It is fitting that the website aCOMMENT went live on 21 July 2011, the centenary of the birth of Cecily Crozier who founded the little magazine Comment.
Cecily began Comment in 1940 soon after returning to Melbourne at the outbreak of WW2 from Alexandria in Egypt. She had left Australia with her parents in 1919 aged 8, grew up in Montpellier in the south of France, and was an artists model in London during the late 1920s.
By the time Comment ceased in the winter of 1947 for want of 150 subscribers at an annual subscription of six shillings, Cecily had published her little avant garde classic with its distinctive brown wrapping paper pages a total of twenty six times.
From left to right: (1) “A Comment No. 12”, ed. Cecily Crozier, July 1942, charcoal drawing by Adrian Lawlor; (2) “Passion Waiting”, photographic collage by Irvine Green, c. 1941 or 1942
Cecily is the model for Passion Waiting, a photographic collage by Irvine Green who was her cousin and, at that time, husband. The photo was tipped in on page 11 of Comment No. 12, with Irvine commenting ‘The reproduction on the opposite page is the result of my experiments with surrealism. It was the first photograph to be hung as an exhibit by the Contemporary Arts Society.’