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The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The ‘dangerous' Australian women whose art was dismissed, forgotten – and even set on fire
When Justine Kong Sing stepped off a steamship into Edwardian London, the Nundle-born daughter of a Chinese merchant could tell straight away she was a long way from Australia: amid the 'roar and rush' of the city, no one seemed to notice her. 'In the colonies, where foreigners are treated differently, an Oriental suffers keenly the mortification of being stared at, and often assaulted, because of his color!' she wrote in a widely published account. But the 43-year-old soon attracted a different kind of attention, studying at the Westminster School of Art and exhibiting at London's Royal Academy and the Paris Salon. Basing herself in Chelsea, her specialty was watercolour-on-ivory miniature portraits, painting 'London Society beauties' and a Chinese minister's wife. But one pocket-sized piece, painted in 1912 – soon after she arrived in England – and titled simply Me, has Kong Sing herself staring quizzically at the viewer, eyebrow arched and head tilted under a green hat. Kong Sing's known body of work is tiny in almost every sense, and for the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) curator Elle Freak, she remains an 'enigma'. Freak is a co-curator of Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890-1940, an expansive new exhibition co-presented by AGSA and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Some of the 50 featured artists are already icons: the Archibald-winning face of Nora Heysen; the gentle cubism of Dorrit Black; Margaret Preston's still life studies; and the vivid, stippled colours of Grace Cossington Smith. But many, like Kong Sing, are being salvaged from obscurity. 'That's been the challenge of the whole project,' Freak says. 'Especially these artists who were working internationally, trying to trace their movements, trying to find their works that sold overseas. 'There are some artists along the way where we've come across a work and it's the only example that we really know.' Freak and co-curators Tracey Lock and Wayne Tunnicliffe spent years mapping this intergenerational movement of women who traded the antipodes for Bohemian melting pots in Bloomsbury and Chelsea, or Paris's left bank. From the late 19th century they abandoned the parochial constraints of the home and the homeland to make their own way on and off the canvas. For Victorian-born Agnes Goodsir, Paris was a place where 'art is something more than a polite hobby'. While Goodsir made a living from conventional commissions, Freak says her private works are often 'subtly subversive and coated with sapphic symbolism'. 'She really was committed to this emotional form of realism, where she was more interested in the mood of her sitter,' Freak says. Often that sitter was Cherry: the nickname of Rachel Dunn, a divorced American musician and Goodsir's long-term partner, who is seen in works such as 1925's Girl with cigarette. Goodsir was pipped to be the first Australian woman elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts by Bessie Davidson, an Adelaide-born artist who also became the vice-president of the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes. Davidson's painting Intérieur (interior) was also completed in Paris in 1925, and turns the familiar trope of a bedroom scene into a site of intimacy and liberation; we see a hairbrush teetering on the edge of a dresser, a nude study perched above the unmade bed – and the reflection of Davidson's French partner Marguerite Le Roy just visible in a mirror. 'You get a sense that a moment has just passed,' Freak says. Dangerously Modern's focus is deliberately blurry; Australian and New Zealand-born expatriates are placed alongside inbound migrants, reflecting a decoupling from a notion of national identity that resurgent – and male-led – art movements back home were trying to galvanise. Freak and her colleagues trace more subtle points of convergence and exchange: Kong Sing once shared a Sydney studio with Florence Rodway; oils by Hilda Rix Nicholas and Ethel Carrick respond to exoticised colours and markets of Tangier, Morocco and Kairouan, Tunisia; and Girl in the sunshine, by New Zealand-born Edith Collier, was painted in the Irish village of Bunmahon, as part of a 1915 summer class led by Margaret Preston. A trio of paintings by Dorrit Black, Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar each capture a different view of the French village Mirmande – all three painted on the same field excursion in the summer of 1928. 