This timeline includes critical events in the development of abstraction, the contribution that women have made to its growth and expression, and key moments of socio-political history occurring concurrently with its evolution as a dominant tendency in the art of the twentieth century. 1844 In England, Joseph Mallord William Turner 1895–99 paints Rain, Steam and Speed. Paul Cézanne paints a series of proto cubist landscapes considered to be a bridge between 1875 Impressionism and Cubism at Bibémus Quarry, American artist James Abbott McNeill Aix-en-Provence. Whistler paints Nocturne in Black and Gold – http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=251113 the falling rocket. 1897 1885 In South Australia, Catherine Helen Spence Georges Seurat paints Le Bec du Hoc, becomes the first woman in the world to stand Grandcamp, now in the Tate Gallery, for election. London. The study was acquired by the NGA in 1984. The artist employs a scientific 1900 basis for this series known as Divisionism, Queen Victoria proclaims the Declaration of where he juxtaposes small brushstrokes of the Commonwealth of Australia to take effect colour to create light and shade to form the on 1 January 1901. composition. http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=92051 1901 Australia becomes an independent nation. 1877 Federation of Australia occurs and the French Impressionist artist Claude Monet Australian Federal Parliament opens in paints La Gare Saint-Lazare. Melbourne, the temporary capital. 1883 Author and feminist Stella Maria Miles In England, married women obtain the right to Franklin, also known as Miles Franklin, acquire their own property. publishes My Brilliant Career. 1883 The Immigration Restriction Act is passed, Paul Gaugin paints The vision after the sermon. leading to the ‘White Australia Policy’ kept in He employs flat, coloured planes where place for the next 60 years. composition, shape and colour take on an independant value; a dream sequence, the 1902 subject goes beyond the depiction of observed The Commonwealth Franchise Act becomes reality. For Gaugin, art is more about ‘the idea’, law declaring that women could vote in and members in his circle increasingly dissect all Commonwealth elections. Indigenous the new art as having inherent ‘musical’ Australians and people of Asian, African and qualities, another step on the road Pacific nationality were excluded. Australian to abstraction. women (other than those excluded on racial grounds) were given the vote in South 1891 Australia (and thus the Northern Territory) and The Women’s Christian Temperance Union is Western Australia. Those in New South Wales, established in Melbourne. This highly active Tasmania, Queensland, and Victoria achieved union campaigned for women’s suffrage. the right to vote in the federal election on 16 December 1903 under this act. These 1894 women finally won the right to vote in their South Australian women are granted voting state elections in 1902, 1903, 1905 and 1908 rights and the right to stand for Parliament. respectively. Both of these rights established together were a world first. 1 1904 the avant-garde artists in Paris, contributing Rose Macpherson (later known as Margaret to the advent of Cubism. Preston) and Bessie Davidson move to Paris where they remain until 1906. During this Pablo Picasso paints Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, period, they study at the Académie which is not publicly shown until 1916. It is La Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. revolutionary on many fronts but, in terms of http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=24997 the development of abstraction, it marks an important moment in both the abandonment 1905 of illusionistic space and perspective and the Henri Matisse exhibits a revolutionary anarchic depiction of the female form reduced landscape, Luxe, Calme et Volupté 1904 at the to disjointed angles and shapes painted in a Salon des Indépendents in Paris. Painted in minimal palette. The profound influence of pure primary colours, its very title suggests African and Oceanic art, which Picasso had that it is about ideas and sensation, as much seen in museums, is first made explicit in as the figure in the landscape. It is also a this work. painting about painting, not simply a painting of a scene. French inventor Louis Lumière develops a process for colour photography using a At the Salon d’Automne, Henri Matisse, three-color screen. The process proves to be André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck cause adaptable to the industrial production of a sensation when they exhibit brightly coloured images and is one of the few available for paintings referred to by journalist Louis nearly thirty years. With his brother Auguste Vauxcelles as les fauves, or ‘wild beasts’, thus Lumière, Louis is also credited with having coining the term Fauvism. Margaret Preston invented the motion picture. and Bessie Davidson visit the controversial exhibition having already seen the van Gogh 1908 retrospective in Paris in March. Georges Braque paints Houses at l’Estaque http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail. depicting the scene in an arrangement of cfm?IRN=98696&PICTAUS=True ‘bizarre cubiques’, as described by influential French art critic Louis Vauxcelles. Braque 1906 submits works to the Salon d’Automne in Paris Margaret Preston and Bessie Davidson visit where they are rejected, but he is adopted the Gauguin retrospective at the Salon by the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, d’Automne. This exhibition has a decisive who shows the work in his gallery near the influence on Preston’s future directions. Madeleine. Vauxcelles reviews the exhibition http://cs.