Antipodeans

The Antipodeans were a group of Melbourne painters organized in 1959 by the art historian Bernard Smith, who feared that imported abstract expressionism was crowding the figure out of Australian art. Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, John Brack, David Boyd, Robert Dickerson, Clifton Pugh, and John Perceval exhibited together at the Victorian Artists' Society in August 1959, with a catalog containing Smith's Antipodean Manifesto, which defended the human image, the image-making tradition, and art's contact with social experience. The group existed for that moment - one exhibition, one manifesto - but the debate it sharpened between figuration and abstraction ran through Australian art for a decade, and the show's artists became some of the country's most celebrated painters.

Defining characteristics

• Figurative painting upheld as the vehicle for meaning: people, place, narrative
• Strong drawing and design underpinning the image - legible, constructed compositions
• Australian subjects without colonial nostalgia or abstract escape
• Bold, sometimes hard-edged color and clear silhouettes
• Satirical or melancholic social observation of suburban and city life

Key figures

• Bernard Smith (1917-2017) — Art historian who organized the group and wrote its manifesto
• Charles Blackman (1928-2018) — Dreamlike schoolgirl and Alice figures in soft, dark tonality
• Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) — Expressionist figure and landscape painting
• John Brack (1920-1999) — Ironist of suburban and city life (Collins St., 5p.m.)
• Robert Dickerson (1924-2015) — Angular, melancholy figures in spare urban landscapes

Example works

• Collins St., 5p.m. — John Brack (1955)
• The Antipodean Manifesto — Bernard Smith (1959)

Sources

• Antipodeans - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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