Australian female artists and modernism, 1900-1940

Abstract

The thesis provides a revaluation of the art of Australian women artists in the period 1900-1940. In the first instance, this study attempts to answer the question posed by a number of male historians: "Why were there so many succesful Australian women artists in the period between the two world wars?" My answer has involved the analysis of three major phenomena: 1. The women's emancipation movement which enfranchised women and gave them the key to education and subsequently to the professions. 2. The women artists of the early twentieth century were the direct benefactors of the women's movement, the confidence that the new woman acquired enabled her to continue her studies abroad for the first time in significant numbers. 3. Women artists became identified with modernism and also for their contribution to the arts and crafts movement. Critics have noted that there was a large proportion of women artists involved with various aspects of the modernist movement. The question has not been examined before in Australian art because there has not been any enquiry into their collective artistic genealogies, nor has the interconnectedness of much of their art been noticed before. When this is analysed, it becomes clear that women had a special affinity with aspects of modernism because of their gendered artistic education in the nineteenth century which rendered them particularly sensitive to some aspects of modernism. This is clear in most of the case studies of the women artists whose careers I examine here. My study has been conducted from the point of view established by certain feminist critics and art historians whose theories have provided an important perspective on the art of this period. This perspective is a necessary one, it hinges on the concepr of "difference" in women's artistic expression. This theory of "difference" also provides a parallel to the sociological study of women's liberation at the beginning of this century (the data for which IS provided in the Appendices at the end of the thesis). The theory of "difference" can be seen to link up with an analysis of gendered art education and thus facilitates an understanding of why it was that so many women readily pursued the criteria for modernist art.