Leonard French

Mr. L. Hawkins, Melbourne
Hon. J. D. MacDonald, MP, Melbourne
Australian and International Works of Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 29 November 2000, lot 16
Company collection, London
Australian and International Fine Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 14 June 2006, lot 20
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

The Odyssey Series, Victorian Artists' Society, Melbourne, April 1955, cat. 4
Leonard French Retrospective, Adelaide Festival of Arts, Art Gallery of South Australia, March 1970, cat. 9 (label on reverse)
You Beaut Country: a selection of Australian art 1940-2000, Thomas Agnew and Sons, London, 3-25 October 2006, cat. 24 (label on reverse)

Vincent Buckley, The Campion Paintings: Leonard French, Melbourne: Grayflower Publications, 1962, pp. 14, 99
Sasha Grishin, Leonard French, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995, p. 23

Large, silvered round frame. Fine and minor scuffs consistent with age. No cracking.
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When Leonard French first showed his Odyssey paintings at the Victorian Artists' Society Gallery in 1955, he invited poet and academic Vincent Buckley to open the exhibition. Their meeting on this occasion was to deepen into a close friendship; Buckley would later write the introduction and catalogue annotations for French's book on the Campion Paintings.¹  The choice of Buckley to open the show was prompted by French's deep admiration for his verse, and in Buckley's collection The world's flesh there are certainly parallels with the dark, Celtic, chthonic flavour of paintings such as the present work:

... What armour has the heart
Against these living and these dead we wear
Like secret limbs, when nothing wounds or heals
But flame? These stones conceal the serpent's head:
Stones that are built on darkness, and can bear
The slowly falling rain, the rain that falls
At peace on all the living and the dead
      ('The voice of the turtle')²

The V.A.S. exhibition was French's second based on Homeric legends; an earlier collection, drawing on The Iliad, had been shown at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1952. Neither show could be described as narrative or illustrative; rather, the works (like poetry) employ an abstract, metaphysical language, using the Greek stories as initial points of reference: mythic mnemonics, an architecture of archetypes. On such archaic grounds – the symbols of eyes, heads and hands, shields and spears, suns and moons; the tales of kingship, voyaging, battle, defeat and death – French built pictorial structures with a determinedly modern sociological and psychological resonance.

The formal vocabulary of these early paintings is rich and complex. It is also transparent, the artist's various inspirations clearly legible. As James Gleeson once observed, '... we can trace his points of contact – from his days as a signwriter through his encounters with the Mexican muralists, the machines of modern technology, Leger, Permeke, Indian carvings, the heraldic elements in Uccello, the enamels of Limoges, the golden stiffness of Byzantium and the intricacies of Celtic art – and the amalgam is certainly very personal'³  The present work, with its emphatic black sarcophagus-grid, its crosses and arrows, cogwheels and pistons, grasping hands and staring eyeballs is an outstanding example of the antipodean mechanical cubism of French's first mature style. One of the very finest of his 1950s paintings, The burial handsomely prefigures the later and better-known work of the same title held in the National Gallery of Australia.

1.  Leonard French, The Campion paintings, Melbourne, Grayflower Publications, 1962
2.  Vincent Buckley, the world's flesh, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1954
3.  James Gleeson, 'The strength of Leonard French', undated (1970) Sun-Herald clipping, Leonard French AAA file, State Library of Victoria