the divisive impact of the Antipodean Manifesto, this exhibition emphasized the exotic and mythic qualities of the Australian interior as exemplified in the work of Drysdale, Nolan, and Tucker for an English audience (Burn et al. 1988, 88). In an essay for the exhibition catalogue participating artist and critic Robert Hughes challenges the view of “Australia as a jardin exotique”, promoting instead the unique opportunity Australia’s geographic isolation afforded its artists, who were so removed from the Renaissance tradition that they were “confronted, virtually, with a tabula rasa” (Hughes 2006, 708–709). Hughes considers this isolation as an advantage – presaging a major theme of postmodernist discourse – in which Australian artists were “thrown back on their own resources” and required “to make a cultural pattern… a more stimulating and productive task than adding to one” (Hughes 2006, 709).
Bernard Smith dismisses this theme of isolation as a myth in the 1961 John Murtagh Macrossan memorial lecture, “Australian Painting Today,” observing that it was only applicable to Australia in terms of exposure to and support of the modern movement within a conservative institutional context in the interwar years (Smith 2006, 717–718). Culminating in a defense of the Antipodean Manifesto, he disavows its intent to foster national myths, asserting instead that it represented the first truly original modern gesture in Australian art, “which was not in some way a reflection of something that had already occurred in Europe or America before” (Smith 2006, 720). In this lecture, Smith thus qualifies his earlier theme of the dependency of Australian art on overseas models proposed in Place, Taste and Tradition by associating a local avant-garde mentality with the ability to reject such inherited traditions (Burn et al. 1988, 91). Distinguished by a process of selection and rejection, this variation on the dependency theme is further articulated in Smith’s survey, Australian Painting: 1788–1960 (1962), which would become the basis for most subsequent art historical accounts of Australian art.
Building upon his central thesis in European Vision and the South Pacific, the colonial period in Australian Painting is discussed in terms of how travelers and settlers visualized the novel Australian environment. Smith designates 1885 as the starting point of a national tradition with a trio of chapters, “Genesis”, “Exodus”, and “Leviticus”, which relate the creation of the Heidelberg School and the expatriate experiences of its artists to the biblical ideals of birth, exile, and return, reinforcing the mythic status of this era in Australian art history. In the chapter “Leviticus”, he controversially attributes the prominent role women artists played in the interwar modernist period in Australia to the lost generation of their male colleagues in World War I (Smith 1971, 198). The relationship between reactionary academicians and progressive modernists is a key focus with considerably less emphasis placed on social realism than in Place, Taste and Tradition. Through the concept of an Australian avant-garde combined with Smith’s emphasis on inherited stylistic tendencies, the idea of a “time-lag” as part of the dependency model emerges to account for perceived delays in the development of European and American trends (Burn et al. 1988, 66). Smith’s engagement with contemporary art is elaborated in the second edition of Australian Painting (1971), which includes four new chapters on painting in the 1960s, including abstract expressionism, Pop Art, and color painting, and reveals a broader acceptance of American cultural imperialism without altering the essential methodology of the first edition. He does, however, develop a framework for interpreting what he sees as the changing status of Australia’s provincial situation in the 1960s based on the emergence of metropolitan cultures with their own artistic dynamic (Smith 1971, 334).4
Briefly mentioning members of the Hermannsburg School as followers of Hans Heysen, Australian Painting relegates Aboriginal art to the margins of its internationalist discourse, arguing it “is an art which has evolved in isolation from the rest of world art” (Smith and Smith 1991 vi, 333).5 This exclusive approach is characteristic of mid-twentieth-century art historical discourse and also informs Robert Hughes’ The Art of Australia (1966) and Alan McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968). Unlike Smith who provides a nuanced discussion of the contribution of colonial artists to the development of landscape painting in Australia, Hughes is less convinced of the merit of Australian art produced prior to the Heidelberg School:
There is little in the history of Australian art between 1788 and 1885 that would interest a historian, except the way that painters, set down in an environment for whose forms their training had not prepared them, accommodated themselves to it. But the struggle between schema and things seen only becomes dramatic when it happens in the mind of a great painter. There was no Australian Delacroix. (Hughes 1970, 51).
McCulloch is similarly dismissive, writing off Eugene von Guérard, for instance, as “uninspiring” (McCulloch 1968a, 564).
By the mid-to-late 1960s, writing about contemporary Australian art was focused on emerging local networks of galleries and art collectives, exemplified by the Central Street Gallery established in Sydney in 1966. Led by the painter Tony McGillick who had lived and worked in London, the Central Street Gallery showed the work of artists who had recently returned from overseas who were no longer interested in a nationalist narrative anchored in Australian cultural identity exemplified by the Antipodeans (Barker and Green 2011, 4). Rather, they sought more metropolitan models of painting through tendencies of geometric, minimal, and color field art promoted in American art publications such as Art Forum and Art International (Grishin 2013, 399). Reissued in 1964, Art and Australia was also influential in disseminating new directions in American painting as revealed in expatriate Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore’s article, “New York Scene II – Color as an Idiom” (1966), in which he examines the work of Barnett Newman as a defining influence on color-field painting and Minimalism against a backdrop of color reproductions of Newman’s work (Meadmore 2006, 768). In 1967 the exhibition, Two Decades of American Painting, featuring work by Newman, Josef Albers, Ellsworth Kelly, Ad Reinhart and Frank Stella toured Sydney and Melbourne providing the first large-scale opportunity for the Australian public to see such American paintings.
Its design had a significant impact on The Field, a pivotal exhibition in the history of modernism in Australia. Held as the inaugural show at the new premises of the NGV in 1968, The Field, curated by John Stringer, presented a survey of local color-field abstraction with an emphasis on paintings and sculptural works by emerging artists exhibiting with the new network of commercial galleries. The exclusion of a number of established modernists from the exhibition triggered dissent among critics. Alan McCulloch, the most vocal opponent, denounced the participating artists as “band-wagon-jumpers” who were “gambling on the staying power of current international art fashions”, and reproached the NGV for “creating artificial standards of value” that represented ‘”a new kind of hazard to national creativity” (McCulloch 1968b). On the other side of the debate, the critic Patrick McCaughey championed the new autonomy of the art showcased in The Field: “It and it alone confronted the watcher and the feelings, associations, or references to things outside itself” (Eagle 1984, 146). He enthusiastically defended the artists, insisting that they signaled a “fresh enterprise” in Australian modernism (McCaughey 1968).
The Field signaled a generational shift in the Australian art world in which the old establishment represented by the Antipodeans and Bernard Smith was replaced by a new cohort of educated, middle-class artists, critics, and curators, many of whom had garnered significant overseas experience (Grishin 2013, 400). The theorist and artist Ian Burn designated this transitional period as one of crisis brought on by a variety of factors, including the deskilling of artistic practice and the decrease in the significance of the art object, the detachment of the artist from social issues, the exclusion of women and marginal groups by the art world, the commercialization of art, and the crushing influence of American culture on Australian art, all of which resulted in the proliferation of Pop art, color-field, and Minimalism (Burn 1984, 8). A member of the Conceptual Art group Art and Language, Burn proposed Conceptualism as paving the way for more democratic, collaborative, and expansive approaches to the production and perception of art in Australia in the transitional decade of the 1970s against
