Angry Penguins

Art and literary journal founded in 1940

Cover of the December 1945 issue of Angry Penguins, designed by Albert Tucker

Angry Penguins was an art and literary journal founded in 1940 by surrealist poet Max Harris, at the age of 18. Originally based in Adelaide, the journal moved to Melbourne in 1942 once Harris joined the Heide Circle, a group of avant-garde 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 that would later be known by the same name. Key figures of the movement include Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester, Gray Smith, and Albert Tucker.

## Origins and ethos

[edit]

The precursor to the Angry Penguins magazine, Phoenix, was published at the University of Adelaide with funds from the University Union. Funding was withdrawn in 1940 following a change in leadership. Phoenix was no longer published, but carried on as Angry Penguins under the Arts Association, with funding from J. I. M. Stewart and Charles Jury, and others.[1][2]

Angry Penguins was first published in the South Australian capital of Adelaide. The title is derived from a phrase in Harris' poem "Mithridatum of Despair": "as drunks, the angry penguins of the night", and its use as a magazine title was suggested to Harris by C. R. Jury.[3]

The magazine's main Adelaide rival was the Jindyworobaks, a nationalist and anti-modernist literary movement promoting Indigenous Australian culture and the Australian bush ballad tradition. According to Angry Penguins poet Geoffrey Dutton, "we stayed with Yeats, Eliot and Auden, ... and left Lawson and Paterson to the Jindys."[4] In 1942, Harris gained the patronage of John and Sunday Reed in Melbourne, and the magazine subsequently moved to the couple's home at Heide (now the Heide Museum of Modern Art).

The Angry Penguins artists were early Australian exponents of surrealism and expressionism, and included John Perceval, Guy Gray Smith, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Danila Vassilieff, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester.

## The Ern Malley hoax

[edit]

Main article: Ern Malley

Their interest in Surrealism led James McAuley and Harold Stewart during their time at the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs to create the group's most famous event, the Ern Malley hoax and the subsequent trial for indecency. James McAuley and Harold Stewart submitted a group of poems that fitted in with the typical submissions featured in the magazine's 1944 autumn number, and attributed them to a recently deceased young poet named Ern Malley, who never actually existed. These poems were constructed as a pastiche of fragments pasted together nonsensically; McAuley and Stewart were critical of Modernism, and wanted to prove that it has no inherent value.[5] The poems were received and published enthusiastically by the creators and patrons of the magazine. When it was revealed to be a hoax, the publication received negative backlash, and the affair tarnished the image of the magazine.[6]

## Criticism

[edit]

The Communist Party of Australia publicly criticized Angry Penguins. In the August 1944 issue of the Communist Review, to support his assertion that the magazine "has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards"[7] Vic O'Connor writes that editors of cultural publications are responsible for fostering cultural development as a part of the overall advancement of "standards of social and economic life in Australia", and that the editors of Angry Penguins are "completely indifferent" to this.[7]

## Legacy and influence

[edit]

The Angry Penguins art movement was surveyed in the 1988 exhibition Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, held at the Hayward Gallery in London.[8] In the exhibition's catalogue, English novelist C. P. Snow is quoted as saying that the Angry Penguins movement "was probably the last flowering of a 'national' modernism that a completely internationalised world of the arts was likely to see".[9]

### Cultural references

[edit]

* My Life as a Fake is a 2003 novel by Peter Carey[10] based on the Ern Malley hoax. It is a first-person narrative from the point of view of a young woman editing a literary magazine who encounters the perpetrator of the hoax (called Bob McCorkle, not Ern Malley, in the story) after many years. Carey is more interested in the idea of "magical thinking" than a literal recount; the Ern Malley character is a flesh-and-blood person who haunts his "creator."[11]
* In Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013),[12] the main character, Dorrigo Evans, meets the love of his life at the launch of Angry Penguins.

## See also

[edit]

* Ern Malley
* Alfred Tipper
* Museum of Modern Art Australia
* John Reed
* Heidi Circle
* 1944 in Australian Literature
* Sokal affair

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Geoffrey, Dutton (1994). Out in the open : an autobiography. University of Queensland Press. p. 85\. ISBN 0-7022-2681-5. OCLC 440611987.
2. ^ Hoskin, Cheryl (2013). ""A Genius About the Place": The Phoenix Magazine and Australian modernism" (PDF). Paper Presented at South Australian History Festival Exhibition, May 2013. - via Adelaide University.
3. ^ Nick Harvey; et al. "A History of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide 1876-2012" (PDF). University of Adelaide. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 December 2015. Retrieved 20 August 2015.
4. ^ Dutton, Geoffrey. Out in the Open: An Autobiography. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1995. ISBN 0702228109, p. 86
5. ^ Phiddian, Robert (1997). "Are Parody and Deconstruction Secretly the Same Thing?". New Literary History. 28 (4): 673–696. doi:10.1353/nlh.1997.0056. JSTOR 20057449. S2CID 144559591.
6. ^ Lloyd, Brian (1 May 2001). "Ern Malley and His Rivals". Australian Literary Studies. 20 (1): 20. Gale A75088915.
7. ^ a b O'Connor, Vic. "A Criticism of Adelaide's 'Angry Penguins.'" The Communist Review. August 1944. https://www.marxists.org/history/australia/comintern/sections/australia/1944/adelaide.htm
8. ^ Keon, Michael (1 August 1989). "Angry Penguins at home and abroad", The Age.
9. ^ Hayward Gallery. Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s. London: South Bank Centre, 1988. ISBN 1853320218.[page needed]
10. ^ Carey, Peter (2003), My life as a fake, Knopf (Random House Australia), ISBN 978-1-74051-246-6
11. ^ Moran, Jennifer (2003) Carey's powerful plea for novel as act of imagination, The Canberra Times, 21 August 2003, p. 3
12. ^ Flanagan, Richard (2013), The narrow road to the deep north, Random House Australia, ISBN 978-1-74166-670-0[page needed]

