Multiple Modernisms

Twentieth-Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective

Don Binney, Mana Island IV 1970, oil on canvas 1070 x 1525 mm Pataka Museum of Art and Culture, Porirua, New Zealand

Don Binney, Mana Island IV 1970, oil on canvas 1070 x 1525 mm Pataka Museum of Art and Culture, Porirua, New Zealand

Damian Skinner is currently working on a project about ‘New Commonwealth Internationalism’, the period after the Second World War when many artists moved from moved from England’s ex-colonies to London to pursue their artistic practices as modernists. Alongside the widely recognised contribution of artists from Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean, Skinner is specifically exploring the contribution of artists from the so-called ‘white dominions’ and settler colonial societies of Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The role of settler artists in New Commonwealth Internationalism is hardly acknowledged or explored, even though it appears that, for example, Australian artists were the largest single population of Commonwealth artists living in the UK. To introduce settler artists is to challenge dominant understanding of New Commonwealth Internationalism, which has been narrated primarily as a story of ex-colonial native artists from India, Africa and the Caribbean operating within the broad trends of decolonisation in the middle of the twentieth century.