In contrast, Modern Times reveals a largely ‘untold story’ of modernism in Australia that highlights the influence of European culture and international modernism upon Australian art, architecture and design, the impact of Aboriginal culture upon design, and the multidisciplinary nature of many artists’ practice. It is also refreshing to read an account of Australian modernism that is inclusive of the modernist activities of women, including Penelope Seidler, Mary Feather- stone, Janet Dawson and Margaret Preston.

The articles in this volume take a range of approaches. Some are studies of particular architectural designs or of particular artists. In Peter Cox’s article, we follow the fascinating Annette Kellerman, ‘the Venus of the South Seas’, who helped to establish the functional, feminine bathing costume. Max Bannah’s essay reveals the extraordinary and quirky life of Harry Read, who moved from creating animations based upon Aboriginal legends to producing educational films in Cuba during the early 1960s.

The core of Modern Times is to be found within the broad, thematically based articles. Goad’s ‘Shells, Spirals and a Dome’, for example, traces these forms within Australian monumental, postwar public buildings. These include the dramatic domed Academy of Science building in Canberra, designed by Roy Grounds, Darwin’s St Mary’s Star Church Cathedral, the Sidney Myer Music Bowl and, of course, the Sydney Opera House. Goad identifies how buildings such as the Academy of Science attempted to meld science and art together in order to redefine Australia’s identity within the context of space and atomic age developments.

Ann Stephen’s thematic essay ‘The Body at the Scene of Modernism’ traces how the formlessness of the body is shaped by particular fashions. It begins with a discussion of Grace Cossington Smith’s Movement (1922). This was a response to Taylorism, a controversial theory in Sydney at the time, because it attempted to measure the efficiency of the working body and threatened to reduce the factory worker to a machine. Stephen concludes with an analysis of the ‘fragmented body’ found in John Brack’s canvases of the 1950s and 1960s. Brack’s paintings reflect the increasingly fetishistic nature of twentieth-century consumerist society.

The guiding principle of Modern Times is the interdisciplinary approach of Australia’s modernist artists, designers and architects. We discover that Margaret Preston’s Implement Blue (1927) was named after a particular colour utilised within the painting that was produced by the paint manufacturer Major Brothers. Their paint sample card inspired Preston’s use of flat colour stripes within this work. Furthermore, Implement Blue was featured in one of the ‘modernist’ display rooms that formed part of the Burdekin House experiment in central Sydney in 1929.

Later, during the 1930s in Melbourne, the furniture designer Frank Ward, the painter and furniture designer Sam Atyeo, the textile designer Michael O’Connell and the artist and designer Cynthia Nolan also adopted an interdisciplinary approach within their modern furnishing shop.

During the 1960s the fascinating interrelationship between European and Australian modernism was clearly reflected in the culture surrounding Melbourne’s design, furniture retail and small gallery space, Gallery A. Artist–designers Clement Meadmore and Max Hutchinson were closely connected with this gallery and were partly inspired by the artist and Bauhaus veteran Ludwig Hirschfield Mack. Consequently, Gallery A’s programme ‘encouraged the crossing of discipline boundaries as well as the traversing of different media in particular exploring the affinities between painting, sculpture, photography and design’. The marvellous cover of Modern Times, featuring a hard-edge style orange, red and blue table-top by the abstract, Paris-trained artist Janet Dawson clearly illustrates Gallery A’s multidisciplinary, Bauhaus aesthetic.

The relationship between Australian national identity and design practice is discussed in Goad’s article about Australia’s representation at the 1939 New York World Fair and the 1967 Montreal Expo. Goad’s analysis of the Expo reveals the innovative nature of Robin Boyd’s Australian Pavilion interior. At the centre of the building were four symmetrically placed tree forms made of Tasmanian black- wood. Its interior space included Grant and Mary Feather- stone’s winged stereophonic chairs in which one could sit and select a series of tracks to listen to, including Robert Menzies’ talk about Australia’s natural resources. All the rooms were themed with the Australian colours of charcoal green, eucalyptus and orange desert. Inside, Australian hostesses – dressed in woollen, A-line, orange desert outfits designed by Zara Holt – handed out information. Yet despite the 1967 referendum, held the previous year, Aborigines were not selected for the hostess roles. Nor was any Aboriginal art selected for display within the conservative selection of fine art paintings on show. Here, and throughout the articles included in the book, the tensions between settler and indigenous culture emerge clearly.

Steven Miller’s exposé of the interconnection between Aboriginal art and design challenges a conception that Aboriginal subject matter virtually disappeared from ‘high- art’ during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In 1917, Tristan Tzara of the Cabaret Voltaire performed Aranda and Loritja songs as part of a Dada cabaret. Sections of Die Aranda und Loritja Stamme in Zentral Australia, by émigré pastor Carl Strehlow, were published in the surrealist magazine Dada.

This volume, full of previously unpublished research, opens up new vistas concerning Australian modernism. It is suitable for both the general reader who is broadly interested in Australian culture and for the specialist reader working in art, design, architecture or fashion. Modern Times successfully challenges the perception of modernism as a retrogressive or completely passé movement. It is the deserving winner of the Art History Association of Australia and New Zealand book prize (2008).