return to index
The Life and Work of Godfrey Clive Miller, 1893 - 1964
PhD thesis by Ann Wookey
Chapter 8. Miller’s pictorial sources and expressive intensions for the paintings of his maturity (link to notes)
The examination of Miller’s expression in formal terms for purposes of this thesis is now completed. However, two issues warrant further critical attention. These embrace firstly, the pictorial sources on which Miller based his themes and motifs in maturity and secondly, the symbolism that pervades these pictures. My introduction notes that Miller’s themes comprise abstracts, religious subjects, figure painting, landscape and still life, but in maturity he turned from full abstractions of the nature of Abstract [Plate 31] and Palette design [Plate 49] 1. As we will see, many sources for his imagery then had become significant to him in London over the transitional years of the 1930s. It was also when approaching maturity that he adopted the symbolic mode to express his thoughts and feelings. The recurrence of some of Miller’s forms as representations of quite different motifs - for instance, the one shape for a tree in landscape and a vase in still life, or the commonality between a stratified landscape and the reclining nude - demonstrate his achievement there. At a deeper level a singular philosophy threads its way through all the paintings. The examination of just a few pictures in conjunction with comments the artist made about them illustrates these points.
Miller’s philosophical stance has been established already. An early clue in deciphering his dominant focus was given in 1936 when he wrote, ‘[T]he simple unadorned expressions of growth thro [sic] all things could be the home of the painter. Man should not wander too far from his simple self’ 2. In 1937 Miller asked himself another important question, ‘Cld [sic] one treat one subject, in a thousand ways, and still be lively and Inventive. I wonder’ 3. His solution, by the use of symbolic means, is the subject of this chapter.
We have seen that from as early as August 1934 Miller was of a Neo-Platonic disposition. For the rest of his life he held to the main belief this entailed, namely the unity of all. Evidence of this in his letters and jottings is plentiful as this examination of Miller’s thoughts and ideas has shown. It is clear also that Miller’s mature artistic means were remarkably appropriate for expressing this philosophical view. Unity, then, is the recurrent concept pervading his letters, notebooks and pictures. It is the integral and integrating element of his philosophy. Unity accompanied all life’s experiences - creation, birth, growth, changes of relationships, death and the life of the Spirit thereafter. In essence holistic, the conception is also intrinsically metaphysical.
Why was Miller drawn to the representation of a single underlying theme, if in a variety of aspects? And what prompted his adoption of symbolic, perhaps allegorical means to carry his idea? The first question can be answered largely in terms of his experience of war in 1915 and, as the artist himself later admitted, in London leading up to World War II 4. A dream was kindled out of his sufferings from World War I that the world could learn to live at peace, that humans would move in themselves into spiritual harmony, together with others and the world of nature. The other question finds its answer in the effects on his personality of that dreadful time. A subsequent psychological withdrawal, as took place 5, provides one key to his proceeding to visual symbolism. Symbolism is a form of expression inherently a step or steps removed from the direct and pragmatic transcription of experience where forms simply represent themselves [that is, a cup is a cup, etc]. As we saw, Miller’s moves towards abstraction and the resultant avoidance of real appearance in the pictures painted after the mid-1930s had symbolic intention. While the Modernist interaction with symbolism of the 1930s was doubtless a contributing factor 6, so was his metaphysical inclination. The expression of metaphysical concepts necessarily encompasses the abstract and non-representational. For this Miller used symbolic means.
The metaphysical tradition has been significant in oriental cultures since time immemorial. For occidental peoples by comparison, the beliefs therein fell into general disrepute with the Renaissance. A resurgence of a broader interest in the tradition that gathered momentum in the late nineteenth century has continued into the twentieth. This renascence coincided with the growing interest in comparative religious studies 7. In Miller’s case, his knowledge during the 1930s of Plotonius, Carpenter’s “Cosmic Consciousness”, Indian philosophy and the Chinese conception of Yang-Yin were all remarked upon earlier. His experiences while in London of this broad metaphysical tradition culminated in his readings from Anthroposophical and Theosophical literature from the 1940s onwards. All metaphysical thought pivots on the concept of unity. By this is meant, as Seyyed Nasr expresses it, ‘the One, the Absolute, there is no “otherness” or “separation”’ 8. The male-female entity Yang-Yin does not represent two opposed life principles as such, but rather two that are essentially interrelated one to the other. It is in this sense revealed by Eastern metaphysics that Miller’s unity concept must be understood. Metaphysically, moreover, an integral connectedness matches life’s experiences with nature. Mircea Eliade discusses this point in terms that, as should be apparent from my previous discussions, correspond intimately with Miller’s thoughts, namely:
The Indian artist never tries to copy nature because, being a philosopher (in the Indian sense, . . . a pure and harmonious man), he could be nature, and thus . . . create in parallel with nature, imitating only the organic impulse, the thirst for life and growth . . . whilst not imitating directly the creations of nature, forms already achieved and thus, in a sense, dead 9.
