Selected Writings - Margaret Preston. Margaret Preston
She knows that the time has come to express her surroundings in her work. All around her in the simple domestic life is machinery - patent ice-chests that need no ice, machinery does it; irons heated by invisible heat; washing-up machines; electric sweepers, and so on. They all surround her and influence her mind and, as her mind is expressed in her work, she has produced ‘Still Life, 1927’, and ‘Banksias’.
Yet again come her friends and critics. Queer people. Only a short time since they were complaining that her colour knocked everything out, and now that she is trying to produce form in its simplest manner, making all other qualities subservient to this, they regret her throwing away of her ‘beautiful colour’. Fortunately she is free to paint what she pleases and how she thinks. She does not imagine she has advanced in her art - only moved. The ladder of art lies flat, not vertical. This only she claims for the works in this book. They are the mind of a woman who is still alive.
Art in Australia - Margaret Preston Number, 3rd Series, No. 22 December 1927
WHY I BECAME A CONVERT TO MODERN ART
The Character of an Individual is not a fixed property. - T. S. ELIOT
Once upon a time when I was twelve years of age I borrowed my mother’s best dinner plates and brunswick blacked them all over. On to the blacking I painted flannel flowers. The result so impressed my mother that after the shock of the loss of the plates was over she determined to have me properly trained. Her justification was that as the flowers were the image of the natural ones I must have talent.
From this on my imitativeness was well nurtured.
Excellent tuition was found for me, and I was well taught to draw the outward show of dancing fauns, Donatello heads, etc. I was well surrounded by tradition and taught only through tradition. Would that I could have had the advantages offered by the Slade school in London, where the sculpture of the Greeks & Co. flourish in museums and not in a live school, and where all imitativeness is discouraged. I must have learnt to draw, for I won so many prizes. After some years of this excellent training I was allowed to start on colour. Oranges, turnips, bald heads, hairy heads, bananas, etc., all were imaged by me, and more prizes followed.
At last I felt competent to face the future, let it be eggs, onions or portraits.
I had been magnificently grounded, and all I had to do was to go on doing more, as I had nature always before me and how could anyone improve on Nature? What is a plate but a dish and an onion but a vegetable?
Then full steam ahead in art.
As long as the onions were of a recognised species, and plates as they are generally known, all was well. Trees and portraits with a little gentle selection were equally safe so long as you were careful to arrange the lights according to nature. This was the text-book of my early realism. Imitating the world, I decided to go abroad, and fixed on Munich.
There were two very strong elements in Munich at that time, the dead realists and the lively moderns. These two sets of painters had their shows at the same time. Naturally, I condemned as mad and vicious the moderns and went willingly with the deads. 1 was well soaked in ‘nature above all’ and ‘sanity first’ and the boat fare afterwards. My first visit to the Secession Exhibition, as the modern show called itself, left me undefiled.
To the pure all is pure, to the blank all is blank.
My letters about this time written back to my native country could be compressed into a few sentences such as: Half German art is mad and vicious and a good deal of it is dull; I am glad to say my work stands with the best of them.
Six months after another tabloid letter could have been received: You were astonished when you read that I am starting to think that perhaps the mad and vicious show has something in it.
And again: I have found out one thing from them - that eggs don’t need to be peculiarly Wyandotte, etc., and they can still be eggs.
This discovery gave me bad growing pains.
I suffered all the discomforts of doubt and indecision and, much worried, determined to leave Germany and go to Paris. When I arrived in Paris the Old Salon (francaise) was open.
Here I found realism triumphant!
Myriads of canvases!
It seemed as if all the artists in the world must be showing there.
But again, its very multitudinousness made me think that if painting is as easy as this, why is it regarded as an art? So again I paid my door money to a modern show and this time tried to think.
I found at last that the eggs and onions as part or whole of a picture could appear different and suggest something more than being merely edible. I could not paint the smell so I needn’t paint the species. Realism had its first rebuff.
I went to the Galleries and studied Ingres and Renoir, etc., and so, muddled and worried, I moved on to Spain to worship at the shrine of Velasquez, that demi-god of realism. Velasquez occupied a large room, but, alas, so did Goya. Like the Wandering Jew 1 fled from country to country hunting an ideal, and finally decided to come back to Australia. I had learned to think - so the passage money was not wasted. Australia is a fine place in which to think.
The galleries are so well fenced in.
The theatres and cinemas are so well fenced in.
The libraries are so well fenced in.
The universities are so well fenced in.
You do not get bothered with foolish new ideas. Tradition thinks for you, but Heavens! how dull! To keep myself from pouring out the selfsame pictures every year I started to think things out.
Why is music so controlled and painting such a muddle? Because music is a science and painting is uncontrolled. Mow can art be controlled? By a scientific study of optics, etc.
When does an onion cease to become a kitchen requisite and useful to art? When the onion becomes merely an aesthetic object for the painter?
What is the difference between an onion in art and one in commerce? In art we must use nature as tradition only and originate another suggestion apart from food and fecundity.
Why does the tobacco-juice art (Vandyck brown) flourish in Australia in preference to the light and colour sect? Because the appreciation of colour was nearly killed in the Victorian era, and most of the art here has not emerged from that period.
When is a work modern? When it represents the age it is painted in.
These answers were my revised text-book. And so I started to try not to duplicate nature, but to endeavour to make my onions, etc., obey me, and not me them. To add my mind (aestheticism) to their contours and let my eyes be more controlled by my brain. And now 1 want to think and think and try and get those onions, etc., without any remembrance of the Greek, German, French brand, and portray them as a purely Australian product. It’s going to be difficult, but anything is better than turning a handle and finding myself doing brunswick blacked dinner plates, only a little more fluently.
The Home Vol. 4, No. 2. June 1923
AUSTRALIAN ARTISTS VERSUS ART
This is an age of technical expertness, commercialism and imitativeness! Science reigns supreme. But starry-eyed Science hangs on an If - so that her day must be short. The country that produces only Robots is unimportant. Anything that has a formula is useless as a means of making a country great, or of producing something that is not secondary. An artist must be spontaneous, therefore, every country is dependent on its artists to uphold its name and place it among the ‘Great’ of the world. Old lands, old heads, old traditions are all excellent in their own places, but they are the very