Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Leonard French Genesis 1960 Enamel on hardboard 248x122cm Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth a framework within which the central theme unfolds. Yet in this expression of violence, where one figure pierces the other, there is also a note of reversibility; in this death there is also a beginning, a promise of regeneration. The emblematic motifs on the borders serve as totems promising the rebirth that will come out of this sacrificial death. The Burial is the simplest and the most solemn panel in the series. The Garden of Eden is covered in the bleakness of winter; a brilliant gilded tomb glows within the darkness of a subterranean night. The artist notes: A tomb in an ancient landscape — figures interlocked in death — the man and the woman — the barren garden — a burial of the gilded Kings and Queens. In its colour palette this is the darkest of all of the panels — glowing and mysterious. Even in death, there is a note of tenderness as one figure appears to lie on top of the other and the horizontal bars of a golden key seem to lock them together into a final embrace. In Autumn in the Garden, the Queensland Art Gallery panel, there is a celebration of regeneration. It is significant that it is autumn, the dying season, rather than spring, the season of growth, that is selected for the symbol of regeneration. The artist in his working notes writes: In the golden garden — the woman and man emerge — contained in the arc of the earth. Agentle crucible — at the autumn solstice a black sun turns leaves red. Central to the concept of the panel are the two semi-reclining figures of Adam and Eve, who are shown cast as if into a crucible or a chalice, while above them shines the black sun with a single red leaf which, as the sun's epicentre, appears emblazoned on a rectangular flag-like shape. It seems to proclaim, like a banner, that even within death there is the promise of resurrection and regeneration. In a sense, it is the most optimistic and lyrical panel of the series, colourful and joyous. The emblematic symbols, which in the earlier panels had been relegated to the margins, are here brought together into that central crucible from which all life will spring. The branches with the red and golden leaves are gathered into the crucible, together with the golden key, Adam and Eve, and the symbols of fecundity. The crucible itself is like the Eucharistic chalice that holds the life-giving blood of Christ.7 The golden key, which in The Burial had locked the two tombs together, here has shifted into a vertical position and now both figuratively and in terms of its composition appears to lock Adam and Eve to each other. The rich embellishment with gold, the immaculate gilded surfaces which Leonard French had mastered during his years as a signwriter, are here employed to convert the surface of his panel into a glittering brilliant experience. Gold is used both descriptively, as a literal reference to the golden autumn, and also metaphorically, to create the sense of other-worldliness. The use of emblematic symbolism, the combination of geometric elements and organic forms, the tension created between tight symmetrical shapes and loosely manipulated, freely drawn masses of the major compositional elements, all give the panel an ethereal and even transcendental quality. Leonard French's technique is unusual and possibly unique in Australian art. His concept for the picture may start with words, which give way to shapes that are then moved around, frequently in the form of cut-out elements, until a harmonious compositional arrangement is attained. This process seems to resemble an architectural schema, complete with a stencil on wax paper, then the more customary techniques of preparatory drawings or preliminary sketches. Once a design has been resolved, a relief ground is built up in gesso on the primed hardboard carrier covered with hessian, sometimes with the addition of coarse river sand for extra texture. Dry pigments are then mixed with clear Dulux enamel and colours are built up in superimposed layers. Selected areas are gilded and the whole is treated with several layers of glazes which results in an immaculate, brilliant and luminous surface. Individual aspects of his work, like the mixing of colours, the gilding, and the use of stencil shapes, may relate to BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965 techniques associated with the signwriting trade to which Leonard French was apprenticed from the age of fourteen.8 Their combination and use in art has few parallels. Roger Kemp and Ian Fairweather were to some extent kindred spirits, but their art was not directly interrelated; all three were mavericks working out their own paths of development. Almost immediately after painting Autumn in the Garden, Leonard French regarded it as one of his most successful works. Prior to its acquisition by the Queensland Art Gallery in 1961, he exhibited it in Melbourne and Sydney.9In 1962 it was reproduced in Vincent Buckley's monograph on the artist10and also in the first major article devoted to the artist's work, published in Art and Australia in 1963!1It was subsequently exhibited in the Young Australian Painters' show that toured Japan in 1965, in Leonard French's retrospective exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1967, and in his major retrospective, which was staged as part of the Sixth Adelaide Festival of the Arts, at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1970. In a number of ways Autumn in the Garden epitomises the achievement of Leonard French's early art. In it he brought together an art charged with spirituality, an art with a discernible narrative aspect, an art that had a spectacular decorative quality, and yet he achieved all this within an aesthetic framework that was recognisably modern. In the early 1960s the distinguished Australian artist John Brack wrote to his students at Melbourne's National Gallery School that: in that post-war period, to be 'modern' had come to be regarded not as an aberration, but an obligation ... The trouble is, and was, that there is no universal agreement about what 'modem' means, in particular, as applied to painting.12 The uncertainty as to what exactly constituted 'Modernism' in painting was reflected in the disputes that raged in the Australian art world. In 1959, art historian Bernard Smith launched his 'Antipodean Exhibition in Melbourne, which was designed to defend figurative humanism