An exhibition of Australia's pioneering modernist painters features restored paintings by Clarice Be

Know My Name: naati translating Making it Modern at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra looks at the work of six women modernists from the 1920s to the 1940s.

Beckett is considered one of the country's leading female artists of the early twentieth century, but she received little recognition during her lifetime.

She died in 1935 at the age of 48 and it was not until four decades later that about 2000 of her paintings were discovered in a barn in country Victoria.

Most had been destroyed, but the few hundred that did survive showed everyday scenes in a dreamy haze, painted in distinctive flat brushstrokes.

The best of Beckett's work is decades ahead of its time, according to National Gallery of Australia curator Elspeth Pitt.

"It is so minimal that it pre-empts the idea of pure abstraction that only became more popular 15 to 20 years after Beckett had passed away," she told AAP.