The Contemporary Art Society is an Australian organisation formed in Victoria 1938 to promote non-representative forms of art. Separate, autonomous branches were formed in each state of the Commonwealth by 1966, although not all of them still exist today.
The Contemporary Art Society (now Contemporary Art Society of Victoria (Inc.) was established on 13 July 1938, by George Bell. It held its first exhibition in June 1939 at the National Gallery of Victoria, displaying works of artists from all over Australia. [1] Members were not only committed to contemporary stylistic experimentation, but also to engagement with contemporary social realities, and in December 1942 sponsored an "Antifascist Exhibition" at Melbourne's Athenaeum Gallery. [2]
However, Bell and others left the society over differences of opinion in 1940, and further differences among remaining members (who included Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and John Perceval), led to suspension of the society in 1947. [1]
In 1954 CAS was revived by John Reed, and two years later it founded the Gallery of Contemporary Art (later renamed Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia), in a building which included its headquarters. It moved premises in 1963 to 9 Collins Street, Melbourne, in 1967 to 1 Fitzroy St, St Kilda, to Kew and then South Yarra from 1972 to early 1989, after which they held exhibitions in other galleries. [1]
The Contemporary Art Society of Victoria, as of 2021 [update] based in Richmond, is a non-profit organisation, run by artists, for artists and those interested in the arts. It aims to hold four major exhibitions each year, manages three smaller spaces for smaller exhibitions, and also holds social events for its members. [3]
The Contemporary Art Society of Australia (N.S.W.) was founded in 1939 with Rah Fizelle president and Peter Bellew secretary. The NSW CAS's founding members promoted abstraction as a revolutionary art form and positioned the Society as an oppositional artist's group dedicated to the production of experimental art, attacking the values of the mainstream artist's groups such as the Society of Artists. The NSW branch had its first exhibition in Sydney in 1940. The Society purportedly differed from other local societies, in that it "concentrates on unconventional and experimental work". [4]
Its third annual exhibition was held at the David Jones' Gallery in Sydney from 9 September – 4 October 1941.in 1941. [5]
In 1954, as a protest against the Archibald Prize, which it regarded as being biased, boring and of a low standard, the Contemporary Art Society initiated its own awards, with Michael Kmit the first nominated winner. [6]
The Society appears to have wound up by 1970. Its records are held at the State Library of New South Wales. [7]
The Contemporary Art Society of Australia S.A. was founded on 23 June 1942 with David Dallwitz as chairman and Joan Dallwitz as treasurer. [8] In 1943 Max Harris was chairman and secretary. [9] Ivor Francis was a foundation committee member, and became chair in 1944. [10]
The society's first exhibition was held in the South Australian Society of Arts gallery in October 1943, [11] though an anti-Fascist exhibition had been held in Adelaide by the older branches in January that year. [12] Dorrit Black was an active member of the society until her death in 1951. [13]
In 1986 the organisation became incorporated, was renamed the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, and became a publicly-funded organisation which ran nationally and internationally significant exhibitions. [14]
From August 2016 CACSA started talks to merge with the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF) [15] after two rounds of severe funding cuts to the Australia Council in the federal government budgets of 2014/15 and 2015/16. The newly created organisation resulting from the merger was named ACE Open. [14]
The Contemporary Art Society, Queensland Branch, was founded in 1961, with Bernard Schaffer as president, Don Ross and Roy Churcher (husband of Betty Churcher and a key instigator of the formation of the society) as vice-presidents, and Ian Still as secretary. Gertrude Langer was a founding executive member, and Its inaugural public meeting to establish the society was on 14 September 1961 at St Mary's Church hall at Kangaroo Point. [16]
The society was wound up in 1973. [16]
The Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Tasmania Branch, [17] was founded in 1963, with Barclay Erskine president and Rosamund McCulloch secretary.[ citation needed ]
In 1972, the society awarded an art prize to Edith Lilla Holmes, [18] and held an exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from 5 June 1973 to 24 June 1973. [17]
The Contemporary Art Society (WA Branch) was founded in 1966, with Guy Grey-Smith as inaugural president. [19]
The National Gallery of Victoria, popularly known as the NGV, is an art museum in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Founded in 1861, it is Australia's oldest and most visited art museum.
