A Companion to Australian Art (Blackwell Companions to Art History)

A Companion to Australian Art A Companion to Australian Art is a thorough introduction to the art produced in Australia from the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 to the early 21st century. Beginning with the colonial art made by Australia’s first European settlers, this volume presents a collection of clear and accessible essays by established art historians and emerging scholars alike. Engaging, clearly-written chapters provide fresh insights into the principal Australian art movements, considered from a variety of chronological, regional and thematic perspectives. The text seeks to provide a balanced account of historical events to help readers discover the art of Australia on their own terms and draw their own conclusions. The book begins by surveying the historiography of Australian art and exploring the history of art museums in Australia. The following chapters discuss art forms such as photography, sculpture, portraiture and landscape painting, examining the practice of art in the separate colonies before Federation, and in the Commonwealth from the early 20th century to the present day. This authoritative volume covers the last 250 years of art in Australia, including the Early Colonial, High Colonial and Federation periods as well as the successive Modernist styles of the 20th century, and considers how traditional Aboriginal art has adapted and changed over the last fifty years. The Companion to Australian Art is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students of the history of Australian artforms from colonization to postmodernism, and for general readers with an interest in the nation’s colonial art history. "Art in the Australian continent has two very different stories, which have become intertwined in recent times but can never be reduced to a single narrative. The first of these, of course, is the story of the art produced by the original inhabitants of the land, who came here tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic Revolution and the beginning of urban life in the northern hemisphere, and whose way of life seems to have remained remarkably stable, all but untouched by the history of the rest of humanity, until the beginning of British settlement at the end of the eighteenth century. The Aborigines are constantly present to varying degrees in the art and the consciousness of European Australians throughout the history of modern Australia, and so appear in many of the chapters of this book."-- Provided by publisher