Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940

This article stems from a long history of shared discussion and inquiry into that which is left out of Australia’s masculinist art history. Peers’s work in this field began forty years ago, as a life member of the Australian Women’s Art Register, and has continued in her work as a researcher in art, design, and feminism, with frequent exhibition catalogue essays. McNeil commenced his interest in interwar queer and women’s Australian art in 1985; he was recently the Australian representative for the major USA-led exhibition The First Homosexuals (Wrightwood 659, Chicago 2025; Kunstmuseum Basel, 2026). Over the years, both of us have been confronted by the masculinism of not just Australian art and its various protagonists, but its reception, art history, and the way it has been taught and continues to be construed and constructed. Both of us have always been interested in the parts in Australian art history that seem to get away, or are deliberately ignored: the experimentation, the interdisciplinary practices, the domestic vernacular, the fashion systems, the voices of women and gay men that continually seem to be extinguished.

Over the past year, the inquiry into non-masculinist Australian art has been taken up by the exhibition Dangerously Modern, on display in two different iterations at the Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales (Peter did not view the AGSA version). There has been very little genuine critique of this important endeavour: we note one hagiography similar to a press release, published by the sometimes curiously-deficient online platform The Conversation (funded by universities, yet here not commissioning an expert in the field). Both of us were genuinely excited to see these exhibitions and both of us left a little saddened, for various reasons, not least the lost opportunities and lacunae.

The range of artists in the exhibition makes a notable difference from the expected format of historical surveys. Although nearly all of these women have been exhibited before, it brings into the spotlight artists who have long been outliers in mainstream narratives, and are better known within the art trade (where they remain undervalued) than to students of art history. This includes, amongst others, Florence Fuller, Bessie Davidson, Stella Bowen, Frances Hodgkins, Iso Rae, Bessie Gibson, and Dora Meeson. The show also proudly unveils previously almost invisible genealogies of female teaching, with strong and important works by pupils of Margaret Preston—Bessie Davidson, Gladys Reynell, Stella Bowen, and Edith Collier—and of Frances Hodgkins.

There are some real highlights. The major landscape by Eleanor Ritchie Harrison (discovered and donated by a Sydney collector) is broad and lovely, a very coherent work from a Streatham, Victoria-born woman who established during her short life (1854–95) close links to the international avant-garde. It is one of the largest works surviving from an Australian woman artist from the 1880s, progressive in its handling and ambitious and confident in scale. Hilda Rix Nicholas’s war subjects are similarly stark and powerful, and distressed Australians at the time in the wake of both the Anzac myth and the universal reality of bereavement. They remain courageous and unsettling to any audience.

The work of Edith Collier is a major discovery and revelation. A close associate of Gladys Reynell and Margaret Preston, her cluster of Irish subjects is fascinating and has barely been seen previously in galleries before. Collier lives up to the rhetoric of the show. Her work is dangerous and bold in its scintillating capacity, its post-impressionist synthesis, and simplification. She seems to have reached the point of detachment from mimesis either at the same time or even before Preston—and possibly even shaped Preston’s vision of the radical. Her Girl Sitting on a Bed (1917–18) is austere, pallid, yet highly sophisticated in its decorative approach. Her powerful vision of the adolescent girl seems to have detached itself from the academic rhetoric of the male gaze, which in the hands of European male modernists like Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso or Kees Van Dongen became a subject for prurient speculation. Collier presents her subject in a generous and appreciative mode, thus lending this work a global cultural reach. Her image of a young girl in sunshine is a more upbeat, but also sympathetic, joyous imaging of female adolescence. Despite the calm restraint, Collier’s nude has much in common with the luminous, engaged poeticism of Janet Cumbrae Stewart. Cumbrae Stewart’s emphatic depictions of nude women, frequently from behind, subvert the male gaze whilst at the same time gently fondling the sitters with chromatic and scintillating layering of hues.

Indeed, many of the works are simply glorious and, in the Sydney hang, colours light, bright, and clear sang from room to room and wall to wall across genres and oeuvres. Agnes Goodsir’s firm, confident portrait of her life-long partner ‘Cherry’ (Mrs Rachael Dunn), with her clasped hand holding a cigarette, whilst luxurious, also shows the transition into modernism—as well as the importance of social life, interiors, clothing, and gesture in tracking a sense of newness and dynamic change. Three decades ago, the late Joan Kerr celebrated the singular power of this image, a declaration of independence, both as a striking image of a consciously modern woman yet equally as a sign of the social freedoms and shibboleth breaking that transformed life for women in the 1920s.

