Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

For instance the Collection demonstrates the restless travelling and seeking after knowledge that has been one of the hallmarks of Australian artists. In the late nineteenth century Australians travelled overseas to study, often staying away for decades and, like Brisbanes Bessie Gibson and Melbourne's Rupert Bunny, making the better parts of their careers abroad. As travel between Australia and Europe became easier, later artists such as the modernist Eric Wilson and James Cant, who was involved with surrealist artists in London during the 1930s, spent shorter periods away, perhaps seeing themselves more authentically as already part of the world of international art. And Ian Burn, the final artist represented in this volume, is by no means the last Australian artist to have lived overseas for an extended period. Art is a peripatetic profession, since artists must follow cultural energy and patronage, and even today many Australians choose to live and work abroad. This history of artistic migration from Australia was complemented by the arrival of important artists from abroad, especially after the Second World War. The Gallery's superb group of works by Ian Fairweather, who spent the final twenty years of his life on Bribie Island near Brisbane, is a centrepiece of the Australian display and is unrivalled by any other art museum. Another important postwar Brisbane artist of immigrant heritage was Jon Molvig; his contribution to a local form of Abstract Expressionism marked the further development of a sense of participation in international art, rather than peripheral isolation. The defining aesthetic question for much of the twentieth century was how specifically Australian forms of Modernism were to be constructed. This was what artists sought on their travels and during their studies overseas. During the decades before and during the Second World War these questions became more urgent as the country's cultural life matured. Now, some fifty years later, and in the light of the theories of Post-Modernism, it is possible to acknowledge that Modernism was not the one tme beacon of twentieth-century art and that artistic developments are not to be confused with conceptions of 'advancement' that equate cultural life with ideas about the march of progress. If the notion of'progress' is now under review, so too are older art historical concepts that insist the arts conform to a unified historical account. The French philosopher Michel Foucault has been the most influential proponent of the argument that 'history' is best understood not as one overarching master narrative — in French, Foucault dubbed these 'grands récits '— but as a series of smaller, special, inconsistent and even contradictory stories. Happily, this notion fits the history of collecting Australian art at the Queensland Art Gallery very neatly. In the Australian vernacular, the Collection resembles a group of 'short stories'— an art form in which Australians excel — rather than a great novel in which many disparate subplots must be satisfactorily woven into one great pattern. This 'short story' idea allows us to view with fresh eyes works of art which are of great merit but which sit outside canonical accounts of Australian Modernism. When Bernard Smith 16 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965