Dangerously Modern: Lost works of 50 female Aussie artists revealed in new show
A new blockbuster exhibition uncovers the influential – and long-forgotten – role Australian female artists played in international modernism.
Perhaps the only figure throughout history more elusive and formidable than the dangerous woman is the dangerously modern woman. So seemed to be the case when, in the 1920s interwar period, a vast number of female artists left Australia for a taste of cosmopolitan Europe. The art scenes of Paris and London were undergoing unprecedented change and conservative realism was waning in favour of a more liberal style of modernism.
Sydney artist Thea Proctor, who had just returned home from studying in London in 1921, was among those shocked to learn the art she had created on her travels was widely being labelled as “dangerously modern” in Australia.
While Europe was swept up in the bold promise of modernism, Australia’s art scene remained resistant. Even today, the contributions of Australian artists, particularly women, to the global modernist movement have largely been excluded from the country’s art narrative.
During the years following World War I there was a fear of what modernism represented, says Art Gallery of NSW acting director of collections Wayne Tunnicliffe.
“Impressionism and cubism were seen as corrupt and decadent – movements that would decay the country’s moral fibre if they were embraced,” says, Tunnicliffe, speaking to Review from his office in Sydney. “It’s entirely correct to say these women hit a limit as to what art training in Australia could do for them.
“Australian women saw an opportunity to live and study differently in Europe. And the women travelled – my God, did they travel – so they could get away from family and social structures.”
Many modernist female artists returned home to share their art and their stories. Through determination and persistence, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith became household names despite their rejection of realism. But they were the exception; the vast majority were relegated to the margins of history and their legacies erased, until recently.
A new exhibition, which takes its name directly from Proctor’s sardonic musing, now joins a broader movement among curators and art historians to rewrite the narrative of Australia’s forgotten women artists. Presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia and the AGNSW, Dangerously Modern features more than 200 works by 50 Australian female artists who contributed to the global modernist art movement.
The exhibition is curated by Tunnicliffe alongside AGSA’s curator of Australian art Tracey Lock and associate curator Elle Freak. Lock says the journey to reviving a lost history has not been an easy one.
“What we’ve been doing is reading their letters, their travel diaries, lecture notes (they had)published,” she says.
“What were they thinking and talking about? It is all very unfiltered but hopefully also fresh.”
The show is part of a wider drive across institutions to recognise the contributions of female artists to the country’s art landscape. The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, for example, began the Know My Name initiative in 2019 after acknowledging only 25 per cent of its Australian art collection was by female artists, and it has resulted in a multitude of exhibitions aimed at addressing the imbalance. Late last year, the NGA unveiled major solo retrospectives for modernist artists Anne Dangar, Ethel Carrick, and Clarice Beckett, whose exhibition is currently on the tail end of a national tour. Also touring until the end of winter is a group exhibition drawn from Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to now. It was initially held at the gallery between 2020 and 2022 and features more than 60 works by contemporary artists such as Lindy Lee and Tracey Moffatt, alongside influential modernist painters, some of whom are in Dangerously Modern.
“Galleries around Australia, New Zealand and beyond are contributing to the research to elevate women artists … Dangerously Modern contributes to (this) international Zeitgeist,” says Lock. “It is the first exhibition ever staged to focus on the art and lives of Australian women artists in Europe, and the first to comprehensively consider the international role of … their participation in the transnational story of modernism.”
For each curator, the notion of “danger” took on a different meaning.
Tunnicliffe says: “It wasn’t just risky in terms of giving up a stable and secure life for adventure, but it was also a risk to sense of self. The danger is in that embrace of change; of becoming a new person and finding your place. There is danger in making cultural change happen.”
Some middle- to upper-class women left Australia with inherited money or family support, but many had to earn a wage. Preston was one example of an artist who risked stability in Australia to travel, and taught frequently to supplement her practice. Justine Kong Sing, who was one of the first professional Chinese-Australian artists, only had enough savings to travel overseas when she reached her 40s.
Lock adds: “I was really shocked by the extent to which their legacies – their lives – became endangered. We know they were successful, we know they exhibited (during the interwar period). But post World War II, all of their achievements are shut away in a vault.”
The story of one such trio had been overlooked until Lock undertook a research trip to France in 2012 as part of her Churchill Fellowship and uncovered how Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar found themselves in the sleepy French village of Mirmande in the Drome Valley.
