the Gum”, citing Louis Buvelot as the link between such “Pioneer Artists” and the Heidelberg School for his “genius to catch and understand the salient living features of this country” (McCubbin 1975, 269–270). Critical of cosmopolitan culture and emerging modernist trends as well as the increasing number of artists traveling overseas to Paris and London, McCubbin concludes by asserting that “the Australian artist can best fulfill his highest destiny, by remaining in his own country, and studying that which lies about him…” (McCubbin 1975, 276).
Modern Engagements
“It was about the year 1913 when the first glimmerings of what is now called “modern art” came to Sydney,” according to Roland Wakelin (Wakelin 2006, 75). Along with Roy de Maistre, Wakelin introduced a French-inspired modernism that explored the relationships between painting, color and music, culminating in the exhibition Color in Art (1919). John D. Moore, a Sydney-trained architect, attempted to codify these emerging modernist tendencies in the article, “Thoughts in Reference to Modern Art” (1927), identifying what he perceived as its two principal strains: the embrace of the avant-garde and the engagement with contemporary culture and society. For Moore, the functional form of “the aeroplane, the steam ship, the motor car, the skyscraper of America, the wheat silos of Canada and Australia” all embodied the “essence” of modernism (Moore 2006, 69–70).
Modernism’s engagement with the present was championed especially by Sydney Ure Smith, the publisher of the nationally distributed Art in Australia (1916–1942), which had a significant impact on the scattered regional networks of artists in Australia after World War I. Ure Smith supported artists such as Wakelin, de Maistre, and Moore as well as Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, and Grace Cossington Smith, while advocating a holistic view of modernism that endorsed design, architecture, and the applied and commercial arts. In his editorial for the September 1929 edition of Art in Australia, Ure Smith draws attention to the paradoxical acceptance of commercial modern design yet rejection of modernist painting: “to quite a number of people, anything ‘modern’ can be appreciated in anything except pictures” (Ure Smith 2006, 89).
From the outset, the development of modernism in Australia was questioned and challenged by a range of dissenting voices, a number of which featured in Art in Australia. Appearing in the first edition of the magazine, the artist and engraver Norman Lindsay’s essay, “A Modern Malady” (1916), aligns modernism with a deracination of art resulting from a lack of foundational principles and from the adulterating influence of other cultures. The pastoral tradition he favored was fervently defended by Norman’s artist brother, Lionel Lindsay, and the critic J.S. MacDonald and institutionalized in the 1920s and 1930s in the face of an encroaching modernism that was seen as the expression of a European culture in decline (Dixon and Smith 1984, 27). In its most extreme form, Australian pastoralism developed into anti-modernist, proto-fascist and even anti-Semitic discourse.1
The pastoral tradition was also central to the first monographic survey of art in Australia, William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934), which credits Streeton with the consolidation of a landscape school within the evolution of a local art industry that climaxed in the 1920s (Moore 1934, xx). Establishing a model for later surveys through his emphasis on late nineteenth-century landscape painting as the key movement in national art, Moore also set a precedent for the positioning of Aboriginal art and visual culture within a broader art historical framework. He presents rock art as a starting point for the history of Australian art, beginning with George Grey’s account of his discovery of rock painting in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia. Moore’s interest in Aboriginal art was inspired by Australian Aboriginal Art (National Museum of Victoria, 1929), the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to take place in a public gallery, which featured a range of rock carvings, bark paintings, ceremonial objects, weapons, utensils, as well as models, dioramas, and displays and was accompanied by a number of public lectures and an illustrated catalogue.
From the 1920s Aboriginal art intersected with the public sphere on a broader level both through the impact of such exhibitions and the accessibility of public collections, and also through emergent desert tourism in Central Australia. Margaret Preston was the leading advocate of Aboriginality during this era. She contributed a number of articles to The Home and Art in Australia, beginning with “Why I became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923), in which she explains her desire to create a form of modern art “a purely Australian product” (Preston 2006a, 68). The adaptation of the earth-toned color palette and flat, asymmetrical motifs of Aboriginal art provided a vehicle through which to articulate these goals, with Preston asserting in 1925, “It is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring” (Preston 2006b, 156).
Preston supported the display, Australian Aboriginal Art and its Application, at the David Jones Art Gallery in 1941, which coincided with the North American touring exhibition, Art of Australia 1788–1941, co-curated by Ure Smith and Theodore Sizer, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. The accompanying catalogue begins with an essay by Preston that declares the “limitless possibilities” that Aboriginal art provided for artists and concludes with her painting, Aboriginal Landscape (1941), which Ure Smith champions “as a basis of a new outlook for a national art for Australia” (Preston 1941, 16; Ure Smith 1941, 28). It also includes sections on “The First British Artists in Australia,” “The Foundation of an Australian School”, and “Modern Art in Australia”, with text borrowed from William Moore and J.S. MacDonald. American magazine reviews of the exhibition suggest that the Aboriginal component, including bark paintings from Spencer’s collection, represented the most interesting aspect to overseas critics and audiences (Thomas 2011, 7–8). Aboriginal art enjoyed particular prominence on the domestic front as well, appearing regularly in Art in Australia from 1941 alongside Western modernist art, and featuring in an exhibition of worldwide “Primitive Art” organized by Daryl Lindsay, the new director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in 1943. In an introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, “Has Australian Aboriginal Art a Future?”, German anthropologist Leonhard Adam, who was deported to Australia with other Jewish artists and scholars during World War II, lobbies for the preservation and promotion of post-colonial Aboriginal art: “Some people think that European art materials should be avoided, and that any modern influence must result in the deterioration of primitive art. They forget, however that art is not a static, but a dynamic phenomenon…” (Adam 2006, 448, 453).
With the advent of the Second World War, emerging expressionist and surrealist tendencies in landscape painting challenged the pastoralist tradition through the promotion of a universal vision of the Australian bush dominated by its relentless elements, evident in the work of artists like Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, and James Gleeson.2 In 1939 the Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in Melbourne displayed for the first time in Australia new developments in European modernism previously seen only through reproductions, galvanizing liberal and radical artistic factions (Chanin and Miller 2005). A series of polemical institutional disputes between the conservative art establishment and these emerging factions unfolded around the foundation of an Australian Academy of Art in Canberra in 1937 by the federal government’s attorney general Robert G. Menzies, a staunch anti-modernist, and the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) established in response in 1938 through the initiatives of Melbourne artist and educator George Bell (Stephen et al. 2006, 132).
The CAS was plagued by internal divisions between moderate modernists interested in formal experimentation and a group of younger avant-garde artists associated with the Melbourne patrons John and Sunday Reed, including Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, who called for a radical and anarchist approach to art-making. Tensions simmered between this avant-garde group who prioritized art for art’s sake and those in the CAS who promoted a commitment to society through social realist art (Stephen et al. 2006, 399). The two sides of this wartime debate are encapsulated in Albert Tucker’s “Art, Myth and Society” (1943) and Noel Counihan’s response, “How Albert Tucker Misrepresents Marxism” (1943). While Tucker champions artistic autonomy and
