Expert always drew the highest recognition

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

RICHARD PHILLIP PAYNE HAESE November 10, 1944-May 19, 2025
People of note have always recognised 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 (August 16, 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 '. Main's report (June 13, 1979) offers a further 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 two comments point to Haese's twin attributes: his ability to note the overlooked and his understanding of the actual practice of art. This combination of intellectual and practical knowledge runs like a continuous thread through his scholarly contributions and authoritative publications.
Haese's 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. His research skills were honed by Professor Geoffrey Searle (From Deserts the Prophets Come), who acted as his PhD thesis supervisor at Monash University, which provided him with an acute feeling for Australian history and the place of cultural activities in the shaping of national identity. It is this that 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 difficult to overestimate the impact and importance of this book and its subsequent three editions. It continues to be a major reference source, being cited in all post-1980s studies of Australian culture and is valued as establishing a new paradigm for the study of the visual arts in Australia.
Haese's second major publication is Permanent Revolution: Mike Brown and the Australian Avant-Garde 1953-1997 of 2011. The 30 years between these two publications brackets a period of productive research that led to a further 18 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 has always drawn the highest recognition. 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, October 1981). Writing in the national magazine The Bulletin (October 27, 1981), 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 he may not have realised. 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.' The book was universally lauded in many other reviews – and in 1982 it won the NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Reviewing the book for The Age on October 10, 1981, Professor Patrick McCaughey (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. 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.'