Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

While Badham appears to be using distortions of perspective for its own sake — to exercise a technical skill — the effects hint that he was perhaps suggesting something out of the ordinary. Other Sydney artists, particularly Frank Hinder and Godfrey Miller, overtly used geometry to explore the spiritual and unknown. Although the implications of the use of perspective and the geometry of form remained latent in Badham's depictions of everyday life, they were used deliberately in the four religious paintings he made. Badham's religious works were not, like de Maistre's, a chosen expression of faith but were motivated by the instigation of the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1951. The prize- money (100 pounds in 1951) attracted artists who had not previously painted religious works. Badham entered works in the prize in 1954, 1956, 1957 and 1959.23 The Annunciation, his 1954 entry, was exhibited in a selection of Blake Prize entries in Brisbane in 1954 and was purchased by the Roman Catholic Archbishop James Duhig and presented to the Queensland Art Gallery.24 In a survey of twenty-five years of the Blake Prize, art historian Rosemary Crumlin has demonstrated that most of the subject matter was explicitly religious and that Christian images of the Passion and the Virgin Mary predominated.25 Rev. Rod Pattenden's comment that 'some artists whose works may normally exhibit strong qualities of innovative vision seem constrained by the expectations of religiousness, reinventing the muted colourings of fresco paintings to convey some religious aura' could almost have been written about Badham's work.26 In The Annunciation, Badham has stepped away from his usual realist style to use perspective and geometry in an abstract way to convey a mystical process. He has replaced the announcing angel of traditional religious iconography with a pattern of geometric shapes emanating from a central circle of light. The abstract pattem is not unlike de Maistre's Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor 1919, but whereas de Maistre allowed his abstraction to speak for itself, Badham has imposed his over a readable image. Even Mary's halo has been depicted. Badham's scene is an odd combination of the style of fifteenth-century Renaissance religious paintings (such as works by Botticelli, Veneziano and the Master of the Barberini Panels, which show the same composition of Mary on the right, the angel on the left, the patterned floor and the glimpse of countryside through an open doorway) with the Dutch interiors of Pieter de Hooch and the domestic genre of Jean-Siméon Chardin.27Badham shows himself an accomplished executor of Renaissance perspective in the play of light on the patterned floor, which at times looks perfectly flat but at others seems to bend forward along the horizontal line of sunlight, elevating the scene to one set on a stage and thus removing it from life. The foreword to the catalogue of the 1957 Blake Prize stated that religious art must be didactic and relate to specific theological truths, and that the function of the religious artist is to state the eternal truths of Christianity in new, fresh and acceptable forms. Badham's work reads as a realist artist's attempt to do this: the use of modemist design to depict the unknown and unexplainable, a power beyond the experience of the everyday, the Holy Spirit as an unreal pattern of light. Rosemary Cmmlin points out that conspicuous by their absence in the Blake Prize have been works that looked critically, and religiously, at the Australian social situation.28Awork that might fulfil Crumlin's criteria is Badham's The cinema 1958 (private collection). In this work, Badham has again used geometric forms to convey light, not the light of religious aura but that of a projection box in a contemporary cinema. The contrast between the well-lit screen and darkened audience conveys the impression that the screen is indeed bathed in a religious light and is being studied with religious attention; that entertainment has replaced both the physical act of church-going and the spiritual aspects of life. De Maistre's religious work was a result of his belief in that which surpassed the everyday; but he showed himself more than competent in conveying religious passion, almost realistically, in both small gestures, such as the spasms of the fingers in Christ's hands as they are nailed to the Cross, and large gestures, such as the powerful movement of the upward thrusting of the crosses and ladders in Christ is nailed to the Cross. Badham, the realist, has in The Annunciation produced an almost clichéd depiction of a religious experience but, nevertheless, conveyed the mystic and unreal quality of the unknowable and unexplainable by the use of an abstract geometric pattern. Paradoxically, perhaps, the most successful of the three works in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, both aesthetically and in its symbolism, is de Maistre's The Garden o f Gethsemane, in which the artist well demonstrates his knowledge of colour and design but subverts them to an almost realist depiction of a commonly told event in the Christian story, one that shows the humanness of the disciples but also one that demonstrates very subtly the essence of Christian faith. Heather Johnson teaches at the Power Institute of Fine Arts, Sydney, and has written a two-volume study of the art of Roy de Maistre. REALITY OR RELIGIOUS FANTASY? 223