The art of the overseas exhibition

From the first exhibition of Australian art in London (held at the Grafton Gallery in 1898 and including almost 400 Heidelberg School related paintings) to the most recent event at the Royal Academy in 2013 (with its grand sweeping title, Australia), the art critical record of such enterprises can best be described, more often than not, as simply extraordinary. Ostensibly intended to focus on landscape-related art, Australia appears to have been in troubled waters from the outset. Although the Director of Exhibitions for the Royal Academy, Kathleen Soriano, was officially its principal curator, John McDonald (the art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald) did not hesitate to lay the blame for its perceived limitations ‘squarely with the National Gallery of Australia’, given that half the 200 works were sourced from this one collection (McDonald, 2013). McDonald’s review pulled no punches:

Instead of a dedicated exhibition of landscape art we have a vehicle that enables the curators to include anything they believe to have some relation to landscape … The show is neither a survey of Australian landscape art nor an overview of Australian art history. It is a compromise, and frankly, a mess.

To be fair, amongst the usual carping, Australia did manage to receive a number of laudatory responses from British and Australian critics. The closest, however, that an Australian exhibition has come to being met with overall approbation was the Recent Australian Art show, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961. Perhaps the most important Australian cultural event staged in London, this key exhibition forms the centrepiece of the recent book An Antipodean Summer: Australian Art and Artists in London, 1950–65, by the British art historian Simon Pierse – one of the most significant recent contributions to the study of Australian art history. Apart from the late Professor Bernard Smith, Pierse is the only other historian to give this fascinating and key period of Australian expatriate experience the significance that it deserves. In contrast to Smith’s concise but fiercely satisfying partisanship located in a number of publications, it is Pierse’s extensive primary research in Britain and Australia that finally provides the coherent and richly detailed analysis for a balanced understanding of a cultural narrative so often embroiled in conflict and mutual misunderstanding – a torturous cultural and political game of move and counter-move.

Although with several notable exceptions (above all in the support of Australian art by Sir Kenneth Clark and Bryan Robertson), overall the ineluctable conclusion is that throughout the history of Australian art such enterprises have all too often been met with condescension and scorn. As recently as 1988, the exhibition The Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, sponsored by the Hayward Gallery in London, provided the most egregious example of the phenomenon. In spite of the inclusion among the radical figures of that decade of the work of the key Angry Penguin painters Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd (who had each exhibited with immense commercial and critical success in London during the 1950s and ‘60s), even this cachet could not succeed in warding off the utter absurdity of the majority of British critical responses. ‘With some important exceptions’, Bernard Smith pointed to the appalling ‘ignorance in which most of the reviewers … took an ill-concealed pride. More often than not this was associated with an insufferable tone of patronage and overweening arrogance’ (Smith 1988/9: 86). While noting the superciliousness of a Brian Sewell, Smith cited for particular analysis the effort of the art critic of The Guardian, Tim Hilton, which included the statement that ‘the Angry Penguin movement failed because it could not develop a coherent manner of painting. It had a simple and central disability; it was not artistic enough’ (Smith 1988/9: 87). As if such an observation was insufficient as an insult, Hilton proceeded to accuse Tucker and Boyd of somehow not wishing to ‘betray the national virtue of clever uncouthness’. Smith’s assessment was damning: ‘This is not criticism but prejudice. He might well have said that neither of them ever learned to hold their knives and forks like an English gentleman.’

By 1957 after ten years of exile spent mostly in Paris and, above all, Italy (where he had participated in the Venice Biennale the previous year), Albert Tucker finally succeeded in finding a degree of acceptance in London, exhibiting his Pan in Armour series there at the Imperial Institute. Perhaps even more significantly, in the same year he also had a painting acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art – his first work to enter a public collection. Whatever the difficulties of these years, in a letter at this time to his Australian patron, John Reed, Tucker reflected on what he saw as the inward-looking character of post-war Australia and its artists:

socially, politically, officially, Australians are truly provincial … leaving their best talent to rot on the branches … My advice to them – the painters – get out. Australian painting won’t be able to mature until it’s worked through a generation of expatriates. (Fry, 2005: 153).

