Aspects of Australian Art from the Australian National Gallery Collection

About the exhibition
A touring exhibition from the Australian National Gallery, Aspects of Australian Art 1900–1940 presented a variety of works from the decades between Federation and the Second World War. Curator James Gleeson aimed to demonstrate the key developments and characteristics of Australian art in a period typically overshadowed by artistic movements that came just prior or just after—namely the Heidelberg School and Australian Impressionism of the late nineteenth century, and the ‘heroic’ period of emerging modernism in the 1940s. This historically oriented view of Australian art included Hugh Ramsay’s subtly characterful Portrait of Miss Nellie Patterson,1906 and Ian Fairweather’s Hangchow, 1938, the latter described by critic Joan Kerr as an ‘astonishingly early proto-Abstract Expressionist work’.

Reference: Joan Kerr, ‘Aspects of Australian Art 1900-1940’, Art and Australia vol 15 no 4, Winter 1978: 352-353.

AcknowledgementsA touring exhibition from the Collection of the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

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^{Image: Ambrose Patterson, Self Portrait c.1902, oil on canvas, 130.3 x 81.3 cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra}