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. 20

New Statesman, 11 June 1960
Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 57, 58 (illus.)

This work is framed in a dark timber frame with a gold timber slip. The work has been lined and has a new stretcher bar. UV examination reveals there are areas of retouching to repair a hole to the tree centre left (approximately 1 by .5cm) and to the tree on the right (approximately 2 by .5cm). These holes are visible on the reverse of the work, through the lining. The reverse of the canvas has subsequently been coated with a clear hard substance. There are small areas of scattered infilling in the centre, on the lower right hand margin and along the lower margin (approximately 0.5 by 2.5cm). There is a 5cm crack in the sea in the upper left corner, and some other fine cracking in the sea. There are scattered fly spots across the work. The 'de' and half the 'R' in the signature have been retouched - this is old retouching and is possibly by the artists. There is scattered shrinkage craquelure in the green grass area in the lower right and in the shadow of the stone.
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De Maistre often worked in series and sequences, usually tracing a process of abstraction (simplification or complication) from an initial naturalistic study. In similar fashion he would often return to a previous motif or form or composition, sometimes years later, and rework it in accordance with new perceptions and ideas.

Such is certainly the case with the present work. During his Australian 'colour music' period, de Maistre had painted Flowerbed, Botanical Gardens (1918-19, private collection), a rhythmic kaleidoscope of curving path and bushes and bulbous trees and shadows, with Sydney's harbour and hills visible behind. Highly stylised, the work's sensuous, French-curve flows of flat colour are related to those in the famous Rhythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor (1919, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Fifteen years later, in London, de Maistre revisited the earlier composition, but this time in a considerably simplified form and probably with a more spiritual intent. Though not yet committed to Catholic Christianity and its imagery, he was nonethless a searcher, believing that 'art, being a reflection of life in the most profound sense, is an attempt by the artist to express in concrete form, through symbols, his highest concept of what constitutes for him the Good, the Beautiful and the True.'¹

In the present work the symbolism is obscure, opaque even, though it may have some relation to the theosophical-political ideas of Dimitri Mitrinoviæ, who de Maistre met around this time. But there is evidently some intended metaphorical if not metaphysical significance in the tear-drop form of the Great Stone itself. In the original a rainbow flower bed, this central motif is here reconfigured as a blank white tongue, half of a yin-yang symbol, something between a funereal monument and a cartoon of a speeding vehicle.

Though elusive in its particular meaning, the present work is an intriguing and attractive image in which spare, fundamental forms are combined to create a compelling dream landscape.

1. Roy de Maistre, 'Modern Art and the Australian Outlook', Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 14, December 1925, cited in Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77

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