Antipodeans Group

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The Antipodeans were a group of Australian figurative artists who published a manifesto in protest against abstract expressionism and its intolerance of figurative art in the late 1950s.

The group's seven artist members (art historian Bernard Smith was an eighth member) included Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh. All except Dickerson were Melbourne-based, several of them being members of the prominent Heide Circle that had governed the Melbourne Branch of the Contemporary Art Society since the early 1940s.

The Antipodean Manifesto, drafted by Smith and published in the catalogue to the joint exhibition held by the seven artists in Melbourne in August 1959, was a reaction to the perceived stranglehold of abstract expressionism among both artists and critics, and against the extreme intolerance which the adherents of the new orthodoxy showed towards figurative art. The manifesto warned against the uncritical embracing of overseas fashions (abstract expressionism was the first such fashion to have American, rather than European, origins), and took its central stand on the cardinal importance of the image: "[T]he image, the recognisable shape, the meaningful symbol, is the basic unit of [the artist's] language... It is born of past experience and refers back to past experience - and it communicates. It communicates because it has the capacity to refer to experiences that the artist shares with his audience."

The manifesto was inevitably seen by many critics at the time as a statement in favour of conservatism and reaction, and as an attempt to isolate Australia from international art. Abstract painting continued to dominate Australian painting for the next decade; but with the assistance of influential British critic Kenneth Clark, work by the group were included in an important 1961 exhibition entitled Recent Australian Paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in London alongside that of Jon Molvig, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and others. Although the members of the group had experienced much critical opposition, they felt vindicated by their inclusion in this exhibition, which established that contemporary Australian painting had a well-founded and powerful national identity.

In 1961 a group called the "Sydney 9" had an exhibition of paintings to support abstract art, to counter the Antipodeans group, with members arriving with abstract paintings by helicopter.