ABSTRACT
In the history of Australian art, Thea Proctor – consistently visible since her heyday in the 1920s – was actively present at a key moment in her country’s cultural history, when the Victorian gave way to the Modern. In post-structuralist terms, Proctor presents the historian with a cultural text provocatively varied and emphatically gendered who is undenied, yet by no means agreed upon, significance offers an exemplary case for the importance of women, the female and the feminine in the construction of the Modern. Proctor continued to appear to the Australian public to be expanding contemporary art’s reach, linking Australia with the cutting edge of modernity. The Modern was feminine according to both those who praised it as dynamic and leading Australian culture into the brave new world, and to those who thought it namby-pamby and failing to assist in a desirable and necessary post-war ordering of the world.
