1950s

1950s

The 1950s brought a newfound hope for stability after the distress and struggle of previous decades. It was a formative time in establishing a national Australian identity, recognised as the start of the baby boom generation, with women’s roles ostensibly focused on the home and caregiving. An emerging suburban culture became a homogenising element in Australian art and life. In the arts, a significant debate around abstraction and figuration played out as some looked to the past while others looked to the future. The ambitious post-war migration program from 1947 resulted in a population surge of European migrants during the 1950s. Post-war refugees from Greece, Italy, Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Netherlands established significant communities in Australia, and their culture and stories helped foster diversity in the decades to follow, changing the Australian cultural landscape irrevocably.

Significant artists to emerge during this period, such as Margaret Olley, Betty Quelhurst, and Pamela MacFarlane, established successful careers despite the heavily male dominated field. They found inspiration in the domestic, both at home and in their experiences abroad. Margaret Olley held her first solo show in 1948 at Sydney's Macquarie Galleries, which was a sellout and unprecedented at the time for a woman. Pamela McFarlane was also exhibited widely, despite the devastating loss of her life’s work in a bushfire in 1980. Her work is held in public collections across Australia and New Zealand.

Alice Danciger, a little recognised name in the arts, was born in Belgium in 1914 and moved to Australia after the outbreak of war. Danciger studied at the Royal Art Society of NSW and worked across painting, textiles and theatre design; collaborating with the likes of the Kirsova Ballet in the 1940s. Her first major exhibition was held at the Contemporary Art Society, Sydney in 1947, with a work subsequently acquired directly by the Art Gallery of NSW in the same year. Other public institutions would acquire her work in the latter stages of her life during the 1970s and 1980s. While Danciger spent extended periods abroad, particularly France and Italy, in 1972, she returned to Australia where she passed way in 1991. Her work The Kazbah, Algiers c.1950, showcases her sophisticated understanding of abstraction, her sensual forms and deep hues creating a fluidity within the distorted composition.

The 1950s also saw the arrival of artists who would in later decades become influential as practitioners and supporters of the arts in this country. Mirka Mora and Judy Cassab both arrived in Australia in 1951 after fleeing the Holocaust in Europe. They went on to establish practices over several decades and despite their deaths in 2018 and 2015 respectively, their legacy and influence remains as strong today as it did last century.