Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

ART AND MYSTICISM Godfrey Miller Trees in moonlight Deborah Edwards Are (ideas) in nature or are they in man's soul? Plato said in the soul as a separate world (to him the real world). Kant said no, they are in our world and that only. I prefer Goethe. He says in both. What ideas man has so has Nature. Godfrey Miller, 19401 What largely interested me exterior to actual painting is the French approach to mathematics and Indian writings in poetry and in philosophy ...My impulse or motive in painting other than the actual pleasure of the creative process is in the belief that a Unity is not just a block, solid. It is not either parts or separate things strung together in for instance the manner of necklace and beads or articles thereon. In my paintings if I have achieved anything of satisfaction or revelation (it) would lie in the explorations and initiatives in a matter existing between these two poles, in and inside the Unity but always conforming to its special nature. Godfrey Miller, 19542 I n a century dominated by material progress and by revolutions in . physics, Godfrey Miller sought the spiritual as the central reality of his art. His art/life was consumed by a quest for integrated vision; a desire to express the 'mystical necessary' which was, like Wassily Kandinsky's concept, a search to visualise the spiritual in matter, to grasp the relationship of form and idea, to indicate the higher unity in the material world. His art is located within a context specific to the mid-twentieth century, an era marked by the commitment of artists to express mystical, Utopian and metaphysical ideas in visual terms. Amongst the influential creeds and ideas that preoccupied the artist were Goethe's natu.rphilosoph.xe, which strove to unite empirical observation with spiritual intuition into a 'science' capable of Facing page Godfrey Miller Australia 1893-1964 Trees in moonlight 1955-57 Oil on canvas on wood 62.5x85.7cm Gift of the Godfrey Rivers Trust 1960 Queensland Art Gallery grasping organic archetypal forms; late nineteenth-century Bergsonian Vitalism, with its concept of the élan vital (life- force) permeating all being and uniting the cosmos; and theosophical and anthroposophical teachings. It was Miller's consistent belief that only through a synthesis of intellect and intuition could one gain a true understanding of the 'Real' behind the world of appearances. The concept of'Unity', which was crucial to his creative production and the ways in which he viewed the world, centred on the reconciliation of binary structures such as art and science, science and religion, rationalism and spirituality, 'East and West', nature and culture. Threaded through Miller's oeuvre are objects that become leitmotifs — sun, moon, mountains, flowers, fruit, the figure, trees. These objects are complementary facets of this subtle Unity, and they give symbolic resonance to a coherent body of work. Miller confirmed for many artists and students the concept of art as a mystical vocation; to them he was an isolated visionary who was uninterested in the machinations of the art establishment. Like Ian Fairweather, Miller eschewed the materialism of his age, choosing to live in a spareness which many mistook for abject poverty. The sensation caused in Sydney in 1952 by the first public exhibition of Miller's Unity in Blue 1948-52 (The Art Gallery of NewSouth Wales) and the 'international recognition' of Miller as indicated by the purchase of Triptych with figures by the Tate Gallery, London, in 1961, define the mere decade that was the artist's public life. During this time the mastery of his work was widely recognised, its sources in classical Modernism were accurately identified, its correspondence with certain aspects of postwar 'School of Paris' painting understood, and Miller's independence of vision greatly admired. The affinities of his work with the geometric abstraction of Frank Hinder and Ralph Balsón are apparent, as well as with a significant number of Australian abstract artists then preoccupied with the realisation of a spiritual unity — Carl Plate, Robert Klippel, Ian Fairweather and Roger Kemp. The predominantly geometric and constructivist aspects of Sydney 1950s abstraction owe much to the impact of Miller's paintings in this decade. The ultimate significance of Miller's remarkable body of work is that, as writers Bernard Smith and Robert Hughes have recognised, 'his mysticism worked as painting'; he succeeded in evolving utterly convincing formal equivalents for his philosophical vision of cosmic Unity.3In this way Miller's art links to the creative power of its era in international terms. For fellow theosophists Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, the revelation of truths about the nature of the universe came through a liberation from 'limiting form'. Abstraction was their vehicle for unlocking the mystery of things. Miller's still lifes, landscape and figure paintings — the neutral material of classical Post- Impressionism— reveal that an engagement with nature remained central to his art. Miller adhered to the Platonic view that visible objects are forms through which the 'Archetype'— the eternal truths that 244 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965