Obituary | Dr. Richard Haese (1944-2025) – an Appreciation

Dr. Richard Haese (1944-2025) – an Appreciation

People of note have always recognized Dr. Richard Haese’s talents. The late art historian Professor Virginia Spate of Sydney University and the late historian Professor James A. Main of Flinders University examined his PhD thesis ‘Cultural Radicals in Australian Society 1937-47’. Both scholars made percipient observations. In the first paragraph of her examiner’s report (16 August 1979) Spate noted the extent to which ‘this thesis fills an important gap in the history of Australian art “politics”, which has previously been seriously treated only by Bernard Smith in his Australian Painting 1788-1960 – and then necessarily in a more summary manner’. Main’s report (13 June 1979) fully agrees with the tenor of this summation and offers a more extended observation: ‘All in all, Haese has given us a deeper and more complex analysis of the major artistic innovations of the time than any other writer’.

These erudite comments point to two of Haese’s most consistent attributes: his ability to note the overlooked and his understanding of the actual practice of art. This combination of intellectual and practical attributes runs like a continuous thread through his long-term scholarly contributions and authoritative publications.

Haese’s innate artistic understanding was already noted during his art school education at the South Australian School of Art in 1966, where he was awarded the Harry P. Gill Memorial Medal and Prize. His research skills were honed under the guidance of Professor Geoffrey Searle (of From Deserts the Prophets Come: The Creative Spirit in Australia 1788-1972 fame) who acted as his PhD thesis supervisor at Monash University and provided him with an acute feeling for Australian history and the place of cultural activities in the shaping of national identity. It is this historical acuity that threads its way through Haese’s research and surfaces most prominently in his first major publication, the ground-breaking Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, published in 1981.

It is hard to overestimate the impact and importance of this book and its subsequent three editions. While very well-known and highly respected by scholars it also garnered a wide readership. It continues to be a major reference source, being cited in all post-Eighties studies of Australian art and culture and is valued as establishing a new paradigm for the study of the visual arts in Australia.

The virtues of Haese’s book are many, but perhaps its most significant dimension is its even-handed and unprejudiced insight into overlooked aspects of Australian culture and its fresh recognition of the worth and contributions of previously under-acknowledged individuals. There is little doubt, for example, that the artistic reputation and cultural significance of the late Albert Tucker was reinvigorated and considerably enhanced by this prime publication.

Haese’s second major publication is Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011. The thirty years between these two seminal publications brackets a period of highly productive research that led to a further eighteen scholarly publications, eight of which were commissioned by the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Tolarno Gallery, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. All of this was achieved while fulfilling his full-time academic responsibilities as Senior Lecturer in the notable Department of Art History at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Haese’s work during this time span has always drawn the highest recognition. His first publication met with unprecedented acceptance throughout intellectual circles. The late Professor Bernard Smith, the doyen of Australian art history, wrote: ‘Richard Haese’s book Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art is a book that everyone seriously interested in Australian culture should read’ (Age Monthly Review, Vol. 1, No. 6, Oct. 1981). Writing in the national magazine The Bulletin (27 Oct. 1981), the writer and historian Geoffrey Dutton submitted that:

Rebels and Precursors … is one of the most important books to have appeared about Australian art. Its repercussions extend beyond artists and works of art, most obviously to literature, but also to matters of politics, social history and the Australian character.

The cultural commentator Michael Keon agreed (Quadrant Monthly, May 1982):

Richard Haese has, indeed, written not only art history, but history. Mainstream history, I believe. Haese has done something else that that he may not have realized. He has made a break, that I think can only continue to widen, in that ‘tyranny of distance’ in which we have for so long not so much been immured as immured ourselves. Rebels and Precursors will become as much required reading in London, Paris and New York, as in Melbourne and Sydney.

In a letter (23 December 1981) to Haese, Daniel Thomas, then Senior Curator of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, wrote:

Sunday Reed’s death, following so close upon John’s, has made me realize that you probably became as close to them as anybody … In any case, I have not yet sent congratulations for your marvelous book Rebels and Precursors, which now lives beside me for constant reference.

