The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, it was established in 1967 by the Australian Government as a national public art museum. As of 2022 it is under the directorship of Nick Mitzevich.
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.
The Antipodeans were a collective of Australian modern artists, known for their advocacy of figurative art and opposition to abstract expressionism. The group, which included seven painters from Melbourne and art historian Bernard Smith, was active in the late 1950s. Despite staging only a single exhibition in Melbourne in August 1959, the Antipodeans gained international recognition.
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.
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.
Sunday Reed was an Australian patron of the arts. Along with her husband, Reed established what is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Mirka Madeleine Mora was a French-born Australian visual artist and cultural figure who contributed significantly to the development of Australian contemporary art. Her media included drawing, painting, sculpture and mosaic.
Janine Burke is an Australian author, art historian, biographer, novelist and photographer. She also curates exhibitions of historical and contemporary art. She is Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She was born in Melbourne in 1952.
Georges Mora was a German-born Australian entrepreneur, art dealer, patron, connoisseur and restaurateur.
Moya Dyring was an Australian artist. She was one of the first women artists to embrace Modernism and exhibit cubist paintings in Melbourne. For several years she was a member of the modern art community known as the Heide Circle, named after the home of art collectors John and Sunday Reed, and now the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Dyring then travelled to the USA and France, where she lived most her life. Her work is held in the Heide Museum as well as the National Gallery of Australia.
McGlashan Everist is an Australian architectural practice founded in 1955 by David McGlashan and Neil Everist. Their designs are characterised by low-spread houses with flat roofs and walls of tall, timber framed windows. Although their last project under the original two architects was completed in 1976, the firm continues to flourish in the educational sector and merged with a larger international practice in 2022, and is now known as PMDL-McGlashan Everist (PMDL-MEA). The firm continues to offer architectural and planning services in Geelong and throughout Australia.
Sir Sidney Robert Nolan was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of media, 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 that of Ned Kelly, the bushranger and outlaw. Nolan's stylised depiction of Kelly's armour has become an icon of Australian art.
Danila Vassilieff was a Russian-born Australian painter and sculptor. He has been called the "father of Australian modernism".
Peter Bryant Burns was an Australian architect and artist who practised from 1952 to 1989. He was known for his involvement in Contemporary Art Society exhibitions, his co-founding of the journal Architecture and Arts and his contributions to the Australian post-war Modern Art movement.
Violet Cynthia Reed Nolan (1908–1976) was an Australian writer and gallerist who promoted modern art and design in Australia during the early to mid 1930s. She was a key member of the Heide Circle around Sunday and John Reed. Later she was based in London, but travelled widely. Although she and sister in law Sunday Reed had a bitter split after Cynthia Reed and Sidney Nolan married in 1948, John Reed described her on her death in 1976 as “Sunday's best friend” In the later 20th century, Reed Nolan was mostly remembered as the cause of the high-profile public feud between her husband and Australian author Patrick White.
The Museum of Modern Art Australia (MOMAA), alternatively named the 'Museum of Modern Art of Australia,' or, according to McCulloch, the 'Museum of Modern Art and Design' (MOMAD), was founded by Australian art patron John Reed in 1958 in Tavistock Place, a lane-way off 376 Flinders Street, Melbourne, launched previously with a survey of Modernist Victorian women artists on 1 June 1956, organised by the Reeds who had taken on the then named Gallery of Contemporary Art. It held exhibitions of important contemporary Australian and international art of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Museum operated until 1966 and was formally dissolved in 1981.
Dawn Sime, who was also known as Dawn Frances Sloggett and Dawn Westbrook, was an abstract painter who was part of the expressionist movement in Melbourne in the late 1950s and 1960s. A pioneer of abstraction at the time, she was among only a few in the field She spent most of her life in Melbourne and died in Castlemaine.
Gray Smith was an Australian artist, poet and jeweller who was part of the Heide Circle. While best known as the famous Australian artist Joy Hester's spouse, his most productive artistic period came later while married to Joan Upward in the '60s and '70s. Smith's modernist paintings often featured isolated figures in Australian outback landscapes.
