J.W. Power

An Australian Avant-gardist

By: Ann Stephen, A.D.S. Donaldson

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Hardcover | 1 November 2025

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27.6 x 23.6

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J. W. Power was Australia's most accomplished interwar avant-garde artist. This first monograph of Power's remarkable nomadic career follows a journey from Australia to Britain, and then around the world. Having initially studied medicine in Sydney followed by service as a surgeon during WW1, Power gave up a medical career to study art in Paris in the early 1920s, first with the Brazilian Pedro Araujo and then with Fernand Leger. It was in London, however, that he first establishing his reputation as a modernist, exhibiting with the London Group and the 7 & 5 Society.

In the late 1920s working as a cubist, incorporating elements of the surreal and abstraction, he reorientated his career to Paris, where he showed with the famed galleries run by Leonce Rosenberg and Jeanne Bucher. In 1931 he was central to the formation of the international artists group Abstraction-Creation whose members included Mondrian, Kandinsky and his friend Otto Freundlich.

It is his life as an artist in the midst of the interwar European avant-garde that this book recognises and celebrates.

About the Author

Dr Ann Stephen, FAHA is Senior Curator, Art, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney. She has curated many exhibitions, including those accompanying a range of publications, such as Light & Darkness, Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture and Modern times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, many more.

A.D.S. Donaldson is an artist, art historian and curator. He studied at Sydney College of the Arts, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and the University of Sydney. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and in various state and university museums and art galleries. He is the co-author and co-curator with Ann Stephen of J.W. Power Abstraction-Création Paris 1934 (2012). He is an Honorary Associate of the Power Institute, the University of Sydney.

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