The book was universally lauded in many other reviews – and in 1982 it won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. It was also highly commended in the National Book Council Awards for Australian Literature and short listed for The Age Book of the Year award in 1981.

Haese’s publication is now regarded as the standard study of the period. Reviewing the book for The Age newspaper on 10 October 1981, Professor Patrick McCaughey (the then Director of The National Gallery of Victoria) observed:

Although Australian consciousness changed decisively during that decade, the period remains oddly neglected in recent art writing and the walls of our public art galleries are largely mute about the striking impact of those years. Dr. Richard Haese’s important new book should change that state of affairs permanently. He has written a long, subtle and absorbing study of the period and the lives of the artists. … If this book fosters a new determination on the part of every major public gallery to represent properly the rebels and precursors of our present moment, it will have achieved even more than it has already.

There is little doubt that things did change due in no small part to the impact of this book. McCaughey referred to this dimension of the book’s historical influence in his introductory essay for the catalogue of the Field to Figuration: Australian Art 1960-1986 exhibition curated by Robert Lindsay at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, observing that ‘one other aspect of the 1980s has contributed substantial and influential “background noise” to the changed conditions of Australian art – namely the rediscovery and revival of the 1940s in Australian art. It fed directly into the expressionist revival, and in a way sanctioned the present. Part of the stimulus for this revival would include the publication of Richard Haese’s Rebels and Precursors in 1981’.

The late Robert Hughes, when inscribing a complimentary copy of his book American Visions for Haese, confided: ‘Tell Richard that his book was absolutely pivotal to my own work.’ Such cultural impacts had already been anticipated by Brian Johns, the publishing director of Penguin Books (later to become Chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Commission). In a letter to La Trobe University (16 July 1981) Johns wrote: ‘We are extremely confident that as a result of Richard Haese’s approach Rebels and Precursors will reach across disciplines and be accepted as a central work by those involved in exploring Australia’s cultural traditions’.

There are distinct signs that Haese’s second major publication Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011 attracted comparable levels of response. The content of the book goes well beyond any biographical coverage and places the reclusive Brown and his work within a nexus of ideas that examine the rise of the radical Imitation Realist movement and explains its connections with Postmodernism. When talking casually over dinner about the still unfinished book Brown admitted he felt that ‘until now no one had got me right; I feel finally understood’.

McCaughey selected Haese’s publication as one of his three books of the year for the Australian Book Review (Dec. 2012 – Jan. 2013, No. 347), observing:

Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 (Miegunyah Press) by Richard Haese is a most refreshing, readable, and original contribution to the literature of Australian art history and has gone under-acknowledged in the field.

The Sydney artist Imants Tillers also responded positively to the book in the national art journal Art and Australia (Nov. 2012):

The genius of Haese’s book is that it traces the development of Mike Brown’s art in relation to the evolving cultural and artistic contexts in which he lived and worked, particularly its portrayal of the counter-culture and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – one of the most ‘vital, disputatious and creative periods in Australian art’. To this I can attest personally.

The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (the premier Australian art history association) short-listed Permanent Revolution for its Power Institute Prize for Best Book award for 2012. The book was awarded equal second prize with the judges (Professor John Clark, University of Sydney; Professor Peter McNeil, UTS and Stockholm University) commenting:

Written by a major thinker who has changed the way we think about Australian art, Permanent Revolution explores the groundwork laid for an Australian post-modernism between 1960 and 1975. The case is Mike Brown and Imitation Realism. The book exceeds a monographic approach to an artist’s life by creating a series of scopes – social, political, aesthetic and historical – that animate the bohemianism of Sydney and Melbourne in the 1960s. It successfully brings together the ‘cultural layerings’ and ‘dynamic harbour-based topography’ that Haese argues characterize the imbrication of art, life and place in Sydney. It clarifies many aspects of the recent history of Australian art. … This handsomely produced monograph continues the fine tradition established at Miegunyah Press of publishing high quality books that propel the history of visual culture in this nation.

