This fascinating book is about the most controversial art exhibition ever held in Australia. It provides the first authoritative account of an exhibition that brought the Australian public face-to-face for the first time with the experimental art that had been developing in Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. The 1939 Herald Exhibition was the first 'blockbuster' exhibition to come to Australia. It has been called 'the single most enlivening and sustaining event in Australian modern cultural development'. The 215 works, including nine Picassos and eight Van Goghs, were collected by Basil Burdett on the initiative of Sir Keith Murdoch. It included work from The Tait Gallery, The Louvre, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Director of the National Gallery of Victoria described it in print as 'the work of degenerates and perverts' and refused to display it, so the exhibition was mounted in the Lower Melbourne Town Hall, where it attracted thousands and thousands of visitors. It suffered a similar fate in Sydney, where the NSW Gallery also refused to show it; it was hung instead at David Jones Gallery. When war broke out, this astonishing collection of painti