Modernism’s postwar flowering with Preston, Cossington Smith, O’Keeffe

The title of the Making Modernism exhibition may not be the most accurate description of its content.

Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory (1938) by Georgia O’Keeffe.

A title such as Making Modernism inevitably begs a great many questions. Of course the language of titles is not really meant to stand up to scrutiny: it belongs to the category of marketing, brands and slogans, and addresses itself to a public that is supposed to respond to words not as part of a sustained discourse but as isolated buttons, pushed to elicit preset associations.

If we are of a more analytical turn of mind, though, we cannot help wondering what these words could mean if they actually meant something. What was modernism and who did make it? We could quote Baudelaire and his idea of the heroism of modern life, from as early as 1846. And he already embodies the double face of modernism, which entails both a positive and a negative engagement with the world.

Modernism in art is usually thought of as starting with the impressionists and their successors, but its most acute phase was in the years just before World War I, when an overwhelming surge of cultural malaise looks in hindsight like an anticipation of the political and military catastrophes to come: these were the years of fauvism, expressionism, cubism, ­futurism, pittura metafisica and abstraction, to name only the principal movements.

None of the three women in the present show contributed to creating these movements, nor does their work have the substance or the potential for disturbance of styles that raised fundamental questions about our habitual ways of seeing the world, about the smugness of a materialistic culture basking in an utilitarian conception of progress already questioned by Baudelaire, and about the institutions of art.

By comparison with the art of this period — flawed and limited as some of it was — Margaret Preston (1875-1963) and Grace Cossington Smith (1892-1984) are minor artists. The scope of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was somewhat greater and her formal development was bolder, but in the end she retreated into the carefully cultivated role of the desert recluse, painting in a niche style whose limitations are revealed as soon as she goes beyond certain motifs.

Blue Mountains Theme (c.1941) by Margaret Preston; Winter Cottonwoods East IV (1954) by Georgia O’Keeffe.

Preston is in some respects the most imaginatively limited of the three, although she was a determined and energetic worker and publicist. She was much more successful than Cossington Smith in creating a reliable product, and her decorative paintings and prints of native flowers have always been appealing and successful.

The exhibition includes a series of Preston’s still lifes, all of which display much the same sensibility: horizontals and verticals are counterpoised with the round forms of cups and teapots; a slight flattening of perspective gives a modernist flavour, and every bit of the composition is densely filled with pattern. The effect is visually animated, but there is never a hint of the mysterious life and character of objects that has always made the greatest still life, fromClaesz to Chardin or Giorgio Morandi.

Even the more minimal tray of cups, titled Implement blue (1927), is a self-consciously modernist image, akin to the format of an advertising design. It is a striking piece of styling, but there is little interest in the objects themselves, nor can there be since they are mass-produced. The work is more a celebration of industrial production and marketing than anything else.

In her later work, the group of paintings of the Monstera deliciosa are striking in their combination of vulval and phallic forms. Surely Preston’s attraction to these forms must have been unconscious, but they incidentally draw our attention to the absence of sensual or even sensuous feeling in her painting.

One of Preston’s favourite ideas in later years was that we should borrow design inspiration from the colours and shapes of the Aborigines — whether this was a recognition of the aesthetic value of their work or simply exploitation has been argued about for years — and some of her most successful works are the late landscapes using a quasi-Aboriginal palette and simplified forms, several based on aerial views. Nonetheless, these remain exercises in design rather than serious landscape paintings.

Cossington Smith is in some respects a more interesting, or at least a more appealing, artist, but her production is strikingly uneven. The exhibition includes an engaging self-portrait done around the age of 24, which is followed by one of her best pictures, and the one frequently cited as the first post-impressionist or even the first modernist work produced in Australia: The Sock knitter, a portrait of her sister knitting socks for soldiers fighting in France. The frontal pose of the figure, the simple colours, and the misalignment of the cushions on the back of the sofa, emphasising the play of horizontals and verticals, all contribute to our sense of the picture as simultaneously a quiet and intimate portrait and a composition on a flat surface. We might expect there to be more works in the same vein, but there seem not to be.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Back of Marie’s No. 4 (1931) (detail).

