These women were written out of art history. Now their work is getting the recognition it deserves

The Age

23-05-2025

There are over 200 works on display here, but some of the most sobering thoughts brought about by this exhibition are: what are the works we aren't seeing? What are the works we'll never see? There are the works that were destroyed, there were the works that were reportedly thrown off ships (in response to a debilitating tax that was applied to bringing artworks home to Australia), and there are those that have simply melted into history.
In the first room, in a cabinet near Collier's surviving nude is a series of miniatures, including three by Justine Kong Sing, the first professional Chinese Australian artist who went to London. Despite finding success in her lifetime, much of her work has disappeared. 'She exhibited widely in London, including at the Royal Academy. We couldn't find any of her works in the UK, and there's a handful in Australian collections,' says Tunnicliffe. 'We know there's others, because she exhibited a lot – but we don't know where they are.'
One of the larger works in the exhibition is A Winter morning on the coast of France (1888) by Victorian artist Eleanor Ritchie Harrison. 'It's the only major painting by her to survive, which we actually tracked down to a house in Sydney,' says Tunnicliffe. Her work was exhibited widely, until her death at the age of 41 from complications of childbirth.
For many of the artists on display, even during their lifetime their work was maligned or excluded from Australian art history.
'There was a sense that if you're not painting an Australian landscape, it's not Australian art. If you're outside of Australia, if you're beyond its borders, you're no longer participating in Australian Art,' says Freak. Many artists, she explains, felt they were 'kind of pushed out of the story of Australian art because they were no longer residing in Australia'.
The erasure continued even after the artists had left their marks. 'These women, they were high profile in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and after the Second World War, with the return to conservatism which happened after the war, many of these women became written out of Australian art history,' says Tunnicliffe.
'As Australian art history started to be written by male art historians, the woman's role became more and more diminished until they virtually disappeared. And really it was the 1970s when feminist art historians began working this field and reclaiming them, that's when interest grew.'
Dangerously Modern is an exhibition overflowing with stories. There's the big picture narrative of a generation of women artists making their way over to Europe to pursue artistic dreams – some made their way easily, others struggled financially. There are the stories of what happened when they got there – relationships they formed and the ways they made ends meet.
And there are the stories in the works themselves. One of the most striking works appears about halfway through. Painted by Hilda Rix Nicholas, These gave the world away (1917) is a large-scale painting where the artist has imagined the scene of her husband's death in the Somme Valley.
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All 50 women in this exhibition left home to pursue their art. Some returned, some didn't. Some became household names, others quietly dropped out of art history. One of the hopes of this exhibition is to, at last, tell the stories that were hidden for far too long.
Elizabeth Flux travelled to Adelaide as a guest of Art Gallery of South Australia.