ROY DE MAISTRE

Dimitri Mitrinoviæ
Trustees of the New Atlantis Foundation
Glady MacDermot; thence by descent
Private collection, Switzerland

Roy de Maistre: A restrospective exhibition of paintings and drawings 1917-1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May-June 1960, cat. 35

Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 80, 86
Mary Eagle, Australian Modern Painting Between the Wars 1914-1939, Bay Books, Sydney, 1989, p. 51 (illus.)

This work is framed in a timber frame under glass with linen slip. This work has not been viewed out of its frame. The work is in good condition. There was a hole approximately 12mm by 12mm to the bottom left of the picture, this has been professionally restored, filled and retouched. There has also been minor professional retouching to the edges (bottom middle and top right).
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Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin's Colour in Art exhibition, held at Gayfield Shaw's Art Salon in August 1919, was a landmark event in Australian art history. The hard-edge fauvism of the two artists' luminous landscapes reflected a very radical aesthetic stance, that of de Maistre's elaborate colour theory. This theory in turn reflected a wide variety of influences including: the pointillism of de Maistre's teacher Anthony Dattilo-Rubbo; aspects of his training in viola (and his association with Adrian Verbrugghen, son of the first director of the Sydney Conservatorium); his work with Dr Charles Moffitt in developing colour therapy for shell-shocked war veterans; the fashionable, theosophical notion that spiritual qualities could be expressed in terms of pure colour (an idea also seen in the painting of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian); the flattened and faceted structures of cubism and futurism; and Alexander Hector's 'colour organ', which projected colours in accordance with the notes played on its keyboard.

Heather Johnson summarises the theory as relying 'on his association of the seven notes of the octave with the seven colours of the spectrum: middle C corresponding with yellow, the central colour of the spectrum, and the other colours and notes following suit. Higher octaves were represented by progressively lighter tones and lower ones by progressively darker shades, of the sequence of spectrum colours. De Maistre and... Wakelin... painted colour keyboards and colour wheels, which, by means of a slotted cardboard disk placed on top and turned, could select harmonizing colours.'

While the Gayfield Shaw exhibition maintained a certain representational decorum, in the same year de Maistre applied his theory to the production of Australia's very first purely abstract painting, Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor (1919, Art Gallery of New South Wales). However, the trend in postwar Australia was towards comfortable naturalism and pastoral landscape, and de Maistre was to place his 'synchromy' on hold for another decade. It resurfaced in the more progressive environment of London in 1934-35, in various studies and four major paintings: Arrested Phrase from a Hayden Trio in Orange Red Minor (1935, National Gallery of Australia); Arrested Phrase from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Red Major (1935, National Gallery of Australia); Colour Composition derived from three bars of music in the key of green (1935, private collection); and the present work.

Like the other three in this sequence, the present work is probably a chromatic transcription of an actual piece of music. Given the artist's particular prediliction for the music of Hayden and Beethoven, and given the dominant colour of the painting, the particular phrase illustrated may be from one of the three late Hayden piano trios in B flat (for de Maistre, scarlet) major (Hob. XV: 8, 20 and 38).

We are most grateful to Heather Johnson, Andrew Brighton and Elizabeth Gertsakis for their assistance in cataloguing this work.