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Printed images by Australian artists 1885-1955

Printed images by Australian artists

Roger Butler

Printed images by Australian artists 1885-1955

Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007

328 pages, 439 colour illustrations, 30 x 25 cm., Bibliography, Index.

ISBN 978-0-642-54204-5

This volume follows Australian printmaking through a seventy-year period, from the latter part of the nineteenth century as the print (freed from its reproductive bounds) became a vehicle for pure artistic expression; through the great social and political traumas of the first half of the twentieth century, when print was co-opted to carry a message; and concludes in the immediate postwar years with prints that signal the artists’ search for meaning and an awareness of self.

Available from

The National Gallery of Australia Bookshop
phone: +61 2 6240 6438, fax: +61 2 6240 6628 or email: ecom@nga.gov.au

Distributed in Australia by Thames & Hudson
Distributed in England and Europe by Thames & Hudson
Distributed in The United States of America by Washington University Press

Table of Contents

  • The painter–printmaking movement
    • Early painter–etchers in Australia
    • Working overseas: Etching, lithography and monotypes in London and Paris
    • The artistic lithograph in Australia
    • Prints and photographs: Shared concerns
    • The Australian Painter–Etchers Society
  • The importance of design
    • Early posters and lithography
    • The poster style
    • Blamire Young and the artistic poster in Melbourne
    • An Australian style
    • Artists' woodblock prints
    • Australia and Japan: Links in print
    • Australian artists in Japan
    • Woodblocks: Printed in the Japanese manner
    • Travel posters
    • Wood-engraving and the art of the fine book
    • Exemplars: Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor
    • The linocut and Sydney women artists
    • Melbourne manner
    • Printed in magazines
    • The Grosvenor School and colour linocuts
  • War, Depression, Anxiety
    • World War I
      • Posters
      • Responses to the war
    • World War II
      • Posters
      • Enemy aliens
      • Army life
      • At home with war
    • Printmakers and politics
      • The Great Depression
      • The linocut
      • Activists
      • The New Theatre
      • These are my people
    • Anxiety in war and its aftermath
      • Lithography, a democratic art form
      • Freedom of expression
      • Cold War anxiety and the search for meaning
  • Bibliography
  • Index