Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940

This richly illustrated museum catalog tells the untold story of Australia’s boldest artistic pioneers — women who helped shape international modernism.

From the early 1900s to the mid-twentieth century, a generation of ambitious Australian women artists left home to train and work in Europe. Defying societal expectations and institutional barriers, they forged new paths — as modernists, as professionals, and as global citizens.
Through scholarly essays and thematic explorations, Dangerously Modern reveals how these artists aligned themselves with suffrage movements, built transnational support networks, and developed distinct visual languages in response to the shifting cultural landscape of Europe.

This is the first publication to fully acknowledge the international significance of Australian women in the development of modernist art — not as marginal figures, but as central participants in a dynamic, male-dominated art world.