Dr. Sheridan Palmer, who wrote the official biography of Professor Bernard Smith, reviewed Permanent Revolution in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (Vol. 12, Dec. 2012) pinpointing its significance:

Permanent Revolution continues Haese’s investigation of twentieth-century Australian art – his Rebels and Precursors was published in 1981 – and commences when artists began to abandon the landscape in favour of ‘the suspension of the painted image itself’. It localizes and universalises the key players then orbiting the art centres of Sydney and Melbourne, and finely balances the boom-time art worlds, their patrons, and the entrepreneurial ‘art grocers’. Based upon twenty-five years of research, including a considerable body of largely unpublished correspondence, mostly from Brown’s private papers and from his circle – opinions that matter – this is a sophisticated study of Australian modernist culture. … This brilliant translation of Mike Brown’s life and emissary status as a major Antipodean avant-gardist is equally a comprehensive and significant evaluation of the shift from modernism to postmodernism in Australia.

The unreserved commendations of these peer-group professional reviews are mirrored in others: notably Christopher Allen (Australian, Dec. 2 2011) and Peter Hill (Australian Book Review, March 2013). The effect of these reviews reflected both the breadth and depth of Haese’s observations. Such effects had practical responses. The Heide Museum of Modern Art held a major exhibition of the works of Mike Brown (The Sometimes Chaotic World of Mike Brown, (4 May-30 Oct. 2013) where Haese’s pioneering study underpinned both its content and curatorial rationale. Furthermore, what amounted to a Mike Brown festival flourished in a selection of Melbourne’s art galleries: Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Sarah Scout Gallery and Tarrawarra Museum of Art – all either showed Brown’s works or those of his time (See: Dan Rule, ‘Etched in Shades of Brown’ (The Age, 11 May 2013).

Haese had an enviable ability to see beyond cant and cliché and to instill the innervating virtues of fresh reappraisal. His academic work was always insightful and thorough and students responded to his personable approaches to subject matter and gained much from his specialized and interdisciplinary knowledge of Modernist and Postmodernist history, theory and practice.

All this was obvious to his many graduate and post graduate students, but it became all the more obvious to a much wider audience when he delivered the inaugural Rae Alexander Lecture at La Trobe University (‘Who’s Afraid of the Avant-Garde? Two Episodes in the Australian Response to Modernism 1915-1945’) in 1999; acted as convener at the National Conference of the Art Association of Australia and presented a paper (Australian Art: Radical Perspectives and Post Modernism) to the conference. These latter events, both held at La Trobe University (12-14 November 1993 and 30 November 1996 respectively), attracted over 500 participants and did much to promote the discipline of Art History. In addition, in 1995, Haese curated the retrospective exhibition Power to the People: The Art of Mike Brown for the National Gallery of Victoria and undertook much pro bono public work and gave many guest lectures and academic papers. His opinions were keenly sought and respected and he acted as an advisor and consultant for the National Gallery of Victoria, the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in particular the Heide Museum of Modern Art.

Haese had an abiding interest in contemporary cultural practice and theory – an interest that was supported by an informed historical, critical and philosophical knowledge. Consequently, he was always able to bring to his research work an original and resourceful mind with a clear focus that was both reasoned and expository. His publications and research thus demonstrate both a keenness of perception and a technical familiarity. He was more than superficially familiar with artistic and literary techniques, practice and politics, and consequently was more than merely sympathetic to the creative and questioning mind and its products.

Haese’s major publications form a two-part study of the development of avant-garde art in Australia. His thirty-year research project, both non-ideological and non-partisan in nature, unfolds the growth of a localized Modernism in the Forties into the enculturated Postmodernism of the Sixties and beyond. His two major publications Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art of 1981 and Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011 stand as unique and magisterial signposts of cultural history in Australia.

Many scholars agree that there are essentially three major avant-garde cultural shifts in Australian art – The Heidelberg School, the Angry Penguins and Imitation Realism – remarkably, Dr. Richard Haese has confirmed the artistic significance of two of them.

(Richard Haese died peacefully on 19 May 2025 at the Austin Hospital’s Olivia Newton-John Palliative Care Unit with his partner, Kimi Gim, by his side. He was considerably consoled by his close friends Tracy Spinks, Judith Crotty, Heja Chong and Stephen May.)

Ken Wach

Former Principal Research Fellow and Head of the School of Creative Arts

The University of Melbourne