By 1957 it was not Tucker’s name, however, but those of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale that were synonymous with the recognition of Australian art at the highest level in Britain, a situation largely due to support from Kenneth Clark, one time director of the National Gallery of London, Oxford Slade Professor, and now the chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain. Here was the most powerful figure on the British art scene. Described by Pierse as ‘undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in the promotion of Australian contemporary painting in the UK during the years immediately following the Second World War’ (Pierse, 2012: 1), Clark is one of the two key figures in the book. By 1950 he had become an enthusiastic admirer of Australian life, and a champion of the modernistic landscape-oriented painting of Drysdale and Nolan following time spent in Australia in 1949, an extended visit connected in part with his role as London Advisor to the Felton Bequest for the National Gallery of Victoria. The success of Drysdale’s outback landscapes shown at his first London exhibition held at the Leicester Galleries in 1950 had much to do with Clark’s assiduous promotion of an artist whose work he had acquired while in Australia; as was also the case with Nolan, who enjoyed an even more spectacular success at the Redfern Gallery in 1951 with his new series of large central Australian landscapes.

The critical acclaim for Nolan’s landscapes was followed by the acquisition of one of these spectacularly innovative works by the Tate Gallery. Nolan returned to Australia for two years, arriving back in Britain in November 1953, already demonstrating the habit of restlessness that was undoubtedly to make him history’s most peripatetic artist – with few countries or landscapes left untouched in this relentless pursuit of new experience. Drysdale, by contrast, largely continued to work at home close to his subject matter: inland Australian life and landscape.

As for Tucker, his early sojourn in London in 1947 had been a miserable experience of British smog-shrouded winter and art establishment rejection. The later trenchant advice to Australian artists stemmed from that decade-long struggle – mitigated to a degree by John Reed’s regular if modest stipend. Tucker’s view that Australian art required the tempering of expatriate experience also reflected something of Tucker’s inimitable go-it-alone combative attitude – the initial setbacks in London stemming largely from his failure to establish the comparable sponsorship and patronage enjoyed by Nolan and Drysdale during these early years of the great art exodus. In this regard, Nolan’s timing (as well as his capacity to charm) worked perfectly, enabling him to establish an ongoing friendship with Clark that included regular visits as a guest to Clark’s Saltwood Castle in Kent.

The most significant period of the Australian presence in Britain is the decade from 1953 to 1963. Within this time-frame the main focus of Pierse’s book pertains to the three most ambitious and historically most significant exhibitions of Australian art: Recent Australian Art (1961), curated by Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery; Australian Painting – Colonial – Impressionist – Contemporary (1963) at the Tate Gallery; and Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today in Folkestone (1963). Collectively, these three exhibitions represent the climax of British involvement in Australian art. Against a background of recent memories of post-war rationing and still visible war damage, these events gave support, as Pierse writes, to a feeling in Britain of Australia ‘as a land of warmth and sunshine – quite literally a land of colour – and many at the time saw it as a country of new opportunity: a place to begin again’ (Pierse, 2012: 47). The post-war immigration boom of assisted migration with its ‘Ten Pound Poms’ was by now in full swing, with this idealized vision of Australia a seemingly ingrained part of British consciousness – a vision to which much Australian painting bore witness.

