in my silly painted Footscray fairytale thread. I'd lost track of the provenance of some pics, but i meant to answer on that. B.

[fishcatdogbird]

fascinating!