John Joseph Wardell Power

John Joseph Wardell Power studied at Académie Moderne. Places of work recorded in the authority are France. Work by John Joseph Wardell Power is recorded in the collections of Art Gallery of South Australia, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery and Courtauld Gallery.

John Joseph Wardell Power was born in Sydney on 12 October 1881. He is the grandson of architect William Wardell, and his daughter encouraged John to draw and paint from the age of seven. After attending Sydney Grammar School, Power studied medicine at the University of Sydney, graduating with a Bachelor of Medicine in 1905.

Power moved to London in 1906 to further his studies in medicine, and practised as a doctor there for several years, before serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps from 1917 to 1918, during the First World War. After the war left medicine and studied art at the atelier of Brazilian-born artist Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo in Paris from 1920 to 1922, where he became interested in Cubism and abstract art. He also studied under Fernand Léger at the Académie Moderne, which was an important part of the development of the inter-war avant-garde movement.

Power's first solo exhibition was in London in 1927. He was a member of The London Group and Abstraction-Création in Paris. He had a studio in Paris, and was represented by Parisian gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg. Power authored the book Eléments de la construction picturale (Paris, 1932), which "marked his arrival in Paris". In this treatise, he acknowledges a Brazilian painter, Pedro Correia de Araújo (who he calls Senhor Pedro Araujo) as the one who introduced him to the subject. In 1934, a solo show of his work was held in Paris by Abstraction-Création. He lived in London, Paris, Brussels, and Bournemouth, before moving to Bellozanne on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands. He met Pablo Picasso in Paris in the 1920s and around 1931 he bought ten signed prints from him. Despite his success and his prolific output in England and France, Power remained relatively unknown in Australia, but always identified as Australian.

His estate (worth £A2 million) went to the University of Sydney, where the Power Institute of Fine Arts now bears his name. The Power Institute, established in 1968, is the university's art history department. His effect on art history in Australia was significant.

Part of the Power bequest provided the core funding to set up Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1989.

In 2014, the NLA held a retrospective exhibition of Power's work, Abstraction-Création: J. W. Power in Europe 1921–1938, which brought together for the first time his paintings from the University of Sydney and his sketchbooks held by the library. The Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney held the first comprehensive survey of Potter's art, J. W. Power: Art, war and the avant-garde, from July 2025 to February 2026.