| The
Society has a long and proud history as the oldest surviving women's art
group in Australia.
Founded in 1902, the Melbourne
Society of Women Painters and Sculptors (MSWPS) is Australia's oldest specialist
organisation for women artists. Many women have been members of the
Society. Radicals and conservatives, painters, sculptors, printmakers,
china painters, craft workers, commercial artists and designers, professionals
and amateurs, women artists of varying skills and philosophies worked together
as members of the MSWPS. "More Than Just Gumtrees" tells the story
of the MSWPS and its members' achievements. Issues of the workplace,
family and art commitments, economic survival of artists, migrant artists
and prejudice against women are also explored.
Much of the information in
"More Than Just Gumtrees" has not been available in previous publications,
hitherto unpublished sources include oral history interviews, minute books,
reviews, letters, early photographs.
An intimate picture of women's
art in Melbourne from the plein air and craft movements at the turn
of the century, through tonalism, modernism, the second world war and 1950s
domesticity to realist, traditional and contemporary artists of the present
day.
Biographies of over 300 artists,
with individual exhibition lists, representation in public collections
and further sources form a valuable reference for both general and specialist
readers and researchers, dealers and libraries.
Members included Clara Southern,
Violet Teague, A.M.E.Bale, Ethel Carrick Fox, Hilda Rix Nicholas, Dora
Serle, Janet Cumbrae-Stewart, Dora Wilson, Ola Cohn, Sybil Craig, Peggie
Crombie, Helen Ogilvie, Amalie Colquhoun, Isabel Hunter Tweddle, Ada May
Plante, Lina Bryans, Anne Montgomery, Majorie Woolcock, Maidie McGowan
and many many more.
see below |
"More
Than Just Gumtrees"
A Personal, Social and Artistic
History of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors by
Juliet
Peers CV
or Antique dolls
Copies
for sale : email click here
Publisher/Date: Melbourne
Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in association with Dawn Revival
Press, 1993. Description: xii, 308 p: ill., ports. ; 30 cm.
ISBN 0 646 16033 8.A4.8pp.full colour
see
Index of artists mentioned
"... provocative in places
and interesting throughout.. [an] interpretive analysis of the place of
the Society and of women artists generally in Australian cultural history
... This book should do much more than "complete" the historiographical
picture with regard to women artists; it will help paint an entirely new
one." Anita Calloway, Lecturer, College of Fine Arts, University of New
South Wales
"What is presented here is
far more than a history of an important group of Victorian women artists
- though it is triumphantly that. By filling in the faces of the
Society's members in such precise lively detail and locating them fairly
in the midst of the Australian art scene generally, this book gives us
a new and broader profile of twentieth century Australian art generally."
Dr Joan Kerr,
Co-ordinator, 1995 National
Women's Art Exhibition |
Biographies
of members include :
Judith
Perrey
Clara Southern,
Violet Teague,
AME Bale,
Ethel Carrick Fox,
Hilda Rix Nicholas,
Dora Serle,
Janet Cumbrae -Stewart,
Dora Wilson, |
Ola Cohn,
Sybil Craig,
Peggie Crombie,
Helen Ogilvie,
Amalie Colquhooun,
Isabel Hunter Tweedle,
Ada May Plante,
Lina Bryans,
Anne Montgomery,
Majorie Woolcock,
Madie McGowan... |
