A mercurial figure in the first half of twentieth-century Australian art and writing, Adrian Lawlor was an artist, writer, critic and broadcaster. Lawlor arrived in Melbourne with his sister after the death of his mother and a breakdown in the relationship with his father. He married Eva Nodrum in 1916 and enlisted in the AIF in November 1916. He served on the Western Front.
Lawlor returned to Australia in March 1919. He and his wife moved to Warrandyte and he began a career as a writer contributing articles and poetry to the Bulletin and Vision: A Literary Quarterly.
In 1929 Lawlor enrolled briefly in a drawing class at the National Gallery of Victoria. Largely self taught, he produced a body of work and held eight one-man exhibitions from 1930-1940. In 1937 Lawlor published Arquebus a collection of prose pieces engaging in the debate waged between modernist and traditionalists painters in Melbourne at that time. This work was given to the poet Alister Kershaw (q.v.) by the bookseller Gino Nibbi and was instrumental in the meeting and subsequent friendship between Lawlor and Kershaw.
The bushfires of January 1939 destroyed many of Lawlor's paintings and after his exhibition in 1940, seen by some reviewers as a bewildering array of styles, Lawlor did not exhibit again and his painting career ceased. Lawlor returned to writing; he published his pamplet Eliminations, on modern art, in 1939, and produced articles and poetry for the little magazines Comment and Angry Penguins, and art criticism for Art in Australia, the Melbourne Sun and other periodicals. In 1943 Lawlor began a regular monthly programme for the ABC the 'Art Review' and for much of the 1940s he wrote his novel Horned Capon, published in 1950. Critical reviews (by A. D. Hope and Ian Mair (qq.v.)) of the novel, and poor sales, disappointed Lawlor. In 1951 the ABC dropped Lawlor's monthly broadcast and this cessation of a regular writing stint effectively ended Lawlor's writing career. Eva Lawlor died in 1953. Lawlor married for the second time but the marriage ended in divorce. In 1960 Lawlor left his Warrandyte home moving to St Kilda to be near his sister. In 1966 a retrospective exhibition of his paintings was held. Lawlor died in the General Repatriation Hospital at Heidelberg.
Lawlor was known for the brilliance of his spoken language and was able to mesmerise and draw into his conversations the people around him, friends and strangers alike. Gavin Fry in Adrian Lawlor : A Portrait quotes Alister Kershaw: 'he was...much more than his work...he was extraordinarily gifted...yet somehow his strange genius didn't come through' (p. 62). If he was uncomfortable or depressed Lawlor had the ability to withdraw from his surroundings. Kershaw in The Pleasure of Their Company describes this: 'Inevitably, he would have been the centre of attraction, everyone watching that astounding faunlike face and listening to that mesmeric talk; yet when he chose to vanish, no-one ever saw him go.' (p. 21). In the last years of his life he would tell friends and acquaintances he chanced to meet 'Don't talk to me, I'm dead.'
