27 Facts About Margaret Preston

Margaret Rose Preston was an Australian painter, printmaker and writer on art who is regarded as one of Australia's leading modernists of the early 20th century.

Margaret Rose Preston was born on 29 April 1875 in Port Adelaide to David McPherson, a Scottish marine engineer, and Prudence Cleverdon McPherson, nee Lyle.

Margaret Preston was their first-born child; her sister Ethelwynne Lyle McPherson was born in 1877.

Margaret Preston's family moved to Sydney in 1885, where Margaret Preston attended Fort Street Girls' High School for two years.

Margaret Preston showed a very early interest in art, first with china painting and then through private art classes with William Lister Lister.

Margaret Preston describes her first visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales at the age of 12, recalling it as.

Margaret Preston showed a strong preference for painting still lifes instead of people, and in 1897, she won the school's Still Life Scholarship, which afforded her a year's free tuition.

Margaret Preston began taking on private students while she was still at Adelaide's School of Design, setting up her own studio in 1899.

Margaret Preston later taught at St Peter's College and at Presbyterian Ladies' College, both in Adelaide.

In Munich, Margaret Preston briefly studied at the Government Art School for Women but was not taken with either German teaching methods or German aesthetics.

Margaret Preston's developing Modernist sensibility was influenced by French Postimpressionists such as Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse as well as by Japanese art and design, which she encountered at the Musee Guimet.

Margaret Preston began to try to reduce her own work to "decoration without ornamentation".

In 1911, Margaret Preston was asked to paint a portrait of Catherine Spence for the National Gallery of South Australia.

Margaret Preston went back to France in 1912 with Gladys Reynell, but when World War I broke out, they moved to Great Britain.

Margaret Preston exhibited her work in both London and Paris during this period.

In 1919, Margaret Preston went to America for an exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Margaret Preston married her husband on 31 December 1919, and wrote a false birthdate on her marriage certificate to make herself eight years younger than her husband.

Margaret Preston was a founding member of the Contemporary Group in 1926.

Margaret Preston joined the Society of Artists and became a friend of its president, Sydney Ure Smith, the influential editor and publisher of Art in Australia, The Home, and Australia: National Journal.

Margaret Preston expressed these ideas in a 1925 article 'The Indigenous Art of Australia' in Art in Australia, illustrated on the cover and accompanying the text with relief prints from indigenous designs, which she praises for their rhythm, adapted from aboriginal shields and taphoglyphs and which she executed in coloured wool on hessian woolpack, though the article illustrations are her prints;.

Margaret Preston capitalized on the forum that women's magazines provided in allowing her to reach a wide audience for both her work and her opinions on the future of Australian art.

Readers of the April 1929 edition of Woman's World were prodded to keep the covers of issues on which Margaret Preston's works had been reproduced and to frame them as pictures.

Margaret Preston created over 400 known prints, not all of which are documented and some of which are lost.

Margaret Preston liked to experiment with new techniques, although her most usual approach was to print her images in black with added hand colouring.

Margaret Preston continued her adaptations of Australian Indigenous art, deploying Aboriginal design motifs and natural-pigment colour schemes in her work.

Margaret Preston won a silver medal at the Exposition Internationale, Paris in 1937, and that year became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the Australian Academy of Art.

In 2012, several works by Margaret Preston were included by curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in documenta, Kassel, Germany.