ABSTRACT
In this chapter I consider the intellectual and imaginative currents driving modernism in Australia.2 Australians were once taught that their articulations of modernism were pale, isolated, and belated reections of European modernism, a provincial cliché that has since been countered by the equally clichéd patriotic afrmation that there were ‘myriad connections between Australian artists and global modernist art’ (White 2011: 109). There is no doubt some truth in both positions depending on which aspect of the art-scene one considers, but in so far as the conditions for modern art are not dened in terms of national identities the whole idea of a distinctively Australian modernism is called into question.
