Margaret Preston

‘Wherever and whenever in the future Australian painting is discussed and evaluated, Margaret Preston will surely be one of those to be first mentioned. Not only is her work widely represented in all Australian public and private collections, but by her forthright opinions, published and spoken, she was vociferously ahead of much of the dreary amateurism and provincialism of many painters of her day’¹Hal Missingham, ‘Margaret Preston’, Art and Australia, vol. 1, no. 2, Aug. 1963, p. 90.

Art historian Mary Eagle once described Margaret Preston as the ‘litmus test of Australia’s art personalities’.²Mary Eagle, Unpublished notes on Margaret Preston, 14 July 1986, Mary Eagle archive, National Art Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Like a chemical test that reveals a substance’s true composition, Preston’s unwavering commitment to promoting nationalist ideas of culture and art continues to function as a measure of our position within debates centred on Australian art. From art critics to the general public, whether now or a century ago, responses to her work tend to expose broader beliefs about what Australian art is, is not, or ought to be. Celebrated for her bold floral still lifes and modern woodblock prints, Preston travelled extensively throughout Europe in the early twentieth century, developing a highly distinctive visual language by synthesising styles such as Post-Impressionism, European Primitivism, the Arts and Crafts movement and Japanese ukiyo-e. Following her return to Australia in 1919, Preston emerged as a central figure in the dissemination of modernist principles while at the same time advocating for nationalist ideas of art and culture. From the mid 1920s onwards, Preston finetuned her aesthetic sensibilities to the visual cultures of Indigenous communities from across the world, primarily concerning herself with Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Across her extensive career, Preston developed a public profile with a clearly articulated agenda to formulate a uniquely ‘Australian’ art. Yet, unlike the colonial-era ambitions of groups such as the Australian Impressionists, with their romanticised pastoral landscapes, Preston’s project of cultural synthesis was neither singular nor stable. Rather, by collaging disparate art styles, historical movements and cultural references, Preston constructed a version of Australiana marked by flux and contradiction. It is this tension that characterises both Preston’s practice and legacy. Although Preston yearned for a distinctly Australian art, laying out her ideas in numerous writings, lectures and interviews – as well as a series of ninety-two aphorisms published in her 1929 monograph Recent Paintings – her vision was deeply influenced by a rich tapestry of cultural and artistic references acquired through travel and research. After early years of experimentation, Preston arrived at the position that Australian art’s ‘saving grace is our distance from contaminating sources’³

Margaret Preston, ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 11, March 1925, unpaginated. – for Preston, this ‘saving grace’ was, specifically, the uniqueness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual cultures. While she was among the first to recognise the aesthetic merit of First Nations art, by appropriating it for her own prints and paintings she produced a body of work that was resolutely Australian because it mobilised the logic of settler colonialism. While idealistic, her appropriation of Aboriginal art in aid of ‘an art for Australia from Australians’ visually and discursively erased the voices of First Peoples in a settler society that, according to historian Patrick Wolfe, ‘sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference – and, accordingly, its independence – from the mother country’.⁴Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler-colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, p. 389.

Preston’s work illuminates the power imbalances that continue to exclude the sovereign stories of First Peoples within the broader narrative of Australian art history, offering mediated (and ‘palatable’) representations of Aboriginality. Across time, settler societies have adapted First Nations cultural material for their own purposes, often obscuring the real history of invasion, violence, resistance and ongoing cultural practice. The use of Indigenous forms as decoration, or as a means of asserting belonging, has frequently supported narratives that position settlers as rightful inheritors of the land, while marginalising First Peoples’ sovereignty. When cultural expressions are taken from their communities, they are reframed to position the coloniser as inheritor, interpreter and custodian. The cultural context in which Preston worked was shaped by a provincial outlook – defined less by geographic distance from Europe than by a perception of existing on the margins of empire, with cultural value measured against centres such as London and Paris. Today, this condition is often described as ‘cultural cringe’: a tendency to privilege imported models over local expression. Preston sought to reframe this position as an opportunity, encouraging artists to draw on local environments, materials and cultures rather than rely on external validation. She used this framework to advocate for a distinctly Australian modernism grounded in place and identity.

Amid the turmoil of amalgamating disparate references, antipodean iconography and First Nations visual traditions, Preston produced something recognisably ‘Australian’. Her work thus endures as both a foundational achievement and a site of critical reflection, emblematic of a nationalist vision built through unresolved artistic and political contradictions. Preston challenged cultural cringe directly. Rather than accepting Australia’s distance from Europe as a mark of inferiority, she subverted it, seeing possibility where others saw lack. Through her writing and art, she urged artists to stop looking outwards for approval and to instead turn towards Australia’s own environment, materials and history. What had once been experienced as marginality she recast as distinction. As Preston’s aphorism 45 states, ‘Modern art, to survive, must be made necessary to modern society. The first step is to find subjects that can symbolize what is to us the meaning of our world as effectively as the religious pictures did for other times.’⁵Margaret Preston, ‘92 aphorisms by Margaret Preston and others’, in Sydney Ure Smith & Leon Gellert (eds), Margaret Preston: Recent Paintings, Art in Australia, Sydney, 1929, unpaginated.

In her vision, geographic and cultural distance were not deficiencies to correct but conditions to cultivate. Thanks to Margaret Preston, isolation became fertile ground in which a specifically Australian modernism could take root and flourish.

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Beckett Rozentals is NGV Senior Curator, Australian Art.

Michael Gentle is a curator and art historian based in Naarm.

This is an extract of an essay originally published in the Margaret Preston exhibition publication, available instore and online at NGV design store. The NGV warmly thanks Darcy Brennan and Deborah Galbraith through the Darcy Brennan Foundation for their generous support of the publication.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.

Notes