Auction collection a reminder of some of Australia's great artists

A collection of more than 200 works (including 35 paintings) by Anne Hall – the artist married to John Perceval, one of Australia’s leading Figurative Expressionists – will be auctioned at Leonard Joel’s 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra from 6pm Thursday March 3.

Hall married Perceval in 1972 and, like Albert Tucker’s wife Joy Hester, was swept up in the Heide art circle at a property in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen – owned and mentored by John and Sunday Reed.

Australian artists of note who also were part of this inner sanctum included Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan, who cast a longer shadow than the younger Perceval – and all comprised a group that became known as the Angry Penguins, redefining in the 1940s Australian art.

Perceval, who died in 2000, was the last surviving member of the group. Hall, a next generation Figurative Expressionist, was only 27 when she married Perceval and held her first exhibitions in 1968 at the South Yarra Gallery.

Despite Perceval’s much greater age and tempestuous nature, the relationship between the two appears to have been collaborative and caring until their divorce in 1981 – four years after he was admitted into Larundel Psychiatric Hospital with alcoholism and schizophrenia.

The earliest of Hall’s works in the auction dates from 1965, but most cover the tumultuous years with Perceval.

Highlights include two portraits of her husband – one in a patterned sweater dated 1976, a year before Larundel, and the other 1981.

The eyes in the first are open to the world, in the second they are downcast, blank and desolate.

According to artist and art critic Jeff Makin Hall’s paint handling in both is passionate, descriptive, deliberate, and the bitterness that resides in the corners of Perceval’s mouth is not expressionist license – but how it was.