Art In Twentieth Century Australia

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Introduction The art plays an important role in the way people live, think, and how they feel about themselves. From the outset, the art in Australia takes a part in shaping and sharing of the cultural identity. The modern movement of the twentieth century in Melbourne and Sydney formed a small supportive group to advance their theories. It provided some the most intensive field and passionately recorded art in Australian history. A sense of nationalism gave rise to the Ned Kelly series by Nolan and Russell Drysdale’s Men Feeding his Dogs. They were responsible for the depiction of the most desperate images of the Australian life of that period. One of the most significant things is that the women artists got the leadership in the modern movement …show more content…

The beginning of the twentieth century represented an expatriate era in the Australian art. For instance, such artists as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton found their place in the London’s Royal Academy of Arts. However, the majority of these expatriate painters returned to Australia after the First World War. Consequently, the European avant-garde gave an inspiration to the development of the Australian modernist’s movement. The most significant point of a new art direction was a rejection of the traditional representation of the world. The innovators followed the new European trends and started to experiment with various stylistic and technological innovations. Thus, the forms and styles went beyond the content and subject matter in the paintings. The evolution of the Modernism was also due to the advances in the technology and science. However, the language of the new art tendencies was unfamiliar for the society. As a result, it met a strong resistance from the common Australian public. In spite of it, mostly all of the new aspects of the modernist movement had no boundaries for the free expansion into the Australian culture. For instance, in the 1920s, several artists formed the Sydney Contemporary Group. The same groups started to appear in Melbourne and formed the Contemporary Art Society in 1938 (Roberts, 2009, p. n.d). These organization included a predominate number of modernist …show more content…

Women were a crucial force of its extension. According to the art historian Bernard Smith: “Indeed, the contribution of women to post-impressionism in Australia appears to have been corporately greater than that of men...this is unusual, for women do not normally figure as prominently in the visual arts as do men (Smith, 1962, p. 198). The reason of it was a rising of the feminists’ movements in Australia and establishing of the United Association of women in Sydney. The women’s movements began in the late 1880 and 1890s and reached the highest point in1906 and 1914 (Peers, 2011, pp. 3-7). Thus, when in the 1920s the Australian art felt the first signs of atrophy and getting the landscape cliché the female artists could save it. Such as Norah Simpson, Grace Cossington, Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, and Grace Crowley injected vitality and a modern approach to the style of paintings. These women focused on new ideas of the subject matter and became the pioneers of modernism in Australia. Many of these modern female painters had unconventional lives. They traveled, studied, and lived in Europe. Mostly all of them were financially independent and did not try to comfort the requirements of the male art-buying public. Lots of them sacrificed all their lives only for art. Thus, they decided to stay unmarried and childless. Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor

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