For Australian artists the attraction to London had been a long-standing affair. From the 1880s, through to the 1930s, many successful Australian artists had been drawn to the Empire’s imperial centre with its promise of greater professional recognition. To a lesser degree there was also Paris, with its celebrated galleries and art academies – and eventually the further promise of partaking in something of its avant-garde aura. By the time Nolan and Drysdale were making their mark in London, numerous other figures were also filtering onto the British scene, ranging from Bernard Smith (undertaking postgraduate studies at the great Courtauld Institute) to the surrealists James Gleeson and Robert Klippel, and other ambitious modernist painters who included Fred Williams, Louis James, Frank Hodgkinson, Leonard French, Francis Lymburner and Tony Underhill. As Tucker had discovered, these could be tough times for Australian artists, although there was at least one commercial gallery, the Redfern (run by the Antipodeans Harry Tatlock Miller and Rex Nan Kivell), that, as Pierse notes, was said to positively discriminate in favour of Australian artists. Against the background of a moribund post-war situation back in Australia, for those who could scratch together the price of a one-way fare to London, there lay the promise of a potentially more lucrative situation – as well as the seductiveness of a less provincial art scene. Another glow also emanated from this now distant Churchillian pre-Commonwealth world – one that still trailed something of the glory of the Empire within which, until 1949, Australians still retained the status of British subjects; and, to whatever degree, a sense that here was ‘home’. And no artist found it more congenial or more rewarding than Sidney Nolan: however assiduously the St Kilda-born artist cultivated Irish-Australian and Ned Kelly credentials, for the rest of his life he remained an expatriate British resident to his boot-straps: the British knighthood, Tudor country manor-house, and Whitehall apartment collectively signifying the crowning achievement of unassailable ambition.

Well before the key exhibitions of the 1960s a number of shows acted as a prologue to the later blockbusters. One of the earliest was Twelve Australian Artists at the Burlington Galleries, proposed by Kenneth Clark for the coronation year of 1953. Although less celebrated artists such as Frank Hinder and Godfrey Miller were part of the line-up, 16 paintings were by Nolan, Drysdale and Dobell and would represent Australia in the Venice Biennale the following year. Also in 1953 the newly formed Australian Artists’ Association, with its base at Australia House, held its inaugural exhibition. The association would go on to host numerous events and programs as support for the plethora of artists now flooding into London, many staying for less than a year. Although disparaged by figures such as Nolan and Tucker as a mere ‘art club’, nonetheless its membership reached 70 or so by the mid-1950s before its subsequent decline.

The vast chasm between the struggling majority of these new arrivals and established figures was nowhere now more evident than with Nolan’s first comprehensive survey exhibition, which opened in June 1957 at the newly refurbished Whitechapel Art Gallery under its dynamic and ambitious young director Bryan Robertson. The exhibition then toured England under the auspices of the Arts Council, ‘attracting huge crowds [and] consolidating his reputation in England’ (Pearce, 2007: 245). Nolan’s record-breaking sell-out exhibition of his Leda and the Swan series at the prestigious Matthiesen Gallery three years later in 1960 only served to confirm an already stellar reputation. By then Tucker was back in Melbourne; while Arthur Boyd and his family had finally made a somewhat belated arrival in London.

However impressive, these events were somewhat of a prelude to the most significant moment of this entire story: the exhibition Recent Australian Art at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1961, which changed the whole tempo of the relationship between Australian art and its reception in Britain. Pierse necessarily devotes the best part of three chapters of his book to this exhibition, detailing its initial conception and the arduous preparation by Robertson, whose appointment in 1952 to this gallery had been yet another example of Clark’s talent-spotting ability. Robertson had transformed an unprepossessing venue in an unfashionable part of London into what became London’s most important exhibiting space for international contemporary art, including, above all, American and Australian art.

Robertson was especially in thrall to post-war American abstract expressionism, introducing the work of Jackson Pollock to Britain in the year before Nolan’s big exhibition. Like Clark (who it was said never visited a Nolan exhibition without buying the biggest and best painting on show), Robertson too had become an enthusiastic devotee of Australian contemporary art and what he perceived as the distinctive qualities of the Australian character. He had met Nolan in Cambridge as early as 1951 and throughout the ‘50s came to feel a sense of a growing Australian consciousness in Britain – in large measure because, in addition to the resident visual artists, there was also the presence of the writers Patrick White and Ray Lawler, and the actors Leo McKern, Peter Finch, Peter O’Shaughnessy and Barry Humphries.