As to what else a metaphysical approach to life embodies, Nasr believes that metaphysical doctrine connects with revelation and cosmology 10. A number of recent theorists discuss the proposition that cosmologies can be represented only through symbolic means. Regarding symbolism in general, three factors appear to be commonly agreed to by scholars 11. First is a plurality factor in that any symbol may hold multiple meanings simultaneously. Next, correspondence is an a priori condition in symbolic thinking, obvious between a symbol and the idea represented but less obvious between symbol and symbol where correspondence comes by way of the metaphysical Absolute. Thirdly, the correspondence condition is analogous with nature’s powers but in no way pantheistic, that is, not reflective of the doctrine that ‘God is everything and everything is God’ 12. Finally when discussing an artist’s recourse to symbolic modes, it needs to be recalled that an individual’s arbitrary substitution of images by other forms makes them private symbols, what Silvano Arieta and Peter Fingesten denote as “paleosymbols”. Arieta, a psychiatrist, observes these to be ‘“highly individual, subjective, emotionally loaded and unverifiable”’ 13. It is against such ideas that Miller’s paintings become more than just summarily “an abstract”, “a Madonna”, “a landscape”, “a still life” or “a nude”. Always overlaying the theme seen is the idea of one-ness or the essential interrelatedness of all existence however different the elements. Arguably Miller first introduced the symbolic mode into the abstract paintings and some landscapes of the transitional London years. Back in Sydney he extended this to the religious, figurative and still life work.
return to top
The abstract paintings
In broadest definition metaphysics is ‘abstract general reasoning’ or ontology, ‘that department of metaphysics that relates to the being or essence of things, or to being in the abstract’ 14. The fullest appreciation of Miller’s immersion in metaphysics comes appropriately from his few abstract pictures 15. Two of these, Cityscape [Plate 32] and Palette design [Plate 49] were “read” when their design matrices were identified since their meanings come most directly through these. The “lesser” abstract The four seasons [Plate 43], treated then only in its structural manifestation, warrants more extensive examination 16. Outside the Ø rectangle format that is The four seasons, and for which no symbolic explanation has been uncovered, only one form in the picture carries well-recognised symbolic meaning - the rainbow. Ad de Vries records that the rainbow symbolises Iris, the Greek messenger of the Gods, thus causing the form to represent the divine message. Known alternatively as “Ishtar’s necklace” [Ishtar, the vegetation-goddess of Babylonia, a “great mother” archetype, who descends annually to the underworld to rescue her son-lover], fertility, rebirth and resurrection are also conveyed 17. An Egyptian inference in The four seasons comes by way of the Ø dimensional ratio, which Ghyka derived from the Great Pyramid. It is worth noting a remark Miller made in England in 1936, ‘Do you know . . . that the people who prophecy our future - using the Pyramid as base - that October of this year is to be the time when the Nations are to adopt a new mind. Divinely inspired’ 18. An oracle or prophecy component could thus be signified in the picture’s measurements, to move into correspondence with the rainbow as divine messenger. Miller came to place prophecy among the artist’s prime tasks. He wrote in 1950 of prophecy in these terms, ‘One has to force ones thought rays into the unseeable. When a prophecy is still a prophecy it is rare and it is alive. When it materialises (when everyone studies it), it is dead, useless and misleading’. Two further comments tie his painting activities to prophecy. The first, undated but from after 1940, associated inspiration and prophecy: ‘A prophecy is full of Colour, Form, Truth. When it materialises it is just one ordinary thing after another. However it awakens me - today at 3.30 AM’. The other, also undated but from around 1962, occurred when Miller compared his painting activities with Cézanne: ‘[I] painted what might be: in terms of inventions, speculations and prophecy’ 19. Clearly he conceived creation and prophecy to be intimately related. Bringing together the disparate factors outlined here, it becomes plausible that The four seasons symbolises the creation of matter through the spirit or the Word [the rainbow]. Rebirth and resurrection may also be represented. The picture then becomes evidence additional to Miller’s writings that both aspects of metaphysical doctrine, cosmology and prophecy, entered his world-view.
