Treasure trove from Mirka
HOW would Mirka Mora cope? That was the burning question in early 2000 when the Melbourne artist and legendary hoarder found herself torn between joy and angst.
Her first major retrospective, Where Angels Fear to Tread, was smashing attendance records at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen and she was about to bid farewell to her beloved Edwardian house in Barkly Street, St Kilda.
Surely she would have to ditch many of the treasures crammed into her haven of almost 30 years when she moved into the sleek new gallery-cum-family home built in Richmond by her art dealer son William?
Fourteen years on, the Paris-born Jewish artist – now 86 and a great-grandmother, but as feisty as ever – is back at Heide with her new exhibition, From The Home of Mirka Mora, and it’s clear that curators Kendrah Morgan and Jason Smith were abundantly spoilt for choice.
“I brought all my things from Barkly Street and fixed this flat very quickly – just two, three days,” says Mora with a triumphant wave at her impossibly congested living quarters and studio where she paints every day.
William’s recollections are also sharp. “I packed 10 boxes a week for months on end and it took five men two days to move everything here. It was so jam-packed, you couldn’t open the front door.”
From The Home of Mirka Mora comprises almost 100 works from the artist’s private collection, spanning the years 1947-2014 and covering all bases.
That is, a gloriously eclectic array dominated by paintings including standouts such as the monumental Piglets at Anlaby and a 1958 self-portrait, and extending to sketchbooks, ceramics, soft-sculpture dolls and even a silk tapestry.
Angels and serpents, cats and chickens, erotica and romance, and everywhere, those children with their big, soulful eyes – behind the rich colours and symbolism is an extraordinary life story that almost ended in August 1942 when the then Mirka Madeleine Zelik was 14.
Along with her mother and two younger sisters, she had been interned at the infamous Nazi transit camp in Pithiviers, northern France. They were about to be sent on a journey to hell when, at the 11th hour, her father Leon – still in Paris where he was in the French Resistance – managed to secure their release.
“I missed Auschwitz by one day!” says Mora. “Later, I asked my father, ‘How did you do it?’ He said, ‘Many gold coins’.”
Two other Jewish Resistance fighters made an indelible impact: Georges Mora (originally Morawski), whom she married in 1947, and Marcel Mangel, known to the world as Marcel Marceau.
The incomparable mime artist was among Mirka Mora’s teachers at the Paris theatre school that she enrolled in after World War II and their friendship endured until Marceau’s death in 2007.
“I miss him terribly,” says Mora. “Such a beautiful man and such a talker off the stage! Once, I took Marcel to Heide to meet (founders) John and Sunday Reed. They were ecstatic.”
To numerous culture-starved Melburnians, suave Georges Mora and his delectable young wife – 15 years his junior – were equally thrilling. Within a year of their arrival in 1951, they were in the thick of the city’s arts scene and rapidly became magnets.
Those early, heady years – the studios and restaurants; family joys with gifted sons, Philippe, William and Teriel; the Bohemian lifestyle that shocked many a wowser – are wonderfully captured in Mirka Mora’s autobiography, Wicked But Virtuous: My Life, published by Penguin in 2000.
It is also a heart-stopping account of survival despite horrendous odds, and time hasn’t softened the impact of those terrifying years. “Those who survive war can never be normal. I still suffer from it,” says Mora.
The loss of loved ones in the Holocaust, divorce, cancer, her grief over the death of Georges in 1992 – Mora has had her share of traumas, yet the enfant terrible remains alive and kicking, full of wicked anecdotes and gales of laughter.
As a young child in Paris, she was taught to pray to the Virgin Mary by the devoutly Catholic mother of a neighbour. Her influence can be seen in the artist’s suitably saintly Mother and Child-like paintings. Otherwise, it was like water off a duck’s back.
“I love being Jewish,” says Mora. “I cannot imagine not being Jewish.”
From The Home of Mirka Mora is at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, 7 Templestowe Road, Bulleen until November 9. Enquiries: www.heide.com.au.
REPORT by Zelda Cawthorne
PHOTO of artist Mirka Mora in her studio where she paints every day. Photo by Fred Kroh
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