Angry Penguins was a modernist literary and artistic movement that sought to shake up the entrenched cultural

[Celerity]

establishment of Australia in the 1940s



https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/angry-penguins



Angry Penguins was originally the title of an Australian modernist literary journal founded in 1940 at University of Adelaide by four poets: D.B. Kerr, M.H. Harris, P.G. Pfeiffer and G. Dutton. At this time the University of Adelaide was a focus of modernist writing and debate under the influence of the poet playwright and teacher C.R. Jury, who acted as patron to the magazine.

The name became that of the modernist literary and artistic movement, centred around Harris, that sought to shake up the entrenched cultural establishment of Australia in the 1940s. They were seen as ‘angry’ young people; the rebels of their day. The Angry Penguins, said Harris, expressed ‘a noisy and aggressive revolutionary modernism’ and represented the new language and the new painting of Australia. They were forthright and unapologetic, demanding to be heard and seen. The artists included Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker.

In 1944 Angry Penguins was the victim of a famous literary hoax when two opponents concocted a set of modernist poems by a writer they invented called Ern Malley. Harris published them and a storm ensued when the hoax was revealed. Harris was tried and convicted for publishing obscenities and the cause of modernism in Australia was substantially set back.




Arthur Boyd, The Baths South Melbourne, 1943
62 x 76 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The basic human passion expressed here was aggression

[niyad]

1. Thank you for this most fascinating piece of history. "Angry Penguins"

as defined in the article, seems quite apropos for today.

[Kid Berwyn]

2. A Surreal Poet

Mithridatum of Despair

We know no mithridatum of despair
as drunks, the angry penguins of the night,
straddling the cobbles of the square,
tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight.
We know no astringent pain,
no flecking of thought's dull eternal sea
in garret image, of Spain
and love...now love's parody.

See - chaos spark, struck from flint
and the plunging distemper, flare in the dawn's dull seep
of milkcart horse, morning horse
chaos horse, walking at three to the doors of sleep
with the creamy poison.
convulsions endure
from nine to five,
all life immure.
and still alive.

we know no mithridatum, nor the remembered dregs of fear,
the glass stands dry and silted; no end is near.

— Max Harris

Thank you, Celerity, for the heads-up. Mr. Harris was, and still is, ahead of the times.