The Angry Penguins: portrait of Heide art hub that changed Australia

After the Angry Penguins put down their roots in Melbourne, Australia’s art world would never be the same again.

Angry Penguins for Review, 9/4/16 Albert Tucker In the Library: John Reed, Sidney Nolan and Sunday Reed c.1942 gelatin silver photograph 30.4 x 40.2 cm Heide Museum of Modern Art Gift of Barbara Tucker 2001 © Estate of Barbara Tucker TUC-A200125.jpg

How you experience Heide depends on where you park. If you take the road to the lower carpark, you find yourself next to the contemporary Museum of Modern Art, the excellent cafe and McGlashan House, a perfect expression of modernism circa 1967.

But park among the gum trees at the top of the rise and you find yourself contemplating an archway in a brick wall and a path that leads, via vegetable gardens and an old dairy, to a modest weatherboard cottage and the birthplace of an Australian cultural legend.

In 1935, John and Sunday Reed, newly married and wealthy, bought a dilapidated farmhouse and 6ha of land down on the river flats of the Yarra, in the orchard-filled suburb of Bulleen. They called it Heide, both as a nod to the suburb of Heidelberg across the river and an even bigger acknowledgment of the Heidelberg School of artists who had painted the area in the late 19th century.

Melbourne, in the years leading up to World War II, was for the most part staid, stolid and buttoned-up — but the Reeds’ purchase created a place where bohemianism and modernism could put down fertile roots. And as a result of their circle’s experiments in living, thinking, and making art, Australia was never quite the same again.

The Reeds shared a fascination with the left-wing cultural ideas that were setting Europe and the US on fire. They couldn’t abide their bourgeois upbringings. They wanted a free, simple life filled with new ideas and new art. And they were going to do it, they decided, not just by reading and buying but by surrounding themselves with creative people whom they’d support and collect.

Art historian Richard Haese, whose 1981 study of Heide was seminal in establishing their intellectual and personal relationships in the public imagination — his book’s title, Rebels and Precursors, was taken from a 1962 Heide group exhibition of the same name at the National Gallery of Victoria — says their influence has been profound. “They’re immensely important,” he says. “The Angry Penguin artists have retained a central position in Australian art and our perception of Australian art is based on these artists.

Haese points out how their work forms part of a broader grouping: “Alongside the artists you have the supporters and champions, writers, poets and jazz musicians.” There have been several exhibitions through the years exploring various facets of the Reeds’ story in all three of Heide MOMA’s exhibition spaces. Now the museum plans to go one step further by making the original farmhouse the focus of a series of semipermanent exhibitions in the years to come. These aim to more fully explore the legacy of the Reeds that spanned 50 years until their deaths, 10 days apart, in December 1981. This exhibition, Making History: The Angry Penguins, an examination of the 1940s, which will be on display until November, is the first.

The show’s curator, Linda Short, says the display of seldom-seen archival material, paintings and personal artefacts illustrate how influential the Reeds were, in a practical sense. It includes Sunday’s contributions to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly pictures and John’s leadership of the Contemporary Art Society. He subsequently created Reed and Harris Publishing, which specialised in avant-garde novels, poetry and political essays and the journal Angry Penguins.

“The Reeds liked to be thought of as fellow travellers, not as patrons,” Short says. “They liked to make as well as think.”

The Reeds also embraced a rustic way of living that included growing vegetables and keeping a cow. Sunday had the wrought-iron verandas removed from the house to make it look more like a French provincial cottage and, belying her cosseted upbringing as a member of the powerful Baillieu clan, immersed herself in productive gardening and became an excellent cook. Which is why, alongside the personal effects and furniture, the exhibition includes her recipe book.

By the early 40s, with a global war in full swing, the house had become the hangout and even the home for some of the brightest artists and thinkers of the time. Foremost among these was Nolan, who was also Sunday’s lover in a complicated menage-a-trois.

Albert Tucker and his wife, fellow artist Joy Hester, lived on the property in a tin shed that doubled as a jazz club while Arthur Boyd, the scion of an artistic dynasty, was a frequent visitor to the sometimes hothouse environment. Another member of the group was his close friend John Perceval, who married Boyd’s sister Mary. (Many years later Mary married Nolan.)

The sixth member of the inner-circle was Danila Vassilieff, a father figure and Russian emigre who was a generation older than the others. He was an artist with first-hand experience of the European art scene.

His insistence on the importance of an artist’s visceral response and having a social mes­sage were particularly influential on the whole group, and Hester’s haunting ink drawings, which she dashed off very quickly, were in the spirit of this immediacy and an emotional rather than an intellectual responsiveness.

The public’s thirst for more information lies behind the decision to dedicate Heide I (as the cottage is called) to a permanent exploration of all things Reed. The museum’s archives, paintings and personal effects offer multiple viewpoints: “There’s an almost endless series of permutations,” says Kirsty Grant, the museum’s director.

Another driving force behind the exhibitions has been the frequent, and recent, additions to the archives. “In 2015 we acquired the papers of Joy Hester and [her second husband] Gray Smith,” she says. “They’re great additions to the modernist archive.”

Visitors who arrive, though, expecting Sunday’s hairbrush or John’s slippers may be disappointed. Despite a scattering of furniture and some china in the kitchen, most of the exhibits are shown in display cases and on the walls. Only the library feels like a lived-in room.

