Australian Women, Art and the Interwar Years

Australian Women, Art and the Interwar Years: Migration and Identity offers fresh perspectives on the challenges emerging from past nationalistic narratives of Australian art, particularly regarding the ways they have overlooked women's agency in shaping Australian art and identity. Through a transnational theoretical framework, this book examines the experience of migration of strong-minded Australian women, who were influential cultural agents from the years directly following the end of the First World War until 1941-a pivotal period in the history of cultural relations between Britain and its dominions that has been overlooked in art history. It explores the complexities of cultural ties between Australia and Britain and provides new insights into the interconnectivity between Australian and British modernisms. This book contributes to contemporary post-colonial debates regarding the cultural survival of the Empire. It innovatively intertwines discussions about national identity, migration, global visual culture, modernism, women, and cultural policy. This book's interdisciplinary approach will attract a diverse range of scholars and researchers in art history and women's migration, particularly focusing on cultural transfers, national identity, and modernism in interwar Australia and Britain. Additionally, this book will appeal to art curators, as it addresses exhibition history and curatorial studies while also exploring themes that have recently gained traction in exhibitions in both Australia and the United Kingdom.

Victoria Souliman is lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Sydney and Université Paris Cité in 2019. Her doctoral research focused on issues of national identity, expatriatism, and women's agency in the artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain in the early twentieth century. Her other research interests include the representation of female subjectivity and the legacy of surrealism in contemporary visual culture.

Introduction: 'The remoteness that pains us' Identity, women and artistic exchanges between Australia and Britain, 1919-1941 1. Women's marginalisation in the Australian artistic and cultural sphere: The pre-migration phase 2. Australian women artists at the centre of the Empire: Networks and connections abroad 3. Pioneering transnational perspectives: Edith May Fry and Australian expatriate artists in London in the 1920s 4. Transnational perspectives of British art: Clarice Zander and British Modern Art in Australia. Epilogue: Australian women, identity, and the post-Empire era