Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940, an expansive new exhibition co-presented by AGSA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Some of the 50 featured artists are already well-known: the Archibald-winning face of Nora Heysen; the gentle cubism of Dorrit Black; Margaret Preston’s still life studies; and the vivid, stippled colours of Grace Cossington Smith.
But many, like Kong Sing, are being salvaged from obscurity. “That’s been the challenge of the whole project,” Freak says. “Especially these artists who were working internationally, trying to trace their movements, trying to find their works that sold overseas.
Dangerously Modern’s focus is deliberately blurry; Australian and New Zealand-born expatriates are placed alongside inbound migrants, reflecting a decoupling from a notion of national identity that resurgent – and male-led – art movements back home were trying to galvanise. Freak and her colleagues trace more subtle points of convergence and exchange: Kong Sing once shared a Sydney studio with Florence Rodway; oils by Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick respond to exoticised colours and markets of Tangier, Morocco and Kairouan, Tunisia; and Girl in the sunshine, by New Zealand-born Edith Collier, was painted in the Irish village of Bunmahon, as part of a 1915 summer class led by Margaret Preston.
For artists who bucked tradition, borders and convention, their often cool reception back home and subsequent omission from the Australian canon was structural, geographic and political.
The show’s title comes from Thea Proctor, who was amused to be regarded as “dangerously modern” upon her homecoming in 1926. Freak and her co-curators also point to the art historian Bernard Smith’s dismissive labelling of female expatriate artists as mere “messenger girls” in 1988.
Some works were literally too hot to handle; it’s hard to picture a stronger expression of patriarchal suppression than the day Collier arrived home to find her father had burned a series of her boundary-pushing nudes. (A rare survivor appears in Dangerously Modern, making its first Australian appearance.)
Source: The ‘dangerous’ Australian women whose art was dismissed, forgotten – and even set on fire
