Selected Writings - Margaret Preston


Book Description

Never shy of voicing an opinion, artist Margaret Preston launched into print on a variety of subjects, from flower arranging and furnishing a bedroom, to Aboriginal art and design, Pokerwork and Wood-blocking. Selected from the pages of Australia's journals by Elizabeth Butel, this collection addresses Preston's recurring preoccupations - "modern" art, an Australian national art and the craft of art-making. "The natural enemy of the dull" - Preston's style is infused with paradox, retaining its freshness through her very direct, uncompromising attack and illustrated with examples of her woodcuts.




The Mirror and the Palette


Book Description

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.




Useless Beauty


Book Description

The story of Australian art does not begin and end with landscape. This book puts flowers front and centre, because they have often been ignored in preference for more masculine themes. Departing from where studies of single flower artists leave off, Useless Beauty embraces the general topic of flowers in Australian art and shines new light on a slice of Australian art history that extends from 1880 to 1950. It is the first book of broad chronology to discuss Australian art through blossoms, which it does by addressing stories of major figures including Hans Heysen, Margaret Preston and Sidney Nolan, as well as specific objects such as surreal flowers, Aboriginal flowers and war flowers. Whether modern or conservative, the artists in this study shared an intellectual and emotional passion for flora. This was true for men as well as women, despite blossoms being a more traditionally feminine subject. Through spectacular reproductions of historical and contemporary artworks drawn from collections in Australia, the United States, Britain and New Zealand, Useless Beauty explores how flowers influenced the psyche, governed rituals, defined identity and brought a psychological dimension to the everyday. The peak years for flower-centricity in Australian art were between 1920 and 1940 when flowers were known as the apotheosis of useless beauty.




A Companion to Modern Art


Book Description

A Companion to Modern Art presents a series of original essays by international and interdisciplinary authors who offer a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of artistic works, movements, approaches, influences, and legacies of Modern Art. Presents a contemporary debate and dialogue rather than a seamless consensus on Modern Art Aims for reader accessibility by highlighting a plurality of approaches and voices in the field Presents Modern Art’s foundational philosophic ideas and practices, as well as the complexities of key artists such as Cezanne and Picasso, and those who straddled the modern and contemporary Looks at the historical reception of Modern Art, in addition to the latest insights of art historians, curators, and critics to artists, educators, and more




The Modernist World


Book Description

The Modernist World is an accessible yet cutting edge volume which redraws the boundaries and connections among interdisciplinary and transnational modernisms. The 61 new essays address literature, visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music, film, and intellectual currents. The book also examines modernist histories and practices around the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, as well as the United States and Canada. A detailed introduction provides an overview of the scholarly terrain, and highlights different themes and concerns that emerge in the volume. The Modernist World is essential reading for those new to the subject as well as more advanced scholars in the area – offering clear introductions alongside new and refreshing insights.




Impact of the Modern


Book Description

Australian and international modernity from the late 19th to the mid-20th century inspires research in many fields of cultural endeavour: architecture, fine arts, design, cinema, theatre, and music; in urban studies, literary history and Aboriginal studies. Impact of the Modern brings together examples of this new interdisciplinary work on modern Australian culture by 21 leading scholars. Their writings reveal an original account of 'modernising' Australia as dynamic and creative in many art forms, and interactively linked with international processes and ideas. The essays in Impact of the Modern were presented as papers at the conference, 'Australian Vernacular Modernities', convened by the editors at the University of Queensland in 2006. Plenary papers by Jill Julius Matthews and Angela Woollacott signal the book's focus on the erotic and gendered spaces, and on popular aspects of modernity. They provide the central focus of the material, through such vital and dynamic categories as the 'modern', the 'erotic' and the 'primitive'. As essential components of the historical processes of innovation and modernisation, these central questions of gender and public sociality are taken up in diverse ways in the other chapters, forming a varied and exciting study of a range of creative Australian engagements with modern international life and popular culture.




Margaret Preston


Book Description

This richly illustrated monograph is the first publication to look in detail at the life and art of Margaret Preston, an artist who practised in her native Australia from the mid-1890s right up to her death in 1963.




Trailblazers


Book Description

Australia's first female prime minister. The country's first female judge. The first woman to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Australia's first female chief diplomat. The nation's first female winemaker. These women were all trailblazers, but they have something else in common - every one of them was South Australian. And they are just a handful of the 100 remarkable women whose stories are told in this beautiful book, illustrated with hundreds of photographs. Written by historian Carolyn Collins and journalist Roy Eccleston, Trailblazers shines a light on the lives of these extraordinary women whose feats inspired their state, nation and, often enough, the world. Now they can inspire a whole new generation.




Aboriginal Art and Australian Society


Book Description

This book is an investigation of the way the Aboriginal art phenomenon has been entangled with Australian society’s negotiation of Indigenous people’s status within the nation. Through critical reflection on Aboriginal art’s idiosyncrasies as a fine arts movement, its vexed relationship with money, and its mediation of the politics of identity and recognition, this study illuminates the mutability of Aboriginal art’s meanings in different settings. It reveals that this mutability is a consequence of the fact that a range of governmental, activist and civil society projects have appropriated the art’s vitality and metonymic power in national public culture, and that Aboriginal art is as much a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture as it is an art movement. Throughout these examinations, Fisher traces the utopian and dystopian currents of thought that have crystallised around the Aboriginal art movement and which manifest the ethical conundrums that underpin the settler state condition.




An Opening


Book Description

Artist and writer Stephanie Radok possesses a unique international perspective. For over twenty years she has written about and witnessed the emergence of contemporary Aboriginal art and the responses of Australian art to global diasporas. In 'An Opening: Twelve love stories about art', Stephanie Radok takes us on a walk with her dog and finds that it is possible to re-imagine the suburb as the site of epiphanies and attachments. 'Art wants to enter our lives, yet it is a rare art writer who lets it do that. Writing with full personal disclosure, Stephanie Radok lets us in on her secret. Art c.




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