MARGARET PRESTON ART AND LIFE
EXHIBITION
ARTIST
EVENTS
GARDEN TOURS
EDUCATION
ORDER CATALOGUE
Art Gallery of New South Wales 29 July to 23 October 2005
ARTIST
biography
‘in her own words’
1910s
1920s
1930s
1940s
1950s
‘in her own words’

1923

*‘ … Australia is a fine place in which to think. The galleries are so well fenced in. The theatres and cinemas are so well fenced in … The universities are so well fenced in … Tradition thinks for you, but Heavens! How dull!

(‘Why I became a convert to modern art’, The Home June 1923)

 
Margaret Preston

1924

*‘If Australia is ever to have a typical art of its own, the less it sees of mediocre English or European works the better …’

(‘Should there be an Australian tariff on imported works of Art?’ Art in Australia June 1924)

Image: Margaret Preston c.1924 (detail). Photograph by Harold Cazneaux. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Margaret Preston

1925

*‘In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own I have gone to the art of a people who had never seen or known anything different from themselves … These are the Australian Aboriginals and it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring’

(‘The Indigenous Art of Australia’, Art in Australia March 1925)


Image: Woman’s World October 1926 with Preston’s Coral flowers (1925)
on cover. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Margaret Preston

1927

*‘Art is the tangible symbol of the spirit of a country … What is Australia going to offer to the world as her contribution to the Arts?’

(‘What is to be our National Art?’, Undergrowth March–April 1927)

Image above: Cover for The Home August 1928 with Preston’s Wattle (1928). Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Historic Houses Trust of NSW
Image above right: Still life 1927 (detail) untraced
Margaret Preston

*-‘Yet again the old restless feeling is bothering her. She feels that her art does not suit the times, that her mentality has changed and that her work is not following her mind. She feels that this is a mechanical age – a scientific one-highly civilised and unaesthetic. She knows that the time has come to express her surroundings in her work .All around her in the simple domestic life is machinery – patent ice chests that need no ice, machinery does it; irons heated by invisible heat; washing-up machines; electric sweepers and so on. They all surround her and influence her mind … ’

(Preston speaking of herself, ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, Art in Australia December 1927)

Margaret Preston

1929

*-‘Modern art is attached to science. The world that science is making may be disgusting but it is the world in which we have to live and it condemns to futility all who are too blind to notice it’

*-‘The easiest way to understand modern art is to buy an example and live with it. Custom makes consciousness’

Margaret Preston Aphorisms:
(Art in Australia, 1929)

 

Image: The Home, June 1929 with Preston’s Lobster (1929) on front cover. Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Historic Houses Trust of NSW
Margaret Preston

*-‘Modern art, to survive, must be made necessary to modern society. The first step is to find subjects that can symbolise what is to us the meaning of our world as effectively as the religious pictures once did for other times

*-‘Why there are so many tables of still life in modern paintings is because they are really laboratory tables on which aesthetic problems can be isolated’

*-‘Colour is the emblem of change’

Margaret Preston Aphorisms:
(Art in Australia, 1929)

Image: Cover for The Wentworth Magazine, August 1928 with Preston’s Christmas bells (1925)
Margaret Preston

*-‘Colour is the emblem of change’

*-‘Imitators serve only to emphasise the greatness of their master’

*-‘Art to fulfil its destiny, requires to be accepted by a nation or race and not by the few’

*-‘Art never improves, only changes’

Margaret Preston Aphorisms:
(Art in Australia, 1929)

Image: Margaret Preston in her Mosman garden 1930 (detail). Photograph by Harold Cazneaux. Preston archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales
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