Arts through history about social and cultural influences.

Art History Resources: (Artists, Art Movements, Biographies, Artwork)


Sydney Rock Engravings: 10000 BC






TOM ROBERTS :
A SUMMER MORNING TIFF,
1886
this work was painted in the bush at Box Hill, close to the artists' camp site.
The model for this work was Harriet (Polly), one of McCubbin's four sisters. She was born on 18 August 1861 and would have been aged twenty-three when she posed for this work.








Artist: Noel COUNIHAN
Birth/Death: 1913–1986

Title: At the start of the march 1932






Artist: Sidney NOLAN
Birth/Death: 1917–1992

Title: Head of soldier 1942
The model was Captain Bilby, Nolan’s commanding officer in the supply corps in the Wimmera district of Victoria..Nolan was passionately against Australian involvement in the Second World War and had done everything to avoid active duty. By painting a digger, the embodiment of Australian pride, as a shell-shocked victim, Nolan exposed the lunacy of war and his personal reaction to it.





'The drover's wife', c1945
Drysdale's works are a record of a time when Australians began seeing the bush as a place of broken dreams and hence, began to look elsewhere for their heroes.

n 1944 the artist, Russell Drysdale (1912–81), was commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald to record the devastation of a drought and the associated soil erosion in western New South Wales.






Pop Art
In many respects it was influenced by the consumer boom that followed the end of the Second World War, and greatly coincided with the youth and pop music phenomenon of the 50s and 60s.Pop Art emphasised the kitschy elements of popular culture to downgrade the elitist art culture and the seriousness that surrounded it. It marked a return to sharp paintwork and representational art and glorified unappreciated objects and ordinary business. In doing so, it aimed to make art more meaningful for everyday people and came to target a broad audience.


Modernism refers to the style and ideology of art produced between the 1860s and the 1970s. As traditional art forms had become outdated due to industrialization, modernism emerged in Western Europe out of a need to reject tradition and embrace the political, social and economic change of the industrial age.