Visual Art
This major new exhibition of Australian women modernists is a history of heroic self-authorship, and of erasure. By Jennifer Mills.
Dangerously Modern empowers Australia’s female modernists
“Australia is a fine place in which to think ... you do not get bothered with foolish new ideas,” Margaret Preston quipped in an essay for The Home magazine in 1923. By then, Preston was a leading Australian modernist and had twice lived in Europe. Exposed to international ideas, Preston returned converted and set about dragging Australia into the new age.
Dangerously Modern lauds 50 women artists who underwent some version of that transformation. Not all were as successful as Preston, but each has made a contribution to this country’s sometimes reluctant advancement. A collaboration between the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Dangerously Modern draws on the strengths of both institutions. Meticulously researched, it brings together an extraordinary range of work.
Curators Elle Freak, Tracey Lock and Wayne Tunnicliffe have taken an expansive view of modernity, starting the exhibition in 1890, giving themselves ample room to examine periods of development. The journey begins in a wallpapered Victorian drawing room. We are met by the startling miniatures of Justine Kong Sing, who had success in her lifetime but whose work has suffered from art-historical neglect. Nearby, Edith Collier’s Girl Sitting on a Bed (1917-18) looks on, a rare surviving nude by this artist whose more daring paintings were destroyed by her father on her return to Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand. This is the first chance to see Collier’s work in Australia.
There are plenty of household names here, too: Dorrit Black, Stella Bowen, Grace Cossington Smith, Bessie Davidson, Nora Heysen and Thea Proctor. For these women, modernism was not simply an art movement: it was a social movement promising self-determination and self-authorship. They followed that current to Europe and drew from it. In many cases, they were vital contributors to its energy. While some returned charged, others chose to stay.
Among the latter was Agnes Goodsir, who settled in Paris. Her magnetic portraits are suffused with a frank beauty. Those here are mostly of her partner, Rachel Dunn (“Cherry”), reflecting this show’s interest in personal narratives. There’s a lovely through-line from Goodsir’s private Woman Reading (1915) to Hilda Rix Nicholas’s bold, public Une Australienne (1926). We’re offered insight into not just the expansion of modern art but the development of a modern sense of self.
Bessie Davidson also remained in Paris, where she lived with her partner Marguerite Leroy and was celebrated, exhibiting until her death in 1965. Her travelling paintbox, donated to AGSA in 2018 by a goddaughter, is normally on display in the Elder Wing. It’s moving to see it here, in a room featuring some of her most fully realised work.
Davidson’s interiors are exuberant, dreamy evocations of intimacies, of possible lives. There is an air of private liberation: the unmade bed, the figure of her lover in the mirror, the glorious light. As with Goodsir’s portraits or Janet Cumbrae Stewart’s softly glowing The Chinese Coat (1919), they resonate with queer power.
The dominant narrative about this era is that women artists sought training in the more daring modernist societies of Paris and London because they were locked out of larger conservative institutions. That may be true, but it de-emphasises their agency. These artists forged their own paths, travelled widely, made new lives possible. Queer artists had a particular urge for fresh forms of expression and representation. Belle Époque Paris was a lesbian haven; devotion to art was part of a queer subculture, particularly among expats.
While some, like Davidson, were able to live independently, others struggled financially. Bowen’s life was precarious, profoundly unsettled. Kong Sing saved up to go to Europe, working as a governess for years. She got there at the age of 43.
War had a transformative influence. Hilda Rix Nicholas’s moving battlefield scene, These gave the world away (1917), was made after her husband of only a few weeks was killed at the Somme. There are few depictions of violence. Instead we have Cossington Smith’s post-impressionist The sock knitter (1915) or Collier’s Serviceman in attic studio (1917-18), likely a portrait of her brother. Preston and Gladys Reynell made use of their ceramics skills in rehabilitation workshops for the wounded. Colours dim, distressing scenes appear. New forms arise from the emotional necessity of a changing world.
The influence of place and landscape is present, too. We see Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick transformed by North Africa, Preston, Collier and Reynell by the wet light of the Irish coast. Mount Etna had a wonderful effect on Dorrit Black’s increasingly graphic prints.
The welcome focus on development offers insight into these artists’ technical journeys. In a rare treat, three scenes of the French village of Mirmande hang side by side. Painted at the same workshop in 1928 by Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar, the cubist influence comes through. Each tackles the formal challenge in her own way. It’s a window into the complex relationship between technique and voice, with the added strength of shared experience.
While there’s a surfeit of beauty here, it’s difficult to fight back anger at the stories of neglect. We know that for every artist here there are others who never found an audience, who gave up on their practice, or whose archive lacked the posthumous assistance of a canny niece or godchild. Agnes Goodsir’s partner sent her paintings to Australia after her death. Australia by then had the good sense to keep them.
Some of these artists’ biographies are more privately devastating. Evelyn Chapman married and quit. Florence Fuller spent the last two decades of her life in Gladesville mental hospital. Yet all these women had the strength and vision to become artists. Most found ways to learn, teach and continue practising. Some achieved success in their lifetimes, while others are now being restored to their places in Australian art history.
In recent years there have been many efforts to reassess the status of women artists, often as individuals. Dangerously Modern represents a significant contribution to the charge and offers a sense of a more collective power. The task of restitution remains urgent, even after 50 years of feminist effort. One hopes that contemporary women and non-binary artists will not have to wait another century.
In the final room, two familiar self-portraits beckon. Stella Bowen’s Self-portrait (1928), made after her separation from Ford Madox Ford, is amplified in the flesh. This is an image of blazing intensity, pain and defiance. Across the room, Nora Heysen gazes more contemplatively from a domestic scene in Down and out in London (1937). Soon she will return home and forge an extraordinary career: the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, the first female Australian war artist. For now, she is bathed in London’s pale light, softened by the fresh risk of loosened brushwork.
Like so many of the works here, these paintings hum with courage. Dangerously Modern is electric.
Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940 is showing at AGSA until September 7 and AGNSW from October 11 to February 1, 2026.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "Ladies of the canon".
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