Cirrus@Austlit

The Recent Australian Painting show that opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in June 1961 is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is the exhibition Australian art historian Bernard Smith wished he’d been able to write the catalogue for—he had earlier curated The Antipodeans in Melbourne in 1959, which he regarded as something of an inspiration for it, and helped its curator, Bryan Robertson, in 1960 when he was in Australia. Smith responded to the exhibition by delivering the famous polemic “The Myth of Isolation” as the inaugural Macrossan Lecture at the University of Queensland, which correctly diagnosed the hidden desire of English curators and art historians to understand Australian art as something exotic coming from far away with little connection to recent developments in European art. For Robertson, one of the chief English architects of this myth, Australia had a “lack of any aesthetic tradition with roots”, and in the catalogue he opined that it is “the very real isolation of many Australians [that] gives a special edge to whatever is created [there]”. Indeed, for the exhibition opening, he dressed the Whitechapel full of tropical plants and trees, a staging intended to evoke this fantasy. The other catalogue writers, Kenneth Clark and Robert Hughes, largely echoed Robertson, with Hughes, for example, speaking of “our complete isolation from the Renaissance tradition, and, parallel with that, a similar isolation from most of what happens now in world art” (Introduction)