Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Right Godfrey Miller Still life c.1942-48 Oil and ink on canvas 52.2 X 57.7cm Purchased 1965 Queensland Art Gallery Godfrey Miller Still Life with Lute 1954-56 Oil on canvas 64.5x82.5 cm Purchased 1956 The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney In the 1930s Miller had questioned whether representational modes could carry the weight of his philosophical intentions. As dynamic symmetry provided him with a poeticised mathematics, so the work of Cézanne and the early cubists — in which he saw the breaking down of form in order to construct the related whole — revealed a 'poetry' of vision. In Picasso, Miller noted the presentation of a transparent and interlocking construction in which surface and depth are both visible. Miller's desire to push Cezanne's apples, ginger jars and trees through a 'cubist sieve' of space, light and energy led to a diminished emphasis on volumetric mass for spatial organisation. Trees in moonlight, Blue landscape and Landscape with orange cliffs use pictorial devices that had by the 1930s become standard elements of modernist practice, sourced ultimately in the work of Cézanne. The most Cézannesque of Miller's oils are each a tour de force in organisation and fluidity and work through juxtapositions of wedges of cool and warm colours, of tree trunks used as armature for the shifting forms of the landscape, and of the horizontal banding of planes into distance. The traditional compositional device used in Trees in moonlight — trees framing a landscape vista moving into a deep central space, and organisation predominantly along vertical and horizontal axes — coexists with the remarkable spatial structure that became the unique feature of Miller's art. The structure of the painting is governed by two grids: an underlying geometric division of the canvas according to proportional ratios based on dynamic symmetry principles, and an extraordinary network of black ink mied lines which traverses the surface of the work in sheaths of contracting, expanding and parallel bands. In the principles of dynamic symmetry Miller found the poetry he wished to extract from rationalist disciplines.10 By the 1930s they consistently governed his compositions. His move from square canvases to the rectangular format of works such as Trees in moonlight was developed in order to align the composition to harmonic proportions. In this sense it assumes the spiritual dimension of the grids of Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. The grid remains a visible element of the finished painting, a feature Miller explained in the following terms: In a painting the logic basis should be just apparent, giving a clue to the genesis of the picture area. This relationship or poise between logic ... and personal intuitiveness is the great creative thing .1 The second 'grid' of Miller's art, the network of contracting, expanding, interpenetrating lines which governs the surface of the painting, became an increasingly emphatic element of the artist's work over time. This surface 'lattice' establishes aweb of multidirectional flows, balanced and counterbalanced throughout the painting. Borders are everywhere, but they do not confine. These lines of force, criss-crossing, abutting and overlapping, pull the composition in tightly, and yet radiate out beyond Miller's compositional boundary. Lines define forms, establishing the ground, trees and sky. Miller's image does not thin at the edges, but follows the grid in a balanced rhythm across the entire surface of the composition. Most significantly, the work does not stop at the artist's gridded boundary, but extends beyond in both mied lines and colour patches to the canvas edge (and frequently onto the frame itself). Miller's plea to Director Robert Haines after the Queensland Art Gallery acquired Trees in moonlight in 1960 was that the frame, 'an integral part of the work', be kept intact.12 This visible extension, executed, he said, 'to help my work join up with its new surroundings', implies in one sense that the field of the painting extends infinitely in all directions, that the canvas composition is a subset of a larger universal field described by the grid.13 From the 1940s Miller began to paint in segmented lozenges of colour, applied in characteristically thin oil washes. In Trees in moonlight, as in all of Miller's major Sydney works, colour is laid down meticulously yet expressively in numberless small squares and diamonds which thinly stain the surface to create vibrations of light — the shimmering quality frequently commented upon in Miller's work. These facets are angled off from their controlling lines, thereby subverting any sense of the mechanical, and frequently establish directional pulls against the passage of lines. At a distance the hues tend to fuse and one reads the work predominantly in terms of the blues of evening and complementary reds of the ground. Close up, these areas dissolve in an extraordinarily rich palette. Myriad lozenges of pinks, violets, greys, oranges, greens, creams and browns defuse at the surface the larger chromatic contrasts in nuanced ranges of colour. Colour is not used to fill in spaces created by line, but acts to overlay and penetrate the planes, giving the effect of a multilayered surface. Reading Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) had no doubt encouraged Miller to rely largely on his own eye as a sufficient tool in the study of colour — a cue he also took from Picasso who advocated the close observation of colour in nature. Yet Miller's tendency to follow Goethe's concept of colour as a product of the interaction of light and dark, rather than as the constituent of light itself, resulted in an emphasis on the constructive power of colour as secondary to tonal construction. This, to an extent, always remained with Miller. Colours became denser, more 'blackish' through the effects of air and space, particularly in Australia: one can note the way in which the artist organises dense, dark webs of line and colour at the point of deepest space in Trees in moonlight. The extensive use of a variety of blacks and the predominantly blue-green palette of a number of Miller's paintings has reinforced a view of the artist as a subdued and non-romantic colourist, 'as though', said lohn Olsen, 'he found a colour in Britain and to an extent "dislocated" it to Australia'.14Certainly the visual weight of Miller's linear structure, which tempers his colour, contributes to this perception. Yet, as Trees in moonlight highlights, Miller was a subtle colourist. His paintings reveal his responses to the colours in his immediate surroundings — the lush greens, blues and browns of Paddington, the pinks 248 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965