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

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 Artis 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.