Design and Art Australia Online

Cartoonist and illustrator, produced cartoons and greeting cards in the late 1950s and 1960s. The Sydney Bulletin and London Punch were his chief cartoon outlets, but he also drew them for the Spectator and Lilliput , while in Sydney his wordless, witty and satirical line drawings also appeared in K.G. Murray publications. Harvey’s Christmas cards were typically Australian versions on traditional English Yuletide themes: a kangaroo eating a plum pudding, Santa sunbaking or water-skiing, a man with a horse and buggy taking a Christmas tree to his rural Oz home (the NGA has an almost complete set). In the 1990s-2000s he designed, researched and wrote broadsheet Pictorial City Guides to c.25 cities, the latest being Berlin (2001).

A student at Melbourne High School, Tony Harvey indulged his passion for drawing and cartooning and dreamt of seeing the world. He read widely, borrowed from the Melbourne Public Library, frequented the National Gallery of Victoria and Ellis Bird’s secondhand bookshop discovering old engravings and copies of Punch, The Studio and Art in Australia. For a taste of the avant grade there was the Leonardo Bookshop which played a pivotal role in freeing up literature and art in Australia throughout the 1930 and 19402 by stocking the latest art books and magazines. Critical of the conservative art scene, Nibbi published Stream, edited by Cyril Pearl with Dominic Leon’s Vorticist-inspired covers.
In 1947 Harvey gained a free place to study commercial art at Melbourne Technical College where Alan Warren, Harold Freedman Erick Smith and Ed Heffernan we teaching drawing, printmaking and lithography. Melbourne’s strong printmaking radiation can be traced to the NGV’s acquisition in 1891 of works by Durer, Rembrandt, Whistler and others. Familiar with the Claude Flight inspired relief printing of the 1940s among local artists Harvey was also drawn to the work of British artists like John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Paul and John Nash. In 1948 the Old Vic theatre Co. starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh staged Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in Melbourne. Cecil Beaton’s sets, incorporating gigantic line engravings of Georgian houses were a spectacular introduction to theatre design for the young art student.

With savings from designing for Fortuna Fabrics, Sydney and creating filmstrips for Maxcraft, Harvey sailed in 1951 to Europe. On reaching London he sent three cartoons to Punch signed 'John Harvey’ which were accepted. An invitation to submit drawings to a special exhibition of Punch illustrators in New York followed and his cartoons were reprinted in Pick of Punch Annual (1951-2:44,142,197. His work also appeared in Lilliput, Spectator and London Opinion.

The country’s emergence from the war years was celebrated with the Festival of Britain. In addition to the V&A and Tate and National Gallery collections the new Arts Council exhibited sixty painters and twelve sculptors in a show of British art over the preceding 25 years. Modern graphic design was infused with European and Scandinavian trends as seen in Graphis and _Gerbraugraphik, the art of the Polish poster school and the drawings of Tomi Ungerer and Andre Francois. From America there was the New Yorker with the cartoons of James Thurber and Saul Sternberg. Furthermore in Britain the union of text, illustration, typography and printing pioneered by William Morris flourished through the private press, Nonesuch, Curnow, Golden Cockerel and others.

After sketching around Europe and Britain, Harvey returned to Australia during 1953 via the USA. In Melbourne the printmaking scene during the 1950s was vital and experimental centering on Harold Freedman, Tate Adams, Geoff Barwell and Ian Armstrong and others at Melbourne Tech. Harvey chose instead to design and print greeting cards for distribution on a larger scale than had been attempted by local artists like Helen Ogilvie and Etti Raynor.

Tony married Prudence Boileau, the elder daughter of Sir Gilbert Boileau and Chica Edgeworth Somers (later Lowe) in 1954. They moved to Richmond where he set up his commercial 'art card’ printery, first at 283 Bridge Road Richmond and later at 609 Bridge Road. He produced over 250 card designs using looniest and letterpress ranging from religious art, native flora and fauna, Aboriginal designs as well as a unique and humorous exploitation of an antipodean Christmas celebrated by kangaroos, Santas and the traditional fare turned upside down,'down under’.

Max Harris wrote in the Observer(17 October 1959)of the
the superiority of Australian cards over their English equivalents: “...Australian designers have a fresh and unexploited slant on the festive season… The greatest designer is Anthony Harvey, who does his own colour printing with unusually rich and vibrant inks. He is the first artist to have taken Australian motifs of the conventional kind and given them high wit and sophistication…”

In an interview with Helen Hewson in Auigust 1987, Harvey recalled his working method:

First I cut out the design using lion-cutting and cheap Japanese woodcarving tools, gem razor blades and an umbrella rib. A design would often require 2 or 3 or 4 blocks to create the colour range and I would ink up the first image in black and print it onto a further piece of lino in preparation for cutting the next block and to ensure exact registration. To give variety to the designs and range of cards fine lines were introduced by letterpress, that is photo-processed blocks were made from my drawings and used with linocut blocks.

I had an electric American Chandler and Price platen press and it was all rather dangerous because there was the possibility of crushing one’s hand as you fed the card between the block and the ink rollers. Ensuring the rich coloured oil based inks had dried properly before a card design was returned for further colour printing

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Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2015