Art of a life

Self portrait (1930)

"Australia is crying out for a national culture and it is only with the close bond between the artist and the people that there can be a national art ... I am trying to find one form that will suggest Australia ..." Margaret Preston

Margaret Preston (1875-1963) is one of Australia's most celebrated artists, and is arguably Australia's most famous woman artist. Her cosmopolitan paintings and prints of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s epitomise not only one of the most distinctive eras in the history of Australian art, but also one of the country's most aesthetically innovative periods.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has now organised the first major retrospective of Margaret Preston's work, opening at the Gallery on July 29. In addition to around 100 paintings and 80 prints, the exhibition includes pottery, textiles, illustrative work, photographs and documents. Margaret Preston: art and life provides a comprehensive account of Preston's sixty years of remarkable creativity as Australia's most celebrated modernist. Within the project will be a particular focus on Preston's changing relationship with Aboriginal art, and on the remarkable products of the artist's dramatic late move - after 45 years of almost exclusive still life production - into the area of landscape.

Exhibition curator, Deborah Edwards, and co-curator on the project, conservator Rose Peel, have spent five years locating paintings for this exhibition. Works selected for the exhibition are from museum and private collections from around Australia, as well as from collections in the UK and New Zealand.

Implement Blue (1927)

Ms Edwards said: "Margaret Preston was the best known of her generation of Australian artists with her commanding compositions - predominantly still lifes, landscapes and scenes of Sydney. These works have continued to be, over the past 70 years, amongst the most popular of all Australian artist's images".

"During the 1920s and 30s Margaret Preston, with her art, her strong opinions and her colourful life, was a commanding figure in the public domain. Not only a seminal modernist, Preston was the first serious advocate of Aboriginal art. Her promotion and appropriation of Aboriginal art was developed in the context of her conviction that a modern and necessary identity for Australia could only emerge from the inspiration of the art of 'the first Australians', as well as the influence of Asian artistic traditions. Each was of central importance to Preston's work and to her own positioning of Australian art in the modern era."

I lived at Berowra (1941)

Margaret Preston was often described as a red-headed firebrand, obstinate, uncompromising, vociferous, passionate about her art and jealous of her various contemporaries, including Thea Proctor at times.

The exhibition is presented as a set of experiences, which relate both to the intimate nature of Margaret Preston's paintings and works on paper, and to a number of thematic and stylistic shifts in her art. Through a series of rooms, the range of Preston's most significant works from the 1890s to the 1950s will be presented in a celebration of one of Australia's most significant artists.

Following its season at the AGNSW, the exhibition will tour to the National Gallery of Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Touring dates:
Queensland Art Gallery
18 February - 7 May 2006
Art Gallery of South Australia
26 May - 13 August 2006

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Margaret Preston: art and life

Venue: Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne
Dates: Til 29 January 2006

Cost: Adults: $10
Concessions: $7
Family: $25
NGV Members: $5.00