James Gleeson, Australia's quintessential surrealist artist, died in Sydney at the age of 92.
Gleeson lost his father when he was three, in the great world influenza epidemic of 1919. He spent his childhood with his mother, sister and relatives living near Bathurst, Narara and Gosford, before moving to Sydney where he studied art at East Sydney Technical College under Charles Meere, Arthur Murch and Phyllis Shillito between 1934 and 1936. He proceeded to study to become a primary school teacher and then taught for several years.
A turning point in Gleeson's life was in 1939 when he was given Salvador Dali{aac}'s book The Conquest of the Irrational and became a champion of surrealist art. The following year he exhibited his We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit at the second Contemporary Art Society exhibition and by 1947 he was living in London at The Abbey where he met the Australian sculptor Robert Klippel who became a lifelong friend. By 1949 he was back in Sydney and was elected as the president of the Contemporary Art Society and began writing as an art critic, which he was to continue for almost the next 30 years. In 1952 he had a house built in Northbridge in Sydney and lived there with his mother. In the same year he met his life-long partner, Frank O'Keefe, who later lived with him at Northbridge until his death.
Had Gleeson ceased working when he was 30, he would have been remembered as a prominent Australian surrealist who had produced memorable icons of surrealism including We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral, Structural Emblems of a Friend (1941) and The Sower (1944).
However, his career has spanned 70 years and it was only in the 1980s, when he was aged in his late 60s, that he started to work on the magnificent monumental imaginative landscapes which were to be his finest paintings. These paintings, which he began in about 1983 and on which he continued to work until his death, marked a major culmination in his work and are an outstanding achievement in Australian art. He was an artist who had progressively become stronger with age, whose vision grew more profound, the imagination bolder and the technical execution more precise.
Although Gleeson was an exceptionally well-informed artist, one who travelled widely, worked for many years as an art critic and was the author of several books, including monographs on the work of William Dobell (1969) and Robert Klippel (1983), he was also a peculiarly insular and private artist. As the artist's friend and biographer, Lou Klepac, points out, Gleeson arrived at his basic artistic decisions early in life when he adopted surrealist aesthetic principles and developed a profound admiration for the art of Dali{aac} and the ideas of the French surrealist Andre Breton.
While at least until the 1980s Gleeson remained a central player in the Australian art world, it was within the private experimental laboratory in Northbridge that the great artistic project of Gleeson's life slowly unfolded decade after decade. Apart from some tedious and unsuccessful imitators, there are no close parallels to Gleeson in Australian art. His fantastic landscapes were steeped in classical mythology, they engaged with the strange organic flights of fantasy of his imagination and contained endless points of reference to European culture. All of this made him into somewhat of an oddity in Australian art. Saying this is not to imply that he had close parallels in European art; in fact he did not have immediate masters, only fellow travellers, but what he did have was a shared European sensibility.
Although he was undoubtedly a surrealist in his philosophical orientation, this was more of a starting point than a definition of his artistic practice. The early paintings with their rather graphic homoerotic imagery would comfortably find a place in any major European exhibition of surrealist art. However, the paintings of the last two of decades of the artist's life have outgrown surrealist orthodoxy and emerge as major philosophical statements concerning the human condition.
In one of Gleeson's poems he writes, ''Attention! Attention! Readers, listeners, watchers be warned, the news is bad. The Resurrection scheduled for this evening has failed. There was no lift-off. Repeat. No lift-off. All options have been cancelled. The Pontiff has put on black and all places of congregation have been cancelled. Do not gather or loiter, but stay in your houses. Go to the fuse box and disconnect the power. There will be no further announcements.''
The apocalyptic tone in the poem was also echoed in many of his recent paintings, including his Images for a Darkening Time (2003), Declaration of Intent (2001) and Icons of Hazard (2001).
While the imagery is graphic and we may decipher strange bird-like shapes, cybernetic characters, chrysalis forms and struggling human shapes, all set within that overpowering and all-encompassing landscape belonging to the dawn of creation, most significantly the paintings were not illustrative. Unlike ''sci-fi'' imagery or various renditions of Tolkien, Gleeson's imagery had a convincing palpable reality, but it was a reality created from new imaginary elements, rather than through the rearrangement of existing codes of nature. Once the beholder suspends disbelief and is admitted into Gleeson's private pictorial world, the viewer discovers an immensely powerful and disturbing reality of haunting intensity and one which is preoccupied with an eschatological future.
The great English artist Stanley Spencer may have transformed his native Berkshire village of Cookham into a stage on which he displayed the great eternal dramas of human experience. Gleeson in Northbridge had transcended his local environment to make profound statements concerning the state of the world.
Commenting on prospects for an afterlife, Gleeson observed, ''I think we dissolve back into the elements from which we were made, I suppose there is some kind of non-conscious existence that goes on with the atoms from which we were composed. We metamorphose into gases or ash.''
Gleeson was a great benefactor of the arts, not only generously giving his work to major public collections, especially the National Gallery of Australia where he had served for many years on its council, but through the Gleeson O'Keefe Foundation he promoted major acquisitions of Australian art for public collections. He was the subject of numerous exhibitions, including a recent major touring retrospective curated by Lou Klepac, and the subject of several books. A gentle, generous and compassionate person, Gleeson made a profound contribution to Australian art. Sasha Grishin
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