Source : the age
Hanging on a blue wall there is a picture of a woman. She is relaxed, completely naked, and looking just a little bit out of frame as she perches on the edge of a bed. The colours are soft and gentle, and it’s only when you take a step back that you realise that they inform the palette of the room it’s currently displayed in.
Girl sitting on a bed by Edith CollierCredit: Via Art Gallery of South Australia
There are a few things to know about this painting. Girl sitting on a bed is by New Zealand artist Edith Collier, who until now had never been exhibited in Australia. It was painted around 1917, during the artist’s time spent in London.
The main thing to know, however, is that it’s remarkable that we are seeing this work at all. Upon Collier’s return to New Zealand she was met with scathing reviews, and in the fallout of all this, her father burned most of her “progressive” works – mostly nudes. This one, however, was spared. “This work we’re thrilled to have because it is a rare surviving nude,” says Elle Freak, associate curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Collier is one of 50 women artists whose work forms Dangerously Modern, a new exhibition at Art Gallery of South Australia, curated in conjunction with Art Gallery of New South Wales.
“We had a longer list than that,” says Wayne Tunnicliffe, acting director of collections, Art Gallery of New South Wales. “We argued and we talked – we wanted artists who had connections with each other, who had had a profile in their lifetime,”
“Settling on 50 artists was definitely a challenge,” adds Freak. “We did intentionally want a mix of artists that were known to our audiences, but also some that were lesser known, in that we were hoping to see these celebrated artists in a slightly new way and in different contexts, as well as to make new discoveries or rediscoveries.”
Curators Elle Freak, Wayne Tunnicliffe and Tracey Lock at Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940. Credit: Art Gallery of South Australia
The list of artists is a carefully woven mix of well known, almost forgotten and everyone in between. In between works by Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor and Grace Cossington Smith are paintings and sculptures by women who made their mark in their own time then quietly slipped into the background of art history.
“They were known in their lifetime, and yet they just haven’t stuck in the history books,” says Freak.
There are over 200 works on display here, but some of the most sobering thoughts brought about by this exhibition are: what are the works we aren’t seeing? What are the works we’ll never see? There are the works that were destroyed, there were the works that were reportedly thrown off ships (in response to a debilitating tax that was applied to bringing artworks home to Australia), and there are those that have simply melted into history.
Me by Justine Kong Sing c1912Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales
In the first room, in a cabinet near Collier’s surviving nude is a series of miniatures, including three by Justine Kong Sing, the first professional Chinese Australian artist who went to London. Despite finding success in her lifetime, much of her work has disappeared. “She exhibited widely in London, including at the Royal Academy. We couldn’t find any of her works in the UK, and there’s a handful in Australian collections,” says Tunnicliffe. “We know there’s others, because she exhibited a lot – but we don’t know where they are.”
One of the larger works in the exhibition is A Winter morning on the coast of France (1888) by Victorian artist Eleanor Ritchie Harrison. “It’s the only major painting by her to survive, which we actually tracked down to a house in Sydney,” says Tunnicliffe. Her work was exhibited widely, until her death at the age of 41 from complications of childbirth.
For many of the artists on display, even during their lifetime their work was maligned or excluded from Australian art history.
“There was a sense that if you’re not painting an Australian landscape, it’s not Australian art. If you’re outside of Australia, if you’re beyond its borders, you’re no longer participating in Australian Art,” says Freak. Many artists, she explains, felt they were “kind of pushed out of the story of Australian art because they were no longer residing in Australia”.
The erasure continued even after the artists had left their marks. “These women, they were high profile in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and after the Second World War, with the return to conservatism which happened after the war, many of these women became written out of Australian art history,” says Tunnicliffe.
The model (study of a nude) c. 1905-14 by Bessie GibsonCredit: Bessie Gibson estate
“As Australian art history started to be written by male art historians, the woman’s role became more and more diminished until they virtually disappeared. And really it was the 1970s when feminist art historians began working this field and reclaiming them, that’s when interest grew.”
Dangerously Modern is an exhibition overflowing with stories. There’s the big picture narrative of a generation of women artists making their way over to Europe to pursue artistic dreams – some made their way easily, others struggled financially. There are the stories of what happened when they got there – relationships they formed and the ways they made ends meet.
And there are the stories in the works themselves. One of the most striking works appears about halfway through. Painted by Hilda Rix Nicholas, These gave the world away (1917) is a large-scale painting where the artist has imagined the scene of her husband’s death in the Somme Valley.
All 50 women in this exhibition left home to pursue their art. Some returned, some didn’t. Some became household names, others quietly dropped out of art history. One of the hopes of this exhibition is to, at last, tell the stories that were hidden for far too long.
Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940 is on at the Art Gallery of South Australia from May 24 to September 7, 2025.
Elizabeth Flux travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Art Gallery of South Australia.
