[Right: Margaret Preston. Australian coral flowers 1928. Oil on canvas. 56.0 x 58.0cm.
National Gallery of Australia, gift of Andrew and Wendy Hamlin 1992.  
© Margaret Preston Estate. Licensed by Viscopy Australia.]

Margaret Preston: Australian Printmaker
National Gallery of Australia
Canberra
8 December 2004 to 25 April 2005

Margaret Preston: Art and Life
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney
29 July to 23 October 2005

National Gallery of Victoria
Melbourne
12 November 2005 to 29 January 2006

Queensland Art Gallery
Brisbane
18 February to 7 May 2006

Art Gallery of South Australia
Adelaide
26 May to 13 August 2006


By all accounts Margaret Preston was not the nicest of people. She was pushy, conceited, nurtured a fiery temper and with military precision and obsessive determination fought for her niche in Australian art history.

Margaret Rose Macpherson, as she was known by her maiden name for the first 44 years of her life, did not manage even a tiny splash on the Australian art scene. Although she inherited a small income in 1903 after the death of her mother, she led a largely hand to mouth existence with bits of study, bits of overseas travel and loads of teaching. She received very modest recognition in her native city of Adelaide and was generally unknown outside of it. In 1919 when it seemed that she was destined to slip into the footnotes of art history, she decided to change all of this. On the last day of the year she married William Preston, the manager of Dalton Brothers Ltd, and in 1920 she had launched a new identity and career.

Margaret Preston's makeover was both extreme and completely orchestrated. On her marriage certificate she falsified her age - putting it at 36, rather than the real 44 - which made her a socially acceptable two years younger than her husband.

The marriage gave her economic security which continued until her death in 1963 at the age of 88. Immediately following her reincarnation, she joined the Royal Art Society in Sydney in 1920 and moved rapidly up the social ladder to become a known associate of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith. The slot in the art market under which Ure Smith promoted her was 'sane modernist'. He reproduced her work frequently on the covers of his journals Art in Australia and The Home and ran a number of interviews with her. He also managed to include her work in the touring Australian art exhibition which went to London in 1923.

Howard Ashton, Julian Ashton's son and an influential conservative art critic, nicknamed her "Mad Maggie". The name stuck and many of her detractors, such as Hans Heysen and Lionel Lindsay, referred to her by this name. Sydney Ure Smith promoted Thea Proctor and Preston equally in his journals, but when it came to a special Margaret Preston issue of Art in Australia in December 1927, it was quite lavishly illustrated with 23 colour reproductions and 28 black and white plates. The explanation for this can be found in the private correspondence between Ure Smith and Hans Heysen, where the publisher notes: "We outlined what we felt we could afford, but Preston suggested that she should put more in of colour at her own expense, I agreed to this." Of course this was all done behind the scenes and no one meant to know, but Bill Preston's money was making her one of the most promoted and most widely reproduced artists in Australia.

2005 has become the year of Margaret Preston with a major retrospective exhibition of her prints at the National Gallery of Australia and a major survey of her paintings at the Art Gallery of NSW. It is providing us with the opportunity to review her rhetoric and to match it with her art practice. Preston famously wrote in 1925:

"In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own, I have gone to the art of a people who have never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed to always use the same symbols to express themselves. These are the Australian aboriginals, and it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring. It is on the primitive natural forms that we must depend. In returning to primitive art it should be remembered that it is to be used as a starting point only for a renewal of growth, and a gradual selection must take place to arrive at the culmination."

Although she took her study of Aboriginal art seriously and travelled thousands of kilometres lecturing on its merits and argued for its inclusion in survey exhibitions of Australian art, her stance was that of a cultural imperialist. Modelling herself on the modernists in Europe, for Preston the attraction of this so-called 'primitive art' lay with the idea of capturing a lost innocence of humankind, where these people were thought of as belonging to an earlier phase in our evolution, so their art could be employed to re-boot the tradition.

We have an insight into Preston's thinking in an essay she wrote which was published in 1949 as a preface to a book of her monotypes. "This art is never an attempt at rigid realism, they represent, but never duplicate . the work has no particular technique, and uses symbolic perspective and never scientific.

Their designs are nearly always asymmetrical. Although the fewest colours are used, the work does not look dull or overcrowded. Their realism takes a wider scope than that of European work. A fish, animal or man is painted with both the internal and outside forms; they draw what they know as well as what they see."

The features which she picked out concerning Aboriginal art such as the use of symbolic perspective, asymmetry, limited palette and depicting the internal as well as the external appearance, all to some extent found vivid reflection in her prints and paintings. However, virtually in the same breath she continues concerning Aboriginal art: "It is not suggested that their work should be used as a 'model' for the educated painter, but an aesthetic form that is of our land which can offer the smallest help."

As a printmaker in her relief prints, whether carved on huon pine blocks or on masonite, she championed native flora and fauna imagery. Although identifiably Australian, today they appear dated, it is art which is very much of its time. In contrast, contemporary printmakers, including Jessie Traill and Dorrit Black, or the wonderful painter, Grace Cossington Smith, today retain their power and freshness. Perhaps, more than anything else, 2005 will in retrospective be seen as a time when Margaret Preston was reassessed and her fierce self-promotion was put into perspective.