The exhibition shows a considerable breadth. The inclusion of print-making, sculpture, and the odd ceramic show the need to broaden the discussion of what is culturally significant in Australia beyond marketplace “star’s” paintings. The power of the miniatures painted on ivory by women, including Bessie Gibson, Bess Tait, Bernice Edwell, and the part-Chinese Justine Kong Sing, were a revelation. The sheer eroticism of the Gibson full-frontal draped nude is astonishing, the handling fluid and lyrical, transmuting the formal ethos of portraiture of the well-to-do into a private contemplative handheld scale that amplified the sensuosity. Paintings from New Zealand collections, including especially impressive large-scale figurative works, also extend the range of the show. This includes works by Hodgkins and the delightful Collier, as well as by Helen Stewart, a very important and elegant modernist/classical cubist who worked for an extended period in Sydney and yet is little-known here. Maude Sherwood, another artist who worked between Sydney and New Zealand, indicates the much stronger relationship between New Zealand and Sydney artists than with those based in Melbourne.

Having crafted a successful immersive experience for the deservedly popular Clarice Beckett show in 2021, AGSA appears to have felt obliged to repeat this mode of presentation here. Soundscapes have become popular since their regular inclusion in the NGV approach to exhibition-making (although one of the first, and very effective, was for Roger Leong’s exhibition Dressed to Kill at the National Gallery of Australia in 1993). AGSA’s decision to specially commission a soundscape for Dangerously Modern seems very thoughtful; but the result at times tends to indulgent fantasy, as does the approach to the over-elaborate, upholstered mise-en-scène—what we might call the India Mahdavi-Ellwood School of breaking the white cube (as seen in NGV’s 2023 exhibition Bonnard: Designed by India Mahdavi).

Despite the integration of different media in the exhibition, the exhibition’s didactics and labels make curiously little mention of fashion. Fashion and style, however, inform much of the content and techniques of the works on show, including those by Thea Proctor, Agnes Goodsir, and Rix Nicholas. Cumbrae Stewart was also very attuned to fashion, colours, surfaces, and structure, although she is only represented by nudes and a geometric landscape. The painting of two Napoleon III upholstered-chairs by Stella Bowen (1931) is quite brilliant, and speaks to Walter Benjamin’s comments that if novelist Honoré de Balzac was the first to speak to the “ruins of the bourgeoisie,” it was only Surrealism that “exposed them to view.” Fashion and style are also implicit in Helen Stewart’s, Mary Cockburn Mercer’s, and Crowley’s figurative works, as well as the broader focus of Ethel Carrick Fox, and Hodgkins’s and Preston’s use of fashionable décor for their still lives of the period 1910-20s. The only clear indication of how close the worlds of fashion and art were in the period that is covered by the exhibition (and how important that closeness was) is a short note that Kate O’Connor hand-painted fabrics for Parisian stores. O’Connor—who was also close to Nina Hamnett, part of the Bloomsbury set—worked for Paul Poiret on textile designs. She painted intense domestic still-lifes, including the new exotic batik textiles popularised in France by the Dutch.

The matter of sexuality in this show is complex. Both of us are alert to the dangers of presentism, but we are equally fatigued by the constant cleaning up of gay and lesbian Australian art history. For many of the women-loving women on display we have ample surviving evidence in letters, memoirs, diaries, and other recollections—along with the art itself—to assert a queer identity. The South Australian hang and signage almost made lesbianism a problem, both fetishising and disavowing lesbianism at the same time: nominally making it a reference for outré effet, but not really treating it with any dignity, depth or insight. In queer-friendly Sydney, the topic was more or less completely evaded. The words Sapphic and lesbian were generally avoided altogether, and if the word “sexuality” was mentioned, in a strange move, the viewer is not told what type of sexuality it was. What was most egregious were the biographical labels. These ignore significant examples of clearly women-loving women, some of whom were buried on top of each other (Dora Ohlfson was buried with her Russian partner countess Hélène de Kuegelgen following their joint accidental death or suicide in Rome; Bessie Davidson with Marguerite Le Roy or ‘Dauphine’ in Paris; and Goodsir with Cherry Dunn, also in Paris). Nothing new here: Karen Quinlan was seemingly not permitted to refer to any suggestion of lesbianism in her path-breaking Goodsir exhibition at Bendigo Art Gallery in 1998.

Dangerously Modern seems uncomfortable with not only queer, but the queer-adjacent. It was surprising not to see Davidson’s portrait of Gladys Reynell in that common lesbian symbol, a pith helmet, Portrait of Miss GR (1906). The Sydney wall text, but not the catalogue, mentioned that Cumbrae Stewart lived with her “companion,” publicist, and business manager, Miss Argemore Farrington ‘Billy’ Bellairs. Elma Roach (1897–1942) is not included in this exhibition. She spent much of her artistic painting life in Paris and knew many of the women artists here. She lived in London and Paris and traveled across Europe throughout much of her adult life with another Australian woman artist, Madge Freeman. Mary Cockburn Mercer was another Australian (married) woman artist linked to European 1920s queer circles, including that of Marie Laurencin. She was Cumbrae Stewart’s lover and made flower paintings in the manner of Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein). Stewart and Mercer really should have been hung next to each other in both the NGV Queer show and this one.

