Margaret Preston: Art & Life
Art Gallery Of South Australia
Until Sun 13 August

When viewing a retrospective of an artist's work, there are many aspects that arise for consideration as viewers recognise how the works may change and develop over the years, as outside influences become apparent to the work, or should a predominant theme or unique quality present itself. Personally however, when it comes to the work of Margaret Preston, I cannot help mulling over the ongoing debate that has surrounded her position as either Indigenous art appropriator or ambassador for artistic and cultural progress as a means to a national Australian style. As someone aware of the plethora of exploitations of Indigenous art and culture that have occurred at various stages in Australia's history, it does not take too much twisting of my arm in favour of the former argument.
Here was an artist who promoted the use of Indigenous imagery in an assortment of ways, ranging from the production of decorative arts to personalised printed content. The argument supporting 'artistic and cultural progress' suggests Preston embraced Indigenous art and made a conscious attempt to encourage its presence in the wider arts, under the banner of Australian identity. However, therein lies the problem for me and for many others, which in so doing a non-Indigenous voice becomes the dominant one for the very culture supposedly being advanced.
The travelling Preston retrospective curated by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and currently on show in Adelaide exhibits Preston's early works, her prolific representations of still life, her popular printmaking, her decorative arts, her rare figurative works, her series of monographs and her later landscape works. It is extremely beneficial to witness some of the aforementioned issues regarding Preston's debated role in the context of her oeuvre. As viewers move throughout the exhibition venue, works illustrating the Indigenous/national style conundrum come to light in many ways. The first work is found in a volume of 'Art In Australia', on show within one of the several display cabinets. Sourced from number 11 of the third series of the journal in March of 1925, it depicts blatant reproductions, though in saturated colours, of Indigenous designs found on shields and taphoglyphs, with notation of how they might be applied to the decorative arts. Nine Aboriginal designs c1927 is a beautiful series of small decorative and emblematic Indigenous inspired designs, all of which Preston has clearly attributed their origin.

By the early 1940s, Indigenous artistic influence can be seen to be creeping into her floral still lifes, where she makes transitions to an earthy palette for table arrangements and backdrops, as in Native Flowers 1944. In Aboriginal Still Life 1940, she has also incorporated Indigenous props, such as a coolamon and shield. Perhaps the best example of Preston's hybridisation (if one can call it that) of still life and Indigenous art is Still Life: Fruit (Arnhem Land Motif) 1941, where she has used rich ochre hues to depict a woven basket full of fruit upon an abstract, cubist inspired ground. With the addition of dots to the objects, she has sought to 'Indigenise' the painting. Preston's series of coloured masonite cuts also attest to the way she has 'borrowed' from Indigenous art, using the medium to add texture and segment the works. She has also drawn upon iconic Aboriginal symbology and Indigenous techniques such as cross-hatching to produce these works. Finally, in a number of works from 1949 and 1953, Preston has developed her late landscape style into a series of colour stencils that again appear as blatant reproductions of Indigenous art. Using her rich background as a skilful colourist, she has presented works that illustrate dot and line combinations, segmentation and in a couple of instances such as Kangaroo Hunt 1949 and Fish 1953, bear an uncanny resemblance to Indigenous rock paintings of Northern and Central Australia. Not surprising, she visited these areas in the 1940s, making them likely sources.
The fact that Preston was still inspired by Indigenous art late in her career, does support her own philosophy that Australian Indigenous art could be used by other Australian artists to form an all-encompassing national Australian style; that like European or Asian art, it could be presented to the world with certain uniqueness and originality. However, no matter how postmodern this philosophy may seem today, let us not forget that here was an artist whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. At the end of the day, is not this outlook simply an imperialistic one that has managed to also blinker out real and actual cultural inequities of the said time and
place?

Nerina Dunt

Margaret Preston
Australia 1875-1963, lived in Europe 1904-07, 1912-19
Aboriginal design with Sturt's Pea 1943
colour masonite cut, hand-coloured
30.4 x 38.4 cm
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Purchased 1943
(c) Margaret Preston Estate.
Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia