as a set of derivative stylistic tendencies. In Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art (1981) Richard Haese, like McQueen, also promotes a generative local modernist culture. Arguing that “the absorption of the European modernist tradition into an Australian artistic milieu was a preliminary step for a rediscovery and re-examination of an authentic and local cultural tradition”, he examines the development of surrealist, expressionist and social realist modes of Australian art in the 1930s and 40s (Haese 1981, ix). Haese focuses on the debates between conservative landscapists and experimental modernists, as well as the rift that developed in the Contemporary Art Society between the social realists aligned with the Communist movement and the painters and poets associated with the Reeds, arguing that the artwork borne out of these debates and rifts, distinguished by an intensity rarely matched in Australian art history, represents “one of the least recognized of seminal traditions in this country” (Haese 1981, vii–viii).
In 1984 two exhibitions were mounted that sought to reassess the social and psychological dimensions of modernist art during the Second World War and postwar years: Art and Social Commitment: An End to the City of Dreams, 1931–1948 (AGNSW), and Aspects of Australian Figurative Painting 1942–1962: Dreams, Fears and Desires, hosted by the S.H. Erwin Gallery, Sydney. The latter in particular was significant in its critique of Bernard Smith’s paradigm of modernism in Australia. The accompanying catalogue, written by Christine Dixon and Terry Smith with an introduction by Virginia Spate, calls into question the role of the Antipodeans as set forth in the Antipodean Manifesto “as guardians of the Australian myth,” arguing instead that they were motivated by “a fear of the fragility of culture” spurred by the tensions of the Cold War (Dixon and Smith 1984, 27; Spate, 1984, 7). “Whilst calling for social responsibility, the Manifesto was actually mourning its loss,” according to Dixon and Smith; it was driven by an agenda to preserve the notion of universal and essential myths in a society governed by uncertainty and striving for security (Dixon and Smith 1984, 31–32).
Other studies strove to temper the modernist narrative by revaluating alternative tendencies in Australian art at the time. In “The Lost Art of Federation” (1987), Margaret Plant asserts that the quest for modernism in Australia was “pointless and ahistorical,” arguing that early twentieth-century Australian art was dominated by an Edwardian conservatism concerned with the “Australian need to celebrate belonging” through picturing everyday and heroic Australian life epitomized in Hans Heysen’s landscapes of rural male labourers (Plant 1987, 111, 125). While Plant questions the relevance of modernism in Australia, Ian Burn, Nigel Lendon, Charles Merewether, and Ann Stephen seeks to reclaim the significance of regional landscape painting as the most important tendency of the period, despite its dismissal during the 1940s, in The Necessity of Australian Art: An Essay about Interpretation (1988). Citing William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934) as a central text in the field, they argue that the landscape school, while broadly supported on an institutional and market level, was not solely driven by conservative ideologies, but also catered to an emerging capitalist society and urbanized population through the depiction of national industries and of Australia’s distinctive environment and natural beauty, contributing to a communal sense of cultural identity and nation (Burn et al. 1988, 142).
Emphasizing “the diversity of attitudes towards a modern concept of Australia” brought forth through such scholarship, Ian Burn’s National Life and Landscapes: Australian Painting 1900–1940 (1990), highlights the interaction between groups who explored styles derived from modernism, produced images with modernity as the subject, conceived of the landscape as a symbol of Australia, created art to address political and social issues, and contributed to cross-cultural artistic exchange (Burn 1990, 204–205). Moreover, in Dialogue: Writings in Art History, a compilation of his essays published the following year, Burn presents Australian art “as a cultural space continually… negotiated and refigured within a constitutive intersection of local and international forces” (Batchen 1991, xviii). Writing on the paintings exhibited in The Field in 1968, Burn suggests that they were characterized by an idiosyncratic and ahistorical borrowing of stylistic sources – from the Bauhaus and constructivism to abstract expressionism and minimalism – rather than a linear dependency on overseas models.
Like Burn, Christopher Heathcote is concerned with challenging overarching narratives of modernism in A Quiet Revolution: The Rise of Australian Art, 1946–1968 (1995), which seeks to reevaluate the conventional dichotomy between the Sydney abstractionists and Melbourne figurative painters in the two decades leading up to The Field exhibition. For Heathcote, the complexity of this critical period, when the scene was divided between figurative expressionists, the surrealists, the non-objectivists and others, is distinguished by diverging currents rather than a single modernist mainstream (Heathcote 1995, 210). It was through the “insular and chauvinistic” perspectives of those who administered the local scene in the wake of The Field, such as critic Patrick McCaughey, who according to Heathcote, wrote off the postwar period as a time of boredom and stagnation, that art of the late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s fell into neglect. Despite the flowering of feminist art history, he observes that women artists in particular from this period, aside from Joy Hester, receded into invisibility (Heathcote 1995, 216).
Building upon the seminal work of Janine Burke, the feminist retrieval of women’s contributions to modernism strove to expose the connections between gender and nationalist discourse during the 1920s and 1930s within which a “virile” local pastoralism was contrasted with an “effeminate” foreign modernism.15 Caroline Ambrus’ Australian Women Artists – First Fleet to 1945: History, Hearsay and Her Say (1992) and Helen Topliss’ Modernism and Feminism: Australian Women Artists, 1900–1940 (1996) examines how women artists such as Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Clarice Beckett, Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley, and Anne Dangar challenged male-dominated academic practice by using modernism to establish their own feminist contexts as artists. Margaret Preston, in particular, figures largely for her role as a modernist assimilator or innovative appropriator of Aboriginal culture (Butler 2005a, b). Catrionia Moore has explored the artist’s employment of Aboriginal craft as an exotic decoration in her home and still life paintings as a project of decolonization, while Deborah Edwards, in the Margaret Preston retrospective held at AGNSW in 2005, argues that the incorporation of Aboriginal decoration into her design-based modernism embodied Preston’s “own aims for a handcrafted composite expressing the simplified forms of modernity in a synthetic Aboriginal-Western form” (Edwards et al. 2005, 106; Moore 2005, 205).
In addition to a renewed interest in the contributions of women artists to Australian modernism, other marginalized figures and currents were reevaluated through a number of exhibitions, including expatriates George Lambert and Bertram Mackennal. The George W. Lambert Retrospective: Heroes and Icons (National Gallery of Australia [NGA], 2007), curated by Ann Gray, focused on Lambert’s cosmopolitan career from his work as a war artist in the Middle East to his high society Edwardian group portraits influenced by his extended stay in England, while the 2007 Bertram Mackennal retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, organized by Deborah Edwards, showcased the oeuvre of this internationally renowned sculptor whose dramatic figurative style was considered conservative and theatrical after his death.
Similarly glossed over in modernist narratives, the interest in tonalism that flourished in Melbourne in the interwar years pioneered by Max Meldrum was re-examined in the exhibition Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 (Art Gallery of South Australia [AGSA], 2008), curated by Tracey Lock-Weir, which positioned Meldrum’s perceptual landscapes as the first important advance in Australian landscape painting since the Heidelberg School and a precursor to the Minimalist interpretations of the landscape in the 1960s. In addition, the exhibition included the recovered oeuvre of Meldrum’s follower, Clarice Beckett, whose ethereal suburban, coastal and city views of the 1920s and early 1930s transcend Meldrum’s painting system. Sydney modernism of the interwar period was also comprehensively reviewed in Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World exhibition (AGNSW, 2013), curated by Deborah Edwards and Denise Mimmocchi, which traced the development of formalist experimentation
