A rich and focused collection of works by over fifty outstanding Australian women artists who worked in Australia and abroad between 1880 and 1960. This book also provides great insights into women's professional and economic strategies of the time, in a predominately male environment and how women played a crucial role in the development of impressionism and modern art in Australia in the first decades of the 20th century. Some of Australia's most important women artists represented here include Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith, Ethel Carrick Fox, Clarice Beckett and Hilda Rix Nicholas. An impressive selection of prints from Australia's most influential print makers, including Thea Proctor, Dorrit Black and Ethel Spowers. Also included are rarely or never before displayed works by artists including paintings by Dora Meeson, Florence Rodway, Grace Cossington Smith and Hilda Rix Nicholas. This important book brings much deserved attention to a group of talented, dedicated and determined women artists for whom the desire to create was paramount.

'It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting.' So wrote Virginia Woolf in her classic 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. While the life journeys of many artists can be described as 'odd roads', few were as original and challenging as those of the pioneering Australian women of art from the late 19th and 20th centuries. As these richly talented women gathered around their easels and shared their dining tables, their courage, energy and generosity shone through. This book tells something of the extraordinary lives of these women and in the process celebrates their individuals and collective contributions to the shaping of modern Australian art.

This important new book examines contemporary art while foregrounding the key role feminism has played in enabling current modes of artmaking, spectatorship and theoretical discourse. Contemporary Art and Feminism carefully outlines the links between feminist theory and practice of the past four decades of contemporary art and offers a radical re-reading of the contemporary movement. Rather than focus on filling in the gaps of accepted histories by ‘adding’ the ‘missing’ female, queer, First Nations and women artists of colour, the authors seek to revise broader understandings of contemporary practice by providing case studies contextualised in a robust art historical and theoretical basis. Readers are encouraged to see where art ideas come from and evaluate past and present art strategies. What strategies, materials or tropes are less relevant in today’s networked, event-driven art economies? What strategies and themes should we keep hold of, or develop in new ways? This is a significant and innovative intervention that is ideal for students in courses on contemporary art within fine arts, visual studies, history of art, gender studies and queer studies.

This treasury of Australian art created between the two world wars sheds fascinating light on the country's incredible artistic growth and the flowering of modernism Down Under. This volume comprises some 400 works by Ralph Balson, Frank and Margel Hinder, Roland Wakelin, and others in the Australian vanguard. Arranged by theme, the art reflects a remarkable range of styles and genres: abstraction, landscapes, still lifes, portraits.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices. "Real changes are upon us, and today one can reel off the names of a number of first-rate women artists. Nevertheless, women are just getting started."—The New Yorker

Doing Feminism represents over 220 artists and groups with 370 colour illustrations punctuated by extracts from artists’ statements, curatorial writing and critique. Tracking networks of art practice, exhibitions, protest and critical thought over several generations, Marsh demonstrates the innovation and power of women’s art and the ways in which it has influenced and changed the contemporary art landscape in Australia and internationally. The images and texts are curated by decade and contextualised to provide a broad analysis of art and feminist criticism since the late 1960s. The result of many years of research in the field and the archive, Doing Feminism reproduces essays by key protagonists involved in the critical debates and theoretical positions of the day, including curators writing on exhibitions that signalled major change, especially for Indigenous artists. This extraordinary work presents one of the most comprehensive collections of material ever compiled on women and the arts in Australia. Marsh guides the reader through the struggles, contestations and achievements of women and feminism in the visual arts and argues that this is the doing of feminism with all its differences. It will become essential reading for years to come.

In Australia, the artist’s engagement with the museum is traditionally regarded as having an important role in the colonial project but, as times have changed, the post-colonial viewpoint has come to the fore. The authors of Australian Artists and the Museum propose that the artists’ engagement has moved from politically informed critique taking place in museums of fine art, towards a critique of the creation of knowledge taking place in non-art museums, assuming new forms, including the artist acting as curator, art interventions that highlight the use of taxonomic modes of display and categorization, and the engagement with the aesthetics of collections to suggest different readings of objects and artefacts.

This title was first published in 2002. To date, studies explaining decorative practice in the early modernist period have largely overlooked the work of women artists. For the most part, studies have focused on the denigration of decorative work by leading male artists, frequently dismissed as fashionably feminine. With few exceptions, women have been cast as consumers rather than producers. The first book to examine the decorative strategies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women artists, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts concentrates in particular on women artists who turned to fashion, interior design and artisanal production as ways of critically engaging various aspects of modernity. Women artists and designers played a vital role in developing a broad spectrum of modernist forms. In these essays new light is shed on the practice of such well-known women artists as May Morris, Clarice Cliff, Natacha Rambova, Eileen Gray and Florine Stettheimer, whose decorative practices are linked with a number of fascinating but lesser known figures such as Phoebe Traquair, Mary Watts, Gluck and Laura Nagy.

'Painting matters to Australia and Australians as it does in few other countries. It has formed our consciousness, our sense of where we come from, and who we are. It cries out for wider recognition and acknowledgement.' - Patrick McCaughey Why has Australia, an island continent with a small population, produced such original and powerful art? And why is it so little known beyond our shores? Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters is Patrick McCaughey's answer.