J.W. Power

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 established his reputation as a modernist, exhibiting with the London Group and the 7 & 5 Society.

In the late 1920s, incorporating elements of the surreal and abstraction into his cubism, he reoriented his career to Paris, where he showed with the famed galleries run by Léonce Rosenberg and Jeanne Bucher. In 1931, he was central to the formation of the international artists group Abstraction-Création, whose members included Mondrian, Kandinsky, and his friend Otto Freundlich.

This book recognises and celebrates his life as an artist of the interwar European avant-garde.