A long forgotten 1934 exhibition by the Australian expatriate J. W. Power at the Abstraction-Creation gallery in Paris provides the key to understanding this most elusive artist, arguably
Australia’s most important avant-gardist of the early 20th century. In Paris, he studied with Pedro Araujo and Fernand Leger and showed with Leonce Rosenberg and Galerie Jeanne Bucher. Art
historian Gladys Fabre describes how this group was the focus for the international avant-garde moving through Paris in the 1930s. Virginia Spate examines Power’s creative process through the
analysis of a single painting. The book reveals how Power’s work illuminates the relationships between France and Australia, an exchange that goes to the heart of Australia’s modernism.
A. D. S. Donaldson is an artist, curator, and art historian. He lectures in the Painting Department at the National Art School, Sydney. Ann Stephen is an art historian and
senior curator of the University Art Gallery at the University of Sydney.
