Deutscher and Hackett

Following the death of Godfrey Miller in his near-derelict terrace house in Paddington, the story of the reclusive artist and his unconventional life became widely discussed in magazines and the tabloid media. An article in the widely read Australian Women’s Weekly two years later for example, was richly illustrated with images of his work, and the lead photograph was Summer (2), 1960 – 64, pictured alongside some of the most abstract and intellectually rigorous paintings ever to grace their pages. Summer (2) was found sitting on the artist’s studio easel, leading the artist’s friend and biographer John Henshaw to identify it as the last work he had completed. Miller was known to work obsessively on each canvas, some over many years, enhancing and editing to the point that when he displayed a selection at Australian Galleries in 1963, the catalogue noted that the artist ‘was reported to have only finished thirty-nine paintings in his life.’1
 
Miller was also renowned as a draughtsman who created a raft of sketches over his career which are so spare of detail as to appear elemental. Henshaw’s monograph contains numerous examples of these, and those related to Summer (2) simply feature a series of vertical lines at either side bisected by a low horizon.2 A minimal three sets of lines which successfully invoke thrust, direction, design, tension, and balance, an armature for transmutation into the tessellated vision that is the final painting. Miller began his art studies prior to World War One and following his enlistment, was grievously wounded at Gallipoli in 1915. He underwent an epiphany during his long recuperation, deciding that he would ‘set himself to capture a feeling for the essence of things in the flux of changing experiences: to find a pictorial technique capable of celebrating both permanence and change at the same time.’3 From 1917, he recommenced his studies, first at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, then the Slade School of Art in London in 1929. Uncomfortable with the strictures of formal teaching, he explored Buddhist thought and in the late 1930s, participated in a three-month Rudolph Steiner course on colour at the Anthroposophical Centre in Switzerland. Miller observed that ‘Steiner uses the term ‘web-like’. ‘Lattice’ is the word of my own… When you have solid things you have no unity; when you draw them out to their parts (Plato would say their divine parts) you leap from solidness to an openness, a web or lattice.’4 Considering that Summer (2) was his final painting, it may also be interpreted as a total summation of Miller’s determination to reflect such underlying ‘truths’ and harmonies.
 
One of the artist’s recorded aphorisms was: ‘reality is made of cadences, rhythms, materials – all that science ignores. The world is a beautiful mathematical unity which is unfolding in accord with its exact nature.’5 In Summer (2), Miller places as much emphasis on radiance as he does on structure. Its subject – the sun hovering over a low mountain range bracketed by trees – dissolves before the viewer’s eyes into tiny tiles of fragmented colour before re-assembling into the complete image, only to dissemble again, a continuous rhythm of entropic interplay that rewards each subsequent examination.
 
1. Caroline Field, Australian Galleries: the Purves family business. The first four decades 1956 – 1999, Australian Galleries, 2019, p. 100
2. Henshaw, J. (ed.), Godfrey Miller, Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney, 1965
3. Smith, B., Australian Painting 1788 – 1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 302 – 303
4. Pearce, B., Parallel Visions: works from the Australian Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p. 104
5. John Henshaw, ‘Godfrey Miller’, Godfrey Miller, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, September 2004, non-paginated
 
ANDREW GAYNOR