The main exponent of Australian tonalism was
Melbourne artist
Max Meldrum. In 1899, he won the
National Gallery of Victoria Art School's Travelling Scholarship Award, and went to
Paris to further his training. Dissatisfied with the
academic teachings there, as well as the
avant-garde, he instead taught himself and developed a unique theory of painting based on the importance of tonal values and objective optical analysis, what he termed the "Scientific Order of Impressions". Meldrum proposed: Meldrum returned to Melbourne in 1912, established an art school at
Elizabeth Street and began publishing his theories of art, which created a storm in the Australian art world. His school of painting attracted equally passionate followers and critics, and artists who adopted Meldrum's methods became derisively known as "Meldrumites". They rejected the then-popular
Heidelberg School tradition with its emphasis on colour and
narrative, and attacked various forms of
modern art which Meldrum considered to be ego-based and technically inferior. In 1918, incensed at Meldrum's defeat in the election for president of the
Victorian Artists' Society, his students formed a breakaway group, the
Twenty Melbourne Painters Society. The group often went on
plein air painting trips around and outside Melbourne. When painting
still life, the Australian tonalists set their easels at least six metres away from their subject, and painted with eyes half closed, or wore sunglasses, to aid their perception of different tones. Meldrum's students staged their first group exhibition at the
Athenaeum Gallery in 1919. Presented as a unified whole, the two hundred and five works on show were uniformly displayed in narrow black frames, and in the catalogue, numbers, rather than titles, were assigned to each piece. The "radically humble" qualities of their art were overshadowed by controversy surrounding the show. Art historian Tracey Lock-Weir wrote: ==Exhibitions==