There is something peculiar about artistic genius hidden in plain sight. John Perceval's ceramic angels sit in living rooms across Australia, treasured by their owners, unknown to the broader public. This week, that isolation ends. Opening at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen is John Perceval: All That We Are, the largest survey of the artist's work in more than three decades.
The last major retrospective was Of Dark and Light at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1992. That was 34 years ago. For a figure considered one of Australia's best-known artists and member of the Angry Penguins group, the absence is striking. It raises a question: how thoroughly has Australian art history forgotten one of modernism's most significant contributors?
The practical answer is mundane but revealing. The exhibition required months of detective work. Perceval's ceramic angels, made between 1957 and 1962, are not only among his most well-known works but considered among the most important series of works of Australian modernism, yet they remained scattered. "A lot of these works have been in private collections for many, many years; people love living with them, they treasure them," explains Kendrah Morgan, Heide's head curator. Once someone owns a Perceval, they keep it. Tracking down one angel meant following leads to Preshil school in Kew, where another work had resided since Perceval's children attended in the 1950s.
This curation challenge points to a deeper issue about how we value art. Perceval created up to 100 ceramic sculptures of angels, and this significant period in his artistic practice had not been properly documented or exhibited, a major remiss in understanding Australian art. The implication is stark: one of Australia's modernist masters has been assessed almost entirely through his paintings, while his ceramics escaped serious scholarly attention.
The angels themselves repay close looking. Created in response to nuclear anxiety, they are neither purely spiritual nor abstract. Perceval used an experimental low-temperature reduced copper lustre glaze, producing surfaces he reserved for something precious, with the angels serving as symbols of the world's survival. Each small figure (typically 22 to 48 centimetres tall) bears distinct personality. One grins with mischief. Another shows studied innocence. A third sucks its thumb. They are children, not cherubs.
Perceval himself appears repeatedly in his paintings. His cherubic face with its pudding bowl haircut surfaces across decades of work, the artist inserting himself as witness and commentator on scenes of domestic life and historical events. One painting relocates Christ to Young and Jackson's pub opposite Flinders Street Station, complete with the infamous Chloe painting in the background. It is the work of someone playful with form and convention, unconstrained by formal training.
His daughter Alice, who inherited his artistic temperament, offers insight into the man behind the work. Despite a childhood marked by parental separation, Perceval was playful as an adult, she recalls. He invented games with his children and shared sketches with artists like Mirka Mora. Along with Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker, he was part of a loose group of largely self-taught Australian artists, now known as the Angry Penguins, who rebelled against the conservatism of the art establishment. These were artists determined to shake the Australian cultural consensus.
Yet despite being joint winner of the Wynne Prize for landscape art in 1960 and remaining known as one of the leading Australian landscape painters of the 1950s and 1960s, Perceval's reputation has remained uneven. Some works are held by all major galleries. Others spent decades unknown to anyone but their private owners. The exhibition attempts to reset that balance, bringing ceramics and paintings into conversation, revealing the full scope of an artist who deserves to be remembered as more than a footnote in modernism's biography.
John Perceval: All That We Are runs from 21 March to 12 July at Heide Museum of Modern Art in Bulleen.