How a 'mere flower painter' created a unique Australian art style

When the artist Margaret Preston returned to Australia from Europe after World War I, she had a mission.

In the nascent years of the century she had been studying and teaching art, and working as a wartime nurse. Now she was back, and determined to establish a distinct type of art that was uniquely Australian.

"Every country is dependent on its artists to uphold its name and place it among the 'great' of the world," she wrote in her essay Australian Artists Versus Art.

Preston spent the ensuing decades furiously developing her expansive artistic style, influencing countless others as she did it.

"Margaret Preston is part of how we still shape, make and think about art in Australia," says Beckett Rozentals, co-curator of the new Margaret Preston exhibition in Naarm/Melbourne.

Walking through the calm, salmon-hued rooms at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, you see familiar explosions of Australian flora, vistas of Sydney waterways, vibrant representations of the bush — all rendered with her signature bright colours, flat aspects and dark licorice lines.

But as this exhibition shows, Preston is not simple to categorise, as a person or as an artist.

Making art from the late 1800s until her death in 1963, copping dismissal (and outrage) from male artists of the time, as well as accusations of cultural appropriation from modern First Nations artists, Preston's long career was sometimes controversial, and ever-changing.

"History is never fixed," says Rozentals, "and Margaret Preston reminds us that art is never fixed."

A complicated, contradictory woman

The artist known as Margaret Preston only emerged when she married in 1919, at the age of 44 (although she falsified her age by eight years to appear younger than her husband, Lieutenant William George Preston.)

Born in Adelaide in 1875, she was known to everyone by her middle name, Rose — her early art is signed RM.

Her passion for art started young, and she studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. In a 1927 essay, she wrote about how her younger artistic self was disinterested in "the standardised beauty for art of landscapes, sunsets and ladies".

A bold young woman with bright red hair, she was famously labelled a "hussy" by Australian landscape painter Hans Heysen for putting herself in front of a life model.

But it wasn't until 1904 — when she was in her late 20s, both her parents had died and her familial responsibilities were leavened — that Rose travelled to Europe with her lover and fellow artist Bessie Davidson.

The first of two formative trips to Europe — the second taken with Gladys Reynell — this was where her determination to live and work as an artist found its inspiration and opportunity.

Rose's bowerbird mind gathered up styles, trialling and taking elements from everything from Post-Impressionism, European Primitivism, the Arts and Crafts movement and Japanese ukiyo-e.

Returning to Australia from war-ravaged Europe the second time, she started making a name for herself with her work glorying in Australian flowers, landscapes and colours, and she became deeply and uniquely fascinated with Aboriginal art and practices.

"She begins to look for what national art could look like, and in doing so she famously looks towards the cultural material of our First Peoples," explains curator Rozentals.

"She was really progressive in recognising the aesthetic value [of Aboriginal art], but her approach did not consider the significance to the communities in which she appropriated, and that's a big conversation."

This complicated and contradictory woman is covered from all angles in the wide ranging exhibition, which Rozentals brought together alongside NGV's First Nations Art Curator Michael Gentle.

It doesn't shy away from her downfalls, and platforms the responding works of many modern artists — but it also celebrates the creativity and brain of a trailblazing female artist who boldly pursued her artistic vision.

These are six stand-out moments in the exhibition that show the nuance of who Margaret Preston was, and how her art still speaks to Australia as a nation.

Wheelflower

Preston largely considered herself a floral artist, and clusters of them explode from just about every wall in the gallery. But the marked differences in how they are executed show her restless, curious mind at work.

After studying Japanese art at the Musee Guimet in Paris, Preston later travelled extensively in China, Japan and Korea, learning about their art traditions, and particularly embracing the ancient art of woodblock printing.

It is through these studies and travels, Preston writes, that she learned "that there is more than one vision in art. That a picture could have more than eye realism. That there was such a thing as aesthetic feeling".

Rozentals says when Preston returns to live in Australia she is seen as "somewhat of an authority on woodblock printing". She gave Thea Proctor her first woodblock, and the Australian artist went on to become renowned for her prints.

Preston's Wheelflowers (circa 1929), showing bright orange natives in various states of decay, is made particularly special in this exhibition by the presence of the woodblock she used to create it.

The back is a grid of the nine panels that formed the block, but the front shows the bold dark lines carved by hand out of the timber by the artist herself.

The block also demonstrates Preston's unique approach of printing in black only, then hand colouring the rest. That means no two prints would ever be quite the same.

"And you can see that it's intricate work, it's so hard," says Rozentals.

"And this is 1929, so she's getting close to her 50s now."

