Hi Friends!

I’m writing again a little sooner than expected — I was halfway through putting together a post about my favourite films of the year when I finally caught the Dangerously Modern exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW on Friday, and felt the urgent need to write about it before it closes in a fortnight. So this week cinema is out, modernist paintings are in.

Providing you blot out the news and dodge the heat, it’s been a fairly good week! I’ve been back in my happy place researching ancient history & museum operations for a new script, re-reading The Brothers Karamazov, marathoning Twin Peaks: The Return with my brother, and enjoying the late-breaking redemption of a mediocre Australian Open with Samuel, courtesy of the stellar Alcaraz v Zverev and Sinner v Djokovic mens semi-finals!

Hope you’ve been well and are in the mood for a steam ship full of lesbians making cool art…

Thoroughly and Dangerously Modern

The first and most important thing I can say about Dangerously Modern, an exhibition charting the extraordinary wave of women artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand who migrated to Europe between 1890 and 1940 to live, train and work, is that the art is really, really good.

I felt some serious embarrassment as my eyes leapt from painting to painting, deep underground at the old Naala Nura wing of the Art Gallery of NSW. Sure, I knew Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, but why I only now getting acquainted the lesbian portraits of Agnes Goodsir, the inquisitive impressionism of Hilda Rix, and the intimate interiors of Bessie Davidson?

Where have they been? Where have I been?

It’s immediately clear that this show is more than just a curio, or a knee-jerk corrective — it’s fully-fledged (and extremely persuasive) argument for these women’s place in the pantheon. These artists weren’t playing catch-up to Australia’s bush bohemians, but running far ahead, absorbing the breakthroughs of the European avant-garde and taking their place at the forefront of modernism. It’s the kind of show I honestly wasn’t sure our galleries were capable of pulling off anymore: a delightful voyage of discovery that doubles as a serious work of scholarship. It’s short on the big global names, gaudy tie-ins and Instagram-friendly displays that have characterised so many recent blockbuster exhibitions, instead sticking with smart, simple curation that puts its faith squarely in the quality of the art.

The movement to re-centre Australia’s historically neglected female artists has been gaining momentum in recent years, buoyed by the National Gallery’s Know My Name initiative and posthumous retrospectives for long-forgotten greats like the tonalist painter Clarice Beckett. But the most obvious precursor to Dangerously Modern was the Tate Britain’s superb survey Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520 - 1920. A hugely ambitious undertaking, that 2024 exhibition took in over 400 years of art, across centuries where it was verboten for women to exhibit anything at all.

The Tate made sure to highlight the struggles each artist had to face, not only to win recognition or sustain a career, but simply to cobble together a fraction of the training and resources their male counterparts enjoyed. Most female artists from the 16th to 19th centuries in Great Britain battled it out alone, severely restricted in terms of what they could actually make and exhibit (intricate needlework and floral still lifes were acceptable; art that required stepping outside the family home was not). Their work is impressive, but frequently hobbled by a lack of access to, say, the study of anatomy, or working with nude models (for fear of impropriety, naturally). There are exceptions of course — above all the visiting Italian master Artemisia Gentileschi, whose 1638 self-portrait is one of my all-time favourites — but throughout the Tate’s exhibition, these the impediments never quite left my mind.

So it was astounding to walk into Dangerously Modern and immediately be struck with a sense of complete and total freedom. You can see it in the explosions of colour, the expressionist shapes, the stark nudes, the realist interplay of light, and the diverse array of landscapes and portrait subjects. The walls are teeming with invention. You can feel the artists embracing both the creative ferment of the age — in the very birthplace of impressionism, cubism and half a dozen other legendary ‘isms’ — and the social freedom they’ve found outside the strictures of settler-colonial Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand.

Take the young Rose McPherson. She travelled through Europe in her late twenties from 1904-1907 with Bessie Davidson, a former student from Adelaide (no chaperone required), working and exhibiting together as they learnt from the French post-impressionists and Japanese design aficionados. After a stint back in Australia teaching and saving up money, Rose returned in 1912 with potter Gladys Reynell, working her way across France and Britain and incorporating crafts and print-making into her practice. In 1914 she set up shop in the Irish town of Bunmahon alongside Reynell and young New Zealander Edith Collier, who flourished under their mentorship, and in 1915 expanded their troupe into a summer school with 21 female art students. All the while Rose turned out increasingly brilliant modernist paintings… and all before she finally found acclaim back in Australia under her married name, Margaret Preston.

Where women in previous centuries had been forced to toil alone, these expats had access to flourishing communities, with women-run art schools, communes, clubs and societies springing up all over the continent. They hopped from capital to capital, and even across the Mediterranean to North Africa, chasing new subjects and new commissions. Perversely, despite travelling from two countries where women’s suffrage (limited and universal) was won decades ahead of their European sisters, it was only in the old world that many were finally free to live truthfully and openly.

You can see it clearly in the work — here are lesbian artists emboldened and unwilling to mask themselves, still a thrill a century later. Janet Cumbrae Stewart paints the female form with as much unvarnished lust as any male contemporary; Bessie Davidson captures her lovers in the reflections and corners of her tussled bedroom interiors; and my new favourite Agnes Goodsir paints her long-term partner ‘Cherry’ and other androgynous and flagrantly queer Parisians with an unflinching gaze and unapologetic care. It’s no wonder that many never returned to Australia; but lucky for us their paintings finally made the return voyage.

