Know My Name: Making It Modern curators delve into the exhibition

Posted on 20 September, 2023

An exciting new all-female exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia asks boundary-pushing cultural questions.

What was it like to be a female artist in the early 20th century? Know My Name: Making it Modern celebrates pioneering women artists who changed the course of modern art in Australia. Drawn from the national collection, this major exhibition profiles Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Clarice Beckett and Olive Cotton – unified by their expression of daily life, nature, still life, and interior worlds of place, mind, and imagination.

Here, four curators of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia – Deborah Hart (Head Curator, Australian Art), Shaune Lakin (Senior Curator, Photography), Deirdre Cannon (Assistant Curator, Australian Art) and Alice Rezende (Curatorial Assistant, Australian Art) –  help to explore this unique exhibition with questions about how these female artists experienced life in the early 20th century.

What was it like to be a female artist in the 1920’s and 30’s, vs. 2023?

We know that engaging in any artistic pursuit was very hard for women in the 1920s and 1930s. As in all aspects of social and cultural life, women were met with barriers, social conventions and resistance in their quest to pursue a life in art. The exhibition Making it Modern shows how, in the face of these pressures, bravery, fortitude, resilience and extraordinary talent came together in the life and work of six women artists working at this time – Ethel Spowers, Eveline Syme, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Olive Cotton and Clarice Beckett.

In their lifetimes, these women were met with misogyny and scepticism; they were openly criticised for their modernist approach and their ambition – the highly driven Preston, for example, being often referred to as “Mad Maggie”. When Olive Cotton took over the management of Max Dupain’s photographic studio during the war, clients left the studio because a woman was now in charge – even though by then (1941), Olive had exhibited and published her photographs internationally and was without question one of Australia’s most accomplished photographers. It took conviction and courage to be an artist during this time, as there was also a prevailing attitude among conservative critics and supporters of the arts in Australia that women artists were generally not as capable as their male peers. And while being a female artist in 2023 is still tough financially, some of the barriers that existed over 100 years ago have been lifted.

Can you share how these women came to be artists? And did they garner any fame in their lifetimes?

Olive Cotton

The stories of how each artist came to their practice differ widely. Olive Cotton began taking photographs after receiving a Kodak Box Brownie when she was just 11 years of age. For a time, she took photographs alongside Max Dupain, who became one of Australia’s most well-known photographers.

Cotton was part of a vibrant creative community in Gadigal Nura/Sydney and later moved to Cowra. Although she exhibited in her lifetime, even internationally, it took a long time before her work was given a similar focus to her male peers such as Dupain, in terms of bringing a depth of understanding to her artistic development.

Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme

Meanwhile, Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme were both daughters of rival media families. Part of a newly independent generation of women artists able to follow a professional art education overseas, they learned under avant-garde teachers like Claude Flight and André Lhote in England and France. Following their travels, Spowers and Syme would forge an artistic career alongside other modernist women artists whose circles overlapped through art societies and philanthropic social clubs in Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal Nura/Sydney.

Margaret Preston

Quick-witted, Margaret Preston exhibited with prominent art societies in Tarntanya/Adelaide and Gadigal Nura/Sydney. After extensive travels through Europe and her stay in the United Kingdom, Preston returned to Australia in 1919, applying and sharing her knowledge of what she had learned, including the Japanese woodblock technique of ukiyo-e. She lived in Mosman on Gadigal Nura/Sydney’s lower North Shore with her husband and produced great woodcut prints of harbourside views during this time.

Following trips to Japan and South East Asia in the 1930s, Preston returned to Sydney’s North Shore, where she experimented with the techniques of monotype and hand-stencilling which she developed in her later years to produce some of her most innovative images of Australia.

Grace Cossington Smith

Grace Cossington Smith studied under Antonio Datillo-Rubbo at his Rowe Street atelier in Gadigal Nura/Sydney, alongside a number of like-minded artists including, among others, Nora Simpson, Roland Wakelin, and Roy de Maistre. In 1926 she joined the Sydney Contemporary Group with Thea Proctor, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, Wakelin and other modernists, showing with them over many years.

