Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s

142 Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s 143 MARGARET CILENTO Sydney-born Margaret Cilento grew up in Brisbane where she studied art with Caroline Barker at Sommerville House school for girls, attended Barker’s Brisbane Sketch Club and life-drawing classes, and received drawing lessons from FJ Martyn Roberts. 1 In the 1940s, she moved to Sydney where she shared a flat with fellow Queensland artist Margaret Olley and studied at the East Sydney Technical College before being awarded the 1946 Queensland Wattle Day League travelling art scholarship. The award enabled Cilento to travel to New York where she studied with the innovative printmaker Stanley William Hayter and the Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo, and then at the Subjects of the Artist School founded by New York’s avant-garde artists, including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell. 2 The opportunity brought Cilento into contact with developments in contemporary art that she explored further after moving to Paris where she studied at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and saw the work of Pablo Picasso and other modern European artists who were revitalising classical traditions. The international influences Cilento absorbed can be observed in her painting The immigrants , made in 1951 shortly after her return to Brisbane. Despite the culture shock of returning home, Cilento set about completing the painting in only ten days, entering the artwork under the title The new land in a travelling art prize sponsored by Italian shipping line Flotta Lauro to encourage Italian migration to Australia. 3 Using her brother and his friend as models for her neoclassical vision of bronzed bathers, Cilento blended elements of Picasso’s mythic Mediterranean landscapes with a quintessential image of Brisbane suburbia. 4 Her innovative approach would soon be appreciated by students attending her painting classes in the basement of St Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point. Notes 1 Anita Callaway, ‘Margaret Cilento’, Design & Art Australia Online , 1995, <https://daao.library.unsw.edu.au/bio/margaret-cilento/biography/> , viewed December 2024. 2 Julie Ewington, ‘Margaret Cilento: An introduction’, in Julie Ewington & Lynne Seear, Cilento: The Immigrants in Focus , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1999, p.2. 3 Lynne Seear, ‘Margaret Cilento: The Immigrants ’, in Margaret Cilento: The Immigrants in Focus , p.3. 4 Seear, p.4. Margaret Cilento , The immigrants 1951, reworked 1952