Strange Women – Essays in art and gender –

“Art, like all forms of cultural production, is subject to regulation. Its shape is socially induced by power relationships, its form never accidental or natural.
In this collection of essays, Jeanette Hoorn and her co-writers examine how women’s art in Australia was controlled and shaped from the mid-nineteenth century until World War II.

In a community where the masculine landscape tradition was considered the acme of Australian painting and one that embodied a ‘true’ national identity, the new Modernist painting of women was seen as marginal and incidental.
Yet, Strange Women argues, it was in the work of Grace Cossington Smith, Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston and Grace Crowley that the groundwork was laid for much of Modernist practice. The painter Hilda Rix Nicholas challenged this exclusion by claiming the freedom to work in areas regarded as male preserves.

Strange Women also explores a number of issues concerned with the work of women painters and the representation of women in painting by men.
This challenging book looks behind the commonly assumed narratives of art criticism to present a provocative new reading of gender in Australian painting.”