A postwar generation of art lovers more or less assumed that if a painting was big, colourful, unruly and above all, abstract, then it was American. However, a visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s exhibition “Intensely Dutch”—a big, colourful, unruly and abstract would not only put paid to this notion, but would raise questions about how the American contingent could have so successfully hogged the art-world limelight from the late 1940s through to the 1960s. Another observation which might follow close on its heels is that many of the best-known of the Australian abstractionists, some of them…