Australian Women, Art and the Interwar Years Migration and Identity

Introduction: ‘The remoteness that pains us’ Identity, women and artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain, 1919-1941 1. Women’s marginalisation in the Australian artistic and cultural sphere: The pre-migration phase 2. Australian women artists at the centre of the Empire: Networks and connections abroad 3. Pioneering transnational perspectives: Edith May Fry and Australian expatriate artists in London in the 1920s 4. Transnational perspectives of British art: Clarice Zander and British Modern Art in Australia. Epilogue: Australian women, identity, and the post-Empire era

Biography

Victoria Souliman is lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney and Université Paris Cité in 2019. Her doctoral research focused on issues of national identity, expatriatism, and women’s agency in the artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain in the early twentieth century. Her other research interests include the representation of female subjectivity and the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture.

By focusing on the role of women agents who were makers, curators, and critics, this book explores the complex interchange between Australia and Britain in the interwar period. In dialogue with migration studies, these discussions make strange again assertions of how art and national character are entwined by bringing into focus the understudied interventions of women in the art scene and the role of transnational, national and local positionalities in shaping those conversations in exhibitions, art criticism, and patronage.
Emily Burns, University of Oklahoma

Victoria Souliman’s pioneering study sheds remarkable light on the history and role of ‘national’ collections, the nature and consequences of expatriatism, and the role played by a series of remarkable women in the definition of an Australian school of art. She discusses the issues of provincialism, and of ‘the painful remoteness’ often expressed by Australian women artists, both at home and abroad. Within the context of the decisive impact of Australia’s World War I engagement, which led both to an increasing awareness of an Australian specificity and to a strengthening of the country’s relation to Britain, Souliman’s book considers for the first time the agency of Australian women artists in the shaping up and definition of a national visual idiom between the two World Wars.
Prof. Frédéric Ogée, Université Paris Cité