Margaret Rose Preston (nee McPherson) is celebrated for her bold floral still-life paintings and modern woodblock prints. Born in Port Adelaide in 1875, she studied in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide before travelling extensively throughout England and Europe. Synthesising styles she encountered on her travels, including Post-Impressionism, European Primitivism and Japanese ukiyo-e, Preston began to develop her own unique visual language.

On her return to Australia in 1919, Preston emerged as a central figure in the dissemination of modernist principles. At the same time, she began advocating for nationalist ideas of art and culture. To do this, she turned towards the cultural material of First Peoples, whose designs she perceived as untouched by European taste. Although Preston was progressive in recognising the aesthetic value of the objects and motifs she incorporated, her approach did not consider their significance to the communities from which she appropriated. As such, Preston’s work continues to generate debate, emphasising her important contribution to Australian art of the twentieth century.

The National Gallery of Victoria thanks institutional lenders the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of South Australia, as well as the many institutional and private lenders, for their generosity in bringing this exhibition to life.

Margaret Preston established her first teaching studio in Adelaide in 1899. Her passion for teaching would heavily influence her artistic career. Among her first students was Bessie Davidson, and what began as a meeting between two young artists developed into a close relationship that endured for more than a decade.

In 1904 Preston and Davidson travelled to Europe, where they experienced international art movements firsthand. Commencing studies in Munich, Preston enrolled at the School for Illustrators and Davidson at the Munich Women Artist’s Association. Neither found the city’s artistic environment as stimulating as they had hoped it would be, and later that year they moved to Paris. There, Preston encountered a wide range of contemporary artistic developments, including approaches that embraced greater freedom of form and increasingly vibrant colour.

In 1906 the pair returned to Adelaide, where Preston gave lessons in painting to burgeoning artists such as Gladys Reynell and Stella Bowen. Preston’s artistic and moral fervour, evidenced through her rapid adoption (and adaptation) of French avant-garde principles, was reflected in her teaching. Davidson was to return to Paris in 1910, while Preston remained in Adelaide. She and Reynell grew closer, and the following year they began sharing a studio. It is likely that, as with Preston and Davidson, Preston and Reynell were also romantically involved.

In February 1912, Margaret Preston and Gladys Reynell set out on an extended trip across England and Europe. Preston was greatly influenced by Post-Impressionist painting, particularly the structural clarity associated with Paul Cézanne and the bold colour and simplified forms evident in the work of Paul Gauguin. In France Preston visited the Musée Guimet, the Parisian home of Asian art, where Japanese ukiyo-e prints reinforced her developing interest in flattened space, bold patterning and economy of line.

The effects of Preston’s exposure to different styles converged in the rather unlikely location of Bunmahon, a small village on the west coast of Ireland where she hosted summer schools for young women during the warmer months of 1914 and 1915. With the outbreak of the First World War, the school was moved to the English Cotswolds.

In England Preston completed a war nursing course, and her wartime experiences shaped her life in unexpected ways. She was to meet her future husband, Lieutenant William G. Preston, in 1917 on London’s Vauxhall Bridge while working in a canteen. Due to family commitments, Reynell departed Britain in early 1919. Preston’s own eventual return to Australia later that year was to catalyse a fundamental transformation in her approach to aesthetic, decorative and cultural concerns.

Margaret Rose McPherson and William Preston were married on 31 December 1919, and with the marriage came a new artistic identity: Margaret Preston. The newlyweds were now residing in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, a domestic utopia where Preston’s commitment to the still-life genre would expand into experimentations with nationalist sentiment. She was eager to cement herself in Sydney’s community of artists, patrons and critics, and her public image was strengthened significantly by the literary limb of her creative practice.

From the early 1920s, Preston published numerous texts spanning criticism, manifesto, art theory, travel writing, and myriad domestic and decorative interests. In her 1923 essay ‘Why I became a convert to modern art’, Preston set the intellectual stage for her newfound agenda to transform her ubiquitous domestic scenes ‘without any remembrance of the Greek, German, French brand, and portray them as a purely Australian product’. This period marked a pivotal moment in her practice, beginning as a subtle exploration of ‘Australianness’ through depictions of local flora that was to gradually evolve into her championing of a distinctly national art.

