Angry Penguins was an art and literary journal founded in 1940 by surrealist poet Max Harris, at the age of 18. Originally based in Adelaide, the journal moved to Melbourne in 1942 once Harris joined the Heide Circle, a group of avant-garde painters and writers who stayed at Heide, a property owned by art patrons John and Sunday Reed. Angry Penguins subsequently became associated with, and stimulated, an art movement that would later be known by the same name. Key figures of the movement include Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester, Gray Smith, and Albert Tucker.
The precursor to the Angry Penguins magazine, Phoenix, was published at the University of Adelaide with funds from the University Union. Funding was withdrawn in 1940 following a change in leadership. Phoenix was no longer published, but carried on as Angry Penguins under the Arts Association, with funding from J.I.M. Stewart and Charles Jury, and others. [1] [2]
Angry Penguins was first published in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. The title is derived from a phrase in Harris' poem "Mithridatum of Despair": "as drunks, the angry penguins of the night", and its use as a magazine title was suggested to Harris by C. R. Jury. [3]
The magazine's main Adelaide rival was the Jindyworobaks, a nationalist and anti-modernist literary movement promoting Indigenous Australian culture and the Australian bush ballad tradition. According to Angry Penguins poet Geoffrey Dutton, "we stayed with Yeats, Eliot and Auden, ... and left Lawson and Paterson to the Jindys." [4] In 1942, Harris gained the patronage of John and Sunday Reed in Melbourne, and the magazine subsequently moved to the couple's home at Heide (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art).
The Angry Penguins artists were early Australian exponents of surrealism and expressionism, and included John Perceval, Guy Gray Smith, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Danila Vassilieff, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.
Their interest in Surrealism led James McAuley and Harold Stewart during their time at the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs to create the group's most famous event, the Ern Malley hoax and the subsequent trial for indecency. James McAuley and Harold Stewart submitted a group of poems that fitted in with the typical submissions featured in the magazine's 1944 autumn number, and attributed them to a recently deceased young poet named Ern Malley, who never actually existed. These poems were constructed as a pastiche of fragments pasted together nonsensically; McAuley and Stewart were critical of Modernism, and wanted to prove that it has no inherent value. [5] The poems were received and published enthusiastically by the creators and patrons of the magazine. When it was revealed to be a hoax, the publication received negative backlash, and the affair tarnished the image of the magazine. [6]
The Communist Party of Australia publicly criticized Angry Penguins. In the August 1944 issue of the Communist Review , to support his assertion that the magazine "has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards" [7] Vic O'Connor writes that editors of cultural publications are responsible for fostering cultural development as a part of the overall advancement of "standards of social and economic life in Australia", and that the editors of Angry Penguins are "completely indifferent" to this. [7]
The Angry Penguins art movement was surveyed in the 1988 exhibition Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, held at the Hayward Gallery in London. [8] In the exhibition's catalogue, English novelist C. P. Snow is quoted as saying that the Angry Penguins movement "was probably the last flowering of a 'national' modernism that a completely internationalised world of the arts was likely to see". [9]
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1945.
The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centred around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.
Dorothy Auchterlonie was an English-born Australian academic, literary critic and poet.
Kenneth Adolphe Slessor was an Australian poet, journalist and official war correspondent in World War II. He was one of Australia's leading poets, notable particularly for the absorption of modernist influences into Australian poetry. The Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry is named after him.
Joy St Clair Hester was an Australian artist. She was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism. Hester is best known for her bold and expressive ink drawings. Her work was charged with a heightened awareness of mortality due to the death of her father during her childhood, the threat of war, and her personal experience with Hodgkin's disease. Hester is most well known for the series Face, Sleep, and Love (1948–49) as well as the later works, The Lovers (1956–58).
Albert Lee Tucker was an Australian artist and member of the Heide Circle, a group of modernist artists and writers associated with Heide, the Melbourne home of art patrons John and Sunday Reed. Along with Heide Circle members such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, Tucker became associated with the Angry Penguins art movement, named after a publication founded by poet Max Harris and published by the Reeds.
The Heide Circle was a loose grouping of Australian artists who lived and worked at "Heide", a former dairy farm on the Yarra River floodplain at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, counting amongst their number many of Australia's best-known modernist painters.
Maxwell Henley Harris AO, generally known as Max Harris, was an Australian poet, critic, columnist, commentator, publisher, and bookseller.
James Phillip McAuley was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Harold Frederick Stewart was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax.
John Harford Reed was an Australian art editor and patron, notable for supporting and collecting of Australian art and culture with his wife Sunday Reed.
The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry is a major anthology of twentieth century Australian poetry. Edited by poets Philip Mead and John Tranter it was published by Penguin Australia in 1991. Aside from the usual criticisms any such anthology will produce, it raised some eyebrows at the time for its inclusion of all the Ern Malley hoax poems. It might be claimed there is no accepted canon of contemporary Australian poetry and this book is the selection of its editors.
Geoffrey 'Geppie' Piers Henry Dutton AO was an Australian author and historian.
My Life as a Fake is a 2003 novel by Australian writer Peter Carey based on the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two poets created a fictitious poet, Ern Malley, and submitted poems in his name to the literary magazine Angry Penguins.
Alfred Henry Tipper, also known by the pseudonyms Professor Tipper and H.D., was an Australian showman, competitive and endurance cyclist, and outsider artist. His combined interests in mechanics, fitness and entertainment led to a long career as a trick cyclist and builder of miniature bicycles. Following his death, Tipper's artistic abilities were recognised by the Australian painter Albert Tucker, who promoted Tipper's paintings in the modernist art and literary magazine Angry Penguins.
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan was one of Australia's leading artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of mediums, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known for his series of paintings on legends from Australian history, most famously Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1944.
This article presents a list of the historical events and publications of Australian literature during 1945.
Elizabeth Orme Vassilieff, néeSutton was an Australian artist, writer and peace activist. She initially published under her first married name, Elizabeth Hamill, and later also wrote as Elizabeth Vassilieff-Wolf.