Dangerously Modern: Australian women artists in Europe 1890-1940
Thea Proctor knew she was back in Australia when a reviewer declared a 1925 exhibition of her woodblock prints to be “dangerously modern”. Perhaps it was the influence of her co-exhibitor, Margaret Preston, a famous proselytiser for Modernity, or perhaps it was because the artists had chosen to exhibit their work in bright red frames, but Proctor was still surprised. In London, the same work had been considered rather conservative.
This was the reason, in that period between the wars, why so many Australian women artists set sail for Europe. Art in their homeland was dominated by the ‘gumtree school’ - heirs to the great Streeton, who was back in Melbourne being treated as a role model for local artists. It was a vision of sun-drenched, pastoral landscapes that rejected the industrial squalor of war-torn Europe.
For many artists this blue-and-gold idyll was creatively stifling. It was also almost exclusively masculine, with the boards of major art museums controlled by patrician males with rigidly conservative tastes. Those artists who made tentative forays into Modernism were treated as marginal figures, or – in the case of many female artists -hobbyists.