Review of 'Through Artists' Eyes: Australian Suburbs and Their Cities 1919-1945', by John Slater.

Abstract

I must admit to mild alarm on first scanning John Slater's book. The text shares a large number of references including some relatively esoteric titles with my own book, Ghost Nation, published in 2001, and yet this book does not appear in the bibliography. As it turns out, I need not have worried. While my study looks at a range of art and architectural practices in terms of imagined space, Slater's volume is a relentlessly empirical reading of artworks as illustrations of social conditions, deciphering the images as supporting evidence for history. Yet, it is still a useful, reasonably priced book. Slater's description of the various works along with the illustrations themselves includes many items I haven't seen previously. The book functions well as a catalogue of urban and, as Slater argues, suburban images. He has some good observations about the place of metropolitan imagery in the art of the period, noting that only five per cent of images shown at the Victorian Artists' Society between 191 9 and l 94 5 were urban. Clearly, the attitudes of those like C.E.W. Bean that cities were places of social (and racial) degradation held sway in main­stream Australian art of the period, while the bush functioned as the national 'imaginary'.