Antipodeans Group
Encyclopedia
- In vernacular British English and Irish English, "The Antipodes" is sometimes used to refer to Australia and New Zealand, and "Antipodeans" to their inhabitants (see AntipodesAntipodesIn geography, the antipodes of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to one another are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth....
).
The Antipodeans were a group of Australian modern artists who asserted the importance of figurative art
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork—particularly paintings and sculptures—which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational.-Definition:...
, and protested against abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. They staged a single exhibition in Melbourne during August 1959.
History
The Antipodeans group consisted of seven modern painters and the art historian Bernard SmithBernard William Smith
Bernard William Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic.-Biography:Smith was born in Balmain, Sydney to Charles Smith and Rose Anne Tierney on 3 October 1916. In 1941, he married his first wife, Kate Challis, who died in 1989. Smith married his second wife, Margaret Forster,...
, who compiled The Antipodean Manifesto, a declaration fashioned from the artists' comments as a catalogue essay to accompany their exhibit.
The artists were Charles Blackman
Charles Blackman
Charles Blackman is one of the best known Australian artists still living today, especially for the famous Schoolgirl and Alice in Wonderland series of the 1950s...
, Arthur Boyd
Arthur Boyd
Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd, AC, OBE was one of the leading Australian painters of the late 20th Century. A member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, his relatives included painters, sculptors, architects or other arts professionals. His sister Mary Boyd married John Perceval,...
, David Boyd
David Boyd (artist)
David Fielding Gough Boyd, OAM was an Australian artist, and a member of the Boyd artistic dynasty.-Boyd family artistic dynasty:...
, John Brack
John Brack
John Brack was an Australian painter, and a member of the Antipodeans group.-Life:...
, Robert Dickerson
Robert Dickerson
Robert Dickerson is an Australian figurative painter and former member of the Antipodeans group of artists. Dickerson is one of Australia's most recognised figurative artists and one of a generation of influential artists who include Ray Crooke, Charles Blackman, Laurence Hope, Margaret Olley and...
, John Perceval
John Perceval
John de Burgh Perceval AO was a well-known Australian artist. Perceval was the last surviving member of a group known as the Angry Penguins who redefined Australian art in the 1940s...
and Clifton Pugh
Clifton Pugh
Clifton Ernest Pugh AO, was an Australian artist and three-time winner of Australia's Archibald Prize. He was strongly influenced by German Expressionism, and was known for his landscapes and portraiture...
. All except Dickerson were Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
-based, several of them being members of the Heide Circle
Heide Circle
The Heide Circle was a loose grouping of Australian artists who lived and worked at "Heide", a former dairy farm on the Yarra River floodplain at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, counting amongst their number many of Australia's best-known modernist painters....
that had governed the Melbourne Branch of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) since the early 1940s. Notably, they did not exhibit in the CAS's own gallery, as the society opposed the show, but chose instead to use the premises of the rival Victorian Artists' Society
Victorian Artists Society
Victorian Artists Society established in 1856 in Melbourne, Australia promotes artistic education and exhibition in Australia. Fore-runner of the Victorian Academy of Arts, founded in 1870. In 1888 the Australian Artist's Association amalgamated with the Victorian Academy of Arts to form the...
, long a bastion for cultural conservatism in Melbourne.
The Antipodean Manifesto was a reaction to the considerable public success of the museum exhibition, The New American Painting, an authoritative survey of abstract expressionism organised by New York's Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, which was touring Europe over 1958–59. The Australian painters feared that American abstraction was becoming the new orthodoxy, and that intolerance towards the modernist figurative art they practiced was increasing internationally.
Their manifesto therefore warned against the uncritical adoption by artists of overseas fashion, American abstract expressionism in particular. The manifesto took its central stand on the cardinal importance of the image:
The manifesto was seen by some local artists and critics at the time as a statement in favour of conservatism and reaction, and as a call to isolate Australia from international art. Their case was not helped by the fact that they were all enjoying some commercial success, as against their immediate rivals (the local abstractionists Roger Kemp
Roger Kemp
Francis Roderick Kemp OBE , known as Roger, was one of Australia's foremost practitioners of transcendental abstraction...
, Leonard French
Leonard French
Leonard William French OBE is an Australian artist, known principally for major stained glass works.French was born in Brunswick, Victoria...
, Inge King
Inge King
Inge King is a prominent Australian sculptor, who has many significant public, commercial, and private sculpture commissions to her credit....
and George Johnson) who were struggling. Some members resigned from the Antipodeans group during the exhibition, and have viewed their participation in it with embarrassment ever since.
Nevertheless, with the assistance of British museum director Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark, OM, CH, KCB, FBA was a British author, museum director, broadcaster, and one of the best-known art historians of his generation...
, works by group members were included in a 1961 exhibition entitled Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (alongside that of Jon Molvig
Jon Molvig
Jon Molvig was an Australian expressionist artist, considered a major developer of 20th century Australian expressionism, even though his career 'only' lasted 20 years...
, Albert Tucker
Albert Tucker (artist)
Albert Lee Tucker , a pivotal Australian artist, was a member of the Heide Circle, a group of leading modernist artists and writers that centred on the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, whose home, "Heide", located in Bulleen, near Heidelberg , was a haven for the group...
, Sidney Nolan
Sidney Nolan
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan OM, AC was one of Australia's best-known painters and printmakers.-Early life:Nolan was born in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, on 22 April 1917. He was the eldest of four children. His family later moved to St Kilda. Nolan attended the Brighton Road State School and...
, Fred Williams
Fred Williams
Frederick Ronald Williams OBE was an Australian painter and printmaker. He was one of Australia’s most important artists, and one of the twentieth century’s major painters of the landscape...
and others). They felt vindicated by their inclusion in this exhibition, which established that contemporary Australian painting had a well-founded national identity. In the months after the Antipodeans exhibition, Boyd, Perceval and Blackman all moved to London, and established successful exhibiting careers on the European scene.
In 1961 a group calling themselves Sydney 9 — which included the Australian abstract artists John Olsen
John Olsen
John Wayne Olsen, AO was Premier of South Australia between 28 November 1996 and 22 October 2001.-Parliament:Olsen was a member of the Liberal Party and Member of Parliament for more than 20 years...
, Robert Klippel
Robert Klippel
Robert Klippel AO was an Australian constructivist sculptor and teacher. He is often described in contemporary art literature as Australia's greatest sculptor. Throughout his career he produced some 1,300 pieces of sculpture and approximately 5,000 drawings.-Biography:Klippel was born in Potts...
, Clement Meadmore
Clement Meadmore
Clement Meadmore was an Australian-American sculptor known for massive outdoor steel sculptures.-Biography:...
and Bill Rose — held an exhibition of paintings and sculpture to counter the Antipodeans group. The group also recruited a young critic, Robert Hughes
Robert Hughes (critic)
Robert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO is an Australian-born art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970.-Early life:...
, to oppose the stance of Bernard Smith.
In 1999 the now internationally known art movement Stuckism
Stuckism
Stuckism is an international art movement founded in 1999 by Billy Childish and Charles Thomson to promote figurative painting in opposition to conceptual art...
was founded, which among other preceding art movements draws on the principles of The Antipodeans.