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Thea Proctor

The World of Thea Proctor by Barry Humphries, Andrew Sayers, and Sarah Engledow

by
March 2006, no. 279

Thea Proctor’s long career spanned the 1900s to the 1960s. Sadly, she lived to see her reputation decline. Barry Humphries, in private life a noted art collector, relates here how his characteristic appreciation of the aesthetically démodé led him to seek out Proctor’s acquaintance in the 1960s. A new generation of professional curators sniffily dismissed the grande dame, then in her eighties, as a ‘minor artist’, more important as a teacher and passionate champion of other modernists than in her own right. To Proctor, though, an aesthetic reputation was everything. ‘If I have not got that a life’s work is wasted,’ she despaired to a friend.

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