A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
(1941), which Ure Smith champions “as a basis of a new outlook for a national art for Australia” (Preston 1941, 16; Ure Smith 1941, 28). It also includes sections on “The First British Artists in Australia,” “The Foundation of an Australian School”, and “Modern Art in Australia”, with text borrowed from William Moore and J.S. MacDonald. American magazine reviews of the exhibition suggest that the Aboriginal component, including bark paintings from Spencer’s collection, represented the most interesting aspect to overseas critics and audiences (Thomas 2011, 7–8). Aboriginal art enjoyed particular prominence on the domestic front as well, appearing regularly in Art in Australia from 1941 alongside Western modernist art, and featuring in an exhibition of worldwide “Primitive Art” organized by Daryl Lindsay, the new director of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in 1943. In an introductory essay for the exhibition catalogue, “Has Australian Aboriginal Art a Future?”, German anthropologist Leonhard Adam, who was deported to Australia with other Jewish artists and scholars during World War II, lobbies for the preservation and promotion of post-colonial Aboriginal art: “Some people think that European art materials should be avoided, and that any modern influence must result in the deterioration of primitive art. They forget, however that art is not a static, but a dynamic phenomenon…” (Adam 2006, 448, 453).
With the advent of the Second World War, emerging expressionist and surrealist tendencies in landscape painting challenged the pastoralist tradition through the promotion of a universal vision of the Australian bush dominated by its relentless elements, evident in the work of artists like Russell Drysdale, Arthur Boyd, and James Gleeson.2 In 1939 the Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art in Melbourne displayed for the first time in Australia new developments in European modernism previously seen only through reproductions, galvanizing liberal and radical artistic factions (Chanin and Miller 2005). A series of polemical institutional disputes between the conservative art establishment and these emerging factions unfolded around the foundation of an Australian Academy of Art in Canberra in 1937 by the federal government’s attorney general Robert G. Menzies, a staunch anti-modernist, and the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) established in response in 1938 through the initiatives of Melbourne artist and educator George Bell (Stephen et al. 2006, 132).
The CAS was plagued by internal divisions between moderate modernists interested in formal experimentation and a group of younger avant-garde artists associated with the Melbourne patrons John and Sunday Reed, including Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, who called for a radical and anarchist approach to art-making. Tensions simmered between this avant-garde group who prioritized art for art’s sake and those in the CAS who promoted a commitment to society through social realist art (Stephen et al. 2006, 399). The two sides of this wartime debate are encapsulated in Albert Tucker’s “Art, Myth and Society” (1943) and Noel Counihan’s response, “How Albert Tucker Misrepresents Marxism” (1943). While Tucker champions artistic autonomy and emphasizes the unchanging archetypes of artistic form linked to the realm of myth, Counihan 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