Modern Art

Modern art to the 1970s

John and Sunday Reed started their collection with the acquisition of works by artists spearheading the modernist movement in Australia, such as Sam Atyeo, Adrian Lawlor and Moya Dyring. Later their collection represented artists as diverse in practice as Yosl Bergner, Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, Mike Brown, Noel Counihan, Joy Hester, Elwyn Lynn, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Edwin Tanner, Albert Tucker, Danila Vassilieff and Fred Williams, many of whom they counted among their friends. The work of several of these featured in Angry Penguins, a journal John Reed co-published in the 1940s; many were associated with the local development of expressionism, social realism and surrealism, and reflect the Reeds’ involvement in the Contemporary Art Society, the Gallery of Contemporary Art and its successor the Museum of Modern Art of Australia in the 1950s and 1960s.

During the 1970s the Reeds began to collect the work of a younger generation of artists, contemporaries of their adopted son Sweeney Reed. These included the artists Sweeney exhibited at his two galleries—Strines (1966–1969) and Sweeney Reed Gallery (1972–1975), such as Les Kossatz, Col Jordan, Sydney Ball and John Kryzwokulski.