Clive Travers Stephen (10 November 1889–1957) was an Australian sculptor,[1] painter in water-colour and oils,[2] printmaker,[3][4] and medical doctor.[5]
Clive Stephen was born in Caulfield on 10 November 1889, the son of Blanche (née Travers) and Sidney James Henry Stephen, a solicitor, of 'The Pines' in Middle Crescent, Brighton.[6]
Stephen studied medicine at the University of Melbourne[7][8] in Ormond College, entered third year in 1912,[9] and attained the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery with Third Class Honours in 1914.[10] He was resident medical officer of the Alfred Hospital
Stephen enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps in England[11] and was posted to the 14th General Hospital, Wimereux, near Boulogne, in the north of France.[12] Stephen publicly promoted the cause of the Red Cross.[13][14] He was made an Army Captain in March 1915,[15] and in mid-1916 was married in Chichester. His brother, Lieutenant K. T. Stephen was killed in France in May 1918.[16]
Stephen lived in Elmore and practised medicine in Central Victoria,[17][18] and was Public Vaccinator for the Northern District during the Influenza Epidemic.[19][20] There his wife, Dorothy Edna, bore a son in 1918.[21] He left the district in February 1919[22] to live in High St., Prahran and later at 537 Malvern Rd., Toorak. During WW2 Stephen served in the Citizen Military Forces.
Stephen attended George Bell's Saturday afternoon classes at Selborne Road 1925–30,[23] but otherwise was a self-taught painter and sculptor. His background as a doctor, and as nephew of Chief Justice Sir John and Lady Madden[24] and a relative by marriage of the late Mrs Ellis Rowan,[25] was noted in an Argus newspaper article on "Artists' Aliases".[26]
When in 1933 he exhibited with other students of Bell and Arnold Shore's school, Blamire Young commented that "Clive Stephen ... has a sound method of putting a design together. His colored drawings are rich and full of promise."[27] During the same period, Stephen and his wife Dorothy, a painter, conducted life-classes that attracted such artists as Will Dyson, and others in the nascent modern movement in Melbourne.[28] In the late 1930s he exhibited with the association of Modernist sculptors formed in 1935 by Ola Cohn,[29] who named themselves The Plastic Group,[30] and he also showed with Group Twelve.[31]
McCulloch attributes influences on Stephen to primitive sculpture via European artists such as Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, resulting in his abstraction.[28] He was one of the first Australian stone-carvers thus inspired. Gino Nibbi in Art in Australia of 1939 notes that he;
"...tends by culture and temperament towards abstract art. After searching, let us say, on the surface of his material, by carving its external coat, he begins now to cut it, to excavate into it, to free from it some secret, without which sculpture is in danger of remaining at the bas-relief stage, and of being too elusive. Stephen is a gifted artist showing great potentiality of further development."[32]
Stephen was also an ardent collector; as early as 1934 he acquired Head of a woman (1933),[33] painted in Bali by Ian Fairweather (likewise an artist influenced by the primitives), which he gifted to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1948.[34][35]
Though he was an artist of great energy and enthusiasm, soon after retiring from medicine to devote his life to sculpture, tragically Stephen died in 1957.[28]