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

15 Sidney Nolan , Escaped convict (detail) 1948 ‘Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s–1950s’ presents more than 140 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works of decorative art by artists from Queensland and those who travelled to work here in the mid twentieth century. Drawing on the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s Collection, the exhibition illuminates the natural features and artistically reimagined contours of Australia’s most decentralised state. Queenslanders principally live along the state’s subtropical coastal fringe, from its densely populated south-east corner to the distant and sparsely inhabited reaches of Cape York and the Torres Strait in the far north, with far fewer living out west in the vast outback of central Queensland. As might be expected, the artists represented in ‘Under a Modern Sun’ reflect this demography, with most, but certainly not all, working in the state’s major urban, inland and coastal centres. The Queensland sun not only sustained the state’s flourishing rural and agricultural industries, but also fostered a new urban artistic milieu, not least in Brisbane. European Modernism, which spanned the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries, was an artistic response to the period’s astonishing rate of industrialisation, urbanisation and technological change. The first seeds of an Australian Modernism, however, were planted later and from a distance by a small group of artists who travelled to Europe, mainly France and England, in the early years of the twentieth century. Working in the progressive European schools and academies of the time, such as the Slade School of Fine Art in London and Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, artists learned to reject tradition and to strive for more dynamic, simplified and subjective responses to the modern era. The movement would not fully take root in Queensland until after World War Two. In Queensland, as historian Peter Spearritt outlines in this volume, the 1930s to 1950s was also a time of rapid urbanisation and social and political upheaval. In Brisbane, Modernism was more idiosyncratically Foreword Chris Saines CNZM, Director, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art