A Companion to Australian Art. Группа авторов
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 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1961. Including both abstract and figurative works in an attempt to repair 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