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=54550 describing the works as ‘full of little cubes’, thus the term Cubism is coined. In Sweden, Hilma af Klint begins work on a major cycle of abstract painting comprising Filippo Marinetti writes Manifesto del Futurismo 193 works titled The Paintings for the Temple. – a rejection of the past embracing youth, Deeply concerned with the spiritual dimension, industry and the velocity of the machine age. she believed they were ‘commissioned’ during séances held by a spiritualist group of women Core of my Heart, later known as My Country, named ‘the Five’, of which she was a member. by Dorothea Mackellar, is first published in Although unseen by the art world until 1986, The Spectator, London, on 5 September. It is they are now believed to be among the first reprinted in numerous Australian newspapers wholly abstract works of art to be produced in turning her into one of Australia’s most well- Western art. known poets. The Australian silent film The story of the Site for Canberra is selected for the capital Kelly Gang was released in Australia (1908 in of Australia. England). It is the world’s first feature length film. 1909 Manifesto del Futurismo is published in Gazetta 1907 dell’Emilia, Bologna and Le Figaro, Paris, and Retrospective of the work of Paul Cézanne at immediately becoes influential in modernist the Salon d’Automne in Paris greatly influences circles. 2 1910 Poet Guillaume Apollinaire coins the word Sonia Delaunay, along with Kazimir Malevich Orphism to describe the trajectory of cubism and Alexander Archipenko, exhibit at the Salon that appeared as pure abstraction painted des Indépendants. in bright colours. Apollinaire believed that the style was close to music in its commitment Wassily Kandinsky paints Untitled (First to anti-figuration. Orphism’s main exponents Abstract Watercolor). were François Kupka and Roger and Sonia Delaunay and it is regarded as the key 1911 transition from cubism to abstraction. Salon des Indépendants includes a room Derived from the Classical Greek figure of dedicated to Cubism, Salle 41, with work Orpheus, the name has mystic connotations. by Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Jean http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail. Metzinger and Fernand Léger. cfm?IRN=97876&PICTAUS=TRUE La Pittura futurista, manifesto tecnico is Margaret Preston commences her second signed by Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi visit to England and Europe on 8 February, Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. returning initially to Paris and then settling http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=162456 in England. She carefully studied Cézanne and returned to the work of Gauguin before Wassily Kandinsky publishes Concerning the discovering the Japanese tradition of ukiyo-e spiritual in art, in Munich. He also forms Der printing. In London she was influenced by Blaue Reiter with Franz Marc, a loose knit Whistler and became increasingly drawn to group of artists exhibiting regularly in Munich the modernist theories of Roger Fry and the who are interested in free experimentation Bloomsbury set. She came into close contact and expression. Brightly coloured, the works with the quasi-scientific theories circulating at present a lyrical form of abstraction that tap a the time about colour-music synchromy. She spiritual dimension. These early exhibitions are brought back these progressive theories upon considered as laying a foundation from which her return to Australia with fiancé, William abstraction evolved. Preston, in 1919, extolling them in her numerous http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=1958 published essays about the need for a new modern national art form. 1912 Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger publish 1913 Du Cubisme and establish La Section d’Or, Guillaume Apollinaire publishes Les Peintres a collective of artists, poets and critics Cubistes, in Paris. associated with Cubism and Orphism who are concerned with the intellectual underpinning of Marcel Duchamp exhibits his first ‘ready-made’ cubism and the ascendency of the ‘idea’ over Roue de bicyclette (Bicycle wheel), ‘nature’. They subscribed to a pure abstraction now lost. based on a geometric cubism determined by http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail. the mathematical theory behind the notion of cfm?IRN=49305&PICTAUS=TRUE the golden section. http://artsearch.nga.gov.au/Detail.cfm?IRN=110534 Norah Simpson returns to Sydney after studying in Europe, bringing with her a Marcel Duchamp submits his futuristic Nude collection of art books and reproductions descending a staircase to the Salon des of modernist works.