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Reviewed by:
  • Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967
  • Terry Smith
Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Phillip Goad , eds. Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2006. Pp. xxvii + 1039. $50.00 (paper).

This volume is a very welcome addition to the corpus of publications covering art, architecture, and design in Australia during the twentieth century. Edited by a decorative and applied arts museum curator, an art historian, and an architectural historian, each from a different state capital, it brings together documents from within each of these arts––itself an unprecedented step. It includes a lot of commentary on Aboriginal art. With over two hundred entries, it is the largest anthology of its kind. All of the main tendencies in the visual arts are represented, in texts that were the first to register their occurrence or those that tracked their unfolding. As retired curator Daniel Thomas states in his preface, "serendipity stimulates" the pleasures of browsing, and precipitates "unexpected insights" into the thinking of those whose art and art world positions one thought one knew well enough. But it also raises some larger questions. What was the nature of modernism in these arts, and how did these arts relate to other, broader cultural, social, and economic formations of modernity?

The chronological span of this volume is set by precedent at one end and, perhaps, generational lag at the other. The precedent is the collection edited by Bernard Smith, Documents on Art and Taste in Australia: The Colonial Period, 1770–1914 (1975). The sixty year gap in that groundbreaking volume––between a time seen as truly historical and the present––has narrowed to forty in this anthology. There are of course endlesss contingencies that shape the timing and content of books of this kind: so many are proposed and planned, so few are realized. Their appearance at all amounts to a cultural signpost. Smith's volume signaled that, following the foundational work of art historical research into Australian art and the essential educational work of providing general survey texts about it (both had been done, mostly, and most effectively, by him), the time was ripe for a collection of original writings by Australian artists, and of writings about their art and the circumstances of its making. Public interest, museum attendance, and [End Page 393] university and high school enrolments, were growing apace. An excited nationalism, promoted by a recently elected Labor Party, took certain painters of the later nineteenth century (known as the Heidelberg School, after a favorite painting spot near Melbourne) as expressing this spirit of belonging. Smith's anthology pictured the roles of art within the hard work of settlement, the pragmatic sources of its distinctive realism, and its aspirations toward civilized behavior or "taste." The subsequent success of what, in the French context, Pierre Bourdieu acutely labeled "the love of art" led to these native sons being relabeled "the Australian Impressionists."

Modernism & Australia appears at a different historical moment. Since the 1970s, Australian polity has, broadly speaking, wavered between two opposite poles. First, an outward-looking openness to world currents, especially those in Asia and the country's Pacific neighbors, and an inward-looking embrace of the cultures of its indigenous peoples (Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders), both built on a core set of commitments to a welfare state and an invention-driven economy. Second, a reliance on traditional businesses and an untrammeled market, retreat into a suburban isolation as the root of national values, and dependence on "great powers," particularly the United States, for protection within what is seen as an increasingly threatening international arena. Almost everything that is definitive of Australian life occurs in between these poles (the two major political parties represent, roughly, the differences). In art during the past forty years, provocations and polarizations, sparking both conformity and originality, have clustered around terms such as "provincialism," "internationalism," and "Aboriginality."

These concerns echo through the organization of this volume, although of course it treats the period prior to the 1970s. It is as if the editors were, perhaps partly unconsciously, searching for the antecedents of these issues. Modernism & Australia, as its title implies, is...

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