With its white sofa, portrait of Sunday and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with works of the period, the room speaks to the present exhibition, with its emphasis on the group’s literary and publishing interests.

The name now attached to them, the Angry Penguins, originally referred to the radical journal of surrealist and modernist writing and art. It was founded in Adelaide in 1940 by an 18-year-old poet, Max Harris, and his friends at university. John Reed became the patron of Angry Penguins in 1942 and moved it to Melbourne where he became its co-editor. The periodical became a mouthpiece for the art and writing of the Heide circle, a forum to debate radical social and cultural ideas. Tucker contributed frequent articles on social issues and Nolan was put in charge of the cover and layout. Sunday Reed, according to Harris, became its “governing sensibility”.

But, despite the common purpose of those behind the Angry Penguins journal, it’s not clear whether the Reeds and friends saw themselves as a single, coherent collective.

Art historian Nancy Underhill, whose biography of Nolan was published last year, sees a more complex picture. Underhill argues that the six personalities at the heart of the Angry Penguins grouping only overlapped for a short period. “I don’t agree that there was an Angry Penguins group,” she says. “Only the magazine [carried the name at the time] and it was one of several literary magazines around the world with avant-garde content. The UK has the Bloomsburys [a pre World War II literary circle centred on Virginia Woolf] and Angry Penguins has been picked up and it’s stuck. It’s a convenient label, like impressionism.

Haese, though, takes a different view. “They always were a group,” he says. “And like impressionism, they had certain values and attitudes in common.” This included membership of the Contemporary Art Society. They also shared a passion for creating a uniquely Australian mythology from the bush and the city, one that embraced modernist ideas of colour and form: these included Nolan’s Ned Kelly series and Tucker’s paintings of vaudeville and his Images of Modern Evil series. The latter explored a darker side to Melbourne’s night-time habitues.

They also pored over the periodicals that they believed came closest to the aims of the Angry Penguins:international art journals such as Cahiers d’Art and Verve from Paris, New Writing from Britain and the annual collections in New Directions, from New York.

Although some of the group flirted with communism, says Haese, the anarchist philosophy of English art historian Herbert Read was far more appealing than doctrinaire Sovietism.

“If you were a member of the Communist Party,” he says, “you had to paint in a realist way. And they were in favour of radical painting.” Throughout this period, war was raging. Boyd and Perceval met in the army while Tucker was initially frantic in his attempts to avoid war service. He spent most of his time in the army at the Heidelberg Military Hospital drawing patients suffering from wounds and mental illnesses. Nolan deserted in 1944 when faced with the prospect of being sent to Papua New Guinea.

“All of the group were influenced by the war but each responded in different ways,” says Short. “Nolan didn’t comment on it deliberately but in his new location [stationed for two years in the Wimmera wheat belt] he created the first modernist response to the Australian landscape,” she says.

Despite being away from Heide, adds Short, Nolan was also in almost daily communication with the Reeds by letter. He was also contributing cover art for the Angry Penguins journal.

His most famous cover painting, Arabian Tree, illustrated a poem by a previously unknown young poet called Ern Malley, to whom the 1944 edition of the magazine was dedicated. According to a letter supposedly written by his sister, Ethel, Malley had been a working-class Sydney lad who happened to have a secret life as a brilliant poet. She claimed she had found a number of poems among his effects following his death from Graves’ disease.

Harris fell for the story and trumpeted the special edition with a letter to Read in England claiming the discovery of a major new voice in modernism. Others, including the Heide circle, suspected a hoax but thought the poems rather fine. They did indeed turn out to be a hoax: James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two army intelligence officers in Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks, had decided to lampoon what they saw as the pretentiousness of the surrealists and modernists who aped the style of poets TS Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Angry Penguins never fully recovered from the public ridicule — the scandal was front page news for weeks — and the journal folded in 1946, even though Harris (who was prosecuted for publishing obscene poems) and the Heide circle maintained their belief in the poetry’s worth. The Ern Malley affair was a boost for the conservative literary establishment and sent a chill through the modernist ranks, which took years to overcome and still resonates today as one of the nation’s best-known literary scandals. It is ironic, then, that McAuley and Stewart had set out to write gibberish but ended up created memorable verse.

If Malley’s verse endured through the years, this is even more the case for the Reeds and the Angry Penguins. The subsequent decades saw other significant groupings of artists, architects and writers at Heide, with the Reeds continuing to nurture and inspire the next generations as creating a museum of modern art on the site of their humble country retreat.

The 40s, though, remain the decade that captures the most attention. Maybe it’s the photos, many by Tucker, that show the group’s youthful vigour and stylish assurance, striding through the paddocks, grouped around the kitchen table, ranged around the library. The subsequent fallings-out had not yet taken place, and the patronage of a rich and forceful couple had not yet rankled.

As Haese says, the Angry Penguins group retain their lustre despite the many significant moments and colourful personalities in Australian art over the past seven decades.

“There’s something about that period that is very attractive,” he says. “It was a whole cultural movement and a hothouse atmosphere. They captured our imagination and we think ‘how dramatic, how exciting’.”

Making History: The Angry Penguins is at the Heide Museum of Modern Art from April 16 to November 6.