Her works from the mid-1920s and 1930s affirm what an adventurous and accomplished artist she was for her time. At the time she was often criticised for works that have become some of the most significant in the stories of Australian art. Among her favourite subjects were the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the natural world and bedroom interiors. She was interested in colour theory and architecture, inspiring many artists. Her work did not receive due public recognition until her first retrospective exhibition in 1973 when she was 81 years of age.

Clarice Beckett

Clarice Beckett’s artistic talent was recognised from an early age by her mother, and she was fortunate to attend progressive schools for girls where she explored many creative pursuits. She was a quietly determined artist, who was not afraid to take her art in new directions by training with Max Meldrum, a divisive but pivotal painter at the time, and persevered with making work even without a studio of her own for most of her career.

Her paintings were not always regarded favourably by the press in her lifetime. She did however have a passionate and vocal group of supporters. Sadly, as we see in the lives of so many women artists, it was only when Beckett’s works were brought to light again forty years after her death that they began to receive widespread acclaim.

What does this show say about female artists?

Making it Modern shows how women-led much of the artistic innovation that took place in Australia during the early twentieth century. When seen together, the work of these six artists – and work by many other women artists they were connected to who are also included in the exhibition – makes clear how deeply experimental these women were; how they each brought to established practices new ways of working, of collaborating, and of sharing ideas that were genuinely ground-breaking and helped to shift culture in Australia.

You can clearly see in their work how these women experimented with colour, form, line, technical processes and new modes and materials, such as lino and woodcutting, to move beyond traditional ways of working. They also brought to their practices an interest in the symbolic, the subjective, the emotional and the spiritual – concerns that were shared with many of the most innovative artists working internationally at this time.

What’s the best way to experience the exhibition?

The exhibition brings together almost 300 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from the National Collection that have been acquired over the last 50 years and that represent many of the finest moments in the careers of these six pioneering women artists. This is the first time that these works have been brought together in such depth, and the exhibition provides an exceptional opportunity to see some of the most important works of art made in Australia during the twentieth century.

There are over six rooms to explore, each with its own stories and themes, meaning that all visitors will have something to connect to. The exhibition has been developed to provide a deep sense of the accomplishments and personality of each artist, and visitors can genuinely feel their presence in each room. There is certainly nothing like being surrounded by great art.

Things to add onto your visit while you’re in Canberra to see Making It Modern?

There are some wonderful international exhibitions currently showing across the National Gallery of Australia, including Haegue Yang: Changing From From to From and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Catch the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize 2023. Maybe even reach out to She Shapes History if you’re interested in a walking tour of women’s history in this country.

Favourite piece in the show?

It is impossible to pick one single favourite, as this exhibition covers a wide-range of practices by such a diverse set of Australian women artists of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, a highlight moment would definitely be Olive Cotton’s The Shell c. 1935. In this photograph, Cotton manages to evoke a sublime expansiveness through the image of a glowing shell. It is an incredibly intelligent and beautiful image, sculptural and full of movement.

Grace Cossington Smith’s Four Panels for a Screen: Loquat Tree, Gum and Wattle Trees, Waterfall, Picnic in a Gully, 1929 is another favourite. On display in the final room in the exhibition, it is a major work by Cossington Smith which the Gallery is honoured to have in our holdings. It is hard to conceive that these images are painted on cardboard due to their sheer brilliance and luminous presence. The four screens were originally commissioned by an Irish collector who rejected the work when it was finished in favour of a more overtly modernist painting by Cossington Smith. At the time the artist was very disappointed and vowed never to undertake another commission. Yet years later, Cossington Smith’s family was delighted when the Gallery acquired it for the national collection.

Finally, a favourite among many of the staff at the Gallery is a suite of small paintings by Clarice Beckett that have recently been restored by our conservation team. These paintings were donated to the Gallery by Beckett’s sister, each one revealing the way she responded to the environment, atmosphere and the elements to create a distinct mood in her paintings. This group of 24 evocative compositions is shown alongside a group of major works by Beckett that the Gallery acquired in 1971 – the first paintings by her to be purchased by a public museum in Australia.

Feature image: Grace Cossington Smith, Four panels for a screen: loquat tree, gum and wattle trees, waterfall, picnic in a gully, 1929, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1976.