Why did Miller so clearly move away from abstract painting? Conceivably the concepts he painted were not readily expressed by purely abstract means but were more effectively carried by adopting a symbolic methodology in which form and colour linked more directly either to the real world of appearances or to tradition. Moreover, symbolism was the means to achieve that particular ideal in painting queried in 1937, whether the multifarious treatment of a single subject was possible. Expressed another way, pure abstraction was too limited a discipline to hold the artist’s attention except shortly 20. However, a major key to the design, form and colour of his mature style lies with the experiments towards abstraction he made during the 1930s.
return to top
The religious pictures
Miller’s paintings that take traditional Western religious themes as motifs are investigated next since they replaced the painting of abstract motifs. As with the abstracts, these are but a small part of his œuvre. It was for these canvases that Miller reached the furthest back into Western art history for inspiration. All draw from the New Testament and either represent Christ as a Child with the Madonna or relate to His death. Of the first type included here are the early mature Madonna and Child (Madonna no 1) [Plate 84] and Madonna with orb [Plate 85] and late mature Madonna (IV) [Plate 93] and of the second, The tomb [Plate 95], Crucifixion [Plate 99] and Golgotha [Plate 102] also from later years 21.
Many of the Madonna paintings have a jewel-like quality, an effect generated partly by their small size and partly from their colour. The configuration of each is the nurturing Madonna. As most often seen in Western painting, this is the Madonna seated and gazing down at the Child with Jesus usually suckling but sometimes in repose as if prior to or after such activity. As Madonna and Child (Madonna no 1) [Plate 84] demonstrates, Miller’s Child is of the second type, lying in repose across her lap 22. Whether Jesus is suckling is unknowable since the figure is lost, first through fragmentisation and second, through His representation as a nimbus [see Madonna with orb, Plate 85, in particular]. A specific source for Miller’s Madonna and Child portrayals has not been identified. Since the artist saw old master paintings of the type on his travels across Europe in the 1930s his figure treatments may well combine aspects from various of these pictures. For instance, a painting from around the fourteenth century that probably influenced his arrangement of drapery is to be discerned in a portrait photograph taken in the artist’s studio 23. Because of focus blurr and the reflections caught by the photographer, the figuration is not readily discerned - the Child looks to be sitting or standing upright in His Mother’s lap. The reproduction is identified by Dundas as a Madonna and Child by Giotto 24. The design is close to the Madonna image of Giotto’s Madonna in Majesty although a difference in form exists in their lower sections 25. Because a specific source for Miller’s Madonna and Child imagery remains unknown, his awareness of the fourteenth century type is all that can be noted. The artist’s appreciation of the colours appropriate to the Madonna is likewise traditional. His deep blue for her mantle, red for her dress and white for her veil [the white especially evident in Madonna with orb of Plate 85] harkens back through El Greco and Fra Angelico, to thirteenth century artists such as Cimabue and Giotto, and to Byzantine art. Miller’s golden-yellows quite clearly represent nimbi - in general as a halo around Mary’s head and, most importantly, as the representation of the Child on her lap. The presence of these haloes and the face type in Madonna with orb provide further measures of the appeal to Miller of proto-Renaissance and Byzantine imagery. Moreover, the impression of Byzantine mosaics was created in his tessellated faceting of surface. The interest claimed for the proto-Renaissance is reinforced by the artist’s letters where an admiration emerged over the years for the art and artists of thirteenth century Florence and the Byzantine Empire 26. However, one aspect of Miller’s mature Madonna paintings identifies distinctly with a Renaissance artist. This is the manner in which the central motif is compressed to a womb-like oval shape by the flow of line and colour. A similar effect was generated in Leonardo’s drawing, Studies for the Virgin and Child with a cat, ca 1478 [Plate 128], from the British Museum, a copy of which is among Miller’s personal papers 27. The extent to which Miller drew on earlier conventionalised image types and methods [in other words, their subject and hieratic presentation] as inspiration for his Madonna and Child paintings moves each towards the status of icon. Whether any becomes fully an icon depends on the extent to which a sense of spiritual power is conveyed.
How then are Miller’s Madonna paintings to be interpreted? Madonna and Child (Madonna no 1) [Plate 84] and Madonna (IV) [Plate 93] are my instances. Miller’s nurturing Mother of Christ can be taken to signify the artist’s own great love for humanity. The reading is supported by the wording down the right-hand side of Madonna and Child (Madonna no 1). Although indistinct, this is either “PEOPLE OF THE EARTH” or “PEACE ON THE EARTH”. Peace, the artist can be appreciated to have believed, accompanied the enlightened spirit. A supernatural presence is conveyed by the nimbii that encircle the Madonna’s head and represent the Child on her lap. The radiant yellow light streaming down from the right onto the configuration of Christ in each work reinforces the view. The yellows of the paintings thus signify the divine spirit, eternal presence and revealed faith. A golden-red aspect traditionally symbolises love and constancy, dignity and wisdom. The colouration appears to the upper-left of the Madonna in Madonna and Child (Madonna no 1) and Madonna (IV). Red, as in the Madonna’s gown in each picture, represents the body of man. Two religious aspects of blue can also be claimed for these canvases, those of Heaven and God the Father or the Holy Ghost, and of divine contemplation, humility, chastity and innocence - the first when used in background to the figures and the second, by way of the Madonna’s mantle. Lastly, the traditional meaning for white of Christ as the Light of the World, the perfection of God and holiness, is quite effectively conveyed by the comparatively diffuse treatment given the hue 28. However, more than peace, love, the enlightened spirit and deep religious fervour are signified in these paintings. The structural cross that is their central axis conveys the Passion of Christ. Miller intended also to represent the idea of freedom, a meaning he inculcated by the many small spaces present 29. The study of Miller’s religious paintings well indicates his deep immersion in matters of the spirit. While the impetus to these representations lay well within the Western art tradition, they conveyed a personal and deeply humanist vision as well. Peace and unity were his vision and dream for mankind 30.
