Heide Circle

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The Heide Circle was a loose grouping of artists who lived and worked at "Heide", a former dairy farm on the Yarra River floodplain at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, counting amongst their number many of Australia's best-known modernist painters.

Heide was purchased in 1934 by John and Sunday Reed, passionate supporters and collectors of Australian art and culture. Amongst other activities, John Reed published the modernist literary magazine Angry Penguins, which earned its place in Australia's cultural history with the notorious Ern Malley hoax.

A number of modernist artists came to live and work at various times through the 1930s, 40s and 50s at Heide, and as such it became the place where many of the most famous works of the period were painted. Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, and Joy Hester, amongst others, all worked at Heide, Nolan painting his famous serious of Ned Kelly works in the living room there.

The Heide Circle is well known for the intertwined personal and professional lives of the people involved. Sunday Reed conducted affairs with a number of them, with the knowledge of her husband.

The Heide Circle continued in their commitment to Figurative Modernism through the 1950s and 60s, with several of the artists forming the Antipodeans Group and taking a stand against the new abstract art.

Heide is located very close to Heidelberg, the area associated with a famous earlier Melbourne art movement, the Heidelberg School. The north-eastern fringes of Melbourne, particularly further out at Eltham, retain a close association with the visual arts.

The Heide Museum of Modern Art is now an art museum featuring most of the artists of the period, and actively supporting the development and promotion of contemporary art in Australia.