The Abbey Art Centre in Postwar London 1946–1956

Introduction. The Abbey: a British art centre and Australian art colony Ian McLean Section 1: William Ohly and post-war London 1. Between rubble and reconstruction: London after the war Simon Pierse 2. ‘Hard working Continentals’: refugee art dealers in London, 1933–1955 Helena Cuss 3. The utopian socialist: William Ohly and the Abbey Art Centre Sheridan Palmer 4. William Ohly: the ethnographic collector Sheridan Palmer & Simon Pierse 5. ‘Young artists of promise’: contemporary art at the Berkeley Galleries Jane Eckett  Section 2: Australians at the Abbey 6. ‘Not Wholly Fruitless’: Australian artists in the world’s art colonies Rex Butler & Andrew Donaldson 7. The Abbey Garden: Sydney moderns at the Abbey Rex Butler & Andrew Donaldson 8. Melbourne realists Sheridan Palmer & Jane Eckett 9. Bernard Smith’s reverse atlas Sheridan Palmer Section 3: Europeans at the Abbey 10. ‘Not only shelter, but freedom of expression’: continental Europeans at the Abbey Jane Eckett 11. ‘Here we live … Quaint, ain’t it?’: European filmmakers at the Abbey Arts Centre Tashi Petter 12. British and Irish artists at the Abbey Jane Eckett & Simon Pierse Section 4: After the Abbey 13. The New Cosmopolitans: returning to Australia with the Abbey in the rear-view mirror, 1950-1959. Sheridan Palmer & Victoria Perin 14. Art history after the Abbey Ian McLean. Appendix 1: Chronological list of Abbey Art Centre residents, 1946–1956

Biography

Jane Eckett lectures in art history at the University of Melbourne. Her writing on artists’ communities, modernist diasporas and stateless artists has appeared in ARTMargins, Discipline and Meno Istorijos Studijos. She is co-author and co-editor of two award-winning books, On Bunurong Country: art and design in Frankston (McClelland, 2023) and Melbourne Modern: European art & design at RMIT since 1945 (RMIT, 2019) and was guest curator of Centre Five: bridging the gap (McClelland, 2022).

Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She was Senior Research Associate (2020–24) for the Australian Research Council project Abbey Art Centre: Reassessing postwar Australian art, 1946-1956. Publications include Centre of the periphery: three European art historians in Melbourne, (2008) and Hegel’s owl: the life of Bernard Smith (2016). Recent exhibitions include Crichton, Tucker & Whiteley: the Chelsea Hotel years 1967–1969, Heide Museum of Modern Art (2026).

Ian McLean is an Honorary Professorial Fellow and the inaugural Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne. He has published extensively on relations between Indigenous and European Australian art in articles and book chapters and monographs: Double nation: a history of Australian Art (2023) and Rattling spears: a history of Indigenous Australian Art (2016) and How Aborigines invented the idea of contemporary art (2011).

The book brings together an impressive and deeply researched range of perspectives on the hitherto under-researched artists' community of the Abbey Art Centre. This is the first study that situates the community in its historical context, its artistic ambitions and its global reach. A valuable contribution that troubles our understanding of what it means to be a nation, a colony and a modernist.

Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge

 

Much more than a local art centre on the northern edge of London, The Abbey is pictured in this book as a utopian socialist commune, a home to artists of all kinds; a staging place for artists in transit, especially those finding their direction; and a haven for refugee artists from the war in Europe, then those from Britain’s former colonies. For the many Australian artists who lived and worked there during the postwar period, the Abbey offered cheap studios, a supportive community and ready access to the burgeoning London art scene. To artists such as Noel Counihan, Robert Klippel, Inge King, James Gleeson, Leonard French and Mary Webb, and to art historian Bernard Smith, it was a creative colony at the Imperial centre, one that opened their eyes to a cosmopolitan outlook. At the Abbey Museum and in his Berkeley Gallery in London, where he gave Ben Owonwu his first exhibition, founder William Ohly linked art from Africa and Oceania to contemporary concerns. In this book, fresh scholarship evokes the fascinating, often surprising, results: the succession of Abbey sculptors who worked with Henry Moore, the jewellery, jazz and pottery of abstract expressionist Alan Davie, and the animated shadow cinema of Lotte Reiniger and young sculptor Peter King. Indeed, some contributors propose that colonies of this kind, whether ongoing or transient, might constitute the most fertile fields of artistic exchange, more so than seeing artists as servants of national narratives, a perspective that continues to preoccupy many art historians.

Terry Smith, Andrew W Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh

 

 

This book is essential for anyone interested in the diasporic histories of modern art in the twentieth century. Meticulous archival research is interwoven with cultural history to reveal the fascinating story of the Abbey Art Centre in a leafy suburb of North London as home, refuge, and cultural hub. At its core, the book presents the significance of the Abbey for Australian artists, but does so within the globalised, de- and post-colonial and Commonwealth contexts of the decades after the Second World War. Together, the essays ask us to consider how the silos of art history have failed to account for and virtually erase the transnational networks made at the Abbey Art Centre. The essays vividly bring to life the myriad global connections made by its founder, William Ohly and the Australian and European artists who lived and exhibited there. 

Sarah Victoria Turner, Director, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art