return to top
Figurative painting
Outside the religious pictures, the human figure as motif held the artist’s attention equally during the late transitional and late mature phases of his career. However, there were fewer figurative canvases painted during the early mature years between 1942 and 1952. Furthermore, a very significant change of motif is evident between early and late maturity. His earliest interest lay mostly with figures either standing, seated or diagonally-reclined in lone, paired or multiple configurations and, for the more finished pictures, in a landscape setting. In essence, figures-in-landscape or bathers was the motif that compelled him then. Examples are the late transitional Figure composition [Plate 29] and Untitled (Figure group series) [Plate 41], the early mature Figure group [Plate 63] and Triptych with figures [Plate 75] and to complete the series, the late mature Figure group [Plate 92]. Later as well came the single recumbent figure, often again set in a landscape as evident for Nude and the moon [Plate 96] but otherwise generally indoors and posed before an open window as seen in Figure in red at evening [Plate 89] and Nude and moon [Plate 103]. This change of theme coincides with Miller gaining access to the model at Sydney’s National Art School 31.
Miller’s figurative interest of the late transitional years coincided with his attending short-poses sessions at the Slade. Accordingly, these sessions can be taken to have provided the live models for the pictures of a standing or seated figure that stylistically date to the mid to late-1930s. Mostly these lone figures are oil sketches for one or other of the nudes in the early figure group paintings. They thus signify that Miller became actively cognizant of the figure-in-landscape tradition in Western painting in London during the 1930s. Furthermore, they became the means by which his flagging involvement with the tradition was sustained back in Sydney during the 1940s. As noted earlier, the 1934 London Braque exhibition included bather paintings like Les baigneuses, 1931 [Plate 156]. Braque’s favouring of the motif doubtless contributed to Miller’s growing appreciation of the bathers theme as significant to Western painting. A more likely inspiration to his development of the theme was the Cézanne retrospective of 1936 in Paris. Les grandes baigneuses I (Group of Women), 1898-1905 [Plate 147], was among the bather pictures shown. Connections between this canvas and Miller’s work occur first in Figure composition [Plate 29] where the tree-trunks to the upper left reflect Cézanne’s treatment and the colours are not dissimilar. Moreover, in Figure composition the manner in which the arms and hands of the right-hand figure are raised behind the head and the tilt of the head approximate other of Cézanne’s figures. For example, Man standing with arms raised, 1875-77 and the most distant figure of Eight women, 1883-87, both of which were on view then 32. The triangular compositional aspects given Cézanne’s Les grandes baigneuses I (Group of Women) by way of the groupings and poses of the figures and reinforced by the directional push of the trees also reflect in Miller’s bather paintings. Untitled (Figure group series) [Plate 41] is an instance. By the time of Triptych with figures [Plate 75] Miller was in process of significantly modifying this compositional schema. Here, the inward-leaning directional push of Cézanne’s trees became a fractured modulation of left and right leaning tree-trunks across the canvas breadth. With Figure group [Plate 63] and Figure group [Plate 92] Miller moved to a contrapposto rhythm of striated colour rather than a patterning of tree stems and to less rigidly triangular groupings of figures. This is not to deny their triangulation. In Figure group [Plate 92] the seated figure in back-view on the right and standing figure to her left loosely combine as a triangular unit and what seem to be three figures in the left-hand sector of the canvas as another. The combination of poses of outlying figures and the just perceptible structural circle present then synthesizes these groups into a subtle presentiment of an apex-up triangle. The similarities between Miller’s figures-in-landscape and Cézanne’s bathers are sufficient to justify claiming Cézanne as Miller’s major inspiration.