By the end of the 1950s a confluence of events in both the Australian and London art worlds was to transform what had thus far been a relatively conflict-free expatriate narrative into an intense and fractious climatic moment – creating a hornet’s nest that would enmesh the Whitechapel show in the background politics of a fiercely conflicted contemporary Australian art scene. On the one hand there was the institutional conflict between the conservatism of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board and the radical Contemporary Art Society in alliance with John Reed’s Melbourne Museum of Modern Art; while on the other a newly emergent confrontation had emerged between the recent Melbourne-based Antipodean art movement committed to figurative art and an essentially Sydney-based abstract expressionist movement.

In August 1959 the exhibition of the Antipodean group of seven artists (Charles Blackman, Arthur and David Boyd, John Brack, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and Robert Dickerson) was held in Melbourne’s Victorian Artists’ Society Gallery. Far more controversial than any of the works on show, however, was the strident manifesto that accompanied it – the product of the intellectual leadership of the art critic and historian Bernard Smith, attacking what Smith perceived as an overwhelming embrace, both in Australia and abroad, by contemporary artists of the new international movement of abstract expressionist painting.

As Pierse documents in detail, the first actual impulse in relation to a chain of events that became the Whitechapel exhibition had been initiated by Smith himself, seeking to enlist the support of Clark (whose own antipathy towards abstract art was well known) in helping to arrange a London showing of Antipodean painting. Clark himself refused to become involved, directing Smith instead to Robertson and the Whitechapel – though without disclosing the enthusiasm for American abstract art by Robertson, who was already at work on a monograph on the work of Jackson Pollock. Although Robertson also admired contemporary Australian figurative art, he showed no interest in giving specific support to such a stridently partisan art political position. In any case, Hal Missingham, the director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, had already raised the possibility of a comprehensive non-partisan exhibition of contemporary Australian art in London, suggesting that the best way of facilitating this was by means of an Australian visit by Robertson. As Pierse sums up all this to-ing and fro-ing:

rather than wishing to thwart the Antipodeans, it is much more likely that Missingham, having recently heard … of plans for an officially organized exhibition at the Tate, decided to launch his own plans for an overseas exhibition, which would include recent abstract-expressionist painting likely to be excluded … by the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board. (Pierse, 2007: 86)

By the time Robertson made his exhausting frantic five-week visit to Australia in 1960 to meet artists and select works, as Pierse goes on to note, Robertson had found himself playing ‘a difficult game, dealing with opposing camps of “abs” and “figs” and ultimately bringing both together in a single exhibition … that would reflect the breadth and diversity of contemporary Australian painting’ (Pierse, 2012: 87). As a footnote to this byzantine set of intrigues, while still a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, as early as 1950 Smith had already made an advance to Clark soon after Clark’s return from Australia, attempting to enlist his backing for what would have been the first major exhibition of Australian art in London since 1923. He had been no more successful then (given perhaps that as a member of the Australian Communist Party he had already published Place, Taste and Tradition, a distinctly left-wing account of contemporary war-time Australian art) than he was now with this new ill-disguised art political program promoting Antipodean figuration with an inbuilt component of Smith’s anti-American bias. As the art historian Sheridan Palmer notes succinctly: ‘Bryan Robertson had not only stolen Bernard Smith’s thunder, he had marginalised him’ (Palmer, 2013: 54).

