Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

IN THE CAUSE OF MODERNISM Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Anne Kirker The modern note in the work of both these ladies comes as a breath offresh air to liven up the staleness of our Australian Art atmosphere. H. E. B., 19251 % s has been intimated by writers 1|| since the 1920s, between the JL m two world wars a number of influential women artists in Australia promoted a bold modernist alternative to traditional academic practice.2Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor, referred to in the opening quotation, were outstanding advocates of the new emphasis on design and the shift away from naturalism with its connotations of conservative nationalism. Their joint exhibition in late 1925 at the Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, was just one demonstration that they were both working in a common cause. They were champions of each other despite the fact that Prestons artistic expression was ultimately more radical than Proctors and that Preston held an intense desire to shape a distinctive national art for Australia which was not shared by her friend and professional colleague. The journals Art in Australia and The Home provided a forum for their modernist views and designs, the latter being a smart and sophisticated feminine vehicle for their mutual concerns. For The Home they collaborated on an illustrated article 'The gentle art of arranging flowers', which was a kid-gloved riposte to Whistler's famous essay 'The gentle art of making enemies' of 1890. That Whistler stood as a revered male artist in the standard accounts of art historywhere all but a fewwomen featured, would not have been lost on Preston and Proctor. The article would have delighted female artists in Sydney and elsewhere Facing page Thea Proctor Australia 1879-1966 The swing 1925 (printed 1926) Woodcut, hand- coloured on laid Oriental paper 41X34.5cm Purchased 1980 Queensland Art Gallery Below Catalogue brochure to the Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November - 2 December 1925 THEA PROCTOR and MARGARET PRESTON who fostered close professional and personal networks in the early decades of the twentieth century. From well-to-do backgrounds, this generation of women could enjoy the recent successes of the suffrage movement, had easier access to art training, could travel abroad unchaperoned, and could anticipate more employment opportunities. They remained on the whole unmarried and/or childless, allowing their careers to flourish uninterrupted. Margaret Preston (née McPherson) was born in Adelaide in 1875, moving as a child to Sydney with her family where she received private art tuition, and afterwards studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne (1893 and 1896-97). Upon graduation, McPherson established her own school in Adelaide. She spent two periods in Europe, the first (1904-06) travelling with the artist Bessie Davidson, the second (1912-19) accompanied by Gladys Reynell. McPherson exhibited in Paris and London, teaching to support herself. On her return to Australia she married William Preston, a company director, and settled in Sydney. By all accounts he was supportive of his wife's career to the extent of finding the pattern­ maker to make up her huon pine blocks when she began producing woodcuts in the early 1920s. Thea Proctor was born in Armidale in 1879 and as a young woman studied at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School where she, in turn, became a teacher in the late 1920s. She was principally based in London during 1903-21 producing lithographs, watercolours and fan designs in a fashionable fin-de-siècle mode. Her advocacy of Modernism would not be apparent until she returned to Australia. Moving to Sydney, Proctor joined the Society ofArtists and in 1925 was a founding member of the Contemporary Group. At this time, following the example of Margaret Preston, she began to produce woodcuts. Although Preston and Proctor did not move in the same art circles in London, in the smaller confines of Sydney these two experienced modernists found common ground. They shared a desire to impose a considered, more intellectual perception on Australian practice in tune with English critic and painter Roger Lry's Vision and Design text of 1920 where he interpreted 'significant form' as 'the outcome of an endeavour to express an idea rather than to create a pleasing object'.3The two women met in 1922 after the art commentator Basil Burdett showed Proctor some of Prestons recent paintings and coloured woodblock prints. Preston, in turn, introduced Proctor to the art of Ukiyo-e woodblock printing, which she declared to be: ... one of the easiest of all the crafts in the way of materials. Anyone can have them. A piece of wood, a knife, some ink, and a sheet of paper ... It is a comfortable kind of craft... also if you are lucky a paying one.4 These were pragmatic considerations as the printed image, in comparison to painting, could be produced at little cost in a domestic context and it was well suited to illustrative work. The graphic arts (printmaking and drawing) were particularly appropriate 124 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965