ARTS112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: William Dobell, Crustacean, Harold Cazneaux
Katherine Paterson
ARTS112 Arts & Design History & Theory
Week 11
Australian Modernism
-The Proctor, Cover design for HOME v4 no1 Mar1923 > Rivalry between Sydney and
Melbourne > obsessed with making their homes and lifestyles the best > over 20
home magazines > The Great Australian Dream.
-Reacting to technology in progress or reacting against it.
-AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONISM > Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) Beaumaris Seascape
(c.1925) > light colour and subtlety > Early Morning Beaumaris (c.1925) > blurred
photographic painting style
-ABSTRACT IMPRESSIONISM > Roy de Maistre "Rythmic composition in Yellow
Green Mirror" (1919) > playing with colour as Australian landscape is vivid and bright
> Roy de Maistre went onto make art with Francis Bacon
-Art was about the cities in the 1920's, before that it was about the landscape > Grace
Cossington-Smith "Rushing" 1922 > form: line colour composition echo the rushing on
the diagonal and slightly off centre and people are abstracted > Cossington-Smith
"Centre of a City c.1925 > black lines not much detail, just slab colour > Grace
Cossington-Smith "The Lacquer Room" 1935-6 Fauvist style artwork
-Most artists in Australia make art regarding the Art Deco Harbour Bridge > "The
Bridge in Curve" 1930 > Ronald Wakelin "Bridge Under Construction" 1927 + "The
Bridge" > Jessie Trail "Building the Harbour Birdge No.1" 1927 etching > geometric
folding planes of cubism and impression it use of light and colour Dorrit Black "The
Bridge" 1930 oil
-(((((Art about the bush and the landscape > Fredrick McCubbin "The Pioneer" 1904
Triptych painting > inhospitable landscape hostile to Europeans > The fashion isn't
suitable for the climate)))))
-EXPRESSIONISM > Printmaking >Dorrit Black "Music" 1927-28 Paris Linocut
29.2x26.1 > freedom and mood of society > Chinese block print influence on Dorrit
Black's "Bush Windmill" c.1930 Sydney > Ethel Spowers "Special Edition" 1936
Melbourne special edition newspaper sales, dotting and juxtaposition of colour beside
white blocks > Thea Proctor "The Rose" 1879-1966 (evocative of Pre Rafelites style of
woman)
-Margaret Preston > began to appropriate aboriginal art for aesthetic reasons without
considering the symbolic meaning in her early works but in her later works that made
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