Joy St Clair Hester was an Australian artist. She was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism. Hester is best known for her bold and expressive ink drawings. Her work was charged with a heightened awareness of mortality due to the death of her father during her childhood, the threat of war, and her personal experience with Hodgkin's Disease. Hester is most well known for the series Face, Sleep, and Love (1948–49) as well as the later works, The Lovers (1956–58).
Elizabeth Ann Dewar Churcher was an Australian arts administrator, best known as director of the National Gallery of Australia from 1990 to 1997. She was also a painter in her own right earlier in her life.
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Clarice Marjoribanks Beckett was an Australian artist and a key member of the Australian tonalist movement. Her works are featured in the collections of Australia's major public galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Fiona Margaret Hall, AO is an Australian artistic photographer and sculptor. Hall represented Australia in the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2015. She is known as "one of Australia's most consistently innovative contemporary artists." Many of her works explore the "intersection of environment, politics and exploitation".
Peter Benjamin Graham, was an Australian visual artist, printer, and art theorist.
David Friedrich Dallwitz was a South Australian jazz and classical musician, bandleader, composer, painter, and art teacher whose work spanned almost seven decades. He led jazz, Dixieland, and ragtime bands, and performed with classical chamber music groups.
Aubrey Hickes Lawson Gibson was an Australian businessman, arts patron and art collector. Born and educated in Melbourne, Gibson became a successful businessman in the city, establishing his own company, A.H. Gibson Industries, which was listed on the stock exchange in the 1950s. He was also a director of other major manufacturers and distributors, including Volkswagen Australasia and Hoover Australia.
Desiderius Orban, was a renowned Hungarian painter, printmaker and teacher, who, after emigrating to Australia in 1939 when in his mid-50s, also made an illustrious career in that country.
Makinti Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She was referred to posthumously as Kumentje. The term Kumentje was used instead of her personal name as it is customary among many indigenous communities not to refer to deceased people by their original given names for some time after their deaths. She lived in the communities of Haasts Bluff, Papunya, and later at Kintore, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north-east of the Lake MacDonald region where she was born, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Rosella Namok is an Indigenous Australian artist from Lockhart River, Queensland. Namok was taught art at high school and learned printmaking and other techniques through a community art project in 1997 that led to the formation of a group of artists known as the Lockhart River Art Gang.
Contemporary Indigenous Australian art is the modern art work produced by Indigenous Australians, that is, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people. It is generally regarded as beginning in 1971 with a painting movement that started at Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Northern Territory, involving Aboriginal artists such as Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Kaapa Tjampitjinpa, and facilitated by white Australian teacher and art worker Geoffrey Bardon. The movement spawned widespread interest across rural and remote Aboriginal Australia in creating art, while contemporary Indigenous art of a different nature also emerged in urban centres; together they have become central to Australian art. Indigenous art centres have fostered the emergence of the contemporary art movement, and as of 2010 were estimated to represent over 5000 artists, mostly in Australia's north and west.
The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia (CACSA), formerly Contemporary Art Society (CAS), was an art museum and art space located in the Adelaide suburb of Parkside, in South Australia. In late 2016 it merged with the Australian Experimental Art Foundation to form ACE Open.
Constance Stokes was a modernist Australian painter who worked in Victoria. She trained at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School until 1929, winning a scholarship to continue her study at London's Royal Academy of Arts. Although Stokes painted few works in the 1930s, her paintings and drawings were exhibited from the 1940s onwards. She was one of only two women, and two Victorians, included in a major exhibition of twelve Australian artists that travelled to Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy in the early 1950s.
Udo Sellbach (1927–2006) was a German-Australian visual artist and educator whose work focused primarily around his printmaking practice.
Ivor Pengelly Francis was an artist and art critic and teacher in South Australia. He has been called South Australia's premier surrealist painter.
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This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, (MUP), 1996