The Field (exhibition)

Echoing emerging international stylistic tendencies of the time, The Field sparked immediate controversy and launched the careers of a new generation of Australian artists.

[11] The curators acknowledged their bias towards a particular form of abstraction;[12] they included neither artists with established reputations,[1] such as those of the nationalist, or arguably provincial,[13] movements culminating in the 1959 Antipodean Manifesto and exhibition,[11] nor the concurrently practicing expressionist abstractionists John Olsen, Leonard French or Roger Kemp.

Stringer had worked as consulting curator for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, which opened at the NGV in 1967.

[16]The Field, being at the NGV, Gleeson emphasised, simply brought much wider attention to revolutionary young artists sought out while still in art school by curators who were obliged to ‘show what is happening at the spearhead of art.’[4] In parallel, there were Canadian influences on the work of Jack and Hunter (residing in Canada at the time work was selected and who freighted their paintings into Australia), and British and European influences also amongst several exhibitors born in, or who had travelled to, Europe and the United Kingdom, such as Janet Dawson, one of only three women in The Field, who was exposed to School of Paris, Art Povera and Tachiste abstraction during residencies in Paris and Italy in 1959-60.

"[17] Influential as a critic and as author of The Encyclopedia of Australian Art, released in the same year as The Field, McCulloch continued to condemn the styles the show represented.

[18] Dealer Rudy Komon and sculptor Norma Redpath delivered scathing assessments of the show on opening night,[2] and artists Clifton Pugh and Albert Tucker criticised the exhibition for its 'internationalism’ on broadcast television.