Here, then, was the background to what was to be the most influential exhibition of Australian contemporary art in Britain. Opening in June 1961, ‘the prima facie aim of the exhibition’, in Pierse’s words, was ‘to give a London platform to the work of a younger generation of Australian artists … Recent Australian Painting was initially conceived as a sort of Salon des Refusés: an exhibition focusing on emerging young Australian talent’ (Pierse, 2012: 97). For Robertson, it was also intended as a pro-active move against a Tate Gallery exhibition also scheduled for 1961, but – as things turned out – delayed until 1963. The fear was that the Tate show, in being largely the product of the uninspiring Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, would present a safe, predictable face of Australian art. By contrast, for Robertson, Recent Australian Art was to be an independent show ‘made by an outsider, acting with reasonable good will … willing to listen to all sides, which was me … an independent antidote to what we thought might be a lethal government show at the Tate’ (Haese, 1983). Moreover, as Pierse sums up the achievement of the exhibition (with 111 paintings by 55 artists it was larger than the Tate),

by adding more comprehensive representation from an older generation of Australian painters … the Whitechapel show effectively became the ‘official’ Australian exhibition in London that year [and] the first major event of its kind in London [and] in the process, to upstage [the director Sir John Rothenstein] and the Tate Gallery (Pierse, 2012: 97–9).

Such was the pace of Robertson’s circus-like race around Australia – negotiating, public lecturing, visiting galleries and artists (many like Clif Pugh in the country) – he recalled barely sleeping. Missingham, Daniel Thomas and Tony Tuckson at the Art Gallery of New South Wales assisted Robertson in the selection of paintings. Contributing not only three paintings of his own (and described by Max Harris as nothing so much as a young Orson Wells) was the 22-year-old artist, cartoonist, art critic and architectural student Robert Hughes: ‘I immediately asked Bob if he’d write the text for this exhibition and introduce everybody, which he did brilliantly’. While Robertson found the text ‘fresh, lively and crisply written’, he nonetheless required the elimination on political grounds of Hughes’ attacks on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board (as well as reactionary Australian art officialdom generally) that had, for Hughes, acted historically to exacerbate Australia’s visual art isolation. What became Hughes’ first significant piece of art historical writing was not, however, to please everyone – least of all Bernard Smith. Smith’s charge was nothing less than the fact that Hughes had totally misrepresented the entire history of Australian art by promulgating a view of a visual culture that had necessarily evolved in almost complete isolation from it’s European cultural roots. Hughes’ essential argument was as follows:

What pressures, then, have formed Australian sensibility? The first that springs to mind is our complete isolation from the Renascence tradition, and, parallel with that, a similar isolation from most of what happens now in world art … But at least one good thing has come from misfortune. Australian artists are confronted, virtually, with a tabula rasa. They have no tradition readily available to profit from: neither can the same tradition oppress them by sheer weight. They are thrown back on their own resources. They have to make a cultural pattern, which is, under the circumstances of isolation, a more stimulating and productive task than adding to one (Stephen et al., 2006: 709).

Robertson’s preface to the catalogue had offered his own complementary view on the character of Australian contemporary art, which Smith assessed as assuring visitors to the Whitechapel ‘that Australian artists were geniuses of the raw and the crude; they possessed a brute Antipodean energy all their own’ (Smith, 1988/9: 87). For Smith (whose ground-breaking History of Australian Painting was due for publication by Oxford University Press the following year) such readings of the Australian cultural condition were simply naïve, given that Australian art had necessarily evolved firmly within the context of European traditions stretching back to the Renaissance.

Smith lost no time in providing a formal response to the exhibition and its main introductory essay, delivering two key statements in 1961 for the Macrossan series of lectures at Queensland University. Acknowledging the degree of praise that Recent Australian Art had garnered from certain British critics as well as the fact that it had aroused much interest, Smith felt that the exhibition ‘may well come to constitute, therefore, something of a landmark in the history of our painting. For the first time Australian art has found a large receptive audience outside its own country’ (Stephen et al., 2006: 714). Later, however, with the advantage of hindsight he saw how short lived that popularity had proved to be: one that was, moreover, based on a false understanding of the true nature of Australian art. In addition, London newspaper art criticism in response to the Whitechapel and the Tate demonstrated that, for Smith, ‘most critics were prepared to repeat the shibboleths and apothegms of the Whitechapel catalogue’ (Smith, 1988/9: 87). Thus, the promotion of the isolationist idea by Robertson and Hughes in the catalogue was a myth-making exercise that was simply absurd: that ‘for the long-term understanding and appreciation of Australian art [it was also] disastrous’. In considering critical responses to exhibitions in 1898, 1923, the early 1960s, or 1988, Smith discerned the operation of a long-term kind of ‘tunnel rhetoric … whenever British critics are faced with art from its former colonies’. What made the Whitechapel phenomenon so serious, however, was the fact that the myth of the isolated, untutored Australian artist had now surfaced in Australia itself, a pandering to a deeply established pernicious British critical discourse regarding colonial-derived art.

