On a rainy day in Sydney, it feels completely appropriate to be writing about Clarice Beckett. She was an artist for whom the ideal atmospheric conditions were overcast, a bit misty. Her work is all about the weather. As a subject, it couldn’t be more commonplace, but it transports us into a realm of indistinct forms that haunt the imagination. It’s not often I feel the urge to visit the same show on three successive days, but Clarice Beckett: The Present Moment at the Art Gallery of South Australia, is one of those rare, inexhaustible exhibitions.

We’ve had periodic glimpses of Beckett’s talent since 1971, shortly after she was rescued for posterity by Roslyn Hollinrake. There was a touring show in 1999, when the venues included Sydney’s S H Ervin Gallery. The present survey, the largest ever devoted to the artist, will be seen only in South Australia – which is an excellent reason to consider Adelaide if you’re itching to get back on a plane soon.

The facts of Beckett’s life may be told in short order. She was born in 1887 into a well-heeled, middle-class family. She had a passion for art and literature and would go on to study drawing under Fred McCubbin at the National Gallery School, then spend nine months attending the independent art school run by the outspoken Max Meldrum. It was an experience that would help mould her technique and views on art, although not so much as many have presumed. Although Beckett had admirers, she turned down several offers of marriage and would end her life living at home in the bayside suburb of Beaumaris, having spent years looking after her invalid mother.

In 1935, shortly after her mother’s death, Beckett caught double pneumonia and passed away at the age of 48. What happened next is just as tragic, as her father burnt paintings that he didn’t consider finished or good enough. Her sister, Hilda, would store the remaining 2000 canvases in an open-sided shed in the countryside near Benalla. When Hollinrake tracked them down in 1970, only 369 were salvageable. The weather and the possums had laid waste to the rest.

The loss of so many works ranks as one of the great disasters of Australian art history. We may all be thankful that Hollinrake saved what she could.

The loss of so many works ranks as one of the great disasters of Australian art history.

I’m wary of hyperbole and reluctant to play that game of declaring any artist to be “the best”, but for me this retrospective of what remains of Clarice Beckett’s work has propelled her way ahead of more celebrated painters such as Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith. Beckett has been dismissed as another “Meldrumite”, but neither Max Meldrum nor any of his tonalist disciples ever painted anything as poignant as the work in this exhibition.

Curator Tracey Lock, who has approached this project as a labour of love, seeks to lift Beckett out of the small world of Melbourne tonalism and reposition her as a painter who explored the spiritual dimension of modernism, alongside artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko and Hilma Af Klint. The case is somewhat overstated, as Beckett hardly needs to be classified as a seeker after spiritual truths. She may have read Madam Blavatsky’s Voice of Silence (1889) and shown an interest in theosophy, but she is too individual an artist to be associated with any particular creed. Her spirituality can almost be taken for granted as a function of the open-minded, open-hearted way she approached the subject of a painting.