Expert always drew the highest recognition

RICHARD PHILLIP PAYNE HAESE November 10, 1944-May 19, 2025

People of note have always recognised Dr Richard Haese’s talents. The late art historian Professor Virginia Spate, of Sydney University, and the late historian Professor James A. Main, of Flinders University, examined his PhD thesis Cultural Radicals in Australian Society 1937-47. Both scholars made percipient observations. In the first paragraph of her examiner’s report (August 16, 1979) Spate noted the extent to which “this thesis fills an important gap in the history of Australian art ‘politics’, which has previously been seriously treated only by Bernard Smith in his Australian Painting 1788-1960”. Main’s report (June 13, 1979) offers a further observation: “All in all, Haese has given us a deeper and more complex analysis of the major artistic innovations of the time than any other writer.”

These two comments point to Haese’s twin attributes: his ability to note the overlooked and his understanding of the actual practice of art. This combination of intellectual and practical knowledge runs like a continuous thread through his scholarly contributions and authoritative publications.

Haese’s artistic understanding was already noted during his art school education at the South Australian School of Art in 1966, where he was awarded the Harry P. Gill Memorial Medal. His research skills were honed by Professor Geoffrey Searle (From Deserts the Prophets Come), who acted as his PhD thesis supervisor at Monash University, which provided him with an acute feeling for Australian history and the place of cultural activities in the shaping of national identity. It is this that surfaces most prominently in his first major publication, the ground-breaking Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, published in 1981.

It is difficult to overestimate the impact and importance of this book and its subsequent three editions. It continues to be a major reference source, being cited in all post-1980s studies of Australian culture and is valued as establishing a new paradigm for the study of the visual arts in Australia.

Haese’s second major publication is Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011. The 30 years between these two publications brackets a period of productive research that led to a further 18 scholarly publications, eight of which were commissioned by the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Tolarno Gallery, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. All of this was achieved while fulfilling his full-time academic responsibilities as senior lecturer in the notable Department of Art History at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Haese’s work has always drawn the highest recognition. The late Professor Bernard Smith, the doyen of Australian art history, wrote: “Richard Haese’s book Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art is a book that everyone seriously interested in Australian culture should read.” (Age Monthly Review, vol. 1, no. 6, October 1981). Writing in the national magazine The Bulletin (October 27, 1981), historian Geoffrey Dutton submitted that: “Rebels and Precursors … is one of the most important books to have appeared about Australian art. Its repercussions extend beyond artists and works of art, most obviously to literature, but also to matters of politics, social history and the Australian character.”

Melbourne academic and art historian Richard Haese.

The cultural commentator Michael Keon agreed (Quadrant Monthly, May 1982): “Richard Haese has, indeed, written not only art history, but history. Mainstream history, I believe. Haese has done something else that he may not have realised. He has made a break, that I think can only continue to widen, in that ‘tyranny of distance’ in which we have for so long not so much been immured as immured ourselves.” The book was universally lauded in many other reviews – and in 1982 it won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

Reviewing the book for The Age on October 10, 1981, Professor Patrick McCaughey (then director of the National Gallery of Victoria) observed: “Although Australian consciousness changed decisively during that decade, the period remains oddly neglected in recent art writing and the walls of our public art galleries are largely mute about the striking impact of those years. Dr Richard Haese’s important new book should change that state of affairs permanently. If this book fosters a new determination on the part of every major public gallery to represent properly the rebels and precursors of our present moment, it will have achieved even more than it has already.”

There is little doubt things did change due in no small part to the impact of this book. McCaughey referred to this dimension of its influence in his introductory essay for the catalogue of the Field to Figuration: Australian Art 1960-1986 exhibition curated by Robert Lindsay at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, observing that “one other aspect of the 1980s has contributed substantial and influential ‘background noise’ to the changed conditions of Australian art – namely the rediscovery and revival of the 1940s in Australian art. Part of the stimulus for this revival would include the publication of Richard Haese’s Rebels and Precursors in 1981.”

The late Robert Hughes, when inscribing a complimentary copy of his book American Visions for Haese, confided: “Tell Richard that his book was absolutely pivotal to my own work.” Such cultural impacts had already been anticipated by Brian Johns, the publishing director of Penguin Books (later to become chairman of the ABC). In a letter to La Trobe University (July 16, 1981), Johns wrote: “We are extremely confident that as a result of Richard Haese’s approach Rebels and Precursors will reach across disciplines and be accepted as a central work by those involved in exploring Australia’s cultural traditions.”

There are distinct signs that Haese’s second major publication Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011 attracted comparable levels of response. The content of the book goes well beyond any biographical coverage and places the reclusive Brown and his work within a nexus of ideas that examine the rise of the radical Imitation Realist movement and explains its connections with postmodernism. When talking casually over dinner about the still unfinished book Brown admitted he felt that “until now no one had got me right; I feel finally understood”.

Sydney artist Imants Tillers also responded positively to the book in the national art journal Art and Australia (November 2012): “The genius of Haese’s book is that it traces the development of Mike Brown’s art in relation to the evolving cultural and artistic contexts in which he lived and worked, particularly its portrayal of the counter-culture and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – one of the most vital, disputatious and creative periods in Australian art.” I can attest personally to this.

The effect of these reviews reflected both the breadth and depth of Haese’s observations. Such effects had practical responses. The Heide Museum of Modern Art held a major exhibition of the works of Mike Brown (The Sometimes Chaotic World of Mike Brown, (May-October 2013) where Haese’s pioneering study underpinned both its content and curatorial rationale. Furthermore, what amounted to a Mike Brown festival flourished in a selection of Melbourne’s art galleries: Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Sarah Scout Gallery and Tarrawarra Museum of Art – all either showed Brown’s works or those of his time {See: Dan Rule, Etched in Shades of Brown, The Age, May 11, 2013.})

Haese had an enviable ability to see beyond cant and cliche and to instil the innervating virtues of fresh reappraisal. This became all the more obvious to a much wider audience when he delivered the inaugural Rae Alexander Lecture at La Trobe University (“Who’s Afraid of the Avant-Garde? Two Episodes in the Australian Response to Modernism 1915-1945”) in 1999 and acted as convener at the national conference of the Art Association of Australia as well as presenting a paper (Australian Art: Radical Perspectives and Post Modernism) to the conference.

These latter events, both held at La Trobe University (November 1993 and November 1996, respectively), attracted more than 500 participants and did much to promote the discipline of art history. In addition, in 1995, Haese curated the retrospective exhibition Power to the People: The Art of Mike Brown for the National Gallery of Victoria and undertook much pro bono public work and gave many guest lectures and interviews. His opinions were keenly sought, and he acted as an adviser and consultant for the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and, in particular, the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Many scholars agree there are essentially three major avant-garde cultural shifts in Australian art – the Heidelberg School, the Angry Penguins and Imitation Realism – remarkably, Dr Richard Haese has confirmed the artistic significance of two of them.

Haese, who was born in Jamestown, South Australia, died peacefully on May 19, 2025, at the Austin Hospital’s Olivia Newton-John Palliative Care Unit with his partner, Kimi Gim, by his side, consoled by his close friends Tracy Spinks, Judith Crotty, Heja Chong and Stephen May.

Ken Wach is a former principal research fellow and head of the School of Creative Arts at the University of Melbourne.