Mirka Mora

Mirka and Georges Mora, through the Contemporary Art Society and with Italian Gino Nibbi (1896–1969) who showed Tucker and Nolan at his Galleria di Quattro Venti in Rome, made strenuous efforts to have Australia accepted for the first time into the Venice Biennale, urging the inclusion of contemporary art to promote its alignment with Modernist practice of Australian immigrant artists from Europe and their influence on a reinvigoration of the country's art.

Though they secured an exhibition, it was not a success, as the conservative Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board maintained control over the entries, sending outdated examples of the Heidelberg School and a few Arthur Boyd landscapes.

Mirka Madeleine Mora (18 March 1928 – 27 August 2018) was a French-born Australian visual artist and cultural figure who contributed significantly to the development of Australian contemporary art.

Her media included drawing, painting, sculpture and mosaic.

Mirka Mora was born on 18 March 1928 in Paris to a Lithuanian Jewish father, Leon Zelik, and a Romanian Jewish mother, Celia Gelbein.

She was arrested in 1942 during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv).

Her father, Leon, managed to arrange for her release from the concentration camp at Pithiviers (Loiret) before Mora and her mother were scheduled to be deported to Auschwitz.

The family evaded arrest and deportation from 1942 to 1945 by hiding in the forests of France.

After the war, 17-year-old Mirka met a wartime resistance fighter Georges Mora in Paris.

They married in 1947.

Having survived the Holocaust, Mirka Mora and her husband migrated to Australia in 1951 in order to settle in Melbourne.

They chose Melbourne over Casablanca or Saigon because Mirka had read about it in Henri Murger's novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, in which a young Parisian photographer (probably based by Murger on Antoine Fauchery) makes regular trips to Melbourne to make his fortune.

They occupied studios in Grosvenor Chambers in the 'Paris End' of Collins Street, and quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene.

After coming to Australia in 1951, three years later Mora had become well known in art circles in Melbourne and, with patron friends John and Sunday Reed, was operative in reviving the Contemporary Art Society there.

The Mirka Café was opened by Jean Sablon in December 1954 at 183 Exhibition Street and was the venue for the first major solo exhibition by Joy Hester.

From 1954, Mora exhibited mainly with the CAS and in the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Douglas Galleries and Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, and with Watters Gallery in Sydney.

Mora innovatively used a wide range of media and large numbers of her works are in the permanent collection of the Heide Museum of Modern Art, in the National Gallery of Australia in the National Gallery of Victoria.

They are also available to view in public places; in an external mural in Acland Street, St Kilda, a mosaic seat on the St Kilda foreshore, and as a mixed-media mural prominently displayed at Flinders Street station in Melbourne.

The latter is nine metres long and about four meters high in three different techniques in the same artwork: painting in the upper register, mosaic in the middle, larger one, and painted low relief at the pavement level.

It was followed by the Café Balzac at 62 Wellington Parade, East Melbourne and then by the Tolarno in Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, which opened in 1966, and where Mirka created a bas-relief behind the bar and painted murals on walls and windows of the restaurant and bistro, hallway and toilets, over the period 1965 to 1978.

All three were focal points for Melbourne's bohemian subculture.

As Mora's son Philippe recalls, "my parents literally fed artists at our home and in our restaurants".

Mirka worked initially as a dressmaker while also making art, and Georges became an influential art dealer, in 1967 with his flair and entrepreneurship adding the Tolarno Galleries to Melbourne's only very select number of commercial art galleries.

The Mora family also owned and operated three significant Melbourne cafés.

The episode exacerbated the split between the traditionalist and modernist groups and was not until 1978 that Australia was finally represented at Venice under the auspices of the Australian Arts Council.

Other major commissions include a painted Melbourne tram (1978), sets, costumes and masks for the ballet, Ivan the Terrible (1964), and the operas Medea and Bacchae (1979–80), and 85 1.5m puppets for the opera Bennelong.

A noted colourist and symbolist, Mora's paintings are often bright and bold, constantly reinventing a repertoire of recurring motifs—innocent, wide-eyed children, angels, dogs, cats, snakes and birds, and hybrids of animals and humans.

The highest price achieved for a Mirka Mora work was $120,000, in a private sale, with works on paper often fetching $15,000.

Perceptions of Mora's work have evolved against the background of the Australian art scene and its changing levels of sophistication.

Completed in 1986, in 1998, Mora restored the eroded lower part of the mural.

Mora participated with Bruce Petty, Reg Mombassa, Ginger Riley and others in the production of the Federation Tapestry Suite in Melbourne Museum coordinated by artist Murray Walker and executed by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop to mark the Australian Centenary of Federation in 2001.

In the sixth panel, she portrays Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins conversing with three white Australians.

In an interview in 2004, Mora said:

"I really wanted to make love to him, because I was very humiliated that he didn't because I was 17, and he said, 'I know that you are not happy but we have to wait till we get married.' 'Ah! Married?' So I agreed to get married to lose my virginity. That's true."

In a 2004 interview Mora stated:"Actually, the Mirka Cafe got too big, because too many people came and couldn't get in. And so we opened the Balzac Restaurant and the Balzac Restaurant was really the toast of Melbourne. It was a beautiful restaurant. But it was my husband's work of art and I only came in the restaurant to help when my husband went overseas. My husband always tried to find a big house so I could have a big studio. So one day my husband came and said, 'I have bought a hotel.' I did get a big studio for one week, then I had to give it to my husband for his gallery. (Laughs) And then I went on the first floor, where I had the bridal room, which was a beautiful studio."

The Mora family's social circle included many progressive Australian artists and writers: Charles Blackman and Barbara Blackman, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, Barrett Reid, Laurence Hope, Arthur Boyd and Joy Hester.

The Mora family were especially close friends with renowned art patrons John and Sunday Reed, and spent many weekends at their famous home and artists' colony "Heide" (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art) in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen, and at the Reeds' beach house next door to the Moras' own in Aspendale.

Mora had three children who were to find their place as a film director, Philippe Mora, an art dealer, William Mora, and an actor, Tiriel Mora.

"Culturally privileged" is Philippe's epithet in describing their childhood.

After extramarital relationships on both sides, Mirka eventually separated from Georges.