The Heide Collection

The Heide Collection by Linda Michael, published by the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2011, is the sort of art book that begins with paintings and very quickly becomes a story about people, place, taste, patronage and the slightly dangerous consequences of inviting too many artists to your house.

Heide, in Melbourne, occupies a special place in Australian cultural history. It was not merely a house with pictures in it, but a meeting place, working environment and creative centre associated with some of the most important figures in twentieth-century Australian art.

In other words, rather more interesting than the average suburban property.

John and Sunday Reed, whose lives became inseparable from Heide, gathered around them artists, writers and intellectuals and helped create the extraordinary cultural world now associated with the place. The resulting collection reflects not simply changing artistic styles but friendships, arguments, loyalties, experiments and the complicated machinery through which art actually gets made.

Linda Michael’s book presents the Heide collection as a whole, bringing together works that help tell the story of modern Australian art and the institution that grew around it.

The appeal is partly visual, naturally.

There are paintings, drawings and other works to look at.

But there is also the much more entertaining human background.

Art history tends to become considerably livelier once one remembers that artists were not abstract names printed beneath pictures.

They had personalities.

They fell in love.

They quarrelled.

They needed money.

They annoyed one another.

And occasionally somebody had to decide whether the extraordinary thing leaning against the wall was a masterpiece or simply unfinished.

Heide became closely associated with the development of modernism in Australia and with artists whose work helped define a distinctive Australian visual culture.

The collection therefore offers a route through changing ideas about landscape, portraiture, abstraction, identity and what Australian art might actually be.

This was not always a calm process.

Modern art has rarely arrived politely.

It tends to appear, offend somebody, attract criticism, acquire supporters, become respectable and eventually end up reproduced in expensive books.

A familiar career path.

The great strength of a museum collection book is that it allows all of this to be seen in context.

One artist leads to another.

One movement reacts against the previous one.

A collector’s personal taste gradually becomes cultural history.

And suddenly a picture that once hung in somebody’s home is being discussed in language involving national significance.

Published by the Heide Museum of Modern Art, this volume is also closely tied to the institution itself, making it especially appealing to anyone interested in Australian museums, collecting history and the fascinating question of how private enthusiasm becomes public heritage.

There is something rather wonderful about that transformation.

People buy art because they love it.

They hang it on walls.

Friends come round.

More artists appear.

Decades pass.

Eventually somebody produces a catalogue.

Civilisation has happened again.

For readers interested in Australian art, modernism, museum collections, art patronage or the cultural history surrounding Heide, this is a handsome and useful volume.

It is also excellent for anyone who likes art books with enough substance to be read properly rather than merely arranged on a coffee table beside an aggressively minimalist vase.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. Published in 2011, it is still fairly youthful by Crappy Old Books standards and has not yet had sufficient time to become an archaeological object.

ISBN: 9781921330230.

A richly illustrated introduction to the Heide collection and the remarkable artistic world surrounding it, bringing together modern Australian art, collectors, personalities and the long process by which private taste becomes public history.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where the art may be modern, but the books are already on their second life.

Keep browsing: See more Art books Other books by Linda Michael