Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

transcend the vagaries of human values — can be glimpsed. He sought a stmcture that moved from the particular to the universal; his desired end was the archetype apprehended within material form. In the works of his maturity this resolution flowed from Miller's intense response to the Australian landscape. Trees in moonlight 1955-57 (Queensland Art Gallery), a master-work from the 1950s which attempts to capture 'such a subtle entity as a moving moon', represents, Miller claimed, 'the fulfilment of a progressing theme over thirty years old'.4 New Zealand-bom, Godfrey Miller had lived in and around Melbourne in the 1920s and returned to Australia in 1939 after a decade spent in London. The means by which he effected the 'fulfilment of progressing themes' in his mature paintings in Sydney, in which visual expression is brought into full alignment with its philosophical basis, had involved several crucial studies in London: French mathematics through the discipline of dynamic symmetry; French Modernism primarily through the work of Cézanne and the cubists; and prodigious reading in philosophy, mathematics, literature, psychology, aesthetics and the classics.5 Miller's mature production in Sydney also coincided with his formal commitment to anthroposophy, a personal creed that appears to have provided the artist with a flexible fabric within which he created his greatest works.6 'I just venture to believe', Miller wrote, 'that I could produce a painting which would be as subtle as nature'.7It was the artist's profound early experience of the grandeur and mathematical order of natural forms that had enabled him to draw out a structure, a geometry, vital and rhythmic, bywhich he could 'pierce beneath the mere aspect of the world to seize and himself be possessed by that great cosmic rhythm of the spirit which sets the current of life in motion'.8Living at Warrandyte, Victoria, in the 1920s had catalysed a connection with the Australian landscape — the specific qualities of its light, coloured earth and the stmcture of its natural forms — which Above Godfrey Miller Forest c.1939-45 Oil on canvas 45x35cm Purchased 1988 with the assistance of the John Darnell Bequest Queensland Art Gallery not only remained acutely present in major landscape paintings of the 1950s and 1960s, but which may well have contributed to Miller's decision to settle in Australia. The pantheistic dimension of the artist's response to the Australian bush, 'the most dynamic on the earth', regularly propelled him to spend nights walking and sleeping in suburban bushlands. The Sydney Domain — the subject of Trees in moonlight — with its clusters of massive Morton Bay Fig trees, was a favourite haunt.9 Trees, with the human figure, the only large-scale naturally occurring columnar forms, elicited the artist's profound response. Miller saw these forms as an embodiment of the rhythm and order governing the universe. In them the harmonious relationship of similar and varied parts was forged into one organic yet highly structured whole: a 'Unity'. (Miller was particularly disturbed that the trees he had painted in Trees in moonlight were shortly afterwards cut down to make way for the Domain carpark.) Vertical tree forms (frequently great white Australian gums), which also embodied the architectonic rhythm that Miller appreciated in classical architecture, became key structural elements in the major landscapes of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and brought a new monumentality to Miller's work. Right Godfrey Miller Figure group c.1940-46 Oil on canvas 46.5 X 62.2cm Purchased 1984 Queensland Art Gallery In these decades Miller moved from organic images to the magnificent logic of the tightly geometric structures in which his significance lies. Trees in moonlight encapsulates the fusion of impulses that Miller forged in his first period of mature production. The work belongs to a group of mid-1950s landscapes including Unity in Blue 1948-52, Landscape with orange cliffs 1949-53 (Art Gallery ofWestern Australia) and Blue landscape 1952-55 (private collection), which also prefigure concerns intrinsic to Miller's late great landscapes — the 'Red earth forest', 'Trees and mountain' and 'Summer' series of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the latter works the artist's sustained response to the material qualities of Australian light and space was transformed into a transcendent vision. 246 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Ait 1850-1965