The exhibition Before Addled Art: The Graphic Art of Lionel Lindsay was a curatorial project undertaken by Art History Honours students. It brought together 59 prints from Te Papa Tongarewa’s extensive collection of works by Lindsay (1874 – 1961)—an Australian artist, writer and critic who today is chiefly remembered and judged for his book Addled Art, a vociferous attack on modern art published in 1942 at the height of World War II.

This exhibition represented the first significant showing of these prints as a collection and demonstrated the finest of Lindsay’s work—spanning the media of drypoint, aquatint, etching and wood engraving—while at the same time focusing on some of the key themes in his practice, including the swagman in the outback, the modernisation of old Sydney, the lure of Spain and the ‘exoticism’ of India. The technical brilliance and sheer beauty of the works presented in Before Addled Art gave recognition to these works in their own right, beyond the shadow cast by his notorious rejection of the modernist avant-garde.