Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia (review)

Modern Times follows an earlier collection of primary sources by the same editors and publisher, Modernism and Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture, 1917–1967 (2006). In Australia it is accompanied by an eponymous travelling exhibition that opened at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, in August 2008, where Ann Stephen is curator. Reviewers of the earlier volume read it, incorrectly, as elaborating Bernard Smith's received account of the Australian reception of modernism in Australian Painting (1962) as a series of belated, style-based shifts occurring discretely within painting, sculpture, design, and architecture. Accordingly, in their introduction to Modern Times, the editors stress that the essays collected here tell, "for the first time", another, "untold" history of Australia's informed engagement with modernism as an international, interdisciplinary project spanning five decades, from 1917 to 1967.

The twenty-five essays collected here deal with the popular reception of "modernism"—or "modernity"—in and range of media, including painting, architecture, design, fashion, photography, and advertising; and a range of sites, such as skyscrapers, exhibitions, factories, milkbars, and suburban swimming pools. They are divided into five thematic, roughly chronological sections: "Abstract in Australia," "Bodies & Bathers," "City Living," "Designs on the Space Age," and "Electric Signs & Spectacles." As in many wide-ranging collections with multiple authors, however, the editors' initial arguments about modernism and social modernity, cultural nationalism and internationalism, and the belatedness or otherwise of provincial cultures, tend to drop in and out of their contributors' essays, varying as they do in content, length, and approach.

Their argument is cogently demonstrated, for example, in several of the essays in "Abstract in Australia," including Andrew McNamara's "The Bauhaus in Australia," Annabel Pegus's "Colour in Art," and Heather Johnson's "Modern Rooms." These essays use prosopography—so common now in transnational histories—to trace modernism's flows of people, texts, and ideas across national borders, as seen in a series of exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1910s to the 1960s: Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre's "Colour in Art Exhibition" (1919); de Maistre's contribution to Sydney Ure Smith's Burdekin House Exhibition (1929); Alleyene Zander's incorporation of locally made furniture in her Exhibition of British Contemporary Art (1933); and the involvement of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, a former Bauhaus teacher who came to Australia in 1940, in Clement Meadmore's "The Bauhaus: Aspects and Influence" (1961). Pegus demonstrates that de Maistre's experiments with colour were contemporary with similar experiments in London and Paris, while Meadmore's internationalism made him unconcerned with what he called the "geographical thing" (5): that is, the "nationalist modernism" of the Antipodeans. While the careers of de Maistre, Hirschfeld-Mack, Margaret Preston, John Power, Wolfgang Sievers, and Harry Seidler confrm modernism's international project, these essays by and large focus on the Australian phase of their careers, paradoxically giving the book a national frame of reference – de Maistre, for example, plays no part in the narrative after his departure for London in 1930, where he associated with Francis Bacon, Herbert Read, and Patrick White.

Stephen's essay, "The Body at the Scene of Modernism," serves as an introduction to the essays in Part 2, outlining the theme of "embodied modernism." Her arguments about the body, the body image and mass consumption, exemplified by the Berlei lingerie company's mechanical figure-type indicator, suggest Tim Armstrong's influential formulation of "prosthetic modernity."¹ This usefully draws together a range of examples from many fields of practice—from X-rays in medical practice and avant-garde photography, to the migration of Max Dupain's nudes from modernist art photography to advertising and erotica—but the argument might be sharpened by a distinction between forms of high modernism and what cinema historian Miriam Hansen terms "vernacular modernism."² The connections—as well as the discontinuities—between these domains of practice are reflected in the content and approach of...