Buoyed up by expectations aroused by the prospect of the success of the Whitechapel exhibition, a new wave of artists and their families (including a number of the Antipodean group of artists) sailed for London. Arthur Boyd arrived at the end of 1959, intending to stay for six months; but once settled in Highgate, he was largely to remain based in England for the rest of his life. On his arrival Boyd endured the obligatory meeting with Clark: a somewhat formal meeting in Clark’s forbidding Arts Council office in central London. The artist’s habitual diffidence apparently failed to impress the great man. The reception of Boyd’s exhibition of his recent Half-Cast Bride series, exhibited at Zwemmer’s Gallery the following year (together with the impact of several such works in the Whitechapel), was another matter and Boyd was soon on the road to a success that would rival that of Nolan. Another Antipodean, Charles Blackman, arrived early in 1961, the artist finding a higher degree of favour that included the coveted invitations to Clark’s Saltwood Castle. Blackman remained in London for five years. The electrifying young Brett Whiteley, too, arrived at this time, and would also remain for five years. There were many others – although Robert Hughes appeared somewhat belatedly as late as 1965.

With its impressive catalogue (and the status of being the largest survey of Australian art to be seen in London since1923), the Tate exhibition, Australian Painting – Colonial – Impressionist – Contemporary, finally opened in January 1963, having been previewed at the Adelaide Arts Festival in the preceding year. Unlike the Whitechapel its critical reception was mixed in both locations, due largely to the charge that it was under-representative in relation to contemporary art – even though this section was the major component. As Pierse sums up the dilemma of the show from the Tate’s perspective:

What Rothenstein might ideally have hoped for at the Tate was … an independently selected ‘Contemporary’ section like that chosen by Robertson … But this could never have happened when the Tate Gallery was merely hosting the exhibition and the selection was made, not by an autonomous British curator but by an Australian committee. In this respect Rothenstein found himself at a crucial disadvantage in the rivalry that existed between the Whitechapel and Tate galleries for the reputation as the leading space for cutting-edge contemporary art in London (Pierse, 2012: 159).

The Whitechapel and the Tate Gallery exhibitions (together with the more or less contemporaneous successful solo shows in prestigious galleries) represented the high point of the Australian presence in London, although there was also a parade of lesser group exhibitions that helped sustain an ongoing sense of that presence. Exhibitions with titles such as Commonwealth Vision (1961) or Commonwealth Art Today (1962) were held at the Commonwealth Institute (its earlier identity being the Imperial Institute) in South Kensington. As Pierse states, ‘the role of Australian artists and their importance within these various Commonwealth themed exhibitions is ambiguous … Inevitably, the Commonwealth was, at times, not much more than a flag of convenience for some Australian artists’ (Pierse, 2012: 179–80). The final Australian exhibition of any ambition in the 1960s was Australian Painting and Sculpture in Europe Today, which followed close on the heels of the Tate. It was opened in April 1963 by Kenneth Clark in the impressive New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkstone, before going on to tour Europe. Curated by the Melbourne-born expatriate artist and art entrepreneur Alannah Coleman, for Pierse, the exhibition ‘in many ways marked the end of the heyday for Australian art in the UK’ (Pierse, 2012: 205).

