Modern art and Australia

Gallery 11, QAG

In the first half of the twentieth century, Australian society modernised rapidly. This gallery shows the many ways Australian artists responded to the experience of modernisation. Like expatriate artists in previous decades, artists in the key centres of Sydney and Melbourne often looked to Europe for inspiration. Their eclectic and often cautious art became increasingly influenced by European modernist culture, at first through reproductions in books and magazines, and later through more frequent travel abroad.

Several contending forms of Modernism developed in Australia. Sydney artists in the 1920s and 1930s were closer to the urbane Modernism of European design and decor, exemplified in the publications Art in Australia and The Home. By contrast, in the 1940s and 1950s, Melbourne artists – especially those supported by patrons John and Sunday Reed – became famous for a raw expressionist idiom that drew its passion from the turbulence of the war years, and later from the struggle to develop an authentically Australian cultural vision. Works from both groups are displayed in this gallery.

Modernism — however manifested — was only one story in Australian art during this period. It was certainly not officially sanctioned, nor even widely popular. Modernist artists struggled for recognition where more traditional conceptions of artistic practice continued to flourish, especially in landscape and portraiture. This display exemplifies this climate of contention, and indicates the importance of traditional, as well as innovative, artistic idioms in the developing Australian culture of the time.

Wartime in Melbourne

From European settlement on, most Australian artists had sought to define their world through landscape painting. In the period of World War Two, however, art concerned with the human condition and urban realities was developing in the cities. A radical group of Melbourne artists, the so-called ‘Angry Penguins’, created their expressionist art against this cultural backdrop. The group included Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval and Sidney Nolan, and took its name from a magazine published by Max Harris and John Reed, which championed art that was vital, spontaneous and anti-establishment. Reed and his wife, Sunday, became the patrons of the group and their home, ‘Heide’, on the outskirts of Melbourne – now Heide Museum of Art – was the focus of fervent discussions about contemporary art.

Though the artists in this group adopted individual styles, they shared an interest in various strands of European Modernism, including Surrealism and German Expressionism. Artists who migrated to Australia in the pre and postwar period, including Josl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff, whose sculpture is shown in this gallery, invigorated this scene, bringing with them direct experience of international trends – Vassilieff’s advocacy for child art was particularly interesting for his Australian contemporaries. The paintings made by the group, both during and immediately after the war years, highlighted the social turmoil and anxiety accompanying the conflict.

The landscape tradition was reinvigorated by these modernist developments. Drysdale’s surrealist-influenced paintings introduced a note of tension that has persisted in Australian landscape painting through the subsequent decades, and other works, such as Boyd’s postwar Berwick landscape, while lighter in both palette and subject, retain a distinctly expressionist style.