K.O'd by Griffo

Robert Dickerson grew up during the Depression in the inner west working-class suburbs of Sydney. He left school at an early age, taking factory jobs and fighting as a professional boxer. A self-taught painter, Dickerson remained outside the Sydney ‘art scene’ of the late 1940s and 1950s. Melbourne provided a more receptive environment for his work and in 1953 he made his first visit to Heide, the home of the important patron of modern art, John Reed.

K.O.’d by Griffo was illustrated in the first article on the painter written by Reed and published in an issue of Ern Malley’s Journal in 1955. Supporters claimed that Dickerson’s working-class background and ‘30 or so professional bouts’ on the boxing circuit gave the artist his ‘immensely powerful creative vision’. These were Dickerson’s ‘life-classes’, with K.O.’d by Griffo a particularly poignant reference to his tough teenage years.1

All superfluous details have been stripped away, so the viewer is confronted by the two central figures. There is no referee, no lights and no cheering crowd. The figures are isolated, merely two wide-eyed young boys trapped in a bout, with one hapless participant K.O.’d, or knocked out, by a straight left punch from the other – cause and effect captured in single frame.

The closed setting of a boxing match may also present a metaphor for the theatrically staged ‘fight’ between Sydney abstraction and figurative painting in Melbourne. This reached a crescendo in 1959 when a number of Melbourne artists banded together and exhibited as the Antipodeans. The group included Arthur and David Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh, while the eminent art historian Bernard Smith orchestrated a written declaration of principles called The Antipodean Manifesto. The only Sydney artist of the group, Dickerson’s membership of the Antipodeans affirmed the personal friendships forged during the 1950s.

Steven Tonkin

1See discussions in John Reed, ‘A Statement on Bob Dickerson: Painter’, Ern Malley’s Journal, vol.2, November 1955, pp.15-17; John Hetherington, ‘Robert Dickerson: Life-class (with a difference)’ in Australian Painters

Text © National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2010

From: Anne Gray (ed), Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002