Abbey Art Centre in Postwar London 1946–1956

William Ohly’s Abbey Art Centre has long been sidelined in Australian art history and all but invisible in British accounts due to the dominance of national art histories. Yet over twenty Australian artists lived and worked there during the centre’s first decade of operations, including Robert Klippel, James Gleeson and the art historian Bernard Smith, alongside such avant-garde British figures as Alan Davie and Peter King and Europeans such as filmmakers Lotte Reiniger and Carl Koch, painter-soon-to-turn-animator Peter Foldes and sculptor Inge King.

A hotbed of experimental painting, sculpture, filmmaking, ceramics and jewellery-making, the Abbey offered artists a utopian blend of affordable accommodation, collegial exchange, and inspiration in the form of Ohly’s collection of non-western art from Africa, Asia, the Pacific and meso-America, which he also dealt in at the Berkeley Galleries. Attentive to the circumstances in which art is made, this book frames the Abbey through lenses that reconceive both Australian and British postwar art history.

Extensive new archival material enables this microhistory that comes with big ideas: unsettling the prevailing story of Australian and British postwar art and radically revising art historiography to account for the role of migrant diasporas from former British colonies, displaced peoples and other marginalised groups. With the decline of those powerful narratives of modernism and nationalism, this book will interest art historians, curators and students interested in transnational sites that invest in the new art histories. The book accompanies an online database that expands on the biographic and archival documentation: The Abbey Art Centre Digital Repository, https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/abbey-art-centre/

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).