Comment – an overview
Comment is one of two little magazines dedicated solely to avant garde art and literature published in Melbourne during World War 2. The better known of the two is Angry Penguins with nine issues published between October 1940 and June 1946. Comment was published by Comment Publications and edited by Cecily Crozier who was born in Melbourne on 21 July 1911. This website is dedicated to Cecily and went live on the centenary of her birth. Cecily’s father was a mining engineer and worked...
Read MoreErn Malley – an overview
The mysterious Ern Malley first visited Heide in the late spring of 1943. More visitation than visit, his presence took the form of sixteen modernist styled poems – the entire corpus of his brief and tragic existence. Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England in 1918, came to Australia after his father died in 1920, and went to school in Sydney. His mother died and he left school in 1933, worked as a mechanic and went to Melbourne in 1935 where he lived in a room by himself and sold insurance...
Read MoreSidney Nolan – an overview
Sidney Nolan is one of the best known Australian artists, and needs no introduction. Creator of the iconic Ned Kelly helmet emblem, for sixty years his paintings and his life have been scrutinised, sanitised, scarified and sensationalised in countless monographs, biographies, catalogue essays and weekend magazines. From the artistic truancies of his St Kilda ‘kitsch heaven’ and the lyrical palettes of his Heide years with their magical Kellys; through his central Australian landscapes, his...
Read MoreHeide – an overview
Heide, the home of John and Sunday Reed, is an iconic landmark in Australian cultural history. The role of Heide and the Reeds has been extensively dissected, analysed and discussed, with flavours of the many accounts ranging from portrayals of intellectual flowerings in an antipodean Bloomsbury, to deflowerings more carnal than intellectual amidst the predations of a most disquieting muse. Heide is perhaps best known as the place where Sidney Nolan’s landmark first Ned Kelly series was...
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