The mid-1920s marked the beginning of an extended period of printmaking that would come to define Margaret Preston’s oeuvre. These early prints combine Japanese ukiyo-e with designs appropriated from First Nations cultural material. They also mark Preston’s embrace of woodblock printing as the defining feature of Sydney modernism. Having studied the process overseas, Preston was considered a well-respected authority on the subject by Sydney’s artistic community. Artists such as Thea Proctor were introduced to the medium by Preston, who gave Proctor her first block to cut.

This collaboration culminated in two joint exhibitions of Preston and Proctor’s work, held in Sydney and Melbourne, respectively. The first exhibition was held at Sydney’s Grosvenor Galleries in 1925. Preston’s sixty-five prints, both black-and-white and hand-coloured, were lauded by then art critic J. S. MacDonald for their design, which he described as ‘lean but sturdy’.

Encasing the works in the space were red lacquer frames, again signalling the confluence of Chinese and Japanese craft trends with Preston’s resolutely ‘Australian’ subject matter. The exhibition’s catalogue fortified the idea of Preston as a pioneer of international styles in Australia by suggesting that the ‘prints offered in this exhibition for the first time as a whole are, in effect, what [early ukiyo-e master] Moronobu, in 1625, did for Japanese prints’.

Margaret Preston’s project for a distinctly Australian modernism was built on a fundamental contradiction. She recognised the aesthetic richness of First Nations cultural material at a moment when few institutions did, and believed this was the necessary foundation of an ‘Australian’ national art. Yet this idea was underpinned by the same reductive logic as the contemporaneous trend of European Primitivism, a movement that stripped Indigenous artistic traditions from around the world of their specific cultural and spiritual contexts in service of Western modernist ambitions.

Preston disseminated her vision through a carefully cultivated public profile, shaped significantly by her relationship with her patron and publisher Sydney Ure Smith. Through writings that appeared in Ure Smith journals such as Art in Australia and The Home, a publication aimed at women that focused on ideas about modernism, art and home decoration, Preston promoted her ideas about national identity and modern design to a broad audience.

In her 1925 Art in Australia article ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Preston claimed that a ‘great national art’ could only be built on the artistic practice of First Peoples, emphasising that such ‘primitive art’ should be considered only as a ‘starting point’. This ultimately rendered Indigenous knowledge aestheticised and extractable, legitimate only once it had passed through the hands of non-Indigenous artists.

In 1927, two years after publishing ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Margaret Preston produced nine gouaches each titled ‘Aboriginal design’. Preston often drew from objects she likely encountered in museum collections, appropriating First Nations cultural material for her own decorative and typographic works. One example, Aboriginal design – Design from Pikan shield, derives from a rainforest shield acquired by the Australian Museum in 1891 from the Russell River region of Far North Queensland. The shield’s cassowary-related design is significant to the Mamu people, while bullet holes across its surface testify to frontier violence. In Preston’s bright, stylised quotation, this context is lost.

In the 1990s, the contemporary artist Gordon Bennett became a central figure in the postcolonial reassessment of Preston’s work, focusing on the tensions within a ‘national art’ built from appropriated First Nations material. His 2010 series Home Décor (After M. Preston) is a suite of paintings that closely replicate Preston’s 1927 gouaches. Exhibited alongside Preston’s works at the German contemporary art exhibition dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, Bennett’s paintings drew attention to how designs appropriated from Aboriginal cultural traditions have shaped Australian art. At the same time, they exposed the impossibility of Preston’s works in fulfilling their nationalist aims. For the First Peoples from whom the designs originate, the gouaches remain illegible, detached from Country and cultural context.

For the 1920s modernist, the city was the manifestation of upheaval, an economic and intellectual axis upon which change, industrialisation and urbanisation intersected. Preston had recently returned from London, a place of aesthetic and intellectual ferment, and arrived in Sydney determined to locate within the city a modernity that was distinctly its own. While most of her output focuses on the domestic interior and the still-life genre, works from this period mark a turn outwards into public space, questioning what an urban Australian modernity might look like.