The fully reclined nude is not encountered in Miller’s paintings of the transitional London period. However, the artist knew of the motif then since he and Sweet had become engrossed as art students in Velasquez’ The toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) [Plate 134] at London’s National Gallery. When Miller eventually turned to the motif in late maturity, inspiration came from such well-known forebears to the Modernists who prompted his figure-in-landscape canvases. As with Miller’s Madonna and Child paintings, rather than specific models for his imagery, his awareness of general types only is all the historian can claim. The fully reclined nudes are of four types. The first Miller type occurs in Danaë [Plate 62], which is among the earliest of the recumbent nudes and perhaps based on a version of Titian’s Danaë, such as Danaë and cupid, 1545-46 [Plate 131] 33. In the second, the body is placed ever so slightly diagonally to the horizontal with the head resting on crooked left arm. The configuration resembles languidly rolling landscape; for instance, Nude and the moon [Plate 96]. The pose approximates that of Giorgione and Titian’s Sleeping Venus, ca 1510-11 [Plate 129]. Obvious differences are Miller’s posing the figure to confront the viewer more directly, his locating of the left hand along the hipline and his setting of the head facing to the left. Each Miller representation of the type portrays the nude in a landscape setting in like manner to Sleeping Venus. The visual parallel between Titian’s representation of Mary’s hair in St. Mary Magdalen in penitence, ca 1530-35 [Plate 130], a work known to Miller, and that of his figure in Nude and the moon [Plate 96] is also noteworthy 34. For his third type, Miller gave a pronounced curve to the pose and showed the figure in back-view as Figure in red at evening [Plate 89] and Nude and moon [Plate 103] illustrate. Velasquez’ The toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) and possibly Ingres’ La grande odalisque, 1814 [Plate 136], may have inspired him. These two Miller pictures are interior settings complemented by curtain and still life objects as are the Velasquez and Ingres canvases. Moreover, both Miller nudes are contemplative in the manner of the Velasquez Venus, while the nude of Figure in red at evening is as equally monumental as Ingres’ provocative figure. The fourth Miller type has the figure recumbent on a couch again before a window and in a pose that approximates the Venus and Cupid with a lute player, ca 1565 [Plate 132] attributed to Titian and his workshop 35. Titian seems a major inspiration, therefore, for the recumbent nudes of Miller’s maturity. Many Titian masterpieces are in public collections in Britain and across Europe and were thus accessible. Noteworthy is Miller’s presentation of each nude as confrontationally as possible; that is, whether frontal or in back-view, as parallel to the picture plane. There is no coy body twist to evoke the decorum conveyed in much Western picturing of the motif [and all the Titian works identified], that convention which brings in propriety and modesty, however slight. Miller “dressed” his figure sometimes by way of her loose flowing hair and often by inverting her eyes away from the viewer. Lastly, in these latter years of his career the artist held the standing nude to be an awkward shape for painting since a long vertical panel was needed which limited the formal possibilities. In contrast, he wrote, ‘The figure reclining can do anything. It too is a lovely shape . . . [F]ew have painted such, successfully - in the world. Possibly the rarity of the ability . . . had made it unique. Goya, Rembrandt, Piccaso [sic], Manet, some of the Italians’ 36.
Another reason that Miller preferred the nude recumbent may well have been the traditional associations of the horizontal with female forces, the passive and principle, and of both with the earth, the world manifest. The contention finds support in his having consistently painted her in a landscape setting or before a window framing the evening sky. A closer examination of Nude and the moon [Plate 96] facilitates greater understanding of his intention for these reclining figures. Miller’s awareness of the design similarities between female form and landscape is known through his writings from as early as 1937 [these also give him to then be fully cognizant of symbolic process]:
[T]he figure seemed to associate itself with certain far away sandhills . . . and with certain words that Plato had to say concerning curves and straight lines, and with things that the Songs of Solomon sing concerning the symbolic likenesses of things 37.
