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Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of Modern Art

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The highly influential Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art toured Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in 1939. It was sponsored by the late Sir Keith Murdoch, proprietor of the Adelaide Advertiser, the Melbourne Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald and father of Rupert Murdoch, proprietor of News Limited. The saga of its itinerary is recounted in this book.

Eileen Chanin is a former director of the Macquarie Galleries, in Sydney, which were established by Basil Burdett, who collected and curated the exhibition for Murdoch.

The 1930s-40s was a tumultuous period in Australian art: it saw the foundation of the rival artists' groups - the progressive Contemporary Art Society and the conservative Australian Academy of Art - each with links to the politics of the day. Modernism was burgeoning in Europe, but most of the knowledge locals had of it was from illustrations in magazines like The Studio, usually not in colour. By the end of the Second World War, the AAA had disappeared, and the Herald exhibition played no small role in its demise.

The collection of paintings and sculptures included the first originals by van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, Leger, Matisse and the School of Paris to be shown in Australia. The tour opened in the (then) National Gallery of South Australia, and Adelaide took to the works wholeheartedly. But Melbourne and Sydney were not so ready for Modernism. Neither city would open its state gallery to 'degenerates and perverts', so the collection was shown in the Melbourne Town Hall and, in Sydney, in David Jones department store. Of course, all the controversy made good copy for The Herald.

In September, 1939, the Second World War was declared, necessitating that the works be stored here until 1946. This was done in both the Melbourne and Sydney state galleries, their 'more precious' permanent collections having been sent away for safe-keeping! The common belief that the collection was secluded in the basement of the Art Gallery of NSW 'for the duration' is, apparently, a furphy. In fact, some of the works were also shown in Brisbane, and many artists became familiar with them.

Most of the 217 works were for sale, but only a few of the least controversial were purchased by our state galleries, Melbourne being the exception (it purchased the only van Gogh oil in Australia still - of which, incidentally, the provenance has recently been challenged). Thus, they passed up an opportunity that, as it turned out, was never to be repeated. On the other hand, future Prime Minister, Dr H V Evatt, bought works by Modigliani, Leger and Vlaminck.

Interestingly, the collection included two of the earliest expatriate Australian painters to embrace Modernism - Derwent Lees and John Wardell Power (grandson of the architect of St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne, and who had written a little-known exposition of the principles of abstraction in 1933). Neither of these artists ever returned to Australia, though Power's estate was repatriated to form the nucleus of the Power Institute of Fine Arts in Sydney University the after the death of his widow in 1961. Surprisingly, however, although Lees's picture is illustrated in the book, it gives Power just two lines.

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What Art Is - and Isn't: An Aesthetic Tract