POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Street sign 'Notanda Gallery'

Object No. 2009/79/16

Operating from Rowe Street, Sydney, from 1935 to 1974, Notanda Gallery was both an art gallery and an interior decoration studio. This street sign hung outside the gallery for part of its operation. Margo Lewers established the first Notanda Gallery in 1935 as an outlet for interior wares, most of which she designed herself. She and her brother Carl Plate were born in Australia to their English-born mother and Scandinavian-German artist father. Margo Plate and her husband, Gerald Lewers, met at the night classes of the Dattilo-Rubbo Art School in Rowe St. She started Notanda, which means 'something to be noticed', to give her mother (a friend of Mrs Zabel, who ran the Roycroft bookshop) an interest while Carl was in Europe. Although her plan was that her mother would manage Notanda, it was probably restrictions on the use of materials during the war that saw the original gallery close in 1939. When Carl Plate returned from Europe in 1940 he re-opened the Notanda Gallery at 41 Rowe Street as an art gallery, dealing principally in reproductions of contemporary art. Notanda subsequently moved to 4 Rowe Street just before the street was closed. Jocelyn Plate remembers Carl Plate's early days in the gallery: 'When he first went there he slept on the mezzanine. But he found the rats were running over his feet so he went back home to Woronora... But I think he had fitted up some kind of shower or something at the back part which was open to the sky... Originally he went in all the time but then he did have managers. His mother ran it part of the time. The alarm would go off at half past four in the morning so that he could leave at half past five and avoid the heavy traffic and be in by half past six or so... he would park his car in the space which is now grassed over beyond the entrance to Art Gallery Road at the side of what was then the Registry Office. And then he would walk down to the Notanda and go up to the mezzanine and have a sleep until it was time to open.' Carl, like Margo, was a painter, but he needed regular income to support his family. He saw a need to provide prints, art books and magazines and postcards to the growing number of people who were interested in art, but had little access to information about it. He originally intended to use the Notanda Gallery as an exhibition space and mounted at least four exhibitions including the first show of the well-known artist, Desiderius Orban. In 1941, Carl organised England Today: An Exhibition of Modern British Art, which was opened by Alleyne Zander and attracted a lot of publicity as the first exhibition in Australia to include abstract work. He was unable to earn a living holding exhibitions of modern work, and turned to selling a wide range of reproductions. Jocelyn Plate recalls: 'He was particularly known for his postcards because children used to come who were doing art at school and they were doing projects and needed to illustrate it and they could buy postcards. They were all kept in boxes which Carl had made himself and they were filed under subject matter or countries or the artist's name, so you had a lot of ways of looking things up, and in the back he had files of the small prints. And then he had big prints in big folder things. We had great difficult keeping them pristine for people to buy them, otherwise they got pretty grubby from being handled. And he kept a certain number of things framed which he had on the walls, but he also had them stacked on the floor.' Joyce Orchard, who worked first at the Roycroft bookshop and then managed the Notanda for many years, recalls the names of some of the people who regularly came into Notanda: Loudon St Hill, Thea Proctor, Adrian Feint, Elaine Haxton, Hal Missingham, Lloyd Rees, Connie Robertson, and visiting artists such as Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Leonora Howlett remembers: 'I was an art student in the late 1950s... We used to go to Stern's Disposal Store... which later became Stern's Art Gallery. The guys wore duffle coats with books stuffed in the pockets and the girls and boys wore beige corduroy pants and big army and navy disposal big sweaters... And you had the pale face and long hair. It was the beatnik look. It was probably the first or second wave after the Push, of people who looked different and were challenging middle class values... Rowe Street was a mecca for art, especially with Notanda Gallery, because that was a source of reference to paintings... It was quite soon after the War and there wasn't much information about art filtering through...The little things that you saw were often in black and white so the Notanda Gallery was a really terrific reference, even in the post cards.' (Leonora Howlett, 2001) Frank Elgar comments: 'As the youngest member of the Sydney Club I used to lunch by myself. I was 21 and the next eldest member was about 40. The Governor, Sir John Northcott, used to have lunch there and when he saw me lunching alone he invited me to join him. He called his table 'the bolshie's table'. It was anything but! One day a member said to the Crown Solicitor that he had seen the most shocking thing, the most indecent picture in Rowe Street and something should be done about it. I was shocked and horrified because I used to visit the Notanda Gallery often. So I said did they not know that this was one of the most famous pieces of modern art, by Modigliani, and did they know who Modigliani was? They didn't. I explained and went on to tell them that it was worth tens of thousands of pounds.They were impressed. So we went up and had a look at the picture and it was decided nothing was to be done... I said to them "You've got all those Norman Lindsay's in the Library", and they said that didn't count because they were not out in public view! I said "Well you can look at them, why can't other people?" ' (Frank Elgar 2001).