Which is not to say that these artists didn’t face serious barriers. Most found success in the more femme-friendly genres of domestic scenes, portrait painting and print-making, with limited opportunities for larger, lucrative commissions. However the exhibition does reveal some extraordinary ruptures, particularly during the First World War. When the French village of Étaples was converted into an Army base in 1914, Iso Rae, who had long been living at the nearby art colony, took the opportunity to document the camp in over 200 nocturnal drawings — all without ever being acknowledged as an official war artist. Hilda Rix Nicholas flouted convention (and her grief) by painting a posthumous portrait of her husband lying dead on the Western Front, These Gave the World Away (1917). And the intrepid Evelyn Chapman visited the Somme in the immediate aftermath of the war, and painted a vivid series of ruined landscapes that caught the first flowering of red poppies.

There are no shortage of incredible discoveries amongst the 200+ artworks on display — not only paintings but prints, pottery and sculpture (though admittedly I’m all about the paintings). Eleanor Ritchie Harrison’s stark landscape A Winter Morning on the Coast of France (1888), capturing fisherwomen at work, has been recently restored and is on display for the very first time since 1890. Harrison was a pioneer — one of the first Australian en plein air painters in France, and one of the first Australian women to support herself as an artist — and yet this is her only surviving large-scale piece. Despite enjoying an initial wave of acclaim across Europe, the USA and back home (including from the budding Australian Impressionists, who exhibited her work in Tom Roberts’ Melbourne studio), Harrison and her work were swiftly forgotten following her tragic death just a few year later at age 41. The Gallery put together a great documentary about Eleanor’s life and their restoration efforts (effectively a mini-episode of Fake or Fortune) that’s absolutely worth your time.

In a rare treat, three early cubist works by Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar and Dorrit Black depicting the French hilltop village of Mirmande — painted side-by-side on the very same day — are shown together, opening up comparisons of three gifted artists honing their unique styles. For me, Crowley is a rare cubist who uses abstractions to inform and enrich her portraits, without letting the geometry strip her subjects of their humanity. Her final piece on show, Miss Gwen Ridley (1930), was painted at the family farm in Barraba in northern NSW immediately after her return to Australia — giving it the distinction of being this country’s very first cubist painting. Dorrit Black’s The Bridge (1930), an aptly abstract landscape of the still-in-construction Sydney Harbour Bridge, followed only a few months later.

By limiting itself to works, like Crowley’s, either created or directly connected to an artist’s time in Europe (and thereby resisting the urge to throw in a few famous Prestons), this exhibition is by its nature exclusionary. Taking a 6-week steamer across the ocean and setting up a studio required a degree of wealth and independence that few in colonial Australia and New Zealand enjoyed — doubly so for non-white and working class women. There were rare exceptions, such as Justine Kong Sing, a Chinese-Australian painter of portrait miniatures who saved up for her fare abroad by working as a governess. You can really feel the absence of Indigenous and Maori artists, who would not find comparable opportunities abroad for another generation at least. Today, they’re arguably our most vital and respected artists working abroad.

But even those women who were lucky enough to make it abroad all too often found their moment of creative glory fleeting. Not long after her breakthrough at Bunmahon with Margaret Preston, the gifted Edith Collier was ordered home to provincial Whanganui by her family. Back in Aotearoa New Zealand, her pioneering modernist paintings were met with bewilderment and scorn, and her father burnt many of her most treasured canvases. Others were called home to care for sick parents or assume more traditional responsibilities; and all-too-often the work itself went undervalued and under-appreciated, their “dangerously modern” sensibilities out of step with the conservative and parochial tastes of the time.

Almost a century on, perhaps we’ve finally come back around. Scanning the exhibition labels, I was surprised to discover that most of the works come from the major collections at the NGV, AGNSW, AGSA and National Gallery — but over the years I can’t recall seeing them on the walls between Streeton, Roberts and Nolan. No doubt many have been waiting in the archives, or staring down at us from the nosebleed section.

I suspect that’s going to change. Give it a few years, and I fully expect that Agnes Goodsir, Eleanor Ritchie Harrison, Hilary Rix Nicholas and and Bessie Davidson will be joining Preston, Cossington Smith and the newly-revitalised Clarice Beckett in places of honour in our permanent collections, right where they belong.

I can’t wait to see them again, and discover even more of their work beyond the confines of this marvellous exhibition. These expat painters already feel like old friends.

Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is on at the Art Gallery of NSW and closes in just two weeks (15 February 2026), so if you’re based in Sydney or visiting anytime soon, check it out while you can!

Odds & Ends

• A new Rebecca Solnit essay just dropped! On reclaiming connection in a world increasingly fragmented by Big Tech. As always, she’s compulsory reading.

• One excellent bit of news despite the record temperatures — Australia’s electricity grid is now dominated by renewables, way ahead of schedule and not slowing down.

• And as you’ve probably heard, the legendary Catherine O’Hara passed away over the weekend. I can’t believe it; only a few weeks ago I was losing it with laughter during her scenes in the finale of The Studio, whilst episodes of Schitt’s Creek reliably play on loop in our house. She was simply one of the funniest people in the world, and she’ll be dearly missed. Brilliant in everything from After Hours to Best in Show to Beetlejuice to Home Alone, but I just can’t go past Moira Rose. One of many, many indelible scenes:

That’s it for this week, thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll head back to the movies…