Notes on the Centre: Two Decades of American Painting in Australia, 1967

Abstract

In 1967 the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, travelled to Sydney and Melbourne. While the exhibition has often been framed as introducing Australian artists to new forms of abstract painting, this paper argues that the paintings exhibited were just one manifestation of the transnational proliferation of abstraction globally, and that the exhibition precipitated a series of resonances, contacts and missed contacts between New York and Australia.