Overview

Australian Women, Art and the Interwar Years: Migration and Identity offers fresh perspectives on the challenges emerging from past nationalistic narratives of Australian art, particularly regarding the ways they have overlooked women’s agency in shaping Australian art and identity. Through a transnational theoretical framework, this book examines the experience of migration of strong-minded Australian women, who were influential cultural agents from the years directly following the end of the First World War until 1941—a pivotal period in the history of cultural relations between Britain and its dominions that has been overlooked in art history. It explores the complexities of cultural ties between Australia and Britain and provides new insights into the interconnectivity between Australian and British modernisms. This book contributes to contemporary post-colonial debates regarding the cultural survival of the Empire. It innovatively intertwines discussions about national identity, migration, global visual culture, modernism, women, and cultural policy. This book's interdisciplinary approach will attract a diverse range of scholars and researchers in art history and women's migration, particularly focusing on cultural transfers, national identity, and modernism in interwar Australia and Britain. Additionally, this book will appeal to art curators, as it addresses exhibition history and curatorial studies while also exploring themes that have recently gained traction in exhibitions in both Australia and the United Kingdom.

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9781032715452

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Reviews

By focusing on the role of women agents who were makers, curators, and critics, this book explores the complex interchange between Australia and Britain in the interwar period. In dialogue with migration studies, these discussions make strange again assertions of how art and national character are entwined by bringing into focus the understudied interventions of women in the art scene and the role of transnational, national and local positionalities in shaping those conversations in exhibitions, art criticism, and patronage. Emily Burns, University of Oklahoma Victoria Souliman’s pioneering study sheds remarkable light on the history and role of ‘national’ collections, the nature and consequences of expatriatism, and the role played by a series of remarkable women in the definition of an Australian school of art. She discusses the issues of provincialism, and of ‘the painful remoteness’ often expressed by Australian women artists, both at home and abroad. Within the context of the decisive impact of Australia’s World War I engagement, which led both to an increasing awareness of an Australian specificity and to a strengthening of the country’s relation to Britain, Souliman’s book considers for the first time the agency of Australian women artists in the shaping up and definition of a national visual idiom between the two World Wars. Prof. Frédéric Ogée, Université Paris Cité

Author Information

Victoria Souliman is lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney and Université Paris Cité in 2019. Her doctoral research focused on issues of national identity, expatriatism, and women’s agency in the artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain in the early twentieth century. Her other research interests include the representation of female subjectivity and the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture.

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