AustLit

Edith and John Power, a wealthy expatriate Australian couple, are important, but largely forgotten, benefactors to modern art in this country. Their separate bequests to the University of Sydney have resulted in the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Sydney.

In 1915 John Power married Edith Lee in London before serving as a surgeon on the bloodbath of the Western Front. After the war the Powers left Britain to live in Paris and Brussels at the centre of a large international group of avant-garde artists. Edith, who was twelve years older than John, and had been married twice before (once widowed and once divorced), was to all accounts not only the great love of his life, but also the driving force behind her husband's success as an artist - he exhibited alongside Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky and many other modern masters. The following comes from a book-length dramatised biography of their lives, narrated by Edith in the early 1960s when she was ninety-two years old and bedridden. - Dotlit