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Modern Love: the Lives of John & Sunday Reed

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Modern Love: the Lives of John & Sunday Reed Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 19/09/2015 Page: 10 Section: Spectrum Region: Sydney, AU Circulation: 114634 Type: Capital City Daily Size: 855.00 sq.cms. press clip Secrets of the Sunday set One woman’s allure entranced a group of artists and changed Australia’s cultural landscape, writes ANDREW STEPHENS. unday Reed was at the heart of it all: narrative, lush with relevant artworks and a crop brilliant, bohemian and fragile, as well as of newly discovered black-and-white S generous and full of vitality.No one could photographs. It was, after all, the age of free love rival her.She has been a source of public and experimentation, an atmosphere that burns fascination for decades, the focus of the enduring through the pages. In uncovering many new facts mystique of the talented circle that helped shape about their romantic entanglements and early Australian art from the 1930s. histories, the pair have produced the most She and her husband, John Reed, drew thorough view of the Heide set yet compiled. Australian artists to live and work at their It is no wonder the aura of the Reeds still property on the Yarra River,which became glows. There in the book is Sunday at her 1932 known as Heide. What happens, though, when wedding, in a still taken from a film that recently new material comes to light about a person came to light. She looks magnificent and happy whose life has been under the microscope for so long? How does the reputation of these with her new,handsome husband – why wouldn’t celebrated arts patrons stack up against fresh she? – and yet, that moment was followed by revelations of infidelity, jealousy and the fate of years of complications and stresses, as well as the adopted son who committed suicide in his great successes and wild joys. early 30s? There were so many complex relationships, Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan write in lovers and personalities to be handled at Heide, it their new book Modern Love about sexual liaisons seems incredible the Reeds got anything much between Sunday and the artist Joy Hester, else done. Yet,as great arts benefactors – a term between Sidney Nolan and poet Barrett Reid, they eschewed – they did. and the extent to which John enabled Sunday’s Harding and Morgan, curators at the Reeds’ affairs, participating as a sort of voyeur. great legacy,the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Little wonder the Reeds were shy of public Melbourne, have naturally centred their attention on their private lives. research around the buildings, library and For Harding and Morgan, the new material – archive. Sometimes they have paused at certain and revising all that has been written about the locations on the six-hectare grounds to imagine the spirit of those two strong personalities, to Reeds – has been about fact-finding without conjure certain scenes they now know to have judgment. ‘‘We had one subject who said to us, ‘I transpired. just want the truth to be told’,’’ Harding says. In one of those rooms, Sunday ended her life in ‘‘What is the truth?’’ It boils down, she says, to the 1981, 10 days after John – her husband of almost 50 views of about 40 interviewees, along with years – died of cancer.‘‘Sunday wasn’t ill when she information gathered from a huge variety of died, but she couldn’t live without John,’’ Morgan other primary source materials. says. ‘‘It is a story of enduring love but it is a story Writing Modern Love was like constructing a of great heartbreak and loss. We didn’t intend to jigsaw,with friends of the Reeds taking the write the book like that, it was just how it was.’’ authors into their confidence to share personal During their work on two earlier books – Sunday’s information in the interests of the full story being Kitchen (2010) and Sunday’s Garden (2012) – the told. The authors withheld some sensitive curators found themselves accumulating many material and say they will need to revise the book additional facts and anecdotes. They wryly dubbed once certain people have died. this third project Sunday’s Secrets. Solid amounts of What they have produced is a thorough new information came from reel-to-reel interviews biography of the Reeds, with the urgency of great kept in an attic, ageing interviewees who were illi l h h d k i d Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 1 of 4 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 466836426 Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 19/09/2015 Page: 10 Section: Spectrum Region: Sydney, AU Circulation: 114634 Type: Capital City Daily Size: 855.00 sq.cms. press clip intensely involved. willing to