Author(s): Lesley Harding

General Art

Cubism was a movement that changed fundamentally the course of twentieth-century art. "Cubism and Australian Art" shows the impact of this revolutionary and transformative movement on Australian painting from the early twentieth century to the present day. The book traces the first manifestations of Cubism in Australian art in the 1920s, when artists studying overseas under leading cubist artists began to transform their art. By the 1940s, artists working within the canon of modernism referred to Cubism as part of their evolutionary process, and following World War II Cubism's reverberations were being felt as part of the abstraction movement. Cubism continues to have an influence on contemporary art by giving the geometric basis from which to seek an inner meaning beneath surface appearances, the exploration of the spiritual dimension of painting and a key to understanding modernism. More than eighty international and Australian artists are showcased with over 200 works featuring Alexander Archipenko, George Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger and Pablo Picasso as well as Margaret Preston, Roy de Maistre, Dorrit Black, Sam Atyeo, Grace Crowley and Adrian Lawlor.