Cubism & Australian Art

Cubism & Australian Art shows the impact of the revolutionary movement of Cubism on Australian art from the 1920s to today. It uncovers a little-known yet compelling history through works by over eighty artists, including key examples of international Cubism — by André Lhote, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Alexander Archipenko and others — and nine decades of Australian modern and contemporary art that demonstrates a local evolution of cubist ideas. 

The exhibition documents the earliest incorporation of cubist principles in Australian art in the 1920s, when artists such as Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar began to transform their art in accordance with late cubist thinking. It examines the influence of Cubism on artists associated with the George Bell School in Melbourne and the Crowley–Fizelle School in Sydney; and on those who participated in the cubist movement abroad including James Cant and John Power. 

While its distortions and unconventional perspectives served individual styles such as the expressionism of Albert Tucker or the experimental landscapes of Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, Cubism’s most enduring influence on postwar Australian art has been in abstraction. This exhibition traces its reverberations in 1950s abstract art by Roger Kemp, Robert Klippel and others, through to works by younger artists such as Gemma Smith and Justin Andrews. 

Cubism’s shifting, multi-perspectival view of reality takes on new form in moving-image works by John Dunkley-Smith and Daniel Crooks, paintings by Melinda Harper and sculptures by James Angus. The use of found objects and recycled materials by Madonna Staunton, Rosalie Gascoigne and Masato Takasaka extends ideas originating in cubist sculpture and collage. Other artists are critical of Cubism, bringing Indigenous and non-European perspectives to bear on its modernist history, particularly its appropriation of so-called ‘primitive art’. 

For more information and related public programs, please visit our website. 

Image caption:
Robert Rooney
After Colonial Cubism 1993