Reflections on a city's coming of age Colour scheming: Grace Cossington Smith's The Lacquer Room (1935). Photo: Jenni Carter Appropriately enough for an exhibition with Sydney in its title, it opens with a room dedicated to depictions of the Harbour Bridge and sticks close to the water. Sydney Moderns: art for a new world, opening on Saturday at the Art Gallery of NSW, presents 180 works that reveal how Sydney artists viewed their immediate environment between 1915 and the 1940s. It was a period when artists embraced new theories of colour and composition from abroad and took streetscapes and factories, department stores and apartment buildings, as subject matter. "The early moderns were very much focused on the harbour," curator Deborah Edwards says. It was a vortex of light and colour refraction and they responded to that. When you look at these works and try and understand why Sydney, at this time, at what factors led to [change], you would have to say a response to the light and water of the harbour. Many of the names and images are as familiar as the city's landmarks depicted. Grace Cossington Smith's The Bridge in- curve from 1930, Margaret Preston's Mosman woodcuts of the 1920s, Roy de Maistre's Botanical Gardens, 1918. A self-portrait by Margaret Preston (1925). "We've tried to present a set of works that are almost icons of Australian art alongside lesser known works," Edwards says. People will, I hope, go to their favourites and see them in different company. The exhibition, about a third of which is drawn from the gallery's collection, spans a period when the city first took on the cosmopolitan hue present inhabitants might recognise. There are posters for P&O "to London via Suez" by Frank Hinder, and the Orient Line, that appeared in interiors and lifestyle magazine The Home, the covers of which featured artworks by Preston, Thea Proctor and Hera Roberts. Adelaide Perry's Woman Pilot (1931). "Modernism has reached Australia," declares a 1929 advertisement for The Home, featuring a photograph by Harold Cazneaux. The wave of modernism which has flooded the intellectual centres of civilised countries has penetrated Australia. "Sydney was a cosmopolitan hub," Edwards says, "and I hope that's an experience people take from the show." It was also a period when commercial opportunities arose for artists and they moved away from the easel and into commerce and design. Artists such as Proctor and George Lambert advised on car colours for the Ford motor company. Others created furniture designs, graphics and interiors for the department stores. Preston's Flapper (1925). The exhibition is divided into five themes: colour, the city, still life, landscape and abstraction. There is a strong female presence, from Cossington Smith's The sock knitter, 1915, and The Lacquer Room, 1935, - "a quintessential image of Sydney modernity" - to Margaret Preston's Flapper. Colour also became central to modern painting. "The artists used colour as a system, as a theory, to create new artworks that were modern," Edwards says. De Maistre, who pioneered an approach to colour and its connection to music is well represented and Colour Music, his five-metre-long guache on piano roll, is on display. He even created the "De Maistre Colour Harmonising Chart," which assisted artists, designers and home decorators in the process of modern colour organisation. It was available at Grace Bros on Broadway. The gallery's new acquisition, Hinder's Tram Kaleidoscope (1948), is also on display. The exhibition ends with the colourful, geometric abstracts of house-painter-turned-modernist Ralph Balson. "The period of the Sydney moderns was one when people were looking towards the future," Edwards' co-curator Denise Mimmocchi says. They were working at a time when their city was in a state of flux as it was transforming into a modern metropolis, so artists envisaged the dynamics of a changing time when they were thinking ahead to the future. The Sydney moderns of the 1920s and 1930s probably wouldn't have been too surprised to see the city of today - they would have anticipated the scale of buildings moving upward; the growth of its population and commerce. And really the constant of Sydney will always be its harbour. If they were painting again today it would probably be a central reference point to their work. Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World is on until October 7.