Later that year he observed that nature deployed the same curves for water and the female figure and attributed this changed form as an instance of metamorphosis 38. These statements suggest that 1937 marked the germination, conceptually at least, of Miller’s painting of the recumbent nude. By 1940 the artist was actively searching to characterise “moon force” or “contemplative thinking” and the “awakened ego state” 39. As observed above, the nude of Nude and the moon [Plate 96] is indeed languidly contemplative. The association with the moon, and so with the night, might well signify a dreamed-of state outside Miller’s more everyday experiences since he remained a bachelor 40. The figure of Nude and the moon because of her obviously confrontational pose and long loose flowing hair represents human sexuality. However, while the torso directly confronts the issue of human sexuality, the turned head with face hidden implies the model was unthoughtful of her eroticism. The setting of the figure in nature carries the implication also that both states, her sexual eroticism and innocent unawareness, are naturally co-existent. On one level therefore, the painting expresses innocent and unfulfilled yearning. A still deeper meaning can be extracted. Golden hair is traditionally associated with sun symbolism. Loose, long and flowing hair can signify either energy [especially magical power], or virginity, purity and fertility, or penitence [the act of recovering the purity of the soul by rising above the sinfulness of corporeal existence]. On women specifically, long golden hair is an attribute of love-goddesses such as Venus of Classical Greek antecedence and in Christian mythology, of penitents such as Mary Magdalen. The meaning of penitence is recommended by Miller’s recourse to Titian’s St. Mary Magdelen in penitence [Plate 130] for the motif 41. The moon is another reference to Venus in Nude and the moon [Plate 96] and traditionally signifies fertility and growth. An appropriate reading of Nude and the moon [Plate 96] is thus that Miller expressed transience, especially with regards to creation and creativity. Both creation and creativity generate beauty which is an idea well represented by the reclining Venus herself. The interpretation is consistent with Miller’s artistic commitment and the known facts of his disparate relationships with women 42.
return to top
Landscape
Over half of Miller’s painting during the transitional and mature phases was devoted to the landscape genre 43. Uninhabited, “pure” landscapes are predominantly of two types. These are the trees-and-mountain series as demonstrated by the late transitional Growth [Plate 35], Landscape [Plate 48] and Untitled (Tree and mountain, NT series) [Plate 53] and early mature Untitled (Tree and mountain series) [Plate 73], and the many-treed forest series, represented by the early mature Olympia [Plate 67] and later Unity in blue [Plate 80]. Building-in-landscape and cityscapes, with trees usually present in the latter allowing the two to be grouped together, comprise another of his motifs as Building and trees [Plate 82] demonstrates. Other motifs encountered in minor instance are a single-treed setting, given by The tomb [Plate 95], trees in quarries or against cliffs as seen in Landscape with orange cliffs [Plate 81], and seascapes, beach and river settings, demonstrated by Blue landscape [Plate 88] and Landscape, river and rain [Plate 101]. Another small group incline towards the pastoral since sparingly treed and modulating hills or plains country was pictured, as Summer 1 [Plate 100] shows. Essentially Miller painted nature beyond man’s civilizing touch [the building-in-landscape and cityscape paintings are in comparatively minor incidence]. The other dominant factor is his propensity for the mountain and forests. Both motifs carry religious iconographical meanings 44.
Often Miller’s mountain is framed by a few trees in the foreground either side. The practice of framing a vista by trees pervaded seventeenth and eighteenth century landscape painting. In the nineteenth century, the forest as screen occupying the breadth of the canvas came into favour. The use of trees as a framing device is particularly evident in Cézanne’s paintings of mountains, as La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (The great pine), ca 1886-88 [Plate 142], and Le Lac d’Annecy, 1896 [Plate 146], demonstrate. Since both pictures are in the Courtauld Collection in London Miller probably saw them. These trees channel the viewer’s attention in on the mountain and thus assist in the creation of pictorial depth. At the same time Cézanne’s allowing the mountain to dominate the picture space moves the background forward. The resultant spatial ambiguity is reinforced by the same block-like facets linking the imagery. Similar observations can be made for Miller’s trees-and-mountain paintings such as Untitled (Tree and mountain, NT series) [Plate 53] and Untitled (Tree and mountain series) [Plate 73]. La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (The great pine) [Plate 142] in particular may have influenced him. Despite the differences in weight of the forms depicted, its formal arrangement can be likened to Untitled (Tree and mountain, NT series) 45. Modernists from the fin de siècle who painted the forest motif include Cézanne, with Rocks in a wood (Rocks at Fontainebleau), 1894-98 [Plate 143], for instance, the naive painter Henri ‘le Douanier’ Rousseau, and in the early twentieth century Franz Marc, as seen with Deer in a forest [Plate 152]. Miller admired each of these painters and owned postcards of their work 46. A number of Cézanne’s forest paintings were shown in Paris in 1936, including At L’Estaque, 1882-85, Rocks in a wood (Rocks at Fontainebleau), 1894-98 [Plate 143], and Mill in Château-Noir grounds, 1898-1900. Cézanne’s emphasis on the verticality of tree trunks in these and other canvases became characteristic of Miller’s forest works as is demonstrated by Unity in blue [Plate 80]. Rocks in a wood (Rocks at Fontainebleau) and Mill in Château-Noir grounds possibly inspired Miller’s Olympia [Plate 67], his Landscape with orange cliffs [Plate 81] and the quarry pictures 47. Landscapes into which human habitation intrude are not unknown among Cézanne’s landscapes. As instances, House and farm at Jas de Bouffan, 1885-87 [Plate 141], and Chåteau-Noir, 1904-06, which were likely inspirations for Miller’s Building and trees [Plate 82] were also to be seen in Paris. A last Cézanne picture to be recorded here as perhaps guiding Miller, for Blue landscape [Plate 88], is Mount Marseilleveyre and Maire Island, 1882-85 [a postcard lies among Miller’s papers] 48. Clearly Cézanne was an important source in Miller’s landscape painting. Another source may have been popular photography. There is at least one example of such influence in the solid thickness of Miller’s tree trunks in a canvas like Trees and rain (Landscape in rain) and a Walkabout cover photograph from 1946 of Hoop Pines in South Queensland found with his papers. Equally important was Miller’s own photography since his photograph of forest grotto and temple ruins on Mount Olympia clearly inspired Olympia [Plate 67] 49.