'You've got the Irish moment, you've got a Mirmande moment, you've got your circle of artists in the Latin Quarter in Paris, all living in close contact with one another,' Freak says. In fact, Bowen and Davidson 'lived in the very same apartment building, and Bowen referred to Davidson as 'the old Australian impressionist on the top floor''. For artists who bucked tradition, borders, and convention, their often cool reception back home and subsequent omission from the Australian canon was structural, geographic and political. The show's title comes from Thea Proctor, who was amused to be regarded as 'dangerously modern' upon her homecoming in 1926. Freak and her co-curators also point to the art historian Bernard Smith's dismissive labelling of female expatriate artists as mere 'messenger girls' in 1988. Some works were literally too hot to handle; it's hard to picture a stronger expression of patriarchal suppression than the day Collier arrived home to find her father had burned a series of her boundary-pushing nudes. (A rare survivor appears in Dangerously Modern, making its first Australian appearance.) For Goodsir, at least, her love and muse ensured her legacy would be waiting once Australia caught up. 'After Goodsir passed away, Cherry sent her works back to Australia and said to keep them until audiences were ready – and then to distribute them more widely,' Freak says. Kong Sing died in Sydney in 1960, having eventually returned to 'the colonies' after two decades in England and Spain; a niece donated Me to AGNSW the following year. Now, elevated into an alternative Australian canon, Kong Sing has another opportunity to turn heads in her home country for her watercolours – not her complexion. Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is showing at AGSA until 7 September, and AGNSW from 11 October 11 to 1 February 2026
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Turner's rarely seen watercolours take centre stage in Bath
It is, says the curator Ian Warrell, a little like peering over JMW Turner's shoulder as he puzzles out how to create the sweeping land and seascapes that made him one of the greatest ever. An exhibition of the artist's rarely seen watercolours is opening in Bath, which includes scenes of the English West Country that he created as a teenager to a series of sketched seascapes when he was a much older man gazing out at storms off the Kent coast. Called Impressions in Watercolour, the exhibition gives insight into Turner's methods and serves a reminder of how important he was as a bridge between earlier landscape painting and the radical abstraction of the 20th century. The first of the 32 Turner watercolours on show at the Holburne Museum from Friday 23 May were painted in the early 1790s when the artist was about 16 or 17. One is a view of Bath from a hill made to look much more craggy than the actual rolling landscape around the Georgian city. Next to it is another West Country view, the romantic ruins of Malmesbury Abbey in Wiltshire. Both show Turner's interest in the 'theory of the sublime' that came to the fore later in his sea storms and mountain scenes. 'It was all very conventional at this stage,' said Warrell, a Turner specialist. 'But you can see he is ambitious.' A highlight of the exhibition is a series of seascapes that Turner painted as a much more mature artist in Margate, Kent. Warrell said: 'He'd been to Margate as a child because London was so polluted that his family sent him to school there, and then he went back again from the 1820s repeatedly. 'He'd look out from his lodgings out on to the beach and see the sun rising and setting and the boats and all the goings on. Turner said the skies over Margate and that area were the best in Europe, better than the Bay of Naples. The more turbulent the weather … the happier he was. 'All the time he's experimenting. Some of these watercolours are very simple meditations. Some probably would only have taken him no more than half an hour.' Unlike the great Turner paintings such as The Fighting Temeraire, which is viewed by hundreds of thousands of people every year, these pictures are from private collections and are rarely seen or reproduced. They show how he continued to play with and refine themes and feelings. A Steamboat and Crescent Moon was sketched in Margate in about 1845, seven years after he painted The Fighting Temeraire, but a squiggle of smoke harks back to the fiery funnel in the grand oil painting. 'All the time he's doing this, he's training his hand and eye, coordinating, trying ideas that he might use,' Warrell said. 'It's bold and his colour is different to anybody's work at that time. He doesn't always use the widest range of colours but the yellows and blues are very distinctive. He's trying to capture a moment or just the atmosphere of that moment.' Also featured in the exhibition are the artist's contemporaries, including Thomas Girtin, who like Turner was born 250 years ago in 1775, and John Sell Cotman. The exhibition runs from 23 May until 14 September.
