MARGARET PRESTON
MARGARET PRESTON
ELIZABETH BUTEL
ETT IMPRINT, SYDNEY
This edition published by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay 2015
ETT IMPRINT
PO Box R1906
Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
First published by Penguin Books 1985, reprinted 1986. Published by Viking Books 1986. Published by Penguin Books 1987, reprinted 1989, 1991.
Published by ETT Imprint 1995. New edition 2015.
Copyright © Elizabeth Butel, 1985, 2015
ISBN 9781925416015 (pbk)
ISBN 9781925416152 (ebook)
The author is grateful to the Trustee of the Estate Late Margaret Preston, the Permanent Trustee Company Limited, for permission to reproduce the images and writings of Margaret Preston in all editions.
Design by Hanna Gotlieb
CONTENTS
Introduction
1875-1920
1920-1930
1924-1963
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
An artist is something on two legs with a simple soul and a belief that he was made before God — APHORISM 21
Margaret Preston was Australia’s foremost woman painter between the wars, a period when many of the best Australian artists were women. ‘Their art was remarkably pure; painting was done for pleasure and from inner necessity, not often for money or for fame.’2
Talented, adventurous and certainly the most vociferous of the women artists, Preston differed from her compatriots in her strident demands for recognition – not simply for her own art but for the many theories she held about Australia’s artistic atrophy. Her single, urgent plea was for a truly indigenous national art for this country, liberated from ‘Grandpa G. Britain’3 and the threat of internationalism, by a study of Aboriginal art. Her spirited crusade was partly the expression of her ‘broad and bursting personality’, as her friend Hal Missingham once put it4 and also an outcome of the tenacity bred in her by experience.
Many of Australia’s women artists from the early part of the twentieth century received financial support from their families and thus felt no pressure to compete commercially: ‘society permitted them to be artists but did not necessarily expect them to pay their own way.’5 For Margaret Preston, the story was otherwise. Her itinerant childhood, from Adelaide to Sydney to Melbourne, ended in her mid-teens with a return to the city of her birth in 1894 for her sailor father’s final illness and death. While studying at the Adelaide School of Design she began teaching to help support her widowed mother and younger sister, a career that continued long after the death of one and the marriage of the other. Preston submitted to the strain of teaching rather than compromise her art by painting pictures with one eye on the market. She wanted, as she wrote in 1927, to ‘paint her pictures as she would, to choose her own subjects and do them in her own way, leaving all thought of selling out of her mind.’6
Her determination to see where she stood artistically took her to England and Europe from 1904 to 1907, where her pride in her accomplished realism was shattered by coming face to face with modern European art, an experience she described in 1927 in ‘From Eggs to Electrolux.’7 There in that horrid country no one seemed to understand Australian German, or appreciate Australian art. They were all hopeless. It was even worse for her when she found herself understanding in German what apparently sane artists and students were saying about a certain picture at a Secessionist Exhibition – a picture that had a large pink dragon, with a lady victim clad in yellow, being rescued by a gentleman in black clothes ... They were actually admiring it. It made her feel sick.
Overcoming her nausea she sought enlightenment through the study of Japanese art at the Musée Guimet and learnt ‘slowly that there is more than one vision in art.’8 Her advances over her Australian contemporaries have, in part, been attributed to this study of the art that directly influenced Post-Impressionism, rather than to her analysis of Post-Impressionism itself. Returning to South Australia she resumed her teaching and her personal explorations, saving all the while ‘to be able to make a dash back to Paris to see if she had moved a little’.9 This she did in 1912, consolidating her earlier lessons by an eight-year stay in Europe and England, which allowed her to experience the fierce, non-realistic colour and bold, apparently crude draughtsmanship of the Fauvists. Precision of design was now aided by the decorative possibilities of colour and she wrote to the painter Norman Carter from the Ile de Noirmoutier, a small island off the coast of France, south of Brittany, in 1913:
I am very interested to hear of your decorative work – it is the only thing worth aiming at for this our century. It’s really the keynote of everything – I’m trying all I know to reduce my still-life to decorations and find it fear-fully difficult ... now I know what you are exploring you can expect missives from me from time to time as I am more interested in this part of our Art than any other.’10
One look at Margaret Preston’s invigorating, expressive and powerful art should convince the viewer that by ‘decoration’ she meant something quite different from the vapid, artificial prettiness that has come to be associated with the term.
Living in England during World War I, she taught pottery and basket-weaving to shell-shocked soldiers at a military hospital on the Devon Moors, all the while developing her skills as a colourist. By the time of her marriage to William George Preston in Australia in 1919, she had been studying, teaching and experimenting with her art for almost thirty years. This late and financially secure marriage released her from the need to earn her living and allowed her full rein in applying her considerable energies and willpower to developing her art and her theories. Settling in Sydney where local modernism was a stylish, watered-down variant of the European revolutionary mode, Preston applied her aesthetic to interior decoration, fabric design and even flower arrangement, in addition to painting and print-making.
The Australia she had returned to was an urban society, but one which, nonetheless, still saw the landscape and pioneering traditions of the nineteenth century as its most appropriate visual expression. Depressed urban workers were led to believe that the bush was a place of healing away from the diseased life of the city. Furthermore, the bush was regarded as masculine in gender, a place to escape from the ladylike refinements of the city and women’s challenge to supremacy, which had arisen through the freedoms that had come to them with the war.
Newly and happily married, freed from financial constraints and in complete command of the lessons she had learned in her years in Europe and England, Margaret Preston, in the full authority of her middle age, set about challenging the bush ethos and the entrenched traditionalism of Australian art. Her attack was vigorous, multi-faceted and sustained over the next twenty-five to thirty years. This book examines that attack through the rich variety of her vital art and the voice of the artist herself, in her writings and theories. These come to us today, over half a century later, ringing with the conviction of a fresh, original mind.