Affairs of the Art Inside Heide, the Creative Crucible That Transformed Australia’S Cultural Landscape

Weekend Australian Saturday 9/04/2016 Page: 1 Section: Review Region: Australia, AU Circulation: 225206 Type: National Size: 2,416.00 sq.cms. press clip APRIL 9-10 2016 Affairs of the art Inside Heide, the creative crucible that transformed Australia’s cultural landscape DESTINATION EUROPE WINE DINING GLORIA STEINEM TOP CHATEAUS, BEST MAX ALLEN ON THE FEMINISM, POLITICS AND VILLAGES, SUPER DEALS NEW BREED OF BAR A LIFE ON THE ROAD TRAVEL & INDULGENCE LIFE REVIEW V1 - AUSE01Z01AR Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 1 of 6 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 573001374 Weekend Australian Saturday 9/04/2016 Page: 1 Section: Review Region: Australia, AU Circulation: 225206 Type: National Size: 2,416.00 sq.cms. press clip THE ROARING 40S support and collect. After the Angry Penguins Art historian Richard Haese, whose 1981 study of Heide was seminal in establishing their put down their fertile intellectual and personal relationships in the public imagination — his book’s title, Rebels and roots in staid, stolid Precursors, was taken from a 1962 Heide group exhibition of the same name at the National Melbourne, the art world Gallery of Victoria — says their influence has been profound. “They’re immensely import- in Australia would never ant,” he says. “The Angry Penguin artists have retained a central position in Australian art and be quite the same again, our perception of Australian art is based on these artists. it FionaFi G rub er Haese points out how their work forms part writes of a broader grouping: “Alongside the artists you have the supporters and champions, writ- ow you experience Heide depends ers, poets and jazz musicians.” There have been on where you park. If you take the several exhibitions through the years exploring road to the lower carpark, you find various facets of the Reeds’ story in all three of Hyourself next to the contemporary Heide MOMA’s exhibition spaces. Now the Museum of Modern Art, the excel- museum plans to go one step further by making lent cafe and McGlashan House, a perfect ex- the original farmhouse the focus of a series of pression of modernism circa 1967. semipermanent exhibitions in the years to But park among the gum trees at the top of come. These aim to more fully explore the leg- the rise and you find yourself contemplating an acy of the Reeds that spanned 50 years until archway in a brick wall and a path that leads, via their deaths, 10 days apart, in December 1981. vegetable gardens and an old dairy, to a modest This exhibition, Making History: The Angry Pen- weatherboard cottage and the birthplace of an guins, an examination of the 1940s, which will Australian cultural legend. be on display until November, is the first. In 1935, John and Sunday Reed, newly mar- The show’s curator, Linda Short, says the dis- ried and wealthy, bought a dilapidated farm- play of seldom-seen archival material, paintings house and 6ha of land down on the river flats of and personal artefacts illustrate how influential the Yarra, in the orchard-filled suburb of Bul- the Reeds were, in a practical sense. It includes leen. They called it Heide, both as a nod to the Sunday’s contributions to Sidney Nolan’s Ned suburb of Heidelberg across the river and an Kelly pictures and John’s leadership of the Con- even bigger acknowledgment of the Heidelberg temporary Art Society. He subsequently creat- School of artists who had painted the area in the ed Reed and Harris Publishing, which late 19th century. specialised in avant-garde novels, poetry and Melbourne, in the years leading up to World political essays and the journal Angry Penguins. War II, was for the most part staid, stolid and “The Reeds liked to be thought of as fellow buttoned-up — but the Reeds’ purchase created travellers, not as patrons,” Short says. “They a place where bohemianism and modernism liked to make as well as think.” could put down fertile roots. And as a result of The Reeds also embraced a rustic way of their circle’s experiments in living, thinking, living that included growing vegetables and and making art, Australia was never quite the keeping a cow. Sunday had the wrought-iron same again. verandas removed from the house to make it The Reeds shared a fascination with the left- look more like a French provincial cottage wing cultural ideas that were setting Europe and, belying her cosseted upbringing as a and the US on fire. They couldn’t abide their member of the powerful Baillieu clan, im- bourgeois upbringings. They wanted a free, sim- mersed herself in productive gardening and ple life filled with new ideas and new art. And became an excellent cook. Which is why, they were going to do it, they decided, not just alongside