‘Victors’ and ‘victims'?: Men, women, modernism and art in Australia

The ‘intrusion of women painters’: Ethel Anderson, modern art and gendered modernities in interwar Sydney, Australia

“…13 The aesthetics endorsed or practised by modern women might be regarded as a powerful mobilisation of those forces in a critique of the 'successive antithetic roles' cast upon them by the masculinist modernities that denied women public agency in discourses on civic culture. 14 In a recent study on the British example of Virginia Woolf, Maggie Humm points to the 'blurring of art and everyday experiences' as a strategy that worked to disrupt the high cultural practices enshrined in the masculinist cultural historical canon. 15 Likewise, Janet Wolff, writing on the relationship between feminism and modernism, acknowledges that the 'new literary and visual forms and strategies invented and deployed to capture and represent the changed situation of women in the modern world .…”

“…I have elsewhere shown that this interpretation of the emergence of artistic modernism in Australia, which underpins Australia's canonical modernism, applies narrow and misleading definitions of modernism and radicalism. 17 Though never wealthy, Ethel Anderson moved in upper-middle-class, even upper-class circles, due to her husband's British army ranking and subsequent work for a series of New South Welsh state governors. Further, she was politically conservative, and more representative of the diverse and influential array of right-winged modernist intellectuals exemplified by Ezra Pound and the Italian Futurists than the leftist modernists highlighted in Australia's modernist canon.…”