Recognisable landmarks are scattered throughout: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, constructed between 1924 and 1932, Sydney Harbour itself, and Preston’s home suburb, Mosman Bay. Preston was increasingly drawing on the aesthetic of Japanese ukiyo-e, flattening pictorial space and generating rhythm through intricate line work before applying colour. Industrial expansion, particularly the construction of the Harbour Bridge, was a shared thread among Preston’s contemporaries in their vision of an antipodean modernity.

Although Margaret Preston looked to First Nations cultural material in her search for a distinctly Australian art, she also continued to engage with developments in European modernism. In 1927 she entered a brief but significant phase influenced by French artist Fernand Léger, whose own work drew on Cubism and the visual impact of industrialisation. Preston adopted Léger’s modernist vocabulary – albeit translated into an Australian idiom – simplifying forms into flat planes and reducing botanical subjects to modular shapes. After limited success with this geometric, semi-abstract style, Preston transitioned into another distinct series of works between 1927 and 1928 that retained Léger’s formal clarity while returning to more familiar still lifes that featured ‘hardy’ native plants such as banksias and eucalyptus trees.

The body of work developed by Preston during these years moved beyond sentimental botanical detail towards simplified, rhythmic arrangements that explore pattern and visual balance. This experimentation culminated in a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Grosvenor Galleries in August 1929 that featured paintings and woodcuts centred on Australian flora and Sydney views. Notably, the exhibition signalled her transition to depicting local flora almost exclusively.

Margaret Preston was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy in 1929. This health challenge was to ultimately influence the Prestons’ move away from metropolitan Sydney in 1932 to the outer suburb of Berowra, situated on the lands of the Dharug and Guringai peoples. The move to a bushland property encouraged Preston to adopt a hyper-localised focus on flora, resulting in a seasonal approach to painting that responded to immediately available subject matter.

While Preston had been familiarising herself with First Nations cultural material through museum collections and market goods, the move to Berowra placed her in intimate proximity to Guringai rock carvings and hand stencils at Mount Kuring-gai, as well as Dharug cultural objects from the broader Hawkesbury region. While it is unclear which specific locations the Prestons visited, the radical aesthetic transformation of Preston’s work following the move Berowra indicates engagement with such material.

Just a few short weeks before Australia declared its involvement in the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the Prestons sold their property and returned to Mosman. However, Preston’s time in bushland Berowra was to greatly inspire her subsequent move into landscape painting and extensive travels to rock art sites across Australia in the 1940s.

In 1938 Margaret Preston expanded the native flowers of her garden into six monumental still lifes intended for the world stage. In each panel, painted mostly on the verandah of her Berowra home, local flora sit in humble pots or baskets before broad expanses of open sky.

The six still lifes were commissioned for the Australian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and a second major international commission followed later in 1938, this time for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. The resulting four floral works are the same ambitious scale as the New York series, but the open skies of the earlier paintings are replaced by cool, restrained interior settings.

Designed to command a room and highlight Australia’s natural beauty, the commissions were Preston’s largest ever, extending her intimate domestic still lifes into confident public statements. They came at a moment when international tensions were mounting towards another global conflict, and artists were increasingly called upon to shape visual representations of Australia, both at home and abroad. The timing was also significant for another reason: 1938 marked 150 years since British invasion, celebrated by many as a moment of national progress but publicly challenged by First Nations activists during the first Day of Mourning.

Problems with the Prestons’ landlord led them to unexpectedly vacate their Mosman home in 1945, and the couple found themselves living in a nearby hotel. Working in a room adjacent to the hotel’s first-floor guest living room, Margaret Preston revisited a technique she had used some three decades earlier in England: monotype making. Along with fellow artists Edith Collier and Gladys Reynell, Preston had taught the printing method as a rehabilitative exercise for shell-shocked World War One soldiers. Decades later, she returned to monotype making, this time as a craft to aid her own recovery from escalating arthritis and as a reprieve from the demands of caring for her husband during a period of illness.

