Lowish - Rethinking Australias art history: the challenge of Aboriginal art

This book aims to redefine Australias earliest art history by chronicling for the first time the birth of the category Aboriginal art, tracing the terms use through published literature in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Lowish reveals how the idea of Aboriginal art developed in the European imagination, manifested in early literature, and became a distinct classification with its own criteria and form. Part of the larger story of Aboriginal/European engagement, this book provides a new vision for an Australian art history reconciled with its colonial origins and in recognition of what came before the contemporary phenomenon of Aboriginal art.

Susan Lowish is Lecturer in Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne.

Cover Image: Christian Thompson, Invaded Dreams, from the series We Bury Our Own (2012), C-type print, 100 100 cm. Image courtesy the Artist and Michael Reid, Sydney.

Series Editor: Richard Woodfield, University of Birmingham

The aim of this series is to support and promote the study of the history and practice of art historical writing focusing on its institutional and conceptual foundations, from the past to the present day in all areas and all periods. Besides addressing the major innovators of the past it also encourages re-thinking ways in which the subject may be written in the future. It ignores the disciplinary boundaries imposed by the Anglophone expression 'art history' and allows and encourages the full range of enquiry that encompasses the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches.

A Theory of the Tache in Nineteenth-Century Painting
ystein Sjstad

Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary
Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire
Ahmet A. Ersoy

Painting and Narrative in France, from Poussin to Gauguin
Edited by Peter Cooke and Nina Lbbren

Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Catherine Roach

The Academy of San Carlos and Mexican Art History
Politics, History, and Art in Nineteenth-Century Mexico
Ray Hernandez-Duran

Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism
International Experiments in Italy
Marin R. Sullivan

Comparativism in Art History
Edited by Ja Elsner

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Studies-in-Art-Historiography/book-series/ASHSER2250

The challenge of Aboriginal Art

Susan Lowish

First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Susan Lowish

The right of Susan Lowish to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been applied for

ISBN: 978-0-8153-7417-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-04999-3 (ebk)

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