Angry Penguins

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Cover of the December 1945 issue of Angry Penguins, designed by Albert Tucker Albert Tucker Angry Penguins.jpg
Cover of the December 1945 issue of Angry Penguins, designed by Albert Tucker

Angry Penguins was an art and literary journal founded in 1940 by surrealist poet Max Harris. Originally based in Adelaide, the journal moved to Melbourne in 1942 once Harris joined the Heide Circle, a group of modernist 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 now known by the same name. The Angry Penguins sought to introduce avant-garde ideas into Australian art and literature, and position Australia within a broader international modernism. Key figures of the movement include Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker.

Contents

In 1944, Angry Penguins became the subject of a famous literary hoax perpetrated by anti-modernist poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart. The journal ceased publication two years later.

Origins and ethos

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 Funding was withdrawn in 1940 following a change in leadership.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] 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).

Through Angry Penguins, Harris and various contributors promoted modernism in Australian art and literature, challenging traditional and conservative cultural norms. They embraced experimental and innovative approaches in poetry, painting, and other forms of artistic expression. 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.

The journal attracted criticism from different factions of the Australian art and literary worlds. Its main Adelaide rivals were the nationalist and anti-modernist Jindyworobaks, whose poetry drew on 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] The Communist Party of Australia and associated social realist painters also publicly criticised Angry Penguins. In the August 1944 issue of the Communist Review , to support his assertion that the journal "has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards", [5] Vic O'Connor wrote 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". [5]

Ern Malley hoax

The Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins. Featured on the cover is a Sidney Nolan painting inspired by lines from Malley's poem Petit Testament, which are printed on the cover, bottom right: "I said to my love (who is living) / Dear we shall never be that verb / Perched on the sole Arabian Tree / (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail)". Ern Malley.jpg
The Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins. Featured on the cover is a Sidney Nolan painting inspired by lines from Malley's poem Petit Testament, which are printed on the cover, bottom right: "I said to my love (who is living) / Dear we shall never be that verb / Perched on the sole Arabian Tree / (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail)".

Angry Penguins found detractors in poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who, during their time at the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, created a series of poems constructed as a pastiche of nonsensically arranged fragments, and attributed them to a fictitious poet named Ern Malley. McAuley and Stewart then submitted the poems to Angry Penguins for publication, and in doing so sought to prove that modernist poetry has no inherent value. [7] The poems were received and published enthusiastically by the creators and patrons of Angry Penguins, who dedicated the 1944 autumn issue to Malley. When it was revealed to be a hoax, Angry Penguins received negative backlash, and the affair tarnished the image of the journal, which was subsequently tried and convicted for indecency on the grounds that the poems contained obscene content. [8]

Legacy and influence

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. [9] 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". [10]

Cultural references

See also

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. Geoffrey, Dutton (1994). Out in the open : an autobiography. University of Queensland Press. p. 85. ISBN   0-7022-2681-5. OCLC   440611987.
  2. Hoskin, Cheryl (2013). ""A Genius About the Place": The Phoenix Magazine and Australian modernism" (PDF). Paper Presented at South Australian History Festival Exhibition, May 2013. via Adelaide University.
  3. Nick Harvey; et al. "A History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide 1876-2012" (PDF). University of Adelaide. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 December 2015. Retrieved 20 August 2015.
  4. Dutton, Geoffrey. Out in the Open: An Autobiography. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1995. ISBN   0702228109, p. 86
  5. 1 2 O'Connor, Vic. "A Criticism of Adelaide's 'Angry Penguins.'" The Communist Review. August 1944. https://www.marxists.org/history/australia/comintern/sections/australia/1944/adelaide.htm
  6. Pearce, Barry. Sidney Nolan. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007. ISBN   1-74174-013-4, pp. 96–97
  7. Phiddian, Robert (1997). "Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?". New Literary History. 28 (4): 673–696. doi:10.1353/nlh.1997.0056. JSTOR   20057449. S2CID   144559591.
  8. Lloyd, Brian (1 May 2001). "Ern Malley and His Rivals". Australian Literary Studies. 20 (1): 20. Gale   A75088915.
  9. Keon, Michael (1 August 1989). "Angry Penguins at home and abroad", The Age.
  10. Hayward Gallery. Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s. London: South Bank Centre, 1988. ISBN   1853320218.[ page needed ]
  11. Carey, Peter (2003), My life as a fake, Knopf (Random House Australia), ISBN   978-1-74051-246-6
  12. Moran, Jennifer (2003) Carey's powerful plea for novel as act of imagination, The Canberra Times, 21 August 2003, p. 3
  13. Flanagan, Richard (2013), The narrow road to the deep north, Random House Australia, ISBN   978-1-74166-670-0 [ page needed ]
  14. Sheridan, Susan (22 June 2021). "Susan Sheridan reviews 'Sincerely, Ethel Malley' by Stephen Orr". Australian Book Review. Retrieved 24 August 2024.