The artist spent the next decade or so studying with Dattilo-Rubbo, who is said to have taught her the techniques of Seurat, van Gogh and others, which is questionable, since technique is inseparable from purpose and inspiration, and clearly Cossington Smith shared the inspiration neither of Seurat nor of van Gogh. She had her first solo exhibition in 1928, but really came into her own with the Sydney Harbour Bridge pictures a few years later. This eminently masculine subject appealed to several female artists, particularly Jessie Traill, whose powerful etchings follow the stages of its construction. Cossington Smith too was clearly inspired by an ambitious project that was also a symbol of hope during the worst years of the Depression. The exhibition includes a fine drawing densely annotated with indications of colour and form, as well as the corresponding finished painting.

Landscapes from the years before and after the war are variable in their success: there are a couple, including one in the exhibition, in which she experiments with the plunging perspective of roads running into the distance; but there are others in which space seems to collapse. Space is the dimension in which things exist outside ourselves, and this crushing of space seems indicative of a growing introversion.

The Lacquer Room, with its bright red furniture, is a rather brittle evocation of life in the world of modern style, but then there is nothing in the exhibition for a decade until after the war, when we find a landscape in which colour is bleached and space flattened, and a very similar flower piece (1952). It as though Cossington Smith could barely engage with the world any more, and yet almost immediately afterwards she discovered the formula for her late style, in which the world is seen from within the safety of her home, and even, in one instance, reflected in the wardrobe mirror. From this secure vantage point, the elderly and solitary artist was able to find renewed joy in the colours of nature.

O’Keeffe was somewhat less isolated than the two Australians, in part because of her relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, one of the most prominent photographers of his time and an ­effective promoter of her art and, in his photographic work, of her image. On the other hand, it is important to remember that America was in no sense a leader of international contemporary art before the war: the sudden emergence of New York as an epicentre of modernism in the postwar years took everyone in the old world by surprise.

The exhibition includes a number of abstract or semi-abstract works from O’Keeffe’s earlier period, including the years when she shared a home with Stieglitz at Lake George. These are finely painted with a sensuous pleasure in surface texture and a love of seductive, even sexual forms, even if the notoriously vulval flowers are barely present here. And it is this erotic vitality that separates her so starkly from the rather spinsterly sensibility of the two Australians.

After Stieglitz’s death, she discovered New Mexico and decided that this arid rocky land was her true spiritual home. From then on until her death, she lived in or near Santa Fe and was fortunate to be already famous enough for this retreat to be transformed, by the power of the press and especially of the photographic image, into a consecration.

The exhibition includes a copy of Life magazine from 1968 with the title “Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico: stark visions of a pioneer painter”. The accompanying photograph shows the artist dressed austerely in black, in profile, hunched in meditation. Above is an inset of a painting of a skull, her new leitmotif: indeed an image of a ram’s ox skull, meticulously painted, is among the best works in the show.

After sex — she had wanted a child but Stieglitz had not — she now found death as a compelling theme, and was often photographed dragging bits of skeleton back to the studio to paint. But in case this intimacy with Eros and Thanatos makes her sound rather terrifying, we are assured that in private she was good company and even a good cook.

The bridge in building (1929) by Grace Cossington Smith; Thea Proctor’s Tea Party (1924) by Margaret Preston.

Other striking paintings are of the mountainous landscapes near her home; in the best of them she has a lively tactile apprehension of their harsh and sharp ridges, divided between brilliant sunlight and deep shadow. These are images in which she seems to intuit the ancient analogy between rocks and bones: the ridges she paints are the skeletal forms of the earth.

Less successful are her pictures of trees, for which she seems to lack feeling, or perhaps simply the patience these complex living things require to render them with conviction. In the most disconcerting images there are blurry patches where the image dissolves in a way that uncannily suggests the effect of the macular degeneration from which she suffered years later and which eventually stopped her painting.

None of these three artists can truly be imagined as a maker of modernism; in the case of the two Australians, the suggestion has the perverse effect of making us see their limitations more clearly and with less indulgence than we have become used to according them over the course of the last generation, when it has become a commonplace that female artists were the most interesting of the interwar period.

In the case of O’Keeffe, the show gives a partial view of a complex figure who, if she did not in any sense instigate modernism, nonetheless developed what may be considered the first overtly feminine version of a modernist style in painting.

Making Modernism: O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith

Heide Museum, until February 19