German artist Elise Blumann arrived in Western Australia in 1938, having fled Nazi Germany in 1934. With her husband and two sons, she set up home on the banks of the Swan River and began to paint. Over the next ten years she produced a series of portraits set against the river and the Indian Ocean, and pursued an anlysis of plant forms ... to brilliant effect. In this study Sally Quin traces Blumann's formative student years in Berlin and her first decade in Australia, where the artist reinvented her working method in response to the intense light and colour of the local landscape ... Blumann was a conservative modernist, but the Perth art scene was not prepared for her expressive style, and when she exhibited for the first time in 1944 her art was met with bewilderment. The book considers attitudes to modernism in Perth and the influence on local culture of European refugees and emigrés newly arrived in the city ... Quin establishes Blumann as a significant figure in the story of Australian modernism"--Publisher's description.