Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip explains the effects of the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art on the Australian art community through interviews with artists Albert Tucker, John Perceval and Yosl Bergner and a narration illustrated with historic photographs from the Exhibition’s catalogue. Images shown include photographs of the main opponents to the Exhibition and a racial caricature of a Jewish artist as the narration describes anti-Jewish, antimodern and anticommunist views. The artists emphasise the dramatic effect that seeing these works for the first time had on them.

Educational value points

• The Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, held in 1939 and discussed in the clip, had a dramatic influence on a generation of young Australian artists. It displayed original European works of the previous 40 years at a time when many had seen only reproductions of such works. Artists who saw the Exhibition included Albert Tucker (1914–99), John Perceval (1923–2000), Sidney Nolan (1917–92) and Arthur Boyd (1920–99).

• Opponents of the Exhibition were vociferous in their criticism, linking modern art with jazz, communists and Jews to portray it as a threat to white European civilisation. J S MacDonald (1878-1952), director of the National Gallery of Victoria at the time, famously described the art as the work of ‘degenerates and perverts’. He and Lionel Lindsay (1874–1961), trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, denied the Exhibition space in their galleries.

• The anti-Semitism depicted in the clip reflects a time when racial stereotyping was commonly accepted and many believed that race determined intelligence, physical capacity and even ‘moral character’. The racial views of MacDonald and Lindsay were widely held in the West at the time and they are remarkably similar to those of the Nazis, who also called modern art ‘degenerate’ (entartete kunst) and claimed it was the product of ‘Jewish communists’.

• John Perceval and Albert Tucker, seen in the clip, were both influenced in their art by works they saw in the Exhibition, especially surrealist and expressionist works. They became part of a movement of poets, writers and artists known as the Angry Penguins, who were determined to promote Modernism across the arts in Australia at a time when modern art, literature, music and architecture continued to be viewed with suspicion.

• The Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art was extremely popular with the general public in Australia. No art exhibition of such range and size had ever been seen in the country before. From a total population of only 7 million, more than 70,000 Australians saw the Exhibition in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne. Up to 48,000 saw it in Melbourne alone and on the first day in Melbourne 2,000 people were turned away.

• The Exhibition was commissioned by Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952), chairman of the Melbourne Herald newspaper, and the collection of more than 200 works was chosen by Basil Burdett (1897–1942), the Herald’s art critic. Murdoch, who had an interest in modern art, was appointed a trustee of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1933, and eventually succeeded in having MacDonald replaced as director of the Gallery in 1941.