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

Kenneth Macqueen , Contour ploughing (detail) c.1945 In this outwardly traditional painting, Macqueen clearly takes delight in setting up a dialogue between the endlessly shifting patterns found in nature — the scudding movement of wispy cirrus clouds echoing the pattern produced by wheat stubble that edges newly ploughed ground — in plainly Modernist fashion. Far beyond Macqueen’s rolling hills, out west to the remote border between Queensland, the Northern Territory and South Australia, Melbourne‑born artist Sidney Nolan was commissioned by Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper to photograph the long drought devastating the Diamantina region. (Desiccated horse carcass sitting up) (from ‘Drought photographs’ series) 1952, printed 2011, shows how unflinching Nolan was in composing a black-and-white image of a horse that had died mid-lunge. His series proved too confronting to publish and, to moderate the extreme surreality of scenes witnessed by few Australians at the time, Nolan was asked to produce drawings from them for publication instead. Inspired by the petrified bodies he had seen in Pompeii, Nolan’s ‘Drought photographs’ convey a desolate but compelling picture of mid‑century outback life. Margaret Cilento returned to Brisbane in 1951 from travels to New York, London and Paris where she had absorbed the impact of both American and European Modernism, making her one of the most innovative and influential local artists of the time. Cilento’s The immigrants 1951, reworked 1952 (p.19), draws on the grand solemnity of monumental figures that expressed and dispersed than in Melbourne and Sydney, where major art schools and teachers such as George Bell and Grace Crowley helped proselytise the movement. Among its proponents here were artist Vida Lahey, who had studied in Europe, and the German émigré art historian and critic Dr Gertrude Langer. Where Langer brought a fierce intelligence to her lectures and writings on Modernism, Lahey expressed them best in paintings such as Sultry noon (Central Station, Brisbane) 1931 (p.118). The painting’s light‑drenched, tonally modulated palette, and the dynamic interlocking curvature of the station’s buildings, railway tracks and clouds bind the composition into a cohesive whole. Sultry noon is an apt departure point from which to survey the development of Modernism across Queensland. Out west, on the Darling Downs near Toowoomba, Brisbane’s urban sprawl recedes to be met by the gentle camber of Kenneth Macqueen’s watercolour landscapes. His Contour ploughing c.1945 is not merely an observation of what seems like a bucolic farming life, but in fact depicts a farm owned and worked by the artist. There is nothing like countless days spent tilling the soil and harvesting its bounty to gain a deep and sincere understanding of the land’s endlessly variegated contours and close connection to the sky. Sidney Nolan , (Desiccated horse carcass sitting up) (from ‘Drought photographs’ series) (detail) 1952, printed 2011 (Calf carcass in tree) (from ‘Drought photographs’ series) (detail) 1952, printed 2011