Book Review
Editors: Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara and Philip Goad The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006 pp.1039, RRP: $49.95 AUD
This football-sized collection compacts a breathtaking sweep of opinion on modern art, design, architecture, town planning, education and cultural politics. Modernism and Australia is nonetheless selective, setting up representative contemporary arguments for, against, and ring-side, slogging out over many rounds just what constituted a modern, Australian culture. Not surprisingly, we find that Australian modernism took a variety of forms and faced what the editors call a complex pattern of reception.
It is fascinating to dip into or read through a documentary field so broadly and intelligently laid out. In our art history departments, as in our art, design and architecture schools, we often lazily teach art-form histories as parallel (and mutually invisible) institutional worlds. This volume bridges disciplinary boundaries, and as such is an invaluable source-book. It follows the research and pedagogic pathways of Joan Kerr’s collaborative Dictionary of Australian Art projects, which have been recently launched online, and Bernard Smith’s useful Documents On Art and Taste in Australia 1770-1914 (OUP, 1975). Modernism and Australia starts with an excerpt from the same year as Smith’s last Document (an extract from a 1916 lecture by the Heidelberg painter and National Gallery teacher Frederick McCubbin). Modernism and Australia pays implicit homage to Smith by including an oft-cited, virulent polemic from another anti-modern: Norman Lindsay’s notorious 1916 tract, ‘A Modernist Malady’. As for the volume’s end-point of 1967, it also spills into 1968 with Bernard Boles’ rage against the tragic sell-off of John Power’s collection of international modern art.
Smart research has shaken out our regional archives, airing both familiar and overlooked perspectives. The breadth of this collection also prompts consideration on how we so often accept what we read with little critical