Preston’s intensive monotype making resulted in up to one hundred unique-state prints, often featuring First Nations iconography but also including landscapes and floral still lifes. Created by applying paint onto a hard surface – Preston often chose to use masonite – that is then printed onto a support, each monotype is unique, a one-off that cannot be replicated. The medium allowed Preston to merge chance with intention: the prints could also be altered while still wet, or enhanced once dried.

In the 1920s Preston had argued that the Australian landscape tradition needed no reinvention, being distinct enough from Europe’s to stand alone. By 1940, however, her attitude had shifted. Travelling across the continent with her husband, Bill, she produced a series of Aboriginalised landscapes in which a fabricated settler-nationalist ancestry is sought in the expanses of the environment.

Several years later, in 1947, the couple, now aged in their seventies, undertook even more extensive travels within Australia, journeying just under 20,000 kilometres by truck throughout Central Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia. During her travels, Preston acquired various art and design objects made by First Peoples, many of which she later donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Australian Museum.

Preston’s appropriation of First Nations visual traditions was part of a broader project to fold Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural material into ‘Australian’ art. From her position as a non-Indigenous person, Preston detached these visual traditions from their foundations. She valued the aesthetic of First Nations designs, repeatedly arguing for their significance through writings, lectures, exhibitions and collecting objects, yet rarely engaged with communities to understand the meaning of what she took. Removing culture from Country and its custodians, she recast it within a Western modernist framework, positioning herself, in the absence of a recognised First Nations canon, as an arbiter of Aboriginal art.

Margaret Preston aimed to create a singular style of Australian art. Yet by drawing on the continent’s unique flora and fauna while at the same time borrowing artistic principles from elsewhere, she produced the reverse: an art-historical narrative full of texture and contradiction. This paradox was most foregrounded in her work of the 1950s, when she began to depict Aboriginal figures directly, rather than simply First Nations cultural material. Through narrative and figuration, allegory and direct appropriation, Preston began attending to the sociohistorical forces shaping the lived experience of First Peoples across the colony, collaging them with the artistic principles she had been championing since the 1920s.

In 1930 Preston published an essay instructing artists to ‘be Aboriginal’ in their use of Indigenous designs. Whatever her intended meaning, Preston’s words dissociate Aboriginality from First Peoples themselves, recasting it as an aesthetic position available to non-Indigenous artists. The provocation persists across Preston’s later works Kangaroo hunt, Fish, Emus and The expulsion, in which an Indigenised Adam and Eve are forcibly displaced from their Edenic homelands.

Preston’s work, which simultaneously recognises and subordinates First Nations cultural material, proved generative for the artists who came after her. Gordon Bennett and Tony Albert are among those who have engaged directly with her legacy, finding in its contradictions unresolved questions about ‘Australianness’ and ‘Aboriginality’.

Margaret Preston passed away at Mosman Private Hospital in 1963. Today, she occupies a critical position in Australian art history. In her attempts to forge a national art through the appropriation of First Nations culture, Preston ultimately revealed many contradictions. Her works continue to invite interrogation rather than resolution.

Critiques of Preston’s appropriation of First Nations visual cultures remain central to her legacy, yet they do not define it. Trained in Australia and Europe, and shaped by influences ranging from Dutch still-life painting to Japanese woodblock printing, Post-Impressionism to design reform movements, Preston was determined to develop and promote a vision of modernism that she believed reflected contemporary Australia. Through her teaching, writing, lectures and advocacy, she challenged artistic conservatism and encouraged experimentation, helping to shape twentieth-century Australian art.

Preston’s legacy reminds us that art is never fixed. She championed endemic flora in a modernist register, pursued still life when landscape dominated, and continually reinvented her practice. Her prints, paintings and writings encourage reckoning with the structures of the past and imagining a history of art that is self-aware, responsive and capable of learning from its own complexities. In this sense, Margaret Preston’s work continues to shape how we make, perceive and think about art in Australia.