Margaret Preston

by IAN; MCQUEEN HUMPHREY & SEIVL ISOBEL NORTH, Art Gallery of New South Wales

This richly illustrated monograph is the first publication to look in detail at the life and art of Margaret Preston, an artist who practised in her native Australia from the mid-1890s right up to her death in 1963. Bearing the conspicuous mark of talent from an early age, the fiercely independent and opinionated Preston can be claimed as Australia's most innovative early modernist. Even in her earliest works, her restless experimentation, ambitions and independence of thought governed a desire to interpret rather than emulate what she saw, to exact essential principles. From the 1920s Preston moved rapidly to the forefront of Australian progressive art, producing a body of work that has remained crucially important to the traditions of Australian art. Her search for the essential truths of the Australian conditions as the basis for an authentic, modern, national art consumed her working life. This national art, she believed, should draw from a fusion of the principles, motifs and techniques of Asian,Western and Aboriginal art, independent of Australia's accepted reliance on British traditions and the growing influence of American trends a vision which over subsequent decades she extended beyond the fine arts to the applied, commercial and public arts. Her forceful opinions, expressed in a wide range of lectures, press interviews and writings, established Preston as one of the most important and provocative public voices of the time. An artist of unlimited invention, Margaret Preston split her contemporaries into a number of camps, and her work has since engendered a multiplicity of opinions from critics, art historians, indigenous writers and anthropologists.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

300 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the pictures in this book and I have been an admirer of Margaret Preston's work for some time ...though I never really had a grasp of the breadth of her work. So, the pictures are great and there are a lot of them but the script accompanying the pictures is dense, jargon filled and almost impenetrable. Seems that it has been written for other art critics ...and certainly not the general public. Try this sample: "More significantly Preston established a temporal specificity, recasting Leger's elaboration on the theory of 'contrasts' (the notion of dynamic balance) achieved by building through a series of contrast or opposites, of colour, contour curved and straight forms, modelled objects and flat planes) into a tonal arrangement."The bulk of the text is in the above, overwrought, style though there are a number of individual essays by different contributors that make for much easier reading (and understanding).
In contrast to this turgid prose, Preston's own words, sparkle with clarity, for example: "What is to be our National art? Art is the tangible symbol of the spirit of a country. What is Australia going to offer the world as her contribution to the arts? The art of a country is determined by the character of its people. Painting, music, architecture etc., in all countries are the same......the only opening is in the possibilities of extension.....This is the age of science, highly civilised and uncultured. Science and culture do not link.....Those that object to contemporary art are afraid of their own times."
And the biographical notes and textual notes at the end of the book are both clear and readable. But, overall, the text is very hard going, which is a pity because, for me it spoils the book....and it didn't have to be this way.
I learned a lot of new things about Margaret Preston (MP). First, that she lived for significant periods of time in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Paris and London and in the latter part of her life she travelled extensively both internationally and all over Australia. Second, that she was smart, opinionated, outspoken and somewhat abrasive. I was also interested to note that she attended Fort Street School at Observatory in Sydney for a few years from 1885 and my own Grandmother (who was three years younger) also attended that school and there was probably some overlap of years there. Maybe they even knew each other....though my Grandmother never mentioned it...so probably not.
Right from the start she seemed to have decided that still life was going to be her specialty and, personally, I find the, predictable, flowers in a vase rather boring and unimaginative...though, admittedly, she did some rather interesting work in the 1940's in this genre. At various stages of her artistic development she dabbled in pottery, in basketry. in printmaking, as well as continuing to paint in oils. I don't recall that she ever did much (or any) work in watercolour.
From around 1923 (when Preston was 48) she was committed to the development of a distinctive Australian art and looked to aboriginal art as the grounding for this. Clearly, there was (and still is) a lot of controversy about appropriating aboriginal art and using the symbols, patterns, colours etc. in different contexts...divorced from their original spiritual intention. It's not clear that Preston ever really "got" this though she certainly put in a lot of work visiting sites and talking with aboriginals about their art. She also adopted a colour palette that reflected that of aboriginal art ...and even where she used blue..this was derived from a native plant.....at least in some of her work
In the 1930's she moved to Berowra (Sydney) for about 8 years. Did this coincide with her bout of breast cancer..and was the move to Berowra a kind of convalescence? And this really seemed to be a period in which she developed a unique Australian style...especially using the native flora such as the banksia. Later she moved into landscape....but a very different landscape to that popularised by the Heidelberg school. Hers was the harsh brown land.....actually, often blackened by the bushfires....rather than the softer picturesque land (albeit with some of the harsh light) of the Heidelberg school.
Thank heavens for the art magazine publisher, Ure Smith, who seemed to champion her work and appreciated her vision of establishing an Australian style. Without him, it seems that it might have been very difficult for her to gain any acceptance. For whatever reason, her vision, never really seemed to "take-off". I really like some of her landscape work and her monotypes and prints done around 1946. And, despite my disinterest in still life featuring a vase of flowers, I find myself attracted two some of her paintings in this style around the period 1927-1930 and her woodblock prints done around this time...including some of landscape......Mosman, Balmoral etc.
I must say that my curiosity was piqued by learning that MP had several long term relationships with women ...one lasting at least 8 years and a second also for a long period. The women lived together and travelled together ...including to Europe for extended periods. I was wondering whether she ever had any children...but apparently not. There was the obvious question of whether MP was gay ....but I found no hint of this in the book. So I googled it ...and sure enough....there is a lot of speculation on that score. (I even found an obscure reference to the appendix in the book itself P288, 31). Maybe the sexuality of MP is irrelevant to her art, but anyway, she eventually ...at the age of 44 married William Preston ..whom she had met in England at the end of WW1. And he seemed to provide stability and financial support. And it was during this period that she really started to develop her ideas of the Australian identity and did some of her most interesting work.
Margaret, also travelled to China and Japan and tried to introduce some of the ideas that she had seen into her own art: the Chinese landscape with it's overlapping images from different viewing positions; the Japanese woodcut techniques etc.
I loved the pictures; I thought the appendices were great and very informative, I have yet to view the DVD that came with it. And the text is thorough but so impenetrable. With a better text, I would easily have scored it 5 stars but the text really makes it a very hard-read.