Angry Penguins

The Angry Penguins sought to introduce avant-garde ideas into Australian art and literature, and position Australia within a broader international modernism.

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.

In the August 1944 issue of the Communist Review, to support his assertion that the journal "has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards",[5] Vic O'Connor wrote 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".

When it was revealed to be a hoax, Angry Penguins received negative backlash, and the affair tarnished the image of the journal, which was subsequently tried and convicted for indecency on the grounds that the poems contained obscene content.

[9] 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".

Cover of the December 1945 issue of Angry Penguins , designed by Albert Tucker
The Ern Malley edition of Angry Penguins . Featured on the cover is a Sidney Nolan painting inspired by lines from Malley's poem Petit Testament , which are printed on the cover, bottom right: "I said to my love (who is living) / Dear we shall never be that verb / Perched on the sole Arabian Tree / (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail)". [ 6 ]