From Australia’s Jewish Past: Myer Blashki – internationally acclaimed artist
Myer was born on 10 January 1871 in Carlton, Victoria and was the eleventh child of Philip, a jeweller, and his wife Hannah.
As Miles Evergood
His parents had married in Manchester, England, before emigrating to Melbourne.
Myer was educated at the Melbourne Hebrew Day School and Angel College, later crediting his ability to write and to argue to influential teachers there, especially Rev Jacob Goldstein, who in 1908 wrote a front-page article about Myer in the New York Hebrew Standard. Myer’s main interest was always art, and in the early 1990s, he studied at the National Gallery School Melbourne under George Folingsby and Bernard Hall, both of who served as Directors of the National Gallery of Victoria.
Myer was a member of the Prehistoric Order of Cannibals – a bohemian student art group that exhibited the first recognisable style of Australian painting. The group also came together to discuss contemporary concerns like socialism and the rights of the individual. Such members were well-known artists such as Norman Lindsay and his brothers and Tom Roberts. A number of the group went on to illustrate cartoons in magazines such as The Bulletin. Myer’s satirical cartoons on political events appeared in Melbourne publications – Punch and the Champion.
After unsuccessfully competing for a travelling art scholarship in 1896, Meyer worked in Sydney for two years before leaving Australia in 1898. His drawings ‘On board the Japanese training ship Kongo’ appeared in Town and Country Journal in June 1898. He spent the next forty years living and working overseas. His travels took him via Honolulu and San Francisco, where he worked as an illustrator for the Honolulu Evening Bulletin and the San Francisco Examiner. His final destination was to be New York. A trip to London was where he met and married in 1900, and a son, Philip, was born in New York the following year. Philip was educated in England at Eton College, the University of Cambridge and the University of London Slade School.
Myer had left Australia as an admirer of Whistler but once in New York, he was struck by the works of the French Impressionists and in London by those of later masters. Art critics in New York wrote glowingly of his works and he continued to receive critical recognition. He was elected a life member to the private social club – the New York Lotos Club. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York, and in 1909, a retrospective exhibition was held at the Salmagundi Club – a well-known fine arts centre founded in 1871 in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan.
Flowers and Fruit
Between the period of 1910 and 1912, he worked in Paris and in London. 1910 saw five works exhibited in New York with the International Society of Independent Artists, and, in 1910, he had a landscape hung in the Paris Salon. The family moved to London in 1910, and for the next eight years, he exhibited with the International Society at Burlington House with the Society of Painters and Gravers and the New English Arts Club. After the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in service and worked in the War Office.
He changed his name to Miles Evergood about 1914 whilst in London in order for his son to get a commission in the British Navy. The Lord of the Admiralty at that time, Winston Churchill, wrote a handwritten reply to his query, suggesting that “Blashki” was not a suitable name for an officer in an Anglo-Saxon navy.
Following the death of Mile’s first wife, he re-married in New York in 1930. His wife was a rug designer and a great deal younger than he. In 1931, after almost forty years away from Australia, he returned and spent eighteen months in Brisbane, where he was a member of the Royal Queensland Art Society, then moved to Sydney, with his final destination being Melbourne, where he settled in Kalorama in the Dandenong Ranges in 1935. Miles continued to exhibit in Sydney and Melbourne and held exhibitions in 1933 and 1935 of landscapes, portraits and flower subjects. He was fundamentally an Impressionist, his robust style was characterised by an exuberant sense of colour and vigorous, expressive brush strokes and the use of a palette knife. The bold impasto effects reflected the influence of a group of artists who were part of the New English Art Club, their works exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London, rather than Pierre Bonnard, who he had been linked with, and who was known especially for the stylised decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of colour.
Miles died of cancer on 3 January 1939 in a Melbourne hospital and was cremated. He was survived by his second wife and his son, who followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a leading social realist painter in America. Philip died in 1973
The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story
Australian Dictionary of Biography (Richard Haese); Wikipedia; ANZ Art Sales Digest; UNSW Library – Design and Art Australia
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This most interesting piece strangely did not acknowledge the considerable material taken from the book Miles Evergood: No End of Passion: Blashki Books: Sydney 2014, including the illustrations shown. It is a book that I wrote. The reference here to his second wife ( whose name was Pauline Romero) was incorrect. It was a de facto relationship as she was still married, not divorced from Joseph Romero until 1947, eight years after Miles had died in Melbourne. Pauline “Polly” took all Miles’ estate of art works back to America in 1946. After her death in 1986, they were sold by a dealer at the Alameda Flea Market, eventually returning to Australia in time for a 1988 Bicenenary retrospective exhibition in Castlemaine Art Gallery.
‘Flowers and Fruit’: such a lovely painting – full of light, colour and texture, the forms finely delineated. I hadn’t heard of Myer Blashki and am pleased to catch up with him. It’s a great pity he changed his name.