argues for the necessity of an art practice that directly engages with contemporary social contexts, such as urban poverty and the plight of Aborigines.
Bernard Smith, the first Australian-born professional art historian, sided with the social realists in this debate. Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art Since 1788 (1945), one of the earliest art histories written from a Marxist perspective, shifted the emphasis on art historical writing, thus far dominated by an insular approach towards defining Australian art through its distinctive landscape features, to a history of its aesthetic tendencies anchored within a global historical perspective. Privileging stylistic influence, Smith asserts that the evolution of a national tradition necessarily lay in “the gradual assimilation of many overseas tendencies as they react upon the local conditions of the country,” proposing a cultural dependency model that would come under scrutiny by subsequent Australian critics and artists (Smith 1979, 30). A product of the wartime era, Place, Taste and Tradition expresses Smith’s conviction in his responsibility as a historian to address the rise of fascism in Europe and its threat to Western civilization through an interpretation of social realism, with its roots in the Heidelberg School, as the most significant movement in Australian art.
The following year the first art history department was established when Joseph Burke, one of the earliest graduates of the Courtauld Institute and a specialist in English eighteenth-century art, was appointed to the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1946. Burke recruited Bernard Smith in addition to Franz Philipp, a Viennese Renaissance specialist, and Ursula Hoff, a German scholar who had studied the influence of Rembrandt on English art, constructing a diasporic academic model founded on methodologies of European art history, particularly the iconographic program of scholars such as Erwin Panofsky, which would serve as the basis for the institutionalization of art history in Australia (Anderson 2011, 2–3). These scholars also actively embraced contemporary Australian painting, producing publications and exhibitions on the work of Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, and Sydney Nolan. Through such promotion they contributed to the gradual acceptance of modernism by the local art establishment.
In the postwar era in the 1950s and early 1960s, an emerging internationalist perspective triggered debates over avant-gardism and dependency in Australian modernism with deference to European and then American cultural influence dominating art criticism (Burn et al. 1988, 76–77). The relationship of Australian art to the international scene rather than its role in constructing a national identity took center stage. Echoing earlier historical conceptions of the far-flung antipodes, the theme of isolationism became a key concern encapsulated in A.A. Phillips’ widely reproduced catchphrase, the “cultural cringe”, which targeted feelings of Australian cultural inferiority through “an inability to escape needless comparisons” between Australia and Europe (Phillips 2006, 623).
Developing industrialization and urbanization, meanwhile, coupled with a vast influx of immigrants from Britain and southern Europe, contributed to the rise of consumerism and suburban housing, which posed challenges to the pastoral tradition as the bedrock of a national identity. National character traits such as “the larrikinism of the bushman and the bohemianism of the artist”, crystallized during the late nineteenth century with the Heidelberg School and First World War, were replaced by a suburban experience governed by regimentation and conformity (McAuliffe 1996, 71). In The Australian Ugliness (1960), Robin Boyd deplores the destruction of the native environment and the visual pollution of the built environment, condemning the “featurism” of contemporary Australian architecture dominated by superfluous elaboration and embellishment, in favor of a modernist emphasis on essential form (Boyd 2006, 922).
The growing acceptance of such modernist discourse primed the Australian reception of American abstract expressionism and hard-edge color painting, which was championed by artists and writers in Sydney such as Elwyn Lynn. Echoing the American critic Clement Greenberg, in 1955 Lynn promoted abstraction as part of a larger metropolitan culture, while cautioning against the negative impact of capitalism on the avant-garde (Lynn 2006, 679). In Melbourne the Heide-based Museum of Modern Art was established by John Reed in 1958, providing crucial institutional support for the figurative expressionists associated with the Reeds’ circle (Stephen et al. 2006, 683). When Reed exhibited works by these artists in 1959 the exhibition was vehemently attacked by a number of Sydney critics, including a writer for the Sydney Morning Herald who scoffed that the collection possessed a “decadent hill-billy flavor of tenth-rate German Expressionism mixed with a dash of Picasso and at times reverting to the Australian primitive school” (Smith 2006, 719). In response to such trenchant attacks, Bernard Smith argued that “some sort of vigorous counter-attack was necessary” to avoid the ascendancy of “a provincial form of American abstract expressionism” in Australia (Smith 2006, 719).
The result was “The Antipodean Manifesto” (1959) written by Smith in conjunction with the artists Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Bob Dickerson, John Perceval, and Clifton Pugh. Targeting “tachistes, action painters, geometric abstractionists, abstract expressionists, and their innumerable band of camp followers” who “benumb the intellect and wit of art with their bland and pretentious mysteries…,” the Manifesto asserts that the figurative style of the Antipodean artists who drew upon direct Australian experience was essential to “a young society still making its myths” as a vehicle to shape national identity (Smith et al. 2006, 696). The Manifesto in effect applied the nationalist rhetoric previously reserved for the pastoral tradition to Australian modernism (Stephen et al. 2006, 23).
Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768–1850 (1960), published the following year, had a significant impact on both domestic and international artistic discourse. It was the first cross-cultural art history to reverse the Eurocentric model of the art of exploration by focusing on the impact of the European engagement with the antipodean landscape on aesthetic tendencies. According to Smith, the literally nondescript elements of Australian nature heralded a new mode of artistic vision that blended neoclassical convention and romantic sensibility with empirical science (Smith 1960, 3–4). Within this model, Smith analyzes the portrayal of Indigenous Australians, isolating the pictorial stereotypes of the “noble”, “ignoble” and “romantic savage”, which, while anchored in early-nineteenth-century artistic and literary attitudes towards Indigenous peoples, bears the legacy of early-twentieth-century primitivism (Lowish 2011, 2–3; Smith 1960, 247).
Primitivism’s impact on Australian modernism was pervasive by the 1960s with renewed anthropological research contributing to a better understanding of Aboriginal art and its infiltration into galleries.3 Tony Tuckson, the deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and a significant painter in his own right, visited Arnhem Land in 1958 and 59 with the Sydney medical practitioner and collector Stuart Scougall who donated his collection of Melville Island grave-posts and Yirrkala bark paintings to the AGNSW. In 1960 Tuckson displayed the grave-posts in the gallery forecourt, signaling a shift in the reception of Aboriginal art from an object of ethnographic study to a form of fine art in its own right (Morphy 2011, 8). The same year he launched the nationwide touring exhibition, Australian Aboriginal Art, which employed a modernist aesthetic framework while catering to a postwar nationalism grounded in the indigenous heritage of the land (McLean 2011, 26). In an edited volume emerging out of the exhibition, Tuckson contributed a chapter entitled, “Aboriginal Art and the Western World” (1964), which considers the aesthetic value of abstract Aboriginal imagery, drawing upon his own perspective as an abstract expressionist artist (Tuckson 2006, 755). The anthropologist Ronald Berndt disagreed with his emphasis on the universal language of art at the expense of cultural specificity and deplores Tuckson’s modernist outlook in an epilogue, revealing that while the interests of anthropologists and artists in promoting Aboriginal art were aligned in the mid-twentieth-century, there were still significant differences to their approaches (McLean 2011, 26; Stephen et al. 2006, 745).
The increasing mainstream acceptance of Indigenous Aboriginal art on the domestic front was mirrored by the rising international profile of non-indigenous Australian art sparked by the Recent Australian Painting show