Mosman Bay, Sydney Harbour

After marrying, the Prestons settled in the Sydney suburb of Mosman. It was the start of the 1920s, and the post-war city was buzzing with change and progress.

Preston got to work, creating a series of pieces that reflected the bright vistas of her watery new home.

"For her, woodblock printing was such a modern response to a modern city," says Rozentals.

Her late 1920s work Mosman, Sydney Harbor, captures the sense of place in its simple lines and bright colours, and its stretching view to the horizon.

Through her art and husband's connections, Preston quickly climbed the city's social ladder. She became close with Sydney Ure Smith, the arts publisher who founded influential design journal The Home.

 Preston's colour-rich artworks were frequently featured on the cover, and she wrote regular essays and entreaties about the importance of a unique Australian art movement within its pages.

In her 1923 essay 'Why I became a convert to modern art', she sets out the case for conveying the domestic scenes around her 'without any remembrance of the Greek, German, French brand, and portray them as a purely Australian product'.

Flannel flowers

Preoccupied with how to establish a national art identity, Preston pushed back against cultural cringe and our fixation on international artists.

She bemoaned the idea that Australia would just become a "replica of America, who has deluged herself with the works of dead and alive artists of other lands".

In 1936, after a breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy, the Prestons moved from the bustling city to a more restorative location: Berowra, regional NSW. Here, her love affair with flora was allowed to truly bloom.

Although influential Sydney artists like Norman Lindsay dismissed her as a mere flower painter, Preston knew that Australia's unique flora and landscapes were things the world would be hungry to see.

In 1939, Preston was commissioned to paint 10 large-scale pictures for New York's World's Fair.

More realistic than much of her work, the paintings were also the largest that Preston had done. They are rambunctious crowds of colour, showcasing banksias, waratahs and kangaroo paws.

Another four works, including Flannel flowers, were exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco later the same year.

The delicate flower, which blooms after bushfires, has become synonymous with Preston's work, and remains popular with Australians today.

Liddy, Tunga, Jalikawa

In an essay for Art in Australia in 1941, Preston wrote: "Australian aboriginal art has for a long time been under a cloud as belonging to a people on the lowest level of civilisation.

"But the aborigine is an artist — a true and sensitive artist whose work should be studied and treated with the respect that is due to true art."

After moving to Berowra, Preston was first exposed to Dharug rock art sites throughout the Hawkesbury region. Later, she travelled with her husband extensively throughout NSW, Queensland and the Tiwi Islands, collecting inspiration and artefacts from Aboriginal communities, donating some to the Art Gallery of NSW.

Preston's relationship with First Nations art is mired in contradiction. Her practice was completely removed from culture, more focused on finding unique designs for use in home decor than honouring tens of thousands of years of cultural protocol.

"Preston has explored Indigenous symbols and motifs for personal and decorative reasons by including traditional marks and totems purely to creature own new style of 'Australiana'," writes Dr Deanne Gilson alongside her piece in the exhibition, Tjatjarrang (Elder Sister), Orange Banksia Dilly Bag.

"[She's] removing the person from the object, and the connection to Country."

That becomes all too clear when arriving at her 1943 piece The bark bag, which depicts a Tiwi Island tunga as a vase on a table.

Crafted from folded sheets of eucalyptus bark, with intricate designs and stories applied in ochre, tunga are used in everyday life for collecting food and water, but they are also important ceremonial objects used in Pukumani — the Tiwi mourning ritual.

The exhibition features two historical tunga that were collected by Preston — rare items, as tunga are meant to be returned to the earth as a gift for the ancestors.

Standing bright and proud alongside them are three contemporary tunga made by senior artists Kaye Brown, Raelen Kerinauia Lampuwatu and Mary Elizabeth Moreen, made in response to seeing these objects of their ancestors.

"We invite audiences to see that the visual culture underpinning 'Australianness' was never neutral or fixed," says co-curator Gentle.

"Exploring the lasting impact of Preston's work on identity, art, culture and politics reminds us that history is never simply past; it actively shapes the problems we grapple with today."

Self-portrait

There are rarely faces in Preston's work, and they are never her own.

But in 1930, she became the first woman to ever be commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to paint a self-portrait for their collection.

"She doesn't paint a lot of portraits, but it doesn't mean she can't. She's very good at it," says Rozentals as we reach the simply titled Self-portrait.

The full stop at the end of the NGV's wide-ranging exhibition, her clear, defiant stare goes some way to capturing the enigmatic artist.

Famously, when Preston had finished this work, she stated: "My self-portrait is completed, but I am a flower painter — I am not a flower."

Margaret Preston: A retrospective exhibition is showing until 31 January 2027 at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Naarm/Melbourne.