The Prints of Margaret Preston

Book excerpt: This revised and enlarged edition of The Prints of Margaret Preston includes thirteen new works discovered since the original publication in 1987, and twenty-two works that are reproduced for the first time. Margaret Preston (1875-1963) is one of Australia's most celebrated modernists. In the 1920s and thirties she created exuberant decorative compositions which have remained among the most popular of all Australian artworks. Modern, cosmopolitan, and intensely colored, Preston's woodblock prints and paintings of still-life subjects and the Sydney metropolis captured a moment of extraordinary innovation in the history of Australian art. Preston was the country's first serious advocate of Aboriginal art; her early appropriation and promotion of Aboriginal imagery to the cause of modernism has contributed to her ongoing significance.