The ‘intrusion of women painters’: Ethel Anderson,modern art and gendered modernities in interwar Sydney,Australia

In the interwar period in Sydney, Australia, male art gallery trustees, directors, and art schoolteachers objected to female advocacy and practice of artistic responsiveness to the modern. The dialogue between these two parties has often been interpreted in terms of a margin/centre dichotomy. Closer examination of the case of Ethel Anderson suggests that this model is inadequate. She demonstrated the transnationally apparent predilection of women to infusing civic cultures with the fleeting and everyday, thus inverting the spatial cues to cultural authority and presenting a gendered challenge to institutionalised, masculine notions of cultural authority.