The settler art of anthropology: Martin Crevier, ‘Anthropology and Settler Nationalisms in the Art of Emily Carr, Irma Stern, and Margaret Preston’, The Journao of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler art of anthropology: Martin Crevier, ‘Anthropology and Settler Nationalisms in the Art of Emily Carr, Irma Stern, and Margaret Preston’, The Journao of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: South African Irma Stern (1894–1966), Canadian Emily Carr (1871–1945), and Australian Margaret Preston (1875–1963) all attained iconic status as artists in their respective countries. Early appraisers commended their incorporation of Indigenous and Black peoples in a national modernist canon through the use of post-impressionistic sensibilities. Despite notable similarities in biography, vision and oeuvre, these three artists have yet to be considered together in a comparative and connected mode. This article links their careers, ideas and concomitant emergence by focusing on their common and concurrent engagement with the science of Anthropology. All three absorbed and shared anthropologically-inflected conceptions of the ‘Other’. By distilling Anthropology’s discourses for popular audiences, they served as transmission belts between science and the public. They spread theories of racial typologies, of degeneration, of culture and of Indigenous disappearance. Modern art, via Anthropology, thus served as an interface through which Indigenous populations were appropriated and incorporated within nationalisms across Britain’s empire of settlement.

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