Heide IHouse of Ideas
Danila Vassilieff, Valerie and Betty 1937, oil on plywood, 44.9 x 53.5 cm, Purchased from John and Sunday Reed 1980
The home of John and Sunday Reed between 1935 and 1967, the Heide I cottage was a hub of progressive thinking and modernist ideas that centred on art, but which extended to literature, politics and sociology. The rise of Communism and Fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the spectre of World War II spurred urgent debate concerning the role of the artist and the imperative of creative freedom. Drawing on aspects of the European art movements of Cubism, Surrealism and Expressionism, and their own personal experiences, the artists of the Heide circle forged a new humanist, antipodean modernism, the hallmark of which was a shift from objective to subjective reality.