Coleman was only able to select works that were available in Britain; nonetheless, it was an impressive list of artists and works. Many works were by her friends and associates, others were sourced from mainstream galleries that included Marlborough Fine Art and the Matthiesen (which exhibited Nolan and Whiteley), as well as from her own gallery. The final count was 22 painters and sculptors, a list that included new young artists of Whiteley’s generation – notably Ron Robertson Swan, Michael Johnson and Tony McGillick, who were soon to introduce the new hard-edge abstract art to the Sydney scene. However, it was the still familiar names on the London scene (Nolan, Boyd, Daws, Blackman and Whiteley) that drew the predictable attention of critics. But, as Pierse indicates, in a perspicacious opening speech Clark observed the degree to which Australian art in Britain – especially that of this younger generation – had entered a new phase, by becoming now ‘just a part of modern painting’ in their response to emerging new international (read American) art styles (Pierse, 2012: 213). Clark’s point, of course, was that by so doing they were thereby forfeiting that very character of Australianness that had given Australian art its unique appeal. Apropos of Clark’s point, Pierse describes the immediate consequences of what would be identified as the provincial problem of cultures increasingly viewed as being on the periphery of world art: ‘nationalism had been subsumed by a growing internationalism, which meant that exhibitions curated in terms of a shared national identity … were in danger of becoming redundant’. And if artists surrendered to new international modes of art emanating from elsewhere, they were bound to find themselves falling into the deadly trap of a kind of artistic plagiarism.

What had attracted Clark – as it had Robertson and other enthusiastic British collectors of Australian art throughout the decade 1953–63 – had been those very attributes that marked out the work of Australian artists from that of their British contemporaries. For Pierse, it had been Robertson above all who had promoted ‘the idea of an inclusive “Australian School of Painting” based on characteristics common to both figuration and abstraction – an idea never fully taken up and frequently qualified in print with a question mark’ (Pierse, 2012: 225). It was inevitable, of course, that British critics and writers were bound to focus on the idea of a distinctive school of Australian art defined by both style and subject from the moment they had confronted the energy of its apparent ‘otherness’ in Nolan’s Australian mythic subjects, or Drysdale’s laconic outback characterizations – as well as the prominence of a distinctive landscape. The fact was that both artists were only to penetrate the arid red centre of the continent around the time that their work was actually first exhibited in London. From 1950 onwards, the notion of Mediterranean light, along with such other earlier clichés as the Anzac muscular robustness that Clark celebrated, had become the idée fixe of British critics and curators. Albert Tucker’s Antipodean Head series, together with his re-statement of the Ned Kelly myth, arrived right on time for the Whitechapel and the Tate exhibitions, chiming perfectly with such critical expectations. In his Whitechapel preface Robertson, too, had eagerly embraced notions of Australian figurative and stylistic difference with its ‘fierce, tough, often rather slangy imagery’ (Pierse, 2012: 129). In responding to such readings of Australiana, it is also clear that the ‘raw and the crude’ was a realm in which Smith, himself, had to tread carefully, given the Antipodean movement’s own embrace of a certain toughness of national of style and content. Nonetheless, ‘contemporary Australian artists c. 1960 had become’, he declared, ‘the new white noble savages, stand-ins for those darker ones that Anglo-Celtic settlers had displaced … British imperial culture, even in its declining years, still had a need for naïve, friendly Antipodean monsters’ (Smith, 1988/9: 87).

By the mid-1960s, even American abstract-expressionism, and its off-shoots of lyrical abstraction and hard-edge painting, were already being pushed aside in both London and New York by brashness of another kind of art entirely. With the edgy newness of the British pop art movement in the work of Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Peter Blake and Allen Jones, here was a style as much English as American in its origins. British artists were themselves now in the front ranks of an international avant-garde, the art itself being complemented by the explosion of the wider pop culture of swinging London in all its lurid psychedelic excess. Charles Blackman read the signs with unerring precision: ‘almost as soon as Pop Art happened it moved into dress, into fabrics, into decoration … this is young; this is something young people wanted, to wear this, do this, be this … They’d think of me as an Old Man, now’ (Pierse, 2012: 227). It was time to go home: Lawrence Daws, Louis James, Brett Whiteley, amongst many others, now followed in Blackman’s footsteps. In any case the irresistible surge back southwards was towards an even more spectacular boom in Australian art, the first signs of which had already appeared in Sydney and Melbourne as early as 1959. The wild Antipodean ride would continue unabated through the 1960s.