As earlier indicated, landscape was the one genre other than abstracts which Miller painted with symbolic intent during the 1930s. A painting that combines his two motifs of trees-and-mountain and forest and provides visual evidence of Miller’s active involvement with symbolic expression by the mid-1930s is the imaginary landscape Growth [Plate 35]. Previously, in Chapter 4, a reading of the picture to symbolise beginnings or creation loosely was given. This instance of imaginary symbolic painting on Miller’s part greatly enhances the validity of reading his other landscapes for metaphysical content.
Natural objects and landscape in Western painting are recognised by art historians to have come gradually to signify the divine between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Kenneth Clark prefaces his ‘landscape of symbols’ by contrasting the ‘forest fears and mountain panics of all medieval poets, including even Dante’ to Petrarch, who wrote about nature, ‘“Would that you could know with what joy I wander free and alone among the mountains, forests and streams”’ 50. Petrarch’s response to nature signalled an altered consciousness in the late medieval period by which the joy and ecstasy accompanying spiritual experience might become aroused when alone in nature. Mountains and forests may have remained fearful places to the common man. By contrast, for the man of vision, the artist and the poet, these became realms where the emotional discomforts of everyday life might dissipate and peace and spiritual enlightenment be attained, perhaps even paradise on earth. In art, with the early fifteenth century the divine became symbolised in Dutch landscape painting by light saturation 51. This expressive mode came to typify the European landscape genre.
As we have seen, light saturation is found in Miller’s work. Moreover, the quite different emotional reactions to the natural environment given here find ample expression in his writings. Natural settings provided solace to Miller. His feelings for nature were sufficiently strong not only to cause his frequent musings on nature but also his rising to her defence. An urban resident mostly, the inspirations in nature for his landscapes came from trips to the country and the bush or from the urban parklands of the cities of his life 52. Mountains as fearful phenomena were referred to by Miller in letters of 1938 and 1940, and in the second of these as a metaphor for the shell injury he suffered at Gallipoli 53. Even earlier in 1937 mountainous country represented ‘an individual spirit’ that allowed him to ‘see Essentials in the light of that Spirit’ 54. These expressions imply spiritual experience and solace. By 1940 mountains represented a force of like nature but differing magnitude to waves. Both were realised to be of the same form, the triangle. Furthermore, mountains brought together the earth and the sky 55. A cosmological view of mountains had entered his consciousness. Religious historians have firmly established the summits of mountains as universal symbol of “the centre”, of transcendence, of the place of Creation’s beginnings, of where heaven, earth and purgatory coincide, and as beyond movement and time 56. The cathedral and the pyramid are well-known man-made epitomes of the metaphysic. Miller’s mountain forms tend towards the geometrically pyramidal. Landscape [Plate 48], Untitled (Tree and mountain NT series) [Plate 53] and Untitled (Tree and mountain series) [Plate 73] illustrate this point. They are as equally monumental as the pyramids familiar to him from 1915. Essentially these mountain paintings convey the transcendence of man’s spirit. Miller intended a similar meaning for his forest landscapes. English forests during the 1930s had provided him with a directly immediate experience of growth, with endless “beginnings” epitomised by the coming of each spring and thus life as continuous process 57. As we saw, back in Australia forests became analogies for a spiritual space filled with light in like manner to cathedrals. By fulfilling this conception each of Miller’s forest pictures corresponds to spiritual experience and moves into conjunction with his response to nature as a haven from the conflicts of everyday existence. The luminous and ethereal light of Landscape, river and rain [Plate 101] is reflective of the forest as place of quiet exhilaration or, Petrarch’s “joy”. Even comparatively darker paintings like Unity in blue [Plate 86], steeped in a silvery moonlight and with a boundless space established beyond the foreground screen of tree-trunks, do not forebode of menace or oppression. Each forest picture conveys the senses of peace and freedom, of magic, of the secretness and mystery of nature. This is very true of Olympia [Plate 67]. Ancient Greek culture appealed to Miller and evidence exists of his knowledge of the Elysium-related rites of Egyptian and Greek mythology 58. A temple-in-grotto inspiration is therefore possible for his other forest pictures - in which case a metaphysical intonation again emerges.
