20th-century Australian art: Colour and light: early modernism in Sydney

The interwar decades stand out as one of the most distinctive periods in Australian art history. Artists began to experiment with shedding naturalistic detail and intensifying their colour to bring their work in line with the modernity of the new century. By the end of World War I in 1918, Australia was one of the most urbanised nations in the world and Sydney was its largest and fastest growing city. With its light-filled harbour and thriving commercial centre, Sydney was a fertile ground for the development of modern art.

Colour, in all its sensuous, psychological and spiritual dimensions, was a central concern for artists. As Roland Wakelin put it in 1919, ‘a painter in the modern sense’ is one whose ‘chief medium is colour’. Grace Cossington Smith, Norah Simpson, Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre experimented with colour, light and form, creating an important connection with contemporary international developments. While one strand of modernism sought a universal language of abstraction, by the 1920s Margaret Preston was arguing for a distinctly national art conveyed through a form of reduced and decorative realism.

The tonalist painting movement, popular during the 20th-century interwar period in Australia, was pioneered by the artist and teacher Max Meldrum in Melbourne.

Meldrum argued that painting was a pure science and developed his theory of tonalism accordingly. He believed that tone was the most important component in painting, followed by proportion, with colour the least interesting factor, and that this was the order in which a work should be painted.

Artists should train their minds to focus first on the 'tonal mass' of the subject and then build up the painting's surface with the other elements. There was also to be no preliminary drawing, therefore the work would be spontaneous and responsive, producing an illusion of the subject rather than a realistic reproduction. In this way, tonalist works are characterised by their soft, almost hazy, atmospheric appearance.

While Clarice Beckett is perhaps the best-known practitioner of Australian tonalism, a number of artists experimented with the movement during the interwar period, including Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre, who paused their radical experiments in colour theory to produce a small number of still life and portrait paintings adhering to tonalist theories in the early 1920s.