Art – Under a Modern Sun: Art in Queensland 1930s-1950s – QAGOMA

The above Exhibition is on display at GOMA until January, having commenced in early August, comprising a collection of paintings, sculpture and photographs of Queensland from 1930 to 1960.

For the reader, it represents a nostalgic snapshot of Queensland – not just Brisbane, but Queensland a as a whole – apropos of that important period in the State’s social and economic development.

Included are works by Charles Blackman, Ray Crooke, Margaret Cilento, Max Dupain, Vida Lahey, Daphne Mayo, Sidney Nolan, Margaret Olley, Betty Quelhurst and Joy Roggenkamp.

The Exhibition booklet is well worth the cost. In a Foreword thereto, instructively, Chris Saines, the director of the Queensland Art Gallery – Gallery of Modern Art – says of the Exhibition: 

The Queensland sun not only sustained the state’s flourishing rural and agricultural industries, but also fostered a new urban artistic milieu, not least in Brisbane.  European modernism, which spanned the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, was an artistic response to the period’s astonishing rate of industrialisation, urbanisation and technological change.  The first seeds of Australian Modernism, however, were planted later and from a distance by a small group of artists who travelled to Europe, mainly France and England, in the early years of the twentieth century.  Working in the progressive European schools and academies of the time, such as the Slade School of Fine Art in London and the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere in Paris, artists learned to reject tradition and to strive for more dynamic simplified and subjective responses to the modern era.  The movement would not take root in Queensland until after World War Two.

The Exhibition attendee can spend 30 minutes or a couple of hours enjoying the delights of this exhibition.  Barristers practising in Brisbane – with chambers on or near North Quay – can readily access GOMA across the Kurilpa Bridge at lunchtime with 5 minute walk, and be back in time for afternoon conferences.  Entry is free.

The writer recommends a visit, if not at lunchtime, then at the weekend.  It is a joyous Queensland experience.

Link to the Exhibition – including some of the works on display.