Writing the history of Australian art: its past, present and possible future

Abstract

In the years around 1980 the history of Australian art was reconceived in a bewildering variety of ways. A historiographical revolution was underway. This was largely the result of plethora of new approaches to art history that emerged worldwide during the 1970s: contextual, feminist, populist, Marxist. Aboriginal art awaited detailed art historical consideration. This article places these changes in the context of previous efforts to chart the history of Australian art, which the author argues occurred in six phases: colonial, bourgeois nationalist, realist versus aestheticist, modernist, culturalist, and the approaches noted above. Most of these approaches developed in Australia and were applied by local authors. In recent decades, however, ‘external’ approaches are more evident, and are deeply preoccupied with the question of defining modernism in Australia, which they largely fail to do. The author surveys a number of such attempts, taking this question as the paradoxical key to unraveling the overall structure of the history of Australian art.

Keywords

• Australian art
• history of Australian art
• historiography
• modernism