John and Sunday Reed: Modern Love a drama in five acts

A new biography of John and Sunday Reed provides intriguing insights into the drama of the art lovers’ lives.

Sunday and John Reed in 1943. Picture: Albert Tucker/Heide Museum of Modern Art Collection

The mysterious consensus at which couples with enduring relationships arrive is just that: a mystery that often eludes rational analysis or fanciful speculation. This is the challenge facing Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan, and they have risen to it admirably with a sturdy and sympathetic biography that threads the lives of John and Sunday Reed and their rural idyll Heide through the fabric of the increasingly sophisticated art and literary world of Melbourne in the 1930s and beyond.

If their life could be likened to a play — and high drama at that — it could be written in five acts. Act one: Both were determined to escape the stifling conformity of their Tasmanian and Melbourne establishment families. This stratum embodied the land and business-owners: wealthy, well-connected, pious, anti-Catholic, conservative and with narrow cultural tastes.

Act two: They marry in 1932 and discover that a loving marriage is not incompatible with both parties taking other lovers. Indeed it appears to have been a marriage whose strength lay in some intuited congruities of temperament rather than any grand passion.

Act three: A cast of characters enters from stage left, including painter Samuel Atyeo, Cynthia Reed (John’s sister), Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Mary Boyd (later Nolan’s third wife), enfant terrible Max Harris, Charles and Barbara Blackman, and others. Heide, a cottage with extensive gardens, becomes a honey pot and a gilded trap for a cast of talented free-thinking artists, writers, designers, musicians and assorted intellectuals. Some stay, some are dismissed, some depart.

Act four: The Reeds embark on a range of ventures for nurturing and supporting individuals who they intuit (with astonishing accuracy) will plant the modernist flag on Australian shores in all its variety and boldness. Sunday’s sensitive antennae and John’s capacity for sheer hard work would see lasting contributions to Australia’s cultural matrix.

Act five: Both take their own lives within 10 days of each other in December 1981, and this provides an unexpectedly tender and sad finale.

One event that deformed their lives was the departure of Nolan and his marriage to John Reed’s sister Cynthia (who physically and temperamentally represented almost a fusion of Sunday and John). They would steadily be snubbed, never to re-enter his increasingly charmed — and international — world. At the time of their rupture, John Reed was the soul of magnanimity — publicly and privately — but he could, in a reflective moment, comment on the paradox of the publicly perceived Nolan and the more opportunistic one. “It is just amazing the amount of bastardry this man can get away with, and I say this without in the least reflecting on my opinion of him as an artist or, for the most part, as a man.”

The Reeds had arranged in conjunction with Qantas for 25 Ned Kelly paintings (the original series given to Sunday Reed) to be shown in Paris in 1949 and thence to travel to London, elsewhere in Europe and to the US. Nolan, it seems, had told Qantas that John Reed was under no circumstances to accompany the exhibition, otherwise the show was off.

The authors have also explored in depth the Reeds’ generosity to individuals, but sometimes this largesse came at a cost. They were irritated by being called “patrons”, preferring the term “collaborators”, which they felt more clearly reflected their active engagement in different creative ventures. And no matter how much they rejected the conservative mores of their background, they still possessed a discreet but unwavering authoritarianism.

Thus the generosity and affection for those they took under their wing was also shot through with a certain propensity, especially on John Reed’s part, to over-advise or interfere. He was occasionally stunned by the irritation with which his well-meant advice was snubbed, and frequently disappointed when artists lapsed in correspondence, or absented themselves.

Sunday Reed, when sensing rebellion or a difference of views, would take to her bed with something quaintly known in the 19th century as neurasthenia, which meant exceeding one’s constitutional limitations, and those around her found themselves constantly taking her emotional temperature. Hester had once remarked to Tucker: “Sun has a power over everyone, which she uses very subtly to its fullest extent.” Nonetheless, the two women had a strong and enduring affection for each other, and Sunday and John would adopt Hester’s son Sweeney.

John Reed was a curious mixture of reticence, self-effacement and rock-solid self-certainty, and found himself involved in endless skirmishes. These initially centred on the literary world, with the financing and joint editorship of Max Harris’s Adelaide-based literary journal Angry Penguins. This journal gave full ­licence to Harris’s more fanciful excursions, as well as the views of a raft of people with whom the Reeds didn’t necessarily agree. Their publishing imprint Reed and Harris lost money on everything it published, including Geoffrey Dutton’s Night Flight and Sunrise, Alister Kershaw’s Excellent Stranger and Harris’s The Vegetative Eye. Increasingly their activities centred on the visual arts.

Harding and Morgan’s insertion of fragments of letters offer great insight into the ebb and flow of emotions of all concerned across the decades, and they have revealed in detail John and Sunday’s gifts to the art world, the most significant being Heide II — possibly the finest small museum in the country — which they gave to the Victorian government in 1981. The seed bed of the museum’s holdings was the Reeds’ personal collection: 167 paintings collected over 30 years. Five years earlier the Reeds had given their 25 Nolans to the National Gallery of Australia “with love”.

Patricia Anderson is an author and editor.

Modern Love: The Lives of John & Sunday Reed

By Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan

The Miegunyah Press, 401pp, $45