What Simon Pierse calls the ‘boom period’ of Australian art in London, between 1953 and 1963, remains one of the most fascinating episodes in the story of Australian art. Yet, if it has not been neglected exactly by Australian art historians, until the publication of this highly readable text its interrogation has been confined almost entirely to the work of Bernard Smith. With the roles of the work of other key figures also now brought into full focus (most notably his two key protagonists, Kenneth Clark and Bryan Robertson), An Antipodean Summer will surely remain the authoritative account of the moment when Australian art first received significant international attention – whatever the curious mix of adulation and pernicious misconception that had accompanied this reception of Australian art. In his concluding reflections on the whole complex and contradictory story, Pierse suggests that Clark and Robertson ‘effectively served as gate-keepers of the British art world’ (Pierse, 2012: 245). He nonetheless concludes that it was Robertson who, with all his energy, connections and enthusiasm, was finally ‘a greater moving force than even Clark’ (Pierse, 2012: 244). However such views appear from the British perspective, the view from the Antipodes provides a radically alternative picture. It’s clear that, however much enthusiasm had characterized the efforts of these protagonists, a fuller understanding of the discourse surrounding the entire enterprise necessarily stresses the role of the third key protagonist: an embattled Bernard Smith whose years in London predated the 1950s.

Both Bernard Smith and Kenneth Clark shared a deep uneasiness concerning the status of the abstract dimension of modernism, whereas, of course, Bryan Robertson was unambiguously supportive of its most recent powerful American incarnation. By 1962 the outcome of Smith’s unremitting labour in the field of Australian art scholarship from the war years onwards bore fruit in key pioneering publications of great subtlety and intellectual substance – texts that place Australian cultural history firmly within a framework of a European world-view. Smith’s Australian Painting remains the most comprehensive and incisive account of the history of any nation’s visual culture. While he may have initially been marginalized vis à vis the London scene by Robertson’s masterly coup in the Whitechapel exhibition, whatever its success Smith had responded immediately to what he recognized as a grossly distorted conception of Australian art, one that emanated not only from London but also apparently at this time from within Australia itself.

Smith’s campaign in the cause of an Australian art that was both humanist and rooted within the circumference of a European inheritance, ‘stressing painting as a social and civilizing activity’, guaranteed that there could be no common ground in relation to Robertson’s framing of a ‘primitivist’ Australian culture. In his retrospective account of the Antipodean movement published in 1984, Smith reflected with some bitterness on the fact of the loss of a great opportunity. Australian art had been ‘packaged as exotica and became, like Omai the Tahitian, high fashion for a season and then discarded. What was intended as a serious intervention at the level of art was twisted into becoming a big national and commercial deal’ (Smith, 1988: 212). Whatever the cultural significance of the experience of the Australian art presence in London during these critical years, its eventual discontinuation was, in hindsight, an inevitable outcome of the cultural changes at work both at home and abroad. As the Angry Penguins and the Australia exhibitions (with the latter’s aboriginal art emphasis) subsequently confirmed, given the issues of irreconcilable difference that had emerged by 1965 it was abundantly clear that, it had in fact always been somewhat of an awkward marriage of convenience, one surely doomed to end in divorce. George Bernard Shaw famously quipped that America and Britain were two countries divided by a common language. Any reflection on the long and fraught history of survey exhibitions of Australian art in London surely leads to a comparable conclusion that here were two further countries equally divided by a common culture.