So how much of a discovery is Dangerously Modern? It is true that many of the exhibition’s artists from the 1890s to the 1940s have already been the subject of individual research and curatorial projects. However, they have rarely been integrated holistically with their contemporaries, which is one of the exhibition’s major achievements. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the show was the animated graphic that showed the dense lines of complex alliances and linkages between multiple artists and multiple locations for education, paintings, residences, or all three. The Sydney hang was porous and flattering, attuned to micro relationships of synchronicity, and therefore better aligned to the multivocal scholarship typical of Joan Kerr’s work, on which all such shows are based. The AGNSW iteration gave more space for the artworks to breathe, was less didactic, with a less fixed itinerary through the works, and subsequently a less fixed trajectory imposed on the reading of the work. This seemed to open up a more intelligent reading of the agency of the artists. AGSA seemed to subvert a formalist reading of the artists, claiming rhetorically that art history had emphasised a male-facing formalism that had sidelined these women. But that male world was actually the world in which many of these artists had worked, had aligned themselves with, and in which they excelled.

Yet the exhibition’s success in opening up this terrain of artistic practices is also, ironically, the source of one of its flaws. While Dangerously Modern rightly integrates its artists into a relatively familiar story of Australian art, albeit with an expanded cast, its Public Relations rhetoric (which we acknowledge curators have little control over) presents an image of a total and transformative newness. These PR claims amount to an erasure of previous detailed, rigorous scholarship. Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Rix Nicholas, Carrick, Dangar, Crowley, Jessie Traill, Eveline Syme, Hodgkins, O’Connor, and Bowen at the least have had multiple shows, significant projects, and extended writing by curators and academics devoted to their work over a long period of time—five decades. Most of these artists were captured three decades ago in Joan Kerr’s Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book (1995), which made possible the polyvocal perspective we all benefit from today. Kerr often wrote about the generational amnesia of Australian art history.

Many of these works were also seen in very early feminist shows, for example the Ewing and Paton Gallery exhibition Australian Women Artists (1975), attributed to Janine Burke, but substantially informed by a curatorium including Ian North and Daniel Thomas, who had shown interest in women’s art in the early 1970s. Jude Adams’s project show Women’s Images of Women at AGNSW (1977) revealed the impressive nature of the figurative work of Davidson and Goodsir, drawn in turn from Adams’s and Barbara Hall’s experiences with feminist art in the UK and US in the early 1970s. We should also note that Dangerously Modern builds on essential work found within thematic studies and monographs, such as Helen Topliss’s ANU PhD which became Feminism and Modernism: Australian Women Artists 1900–1940, Jane Hylton’s Modernist Australian Women: Paintings and Prints (AGSA 2004), Tansy Curtin, Betina Macaulay, Desmond Macaulay, and Peers’s The Long Weekend: Australian Artists in France 1918–1939 (Bendigo Art Gallery, 2007), Peers, Victoria Hammond, Merren Ricketson and Helen Vivian’s Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era (1992), Jane Hylton’s South Australian Women Artists 1890s-1940s (AGSA, 1994), as well as a large corpus of research on modernist relief prints and some sculpture studies. Although compromised by restricted movement during Covid lockdowns, the sweeping Know My Name surveys of women’s art at the National Gallery of Australia (2020–22) already had deployed clustered displays of multiple stand-out hero(ine) images to forthrightly, but non-textually, challenge “accepted” white Australian art histories and also capture a wider range of media and scales in which women worked.

Equally problematically, the show’s insistence on newness also allows it to side-step some hard questions about the past, namely why art professionals in galleries and universities have continued to marginalise these very powerful works for nearly a century. About sixty to seventy per cent of the works were acquired by major galleries at an early date which begs the question: Where have they been? The works now speak to each other, mocking the history of their neglect or exile, casting skepticism on the unquestioned acceptance of judgements and validation as to the “best” that the Australian humanities and cultural industries have decided represented our past. The history of these artists, their ambitions and the fully realised nature of their achievements and production needs discussion in its own right, including reflection on curatorial blind spots.

In conclusion, this was a pretty dazzling pair of exhibitions with a fairly unsurprising story to tell Australian art history. Some major artists were missing: Theo Cowan, Margaret Baskerville, Grace Joel, Mildred Lovett, Portia Geach (pupil of Whistler), Vida Lahey and others, who were also overseas in the 1890s to 1920s. As with Gott’s and Anglea Hesson’s NGV Queer show, a few easy and obvious pairings that would have made very strong points were absent. Such shows always need to acknowledge the shoulders of previous scholars and curators on which they stand. We have some concerns that the exhibition continued the well-trod, old-fashioned rhetoric of the “closed shop” of Australian cultural practice and making—which stands in contradiction to the exploratory and ground-breaking ambitions of the women artists themselves. We don’t want readers to feel that we have been negative, yet we cannot in this short review overwrite this wonderful women’s work after already fifty years of feminist and thirty years of lesbian/queer scholarship. Despite the limitations of the exhibitions and accompanying catalogue (that we have not been able to review at length), the women and their art continue to shine through.