A Companion to Australian Art

A Companion to Australian Art is a thorough introduction to the art produced in Australia from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the early 21st century. Beginning with the colonial art made by Australia’s first European settlers, this volume presents a collection of clear and accessible essays by established art historians and emerging scholars alike. Engaging, clearly-written chapters provide fresh insights into the principal Australian art movements, considered from a variety of chronological, regional and thematic perspectives.

The text seeks to provide a balanced account of historical events to help readers discover the art of Australia on their own terms and draw their own conclusions. The book begins by surveying the historiography of Australian art and exploring the history of art museums in Australia. The following chapters discuss art forms such as photography, sculpture, portraiture and landscape painting, examining the practice of art in the separate colonies before Federation, and in the Commonwealth from the early 20th century to the present day. This authoritative volume covers the last 250 years of art in Australia, including the Early Colonial, High Colonial and Federation periods as well as the successive Modernist styles of the 20th century, and considers how traditional Aboriginal art has adapted and changed over the last fifty years.

The Companion to Australian Art is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students of the history of Australian artforms from colonization to postmodernism, and for general readers with an interest in the nation’s colonial art history.

Christopher Allen is Senior Master in Academic Extension at Sydney Grammar School, where he teaches senior Art History as well as Greek and Latin, and National Art Critic for The Australian. He is a Trustee of the State Library of New South Wales and is the author of several books on the history of Australian art and French art in the 17^th century, as well as a major postdoctoral work on early modern art theory. Previously, Allen was lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School in Sydney and was an art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review. 

I Introduction and Historiography 1

1 Introduction 3
Christopher Allen

2 Historiography of Australian Art 16
Molly Duggins

3 Public Art Museums in Australia: A Brief History 51
Gerard Vaughan

II Dwelling in Australia 79

4 Early Sydney: A Land of Wonder and Delight 81
Richard Neville

5 Art in Van Diemen’s Land 108
David Hansen

6 Eugene von Guérard and Colonial Art in Melbourne, 1850–1880 141
Ruth Pullin

7 The Promised Land: Painting in Nineteenth-Century South Australia 167
Jane Hylton

8 Crocodiles, Bottle-Trees and Pineapple Fields: Art in Colonial Queensland 187
Glenn R. Cooke

9 Subject and Object: Locating the Portrait in Nineteenth-Century Australia 210
Mark De Vitis

10 The Heidelberg School 230
Georgina Cole

III Dwelling in the World 255

11 Exodus 257
Barry Pearce

12 The Edwardian Period (1901–1918) 275
Anna Gray

13 Color, Commerce and the Culture of Change: Sydney Modernism, 1915–1941 299
Denise Mimmocchi

14 Angry Penguins 324
Jacqui Strecker

15 Australian High Modernism 343
Sasha Grishin

16 Postwar Art: The International Context 361
Mary Eagle

17 Starting the Sixties Art Boom 383
Christopher Heathcote

18 Avant-Gardism and the Triumph of the Postmodern: 1960–1980 402
Richard Haese

IV Artforms and Themes 429

19 Australian Sculpture, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century 431
Michael Hill

20 Between the Real and The Imagined Photography in Australia 458
Isobel Crombie

21 Aboriginal Art’s Expanding Field: A New Approach 483
Philip Jones

22 Conclusion: From Postmodern to Contemporary 509
Christopher Allen

Index 524

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