Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins was the Australian avant-garde grouped around the literary and art magazine of the same name, launched in Adelaide in 1940 by the young critic Max Harris and later associated with John and Sunday Reed's circle at Heide near Melbourne. Its painters - Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Joy Hester, James Gleeson - fused European surrealism and expressionism with Australian subjects, painting dreams, myths, wartime dread, and the bush legend of Ned Kelly. In 1944 the circle was humiliated by the Ern Malley hoax, a pair of anti-modernist poets' invented poet taken up by the magazine as a discovery. The magazine folded in 1946, but its artists went on to define postwar Australian painting.
Defining characteristics
- Surrealist-inflected imagery: dreamlike, mythic, often nightmarish subjects
- Loose, gestural brushwork and lurid, saturated color
- Australian landscape and folklore reframed through European modernism
- Expressive distortion of figure and space
- Bold graphic energy carried over from the magazine's covers and illustrations
Key figures
- Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) — Painted the first Ned Kelly series within the Reed circle at Heide
- Albert Tucker (1914-1999) — Dark wartime vision of urban evil (Images of Modern Evil)
- Arthur Boyd (1920-1999) — Symbolist figuration rooted in the Melbourne circle
- Joy Hester (1920-1960) — Ink drawings of faces and emotional extremity within the circle
- Max Harris (1921-1995) — Critic and editor who launched and named the magazine
Example works
- Ned Kelly series — Sidney Nolan (1946-1947)
- Images of Modern Evil — Albert Tucker (1943-1947)
- Angry Penguins, December 1945 issue cover — Albert Tucker (1945)
Sources
- Angry Penguins - Wikipedia encyclopedia