Modernism in Australia and Oceania
(Previously published as 'The Experience of Aboriginality in the Creation of the Radically New' in Ross, S. (ed.) (2014) Modernist World, Abingdon: Routledge.)1
(Previously published as 'The Experience of Aboriginality in the Creation of the Radically New' in Ross, S. (ed.) (2014) Modernist World, Abingdon: Routledge.)1
In a career that has spanned over sixty years, Elizabeth Cameron Dalman has been shaped by a politically progressive view of the role of dance…
Norman Lindsay was one of Australia’s most prominent (and most notorious) artists in the early twentieth century. Throughout his extensive career he worked in a…
Kenneth Slessor (born Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser in East Orange, NSW on 27 March 1901, died 30 June 1971) was a major Australian poet, essayist, editor,…
Albert Tucker was a modern Australian painter, known best for his series of works depicting the horrors of wartime and harsh images of the Australian…
Tonalism is an often under-appreciated aspect of Australian painting, which developed from the mid-1910s to the 1950s. A technique pioneered by Max Meldrum (1875–1955) it…
Lloyd Rees is known for his landscapes celebrating the area around Sydney and the south coast and for his masterly drawings. He was born in…
Sidney Nolan is a renowned Australian artist, especially for his iconic rendering of the bushranger and anti-hero Ned Kelly. Primarily known as a painter, he…
William Dobell was an icon of Australian art during his lifetime, renowned for portraiture but also for the controversy surrounding his being awarded the Archibald…
The moniker “New Zealand Modernism” is most frequently used today to describe art and architecture produced in New Zealand from the 1930s through the 1960s…
Albert Namatjira was the leading artist of the modern Aboriginal watercolor art movement at the Hermannsburg (Ntaria) Lutheran mission in Central Australia. He was the…
Clarice Beckett was a major Australian artist, and remains an important figure in feminist history. Beckett’s abstracted impressionism, subtle color harmonies, and ordered placement of…
Judy Cassab was a celebrated portrait and landscape painter, as well as a printmaker. Painting in her own distinctive expressionist style, her work employed both…
The Antipodeans was the title of a group exhibition of figurative painters at the Victorian Artists’ Society in August 1959. Signatories to the exhibition catalogue…
Olive Cotton was one of Australia’s leading 20th-century photographers. She became a skilled observer of nature, incorporating both the principles of Pictorialism and modernism into…
Indigenous modernism is not to be confused with earlier ideas of modern Indigenous art, though they do to some extent pre-empt it. In the mid-20th…
Roy de Maistre was born in New South Wales and is recognized as an initiator of modern art practices in Australia. Aware of the new…
The group of avant-garde Australian artists and their supporters, now identified as the Heide Circle, evolved over three decades, from the pioneering modernism of the…
Fred Williams was an Australian painter and printmaker who bridged the gulf between the country’s landscape painters and contemporary art. In the 1960s he turned…
Janet Frame was a celebrated New Zealand author with a prolific literary career and a dramatic personal history. Mirroring Frame’s own life, her writing frequently…
Christopher Dench is one of a group of British composers who emerged in the early 1980s associated with the notion of New Complexity (other composers…
The New Zealand-born architect Amyas Connell was responsible for a number of strikingly modern buildings, mainly houses, in 1930s England. The first of these was…
Russell Drysdale was an Australian artist who created an original vision of the Australian landscape from the 1940s to the 1960s, portraying the emptiness and…
Grace Cossington Smith was one of Australia’s foremost female modernist artists. Having developed an enthusiasm for modern theories of color and design at the Dattilo…
Lesbia Harford was an Australian writer and political activist. Despite these seemingly complementary roles, she did not view her writing as an instrument for social…