Sarah Thomas

In the 1930s the notorious art critic and gallery director J.S. MacDonald felt it was his patriotic duty to protect Australia from the morally suspect culture of Europe, where, he exclaimed, ‘the pictorial symptoms of the degeneracy of France [is] enfeebled by the rule of functionaries, and … Mittel Europe [is] crushed and torn between Nazi, Bolshevist and Fascist megalomaniacs’. Not a man t ... (read more)

Australian expatriate artist Bessie Davidson was a woman who ripened with age. After decades of living in Paris and dressing somewhat dowdily ‘à l’anglaise’, she gained confidence with the liberation of France towards the end of World War II. In her sixties, she adopted a long black cape, a wide-brimmed fedora and a slender black cigarette-holder. Penelope Little’s A Studio in Montparnass ... (read more)