The Heide Museum of Modern Art Celebrates its 30th Anniversary with Highlights from the Collection

Written by Sidney Younger Monday, 12 December 2011 22:06

Melbourne, Australia.- The Heide Museum of Modern Art is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2011. To celebrate this event, three exhibitions are being show, highlighting the museum's collection by time period. "Forever Young: 30 Years of the Heide Collection" traces the history of the Heide Collection, and brings context and meaning to the story by  following a chronology that aligns with the history of each of the buildings onsite. This is the first ever all-of-site exhibition at Heide and showcases almost 200 works by over 80 artists. In 'Heide I" (on view until April 22nd 2012), some of the earliest works in the Heide Collection are shown, with a focus on an important group of works by the ‘first circle’ of radical young artists that were supported by art patrons and founders of Heide, John and Sunday Reed when they began collecting in the 1930s. This decade witnessed the initial stirrings of modern art in Australia.

Local artists such as Sam Atyeo, Moya Dyring and Adrian Lawlor were at the forefront of these advances, producing imagery that challenged academic traditions and which was clearly influenced by  international movements such as Cubism. Paintings and drawings by by Sam Atyeo, one of the first proponents of abstraction in Australia, and another influential figure of the period, the self taught Russian émigré artist Danila Vassilieff are complemented by a selection of Albert Tucker’s well-known documentary photographs. These images capture the key figures who contributed to cultural life at Heide during what is now regarded as a formative era in Australian art. 'Heide II: 1950s-1970s' (on exhibit through April 15th 2012) follows the Reed's involvement with the Angry Penguins group during the  1940s, John and Sunday Reed began to acquire work by new and younger artists which developed and enhanced their personal collection. The works presented in Heide II demonstrate the increasingly varied nature of their collecting during the 1950s, which encompassed both figurative and abstract idioms. As passionate advocates for contemporary art in the public sphere, the Reeds’ crucial involvement in reinstating Melbourne’s Contemporary Art Society and establishing the Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia (MoMADA, 1958–66) brought them into continual contact with new art and ideas.


Important figures from this time are Mirka Mora, John Brack and Charles Blackman, whose paintings of this decade focus on urban themes—lively townscape, haunting street scenes and shop-front windows. Displayed here too are works exhibited at MoMADA in 1962 by the Annandale Imitation Realists, an irreverent dadaist group who used recycled materials to create collages. From the late 1960s the Reeds began to collect works by artists who were contemporaries of their adopted son Sweeney Reed, including Les Kossatz, Ken Reinhardt, Col Jordan, Sydney Ball and John Krzywokulski, who were all producing experiment works influenced by the latest non-objective or Pop-inspired modes.  Many of the works in this section of the exhibition were once displayed by the Reeds in the minimal modernist setting of Heide II, their home from 1967, which had been designed as 'a gallery to be lived in'. 'Heide III: 1940s

The Revolutionary Years" (through March 18th 2012) is presented in the Albert and Barbara Tucker Gallery and the Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery. This exhibition features key works by artists of the Heide circle. The 1940s were a watershed in the development of modern art in Australia, and throughout the decade Heide was a hub for avant-garde artists and writers. It was a spirited and ambitious period of cultural achievement that has since become central to the history and trajectory of Australian art.  In these years the Reeds helped launch the careers of artists now considered major figures— Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Albert Tucker and Danila Vassilieff—collectively known as the Angry Penguins, after the progressive journal published by the Reeds and Max Harris. Their various preoccupations and innovations can be seen in this section of Forever Young, including one of Sidney Nolan’s earliest images of Ned Kelly’s black mask, Kelly at the Mine, c. 1947; two of Albert Tucker’s landmark Images of Modern Evil; a range of Joy Hester’s compelling psycho-portraits; and several of the surrealist-expressionist allegories that established Arthur Boyd as a leading Australian painter of the 20th century.


Heide Museum of Modern Art is a unique space – a synthesis of indoor and outdoor environments, a place of modern and contemporary art and design, with a rich and colourful art heritage and social history. The Heide site comprises 16 acres of buildings, gardens and sculpture park presenting a dramatic combination of indoor and outdoor spaces. There’s much to explore including: the recently redeveloped Heide III building featuring the Central Galleries, Albert & Barbara Tucker Gallery and Kerry Gardner & Andrew Myer Project Gallery; the iconic McGlashan and Everist designed modernist building, Heide II; the heritage-listed, Victorian farmhouse, Heide I; and Heide’s gardens, with the much-loved Kitchen Garden, Sculpture Park, heritage-listed Osage Orange groves and Yarra frontage extending to the famous Heidelberg Artists’ Trail and nearby bicycle paths. Located just 15 minutes from Melbourne’s CBD, Heide is one of Australia’s leading public art museums and offers a tranquil, surprising and always stimulating place to visit. The museum's collection includes works in various mediums by many contemporary Australian artists conducted since the 1930s. These include works by artists such as; Moya Dyring, Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, Howard Arkley, Charles Blackman, Peter Booth, Mike Brown, Richard Larter, Wolfgang Sievers, Sweeney Reed, Sam Atyeo and Jenny Watson. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.heide.com.au

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