Brave New World: Australia 1930s and Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art are both important new museum shows. They involve a serious investment of institutional resources. They demand great curatorial expertise. They make a number of significant art-historical finds and equally propose a number of tough-minded art-historical exclusions. They are, in their various ways, polemical. They change, even if only subtly, our previous understandings of Australian art.