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“It was about the year 1913 when the first glimmerings of what is now called “modern art” came to Sydney,” according to Roland Wakelin (Wakelin 2006, 75). Along with Roy de Maistre, Wakelin introduced a French-inspired modernism that explored the relationships between painting, color and music, culminating in the exhibition Color in Art (1919). John D. Moore, a Sydney-trained architect, attempted to codify these emerging modernist tendencies in the article, “Thoughts in Reference to Modern Art” (1927), identifying what he perceived as its two principal strains: the embrace of the avant-garde and the engagement with contemporary culture and society. For Moore, the functional form of “the aeroplane, the steam ship, the motor car, the skyscraper of America, the wheat silos of Canada and Australia” all embodied the “essence” of modernism (Moore 2006, 69–70).

Modernism’s engagement with the present was championed especially by Sydney Ure Smith, the publisher of the nationally distributed Art in Australia (1916–1942), which had a significant impact on the scattered regional networks of artists in Australia after World War I. Ure Smith supported artists such as Wakelin, de Maistre, and Moore as well as Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor, and Grace Cossington Smith, while advocating a holistic view of modernism that endorsed design, architecture, and the applied and commercial arts. In his editorial for the September 1929 edition of Art in Australia, Ure Smith draws attention to the paradoxical acceptance of commercial modern design yet rejection of modernist painting: “to quite a number of people, anything ‘modern’ can be appreciated in anything except pictures” (Ure Smith 2006, 89).

From the outset, the development of modernism in Australia was questioned and challenged by a range of dissenting voices, a number of which featured in Art in Australia. Appearing in the first edition of the magazine, the artist and engraver Norman Lindsay’s essay, “A Modern Malady” (1916), aligns modernism with a deracination of art resulting from a lack of foundational principles and from the adulterating influence of other cultures. The pastoral tradition he favored was fervently defended by Norman’s artist brother, Lionel Lindsay, and the critic J.S. MacDonald and institutionalized in the 1920s and 1930s in the face of an encroaching modernism that was seen as the expression of a European culture in decline (Dixon and Smith 1984, 27). In its most extreme form, Australian pastoralism developed into anti-modernist, proto-fascist and even anti-Semitic discourse.¹

The pastoral tradition was also central to the first monographic survey of art in Australia, William Moore’s The Story of Australian Art (1934), which credits Streeton with the consolidation of a landscape school within the evolution of a local art industry that climaxed in the 1920s (Moore 1934, xx). Establishing a model for later surveys through his emphasis on late nineteenth-century landscape painting as the key movement in national art, Moore also set a precedent for the positioning of Aboriginal art and visual culture within a broader art historical framework. He presents rock art as a starting point for the history of Australian art, beginning with George Grey’s account of his discovery of rock painting in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia. Moore’s interest in Aboriginal art was inspired by Australian Aboriginal Art (National Museum of Victoria, 1929), the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to take place in a public gallery, which featured a range of rock carvings, bark paintings, ceremonial objects, weapons, utensils, as well as models, dioramas, and displays and was accompanied by a number of public lectures and an illustrated catalogue.

From the 1920s Aboriginal art intersected with the public sphere on a broader level both through the impact of such exhibitions and the accessibility of public collections, and also through emergent desert tourism in Central Australia. Margaret Preston was the leading advocate of Aboriginality during this era. She contributed a number of articles to The Home and Art in Australia, beginning with “Why I became a Convert to Modern Art” (1923), in which she explains her desire to create a form of modern art “a purely Australian product” (Preston 2006a, 68). The adaptation of the earth-toned color palette and flat, asymmetrical motifs of Aboriginal art provided a vehicle through which to articulate these goals, with Preston asserting in 1925, “It is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring” (Preston 2006b, 156).

Preston supported the display, Australian Aboriginal Art and its Application, at the David Jones Art Gallery in 1941, which coincided with the North American touring exhibition, Art of Australia 1788–1941, co-curated by Ure Smith and Theodore Sizer, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery. The accompanying catalogue begins with an essay by Preston that declares the “limitless possibilities” that Aboriginal art provided for artists and concludes with her painting, Aboriginal Landscape (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 its myths” as a vehicle to shape national identity (Smith et al. 2006, 696). The Manifesto in effect applied 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 (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 the backdrop of the global demise of modernism.