Australia in the World’s Art Colonies

Work by Australian artists made during time spent overseas in art colonies before returning, and the work of artists who lived in art colonies overseas and did not return has almost entirely been erased from Australian art history. Therefore the participation of Australian artists in art colonies across the world has largely remained unwritten. This paper presents an outline and framework for further work to be done on the histories of art colonies in Australian art history. It is first of all something of an exercise in an expanded art history, including those artists who should rightly be part of a more widely encompassing account of Australian art, but, more than this it proposes that the art colony as such contests the idea of a national art history: that, beyond the specifics of any particular art colony, the principle of the art colony—of artists from different countries or from different regions of the same country living and working together—challenges the assumption that modern art must come from an identifiable people and place within modern state formations. We argue that the art colony is always international or even transnational in character. Therefore the art colony in modern art might be best understood as a forerunner to contemporary art in its crossing of spatial and temporal borders and its flattening of (if not its complete doing away with) imposed hierarchies.