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Margaret Preston

Born in Adelaide as Margaret Rose McPherson in 1875, Margaret Preston had by the 1920s become one of Australia’s leading modernist artists.

Attaching equal importance to craft and painting, she had, by the late 1920s, gained an exceptional place in the Sydney art establishment. In 1929 she became the first woman and modernist to be invited by the Art Gallery of NSW to contribute a self-portrait to the collection. In great efforts to develop Australian "national art", she was also one of the first non-Indigenous Australian artists to use Aboriginal motifs in her work.

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