Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

interpretation of Structural emblems as uncharacteristically un-ambiguous': The self-image is surrounded. Above the head a hand holds a 'blood line' which links all the elements in the painting. Someone has suggested it represents the hand of God. My own feeling is that it is a symbol for my father who died in the Spanish-Flu pandemic early in 1919, when I was barely three years old. I have no recollection of him at all, though from a surviving drawing he did in his teens (dated 1897) without art training of any kind, I seem to detect a talent that was never allowed to develop. The figure in the bridal gown was adapted from a photograph of my mother; and at the end of the 'blood line' the little boy looking at the sky and holding a balloon / moon / sun / world is of course an early me, wondering what lies ahead.2 That Structural emblems depicts a private examination of identity does not render it an eccentric or self-indulgent picture. Gleeson's investigation conveys universal meaning — the essence of the drama, the feelings of uncertainty and pessimism derived from a particular experience, are an expression of the general existentialism triggered by the Second World War: Remember— the picture was painted in 1941 — in the second year of a war that was going badly. I was constantly aware that the old world was falling apart — and this was reflected in the wreckage of the self-image and in most of the poems 1wrote during this period.3 Gleeson's shell-shocked image resembles the facade of a war-torn ruin; his appearance suggests a persona partly torn away The internal crisis that is revealed, seemingly dramatised by the central characters of an Oedipus complex, is a war with the self — an image of war turned inside-out. In the same year that Structural emblems was painted, Gleeson delivered a paper to the Contemporary Art Society in Sydney entitled 'The necessity for Surrealism' (later published in the modernist journal A Comment, May 1941), in which he made a surprising assertion: 'At this moment, while we are at war against the totalitarian ideologies, we yet permit the more repressive dictatorship of Reason over our minds'.4In an argument that seems fraught with misgiving, Gleeson claimed that logical thought had served its purpose, being instrumental in the formation of civilisation, but in the process had become a restrictive habit — which, by implication, was leading the human race towards the end of civilisation. ' "Do not commit suicide for Surrealism has been born',' might well be the phrase cried in the night to a desperate civilisation.'5 Gleeson's belief that the aesthetic revolution of Surrealism brought with it the prospect of social and political liberation was in large measure, we now know, wishful thinking. His conviction might have been better articulated (in the spirit of Surrealism) by publicly speaking nonsense and behaving irrationally as many like-minded European surrealists had done. To sensibly claim that logical thought was a restrictive habit may have suited Gleeson's temperament, but as Bernard Smith pointed out, it was a claim contradicted by his own paintings: The art of Gleeson itself gives the lie to such a theory for the artistry of his work is controlled and guided by an intellectual approach observable not only in the presentation of the subject, but also in the technical process of the art-work itself.6 Surrealist imagery is sometimes drug- induced, an outcome of sleep deprivation, or summoned in a state of semi­ James Gleeson at work in his London studio, 1948 Structural emblems gives the impression of being all of these things and more. The painting is, on the one hand, anti-rational and surrealist, presenting a dream-like image, while on the other, it seems quite distant from the movement, painted with a method antithetical to it. This paradoxical position, partially resolved in Gleeson's recent art, makes Structural emblems an intriguing example of the contradiction that beset his early work as a whole. Michael Beckmann Is an education officer at the Queensland Art Gallery. consciousness. In other words, it is created by an artist willing to relinquish a degree of conscious control, to tolerate and, in many cases, to welcome techniques that are random or accidental, even, at times, absurd. The result appears unpredictable and strange, an image of a uniquely revelatory character. 'U N C H A R A C T E R IS T IC A L L Y U N - A M B IG U O U S ' 177