revealeventsthey hadkeptquiet,andrare ‘‘She needed to be personally attached to all the access to otherwise restricted papers and letters. artists as a friend or as a lover,’’ Morgan says. ‘‘She The cover of the book is poignant, showing the thrived on shared experiences. She couldn’t do Reeds and Nolan on the beach at Point Lonsdale anything by herself. Those expectations were why in 1945, during the height of their menage, two so many people were ambivalent about the Reeds. years before the final break when Nolan could They had many people they were close to – and on take no more of the entanglement and left for the flipside there were many people who were Queensland. Sunday,deeply in love with him, was jealous of them and their resources and would do devastated. Soon after,he married John Reed’s all they could to talk behind their backs.’’ sister,Cynthia, who, the authors note, was Even so, both authors are adamant the Reeds physically very similar to Sunday and who, it has were always interested in a greater good, been observed by more than one person, was in especially in seeding a modernist sense of many ways like ‘‘Sunday and John fused into one national creativity.They really wanted to make a person – physically,emotionally and sexually’’. difference and their legacy at Heide – which both If that sounds a bit creepy,there were many women deal with daily,curating exhibitions on other aspects to their lives, as revealed in the various aspects of its heritage – has been book, that might raise eyebrows. The complex extraordinarily rich. love lives of Sunday,Nolan, Cynthia and painter ‘‘They were,’’ says Morgan, ‘‘always thinking Sam Atyeo, for example, involved overlapping beyond themselves.’’ amours (though not at the same time). There was, too, the tryst between Sunday and Hester, Modern Love: the Lives of John & Sunday Reed is as well as Nolan and Reid. As Morgan says, published by Miegunyah Press on September 26. everyone wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Then there was the child, Sweeney.Sunday had had a hysterectomy when she was young and in her desperation for a child, approached a number of other couples. ‘‘Her wish to adopt a child of creative parentage was known within the Heide circle and beyond in the early 1940s and Sunday is said to have broached the idea with a number of couples, including Arthur and Yvonne Boyd, and probably John and Mary Perceval, none of whom were willing to relinquish any of their offspring,’’ they write in Modern Love. Hester,famously,gave over her son, Sweeney,to the Reeds – but sharper light is also cast on that significant event, which occurred when she left Albert Tucker for fellow artist Gray Smith. Tucker and others always maintained that when Hester made these choices, she didn’t know she had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The book shows that, in fact, she had been told she was likely to live for only two more years just before she relinquished Sweeney. ‘‘In that context, her decision to hand Sweeney over to the Reeds, where she knew he was going to be safe, made an incredible amount of sense,’’ Morgan says. ‘‘She had no money,she had this new love affair,she had run off to Sydney to get the treatment she needed for her cancer,and she knew they [the Reeds] had the money and the resources ... she trusted them to bring up her child. She was a realist.’’ The Reeds were undoubtedly incredibly generous to artists and others in their orbit, especially proteges such as Nolan. Was there a catch? Harding describes a tacit contract: the trade-off for the Reeds’ largesse was that Sunday, who loved to be close to the art-making, would be Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 2 of 4 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 466836426 Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 19/09/2015 Page: 10 Section: Spectrum Region: Sydney, AU Circulation: 114634 Type: Capital City Daily Size: 855.00 sq.cms. press clip SMH.COM.AU Clockwise from main: Agnes Goodsir’s portrait of Sunday Reed; John and Sunday Reed on their wedding day in 1932; Sunday Reed and Joy Hester in 1945; Adrian Lawlor’s portrait of John Reed; Sweeney at the front door of Heide, circa 1947. Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 3 of 4 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 466836426 Sydney Morning Herald Saturday 19/09/2015 Page: 10 Section: Spectrum Region: Sydney, AU Circulation: 114634 Type: Capital City Daily Size: 855.00 sq.cms. press clip Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 4 of 4 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 466836426 The Saturday Age Saturday 19/09/2015 Page: 11 Section: General News Region: Melbourne, AU Circulation: 241029 Type: Capital City Daily Size: 421.00 sq.cms.
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