Sydney-born painter John Joseph Wardell Power, better known as J. W. Power, was Australia’s most accomplished artist of the interwar years. In London and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, Power’s unique blend of cubism, surrealism and abstraction found an audience in the heart of the avant-garde. Today, he is chiefly remembered as a benefactor whose extraordinary gifts led to the founding of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney in 1968 and the establishment of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991. This monograph, accompanying the J.W. Power: Art, War and the Avant-garde exhibition at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, reveals his singular role in Australian art in the 20th century.