## External links

[edit]

* cultureandrecreation.gov.au
* Ernmalley
* The Angry Penguins

* v
* t
* e

Schools of poetry

* Acmeism
* Akhmatova's Orphans
* Angry Penguins
* Auden Group
* The Beats
* Black Arts Movement
* Black Mountain poets
* British Poetry Revival
* Cairo poets
* Castalian Band
* Cavalier poets
* Chhayavaad
* Churchyard poets
* Conceptismo
* Confessionalists
* Créolité
* Cubo-Futurism
* Culteranismo
* Cyclic Poets
* Dada
* Deep image
* Della Cruscans
* Dolce Stil Novo
* Dymock poets
* Ecopoetry
* Ego-Futurism
* The poets of Elan
* Flarf
* Fugitives
* Garip
* Gay Saber
* Generation of '27
* Generation of the '30s
* Generation of '98
* Georgian poets
* Goliard
* The Group
* Harlem Renaissance
* Harvard Aesthetes
* Hungry generation
* Imaginism
* Imagism
* Informationist poetry
* İkinci Yeni
* Jindyworobaks
* Lake Poets
* Language poets
* Marinism
* Martian poetry
* Metaphysical poets
* Misty Poets
* Modernist poetry
* The Movement
* Négritude
* Neotericism
* New American Poetry
* New Apocalyptics
* New Formalism
* New York School
* Oberiu
* Objectivists
* Others
* Parnassian poets
* La Pléiade
* Précieuses
* Rhymers' Club
* San Francisco Renaissance
* Scottish Renaissance
* Sicilian School
* Sons of Ben
* Southern Agrarians
* Spasmodic poets
* Sung poetry
* Surrealism
* Symbolism
* Uranian poetry
* Zutiste

Poetry portal

* v
* t
* e

Avant-garde movements

Visual art|

* Abstract expressionism
* Art Nouveau
* Art & Language
* Conceptual art
* Constructivism
* Proto-Cubism
* Cubism
* Functionalism
* Bauhaus
* Grosvenor School
* Devětsil
* Divisionism
* Fauvism
* Impressionism
* Neo-Impressionism
* Post-Impressionism
* Color Field
* Incoherents
* Lyrical Abstraction
* Mail art
* Minimalism
* Mir iskusstva
* Multidimensional art
* Neoplasticism
* De Stijl
* Neue Slowenische Kunst
* Nonconformism
* Nouveau réalisme
* Orphism
* Performance art
* Pop art
* Process art
* Purism
* Rayonism
* Suprematism
* Temporary art
* Vorticism

Literature
and poetry|

* Acmeism
* Angry Penguins
* Asemic writing
* Conceptual poetry
* Cyberpunk
* Ego-Futurism
* Experimental literature
* Flarf poetry
* Hungry generation
* Imaginism
* Imagism
* Language poets
* Neoavanguardia
* Neoteric
* Nouveau roman
* Oberiu
* Oulipo
* Slam poetry
* Ultraísmo
* Visual poetry
* Zaum

Music|

| By style|

* Funk
* Jazz
* Free funk
* Yass
* Pop
* Rock
* Prog
* Punk
* Metal

|

Others|

* Aleatoric music
* Ars nova
* Ars subtilior
* Atonal music
* Electroacoustic music
* Electronic music
* Industrial music
* Experimental pop
* Free jazz
* Free improvisation
* Futurism
* Microtonal music
* Minimal music
* Drone music
* Music theatre
* Musique concrète
* New Complexity
* No wave
* Noise music
* Post-rock
* Rock in Opposition
* Second Viennese School
* Serialism
* Spectral music
* Stochastic music
* Textural music
* Totalism
* Twelve-tone technique

Cinema
and theatre|

* Cinéma pur
* Dogme 95
* Drop Art
* Epic theatre
* Experimental film
* Experimental theatre
* Modernist film
* Poetic realism
* Postdramatic theatre
* Remodernist film
* Structural film
* Theatre of the Absurd
* Theatre of Cruelty

General|

* Constructivism
* Dada
* Expressionism
* Fluxus
* Futurism
* Russian Futurism
* Cubo-Futurism
* Lettrism
* Modernism
* Minimalism
* Postminimalism
* Neo-minimalism
* Neo-Dada
* Neoism
* Postmodernism
* Postmodernist film
* Late modernism
* Primitivism
* Situationist International
* Social realism
* Socialist realism
* Surrealism
* Symbolism
* Russian symbolism

*[v]: View this template
*[t]: Discuss this template
*[e]: Edit this template