Antipodeans Group

Antipodeans
Poster for the Antipodeans Exhibition
Nationality	Australian
Notable work	The Antipodean Manifesto
Style	Modern
Movement	Figurativism

The Antipodeans were a group of Australian modern artists who asserted the importance of figurative art, and protested against abstract expressionism. They staged a single exhibition in Melbourne during August 1959.

The Antipodeans group consisted of seven modern painters and the art historian Bernard Smith, 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, 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 Heide Circle 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, 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, 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, Leonard French, Inge King 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.