A University of Queensland art historian has been selected to edit thousands of often controversial letters by a central figure in Australia's contemporary art movement.
Penguin publishers have contracted Art History Department Associate Professor Nancy Underhill to produce a 400-page volume of letters written by wealthy lawyer, art patron John Reed between 1933 and 1981.
According to Dr Underhill, the book will fill a big gap in the cultural history of Melbourne and Australia and be a basic tool for anyone studying Australian culture but especially literature, publishing and the visual arts.
She said it had been a great privilege to be only the second person ever granted open access to the John Reed letters.
John and his wife Sunday (nee Baillieu) opened their home at Heide, a beautiful farmhouse on the banks of the Yarra in Bulleen, just outside Melbourne, to writers, artists and musicians between 1932 and their deaths in 1981.
'Reed established the farmhouse as part of a Utopian plan to create a cell of ideal living for artistically orientated people. Reed financed the publishing company he and Max Harris operated which produced Angry Penguins including the Ern Malley poems - probably Australia's greatest literary hoax - and the left-wing newspaper Tomorrow. The Reeds were also the financial force behind the establishment of Melbourne's Contemporary Art Society and the Museum of Modern Art,' she said.
'Heide became a hotbed of extraordinary people. Max Harris, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, the music critic John Sinclair all occasionally lived there while Sidney Nolan, Sunday's live-in lover, painted his Ned Kelly pictures there. Their close friends included Sam Atyeo who became Doc Evatt's ?fix-it man', the Boyds, the musician Bernard Heinze, jazzman Graeme Bell, the furniture designer Fred Ward, Barry Humphries and later Mike Brown, Bob Dickerson, Charles and Barbara Blackman.'
Over the past three years, Dr Underhill has travelled to and from the La Trobe Library in Melbourne to read and re-read each of the thousands of letters written and received by Reed and selected several hundred for the book, due for release in 1999.
She said the book, including her 10,000-word critique, will cast new light on the poets, musicians and visual artists who frequented Heide, explain the history of the Angry Penguins literary movement, the Ern Malley case, look at the history of the Contemporary Art Society and open a lot of material on the cultural policy of the Communist Party including its relations with John Reed.
The letters also showed that like Sunday's love letters, John Reed's letters revealed a controlling personality and that together they craved complete devotion and psychological involvement from others which proved too much for Sidney Nolan and Max Harris in particular, she said.
Many people had been waylaid by Heide's bizarre and Bohemian reputation, she said.
'While most people know about Heide and the Art Gallery established there in 1981, attention has focused on the juicy aspects of their private lives rather than an assessment of the intellectual, aesthetic and political positions nurtured at Heide,' Dr Underhill said.
'The footnotes and critical text of my book will re-angle the focus away from the lovers, suicides and the parentage of various children to extend the issues raised by Richard Haese's important Rebels and Precursors published in the early 1980s and will counter many of the views espoused by Bernard Smith whose account of the period has dominated the history of Australian art.
'However, as I have access to all the Reed letters and those held by Albert Tucker, the selection now offers new evidence as to the relationships with Sidney Nolan, his second wife, Cynthia, who was John Reed's sister and of course Sweeney Reed. While Joy Hester and Albert Tucker's son, the Reeds adopted and raised him and until he killed himself in 1979, his avant-garde art galleries and poetry were supported by the Reeds.
'Reading, typing, analysing and selecting thousands of letters, then interviewing people here and overseas like Mary Nolan, the Tuckers, Charles Osborne, Barrett Reid (who started the project) and Max Harris' widow is an enormous and time-consuming task but the type of long-term research that a more senior academic should be encouraged to undertake.'
Once completed, Dr Underhill will use the material to write essays on issues such as Kenneth Clark's use of Sidney Nolan, Herbert Read's influence on Australian Culture and the relationship of the Reeds and the Communist Party.
For more information, contact Dr Underhill (telephone 07 3365 2211).
