Aboriginal landscape

Margaret Preston
Australia
1875 – 1963

Aboriginal landscape
1941
oil on canvas
Currently on display, Gallery 6
Place made
Sydney
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
40.0 x 52.0 cm
50.2 x 61.7 x 4.5 cm (frame)
Credit line
D. and J.T. Mortlock Bequest Fund 1982
Accession number
821P3
Signature and date
Signed and dated l.r. pencil, M. Preston 18-1-41
Media category
Painting
Collection area
Australian paintings
Copyright
© Estate of Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency

  • Born Margaret Rose MacPherson inAdelaide, Margaret Preston became one of Australia’s most celebrated and influential modern artists. Her well-documented and passionate advocacy for a national art style based on visual elements of Aboriginal art reached its extremity with this widely reproduced painting, Aboriginal landscape,1941. In this work, features of the Australian landscape are simplified and exaggerated using dots and dashes, and are offset by repeated blocks of flat earthy colour. The warm creams and red ochre tones,

    delineated with bold outlines, show the particular influence of bark paintings from Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and shields from Far North Queensland.

     

    In the year that it was created, Aboriginal landscape was celebrated as an image of modern Australia and featured in both the Australia National Journal and in the major international travelling exhibition Art of Australia 1788–1941. Today the painting and Preston’s sincere attempts to promote Aboriginal art through the appropriation of its style are recognised as fraught with ethical and cultural complexities.

     

    Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture

  • [Book] AGSA 500.