Over the summer of 1928, the three Australian women, who had previously been roommates while studying at the Sydney Art School, sought guidance under the tutelage of French cubist art teacher and theorist Andre Lhote. While cosmopolitan Paris was the beating heart of artistic innovation, it was common practice for artist colonies to be established in small rural and coastal villages throughout Europe. Lhote was three years into running a popular annual art school, akin to the famed Australian Heidelberg School and Box Hill artists’ camp.
“Lhote is said to have been overwhelmed by the beauty of Mirmande, which resembled Northern European hilltop towns he had seen in 13th to 15th century paintings,” says Lock. “He was very much participating in a movement in Europe at the time that was a call to create order in art following the First World War. There was a big retreat out of the metropolises to the countryside to embrace classicism and history.”
A leading modern art figure in France, Lhote took a liberal approach to accepting international students (even though he spoke only French) and women over the age of 25 when other schools would refuse them. He introduced his students to a distinctive formulaic teaching methodology, which, at that time, was not being taught anywhere in Australia.
“(Art teachers) in Australia were getting students to try to paint what was before their eyes. Instead, Lhote was saying, ‘Here’s your grid, make what you see fit into it; your painting should always comply with the formulaic pattern’,” explains Lock.
Lock began her research into Black, Crowley and Dangar at the Bibliotheque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou. All signs pointed to Dominique Bermann Martin, Lhote’s niece and the custodian of his archive which includes correspondence with his students, manuscripts from his lectures, and drawings in his sketchbooks. From this archive, Lock found the names of the Australian students.
From her home in Paris, Bermann Martin, a historian by trade, says she initially felt an immense sense of responsibility when she inherited her uncle’s archive after he died in 1962. He and his wife Marguerite Hayet had made an active choice not to have children so they could pursue their artistic endeavours and a “freer lifestyle”.
“I was obliged to take it on, but it is something I began to love,” she says. “It was my journey towards discovering his personality. I don’t think I could say I truly knew him before I became custodian of the archive.”
Bermann Martin adds: “Many would have chosen his school specifically because of his ability to teach the classic rules of art. He knew it was only later that the personality and impressions of a specific artist would come into being.”
The three friends are said to have been “transformed” by the time they left the school at the end of summer. Lhote is said to have praised Crowley for her landscape painting Mirmande (1928), drawing comparison to El Greco’s masterpiece View of Toledo.
The following year, Black, too, was commended by a highly regarded French newspaper for her exhibition at the Salon des Artistes Independants.
On the home front, this new direction would not be rewarded, even for decades to come. According to the Australian curators, one influence that buried the legacies of these artists was the work of leading 20th century Australian art critic Bernard Smith.
In a 1988 essay, he labelled Australia’s travelling artists as “messenger girls” whose works – influenced by modern European art – were not “strong”.
While Smith made an attempt late in his career to soften his stance, the exhibition’s curatorial team suggests the damage had already been done, jointly writing: “For decades, Smith’s authoritative voice was a death knell to the legacies of Australia’s travelling women, putting their rightful position in the canon of Australian art in peril.”
Lock says Smith was “so highly respected that his impression was pressed so deeply into the narrative of Australian art history. But he wasn’t perfect. We’re trying to go back (in time) to find out what women were really doing during that period. And we realised, actually, they had a massive impact on the development of art.”
For a long time, art historians’ research was often confined to Australian artists’ contributions while they were on home soil. Lock explains that when it came to artists who regularly travelled, there were “blind spots” in the research.
“Europe was just not a place where art historians were looking,” Lock says. “How do you fit these distinct-looking works into the Australian narrative? How do you hang them in permanent collections of Australian art on display?”
After showing in Adelaide, the exhibition will travel to Sydney’s AGNSW. A significant portion of the 200-plus works in the exhibition – spanning paintings, sculptures, prints and ceramics – have been derived from the galleries’ collections (56 works are from AGSA and 65 are from AGNSW).
For all three curators, the endeavour to preserve the legacy of these artists by bringing their stories to mainstream audiences has become one in which they are deeply invested.
“A lot of these artists were single women put at perilous risk. When you don’t marry or have children by the time you pass away, where does your estate go? Who looks after your legacy? Who will promote you? These women didn’t necessarily have anyone to champion them once they passed away,” says Lock.
“We’re trying to honour these women by bringing their successes back to life. By putting their stories back into the narrative.”
Dangerously Modern will exhibit at the Art Gallery of South Australia from May 24 to September 7 and the Art Gallery of NSW from October 11 to February 1.
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