Brave New World: Australia in the 1930s at Ian Potter Centre, NGV

VISUAL ARTS
BRAVE NEW WORLD: AUSTRALIA 1930s
Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia
Until October 15

A silk dress by an unknown maker greets you in Brave New World, a large exhibition of Australian art and design from the 1930s. The fabric has stripes of bright colour, cleverly split in orientation between top and bottom. Above the waist, the contrasting stripes flow in a loose sash that flatters the span of the shoulder. Below the waist, the lines are diagonal, clashing in the centre to form hectic chevrons that draw attention to the middle of the body.

This fine item not only makes the human presence dynamic and elegant but figuratively insulates the wearer with a kind of armour of sharp style. Throughout the exhibition we find women in one kind of armour or another, as if facing onto a hard new world that had discarded the charming certainties of the past. Beginning with the Great Depression and ending with war, the decade was not tender; everything innovative has a fortified look, as if taking on the streamlining of a missile, the reinforcement of a bunker or the lines of a dart.

Even in the vestiges of the classical tradition, women look tough. Take Dorothy Thornhill's Resting Diana, a stylised painting that shows the naked goddess with rippling muscles and a quiver resembling a cannon shell. Jean Broome-Norton's impressive Hippolyta and the Amazons defeating Theseus shows the warrior queen in a helmet but otherwise nude. Her breasts are thrust high and forward, converting her softest parts into the most formidable.

Women had need of any armour available, as this evocative sculpture suggests. Two female figures support the queen to the side but a fourth wails behind her in a way that she cannot suppress, undoubtedly foretelling her fate at the hands of patriarchy.

Broome-Norton herself would struggle to future-proof her sculpture, adapting her classical skills to the deco tastes of the day, which meant folding the figure into abstraction. Her Abundance, is an example: a Ceres figure with streaming horizontal hair who towers above her brawny husband, hugging a sheaf of wheat, and their toddler child. This allegory is not exactly corny – because it's wheaty – but it allegorically clothes the naked figures in patriotic kitsch.

When women's bodies are fortified with abstraction, they gain a kind of Platonic armour, as in the double exposures of Max Dupain's photography. One work, Brave New World, superimposes a nude over an industrial instrument, giving the body a forbidding equivalence with an advanced machine.

For all its threats, modernity had a socially emancipating role. You sense it in Sibyl Craig's Peggy, a portrait where a thick grey coat occupies most of the field and one of few gaps is closed off by Peggy securely brandishing a cigarette in our face. The women in the show define female space.