Angry Penguins

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Angry Penguins. An Australian avant-garde quarterly journal (1940–6) devoted to art and literature, published first in Adelaide and then from 1943 in Melbourne; the title comes from a line in a poem by its founder, the writer Max Harris (1921–96). It encouraged and provided a focus for a group of young painters who worked in an Expressionist vein and attempted to create an authentic Australian art free from European influences; among them were Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval (b 1923), and Albert Tucker (1914–99). They were opposed by a group of Social Realist painters, among them Noel Counihan (1913–86), and the debate between the two factions in the pages of Angry Penguins helped to make Melbourne a lively artistic centre in the early 1940s. In 1944 the journal was the victim of a celebrated hoax when it devoted an issue to the poems of the non-existent ‘Ern Malley’, whose works were concocted from arbitrarily selected quotations put together by two fairly traditional poets who thought the journal was pretentious and wanted to test the critical judgement of the editors. It never really recovered from the bad publicity this caused.

Angry Penguins An Australian avant-garde quarterly journal (1940–6) devoted to art and literature, published first in Adelaide and then from 1943 in Melbourne; the title comes from a line in a poem by its founder, the writer Max Harris (1921–96). It encouraged and provided a focus for a group of young painters who worked in an Expressionist vein and attempted to create an authentic Australian art free from European influences; among them were Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. They were opposed by a group of Social Realist painters, among them Noel Counihan (1913–+86), and the debate between the two factions in the pages of Angry Penguins helped to make Melbourne a lively artistic centre in the early 1940s. In 1944 the journal was the victim of a celebrated hoax when it devoted an issue to the poems of the non-existent ‘Ern Malley’, whose works were concocted from arbitrarily selected quotations put together by two fairly traditional poets who thought the journal was pretentious and wanted to test the critical judgement of the editors. It never really recovered from the bad publicity this caused.