the personal effects and furniture, by reading and buying but by surrounding the exhibition includes her recipe book. themselves with creative people whom they’d By the early 40s, with a global war in full Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) licenced copy Page 2 of 6 AUS: 1300 1 SLICE NZ: 0800 1 SLICE [email protected] Ref: 573001374 Weekend Australian Saturday 9/04/2016 Page: 1 Section: Review Region: Australia, AU Circulation: 225206 Type: National Size: 2,416.00 sq.cms. press clip g swing, the house had become the hangout and radical social and cultural ideas. Tucker contrib- even the home for some of the brightest artists uted frequent articles on social issues and Nolan and thinkers of the time. Foremost among these was put in charge of the cover and layout. Sun- was Nolan, who was also Sunday’s lover in a day Reed, according to Harris, became its complicated menage-a-trois. “governing sensibility”. Albert Tucker and his wife, fellow artist Joy Hester, lived on the property in a tin shed that But, despite the common purpose of those be- doubled as a jazz club while Arthur Boyd, the hind the Angry Penguins journal, it’s not clear scion of an artistic dynasty, was a frequent visi- whether the Reeds and friends saw themselves tor to the sometimes hothouse environment. as a single, coherent collective. Another member of the group was his close Art historian Nancy Underhill, whose bi- friend John Perceval, who married Boyd’s sister ography of Nolan was published last year, sees a Mary. (Many years later Mary married Nolan.) more complex picture. Underhill argues that The sixth member of the inner-circle was the six personalities at the heart of the Angry Danila Vassilieff, a father figure and Russian Penguins grouping only overlapped for a short emigre who was a generation older than the period. “I don’t agree that there was an Angry others. He was an artist with first-hand experi- Penguins group,” she says. “Only the magazine ence of the European art scene. [carried the name at the time] and it was one of His insistence on the importance of an art- several literary magazines around the world ist’s visceral response and having a social mes- with avant-garde content. The UK has the sage were particularly influential on the whole Bloomsburys [a pre World War II literary circle group, and Hester’s haunting ink drawings, centred on Virginia Woolf] and Angry Penguins which she dashed off very quickly, were in the has been picked up and it’s stuck. It’s a con- spirit of this immediacy and an emotional rath- venient label, like impressionism. er than an intellectual responsiveness. Haese, though, takes a different view. “They The public’s thirst for more information lies always were a group,” he says. “And like im- behind the decision to dedicate Heide I (as the pressionism, they had certain values and atti- cottage is called) to a permanent exploration of tudes in common.” This included membership all things Reed. The museum’s archives, paint- of the Contemporary Art Society. They also ings and personal effects offer multiple view- shared a passion for creating a uniquely Austra- points: “There’s an almost endless series of lian mythology from the bush and the city, one permutations,” says Kirsty Grant, the mu- that embraced modernist ideas of colour and seum’s director. form: these included Nolan’s Ned Kelly series Another driving force behind the exhibitions and Tucker’s paintings of vaudeville and his Im- has been the frequent, and recent, additions to ages of Modern Evil series. The latter explored a the archives. “In 2015 we acquired the papers of darker side to Melbourne’s night-time habitues. Joy Hester and [her second husband] Gray They also pored over the periodicals that Smith,” she says. “They’re great additions to the © ESTATE OF JOHN SINCLAIR they believed came closest to the aims of the modernist archive.” Angry Penguins: international art journals such Visitors who arrive, though, expecting Sun- as Cahiers d’Art and Verve from Paris, New day’s hairbrush or John’s slippers may be disap- Writing from Britain and the annual collections pointed. Despite a scattering of furniture and in New Directions, from New York. some china in the kitchen, most of the exhibits Although some of the group flirted with are shown in display cases and on the walls. communism, says Haese, the anarchist philos- Only the library feels like a lived-in room. ophy of English art historian Herbert Read was With its white sofa, portrait of Sunday and far more appealing than doctrinaire Sovietism. floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with “If you were a member of the Communist works of the period, the room speaks to the Party,” he says, “you had to paint in a realist way.

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