Women artists as drivers of early art historical activities and alternative art historical narratives in Australia

Abstract

This paper overviews women artists’ contribution to early Australian art historiography, especially focusing on the period 1900-1945, but extending to considering the diverse and changing status of women artists and the evaluation of women’s art in public culture from the postwar period up to the early twenty-first century. Two particular lines of enquiry are emphasised concurrently: an overview of feminist and consciously interventionist art historical/theoretical gestures, but equally women’s contribution to disseminating an understanding of art historical narratives in Australia, prior to the establishment of the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at University of Melbourne. These accounts are drawn from primary sources that substantially have not been consolidated or compared before in an academic context and reveal a widespread practice of public lectures and radio broadcasts across Eastern Australia around art historical themes particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as back to the Federation period.