Smith, who opened the show on Tuesday 4 August 1959, explaining their raison d'être as a stand against "abstract and non-figurative art, which is dazzling young artists everywhere," and that they had chosen the name Antipodeans because it "signifies where we live, but avoids any national overtones in the word Australian. It also links us with the European tradition." Manifesto 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: Critical reception 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. The Age critic Arnold Shore in his contemporaneous review framed the group as "anti-abstract painters who believe that art should express ideas" and condemned their "ideas" as "obscure," "comic-strip" and "badly painted," singling out Blackman as the only one "to endow his ideas with a sense of existence and their presentation with subtleties of art form," and considered Perceval's ceramics superior to his paintings of Williamstown as a "perpetual regatta of colour." He dismissed Arthur Boyd's Bride series as "quaint," David Boyd's work as "grotesque cartooning," John Brack's as "illustrative distortion," Dickerson's as reaching "tragic depths," and concluded that Pugh had lost himself in painting his Rape of Europa. Legacy Nevertheless, with the assistance of British museum director Kenneth Clark, works by group members were included in a 1961 exhibition entitled Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (alongside that of Jon Molvig, Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams and others). They