return to top
Still life
When the ideals that Miller conveyed in his more traditional religious painting of peace and unity among mankind were threatened, he devised other quite explicit symbolism - by way of still life. The historian’s first task is to identify the inspirations of his motifs and arrangements. While second in importance to landscape in Miller’s œuvre, the incidence of still life painting dropped away after he started teaching 59. Canvases that date from his reaching of maturity early in the 1940s often take fruit and jug, ginger jar, cut-glass compote or stemmed glass, etc, as subject, along occasionally with other items like books, paint brushes, newspaper, saucepans, egg and conch shell. Still life with oranges (Objects on a table) [Plate 55], Still life with fruit [Plate 64], Still life with books [Plate 65], Objects at night [Plate 66] and Composition [Plate 86] demonstrate this. His favourite still life motif over the following decade was curtain, compote and fruit, represented here by Still life with green curtains (and objects) [Plate 70] and Still life [Plate 87]. These date attributions suggest that Miller’s still life œuvre developed from the paintings of fruit and pieces of domestic hollow ware like cups, jugs and saucepans [see footnote] to the generally busier curtain, compote and fruit arrangements [sometimes with flowers also present] 60. As full maturity approached he introduced a musical instrument, as we see in Still life with lute [Plate 90] and Still life with musical instrument [Plate 98]. Miller’s choice of articles for still life painting was clearly constrained as to range and was generally long standing as to derivation in Western art. Some traditional still life objects, like the skulls of vanitas painting and animal images, do not occur at all 61. Items that recur over and over are fruit and flowers, compotes, vases, pitchers and drapery, or in other words, the accoutrements of the drawing rooms of the well-to-do and civilised social interaction. More everyday household objects are few and predate his maturity. Equally minor but mostly from his maturity are cultural references such as paint brushes, books, musical instrument, etc.
In his use of still life Cézanne was a major influence on Miller once more, and doubtless by way of L’Orangerie retrospective of 1936. Wyndham Lewis observed pertinently in 1919, ‘No doubt the example of Cézanne, who was admired as a magnificent creator of pure form, inspired the abundance of representations of apples in the decade after his death. More apples have been painted during the last fifteen years than have been eaten by painters in as many centuries’ 62. Cézanne’s still life motifs concentrated on hollow ware equally as much as on fruit. These were frequently set on a rather crumpled tablecloth and occasionally before a draped curtain. As would be the case with Miller, the curtain generally indicates that the picture was a drawing-room setting. Paintings of this type that Miller would have known from Paris include Bronze vase and sugar bowl, ca 1875-76, and Curtain, vessels and fruit, 1895-1900 [Plate 145]. When the curtain is absent the motif tends towards more everyday domesticity. Typical here are the monumental and effervescent Nature morte au panier (The kitchen table), ca 1888-90, and Nature morte aux oignons (Onions, bottle, glass and plate), ca 1895-1900 [Plate 144], both seen by Miller 63. As still life types, these two thematic variations could be described as social and domestic. The inclusion by a painter of books, paint brushes and musical instruments is nominated the cultural still life type. Such cultural references by Cézanne are relatively rare. The commonalities between the still lifes of Cézanne and Miller thus lie in their focus on the first two of these three still life types and resemblances between the forms of their fruit and curtains. A major difference is Miller’s avoidance of vanitas imagery. Miller’s table edges are Cézannesque, as is the cloth in Still life with oranges (Objects on a table) [Plate 55]. Few other of Cézanne’s still life forms appear directly in his work. However, the wine bottle of Nature morte aux oignons (Onions, bottle, glass and plate) [Plate 144] perhaps inspired a bottle-form Miller devised in the 1930s 64, while Cézanne’s depictions of onions maybe influenced his including an onion in Objects at night [Plate 66]. Cézanne’s bulbous vase in Bronze vase and sugar bowl, ca 1875-76, was perhaps Miller’s model for the vases of Composition [Plate 86] and Still life [Plate 87]. Equally, Miller found his bulbous form in nature and painted it into some landscapes. This realisation reinforces the view previously expressed as to the multiplicity and wide variety of the sources on which Miller drew in establishing a single form 65. Lastly, Miller’s brushwork for many of his still lifes resembles Cézanne’s technique for his final period. Still life motifs depicted by Miller but not by Cézanne, such as the newspaper and saucepan of mundane daily living and the musical instruments and books of more cultured activity, were endemic to early twentieth century Modernism. These still life motifs are found in Braque’s painting and a postcard of his Pichet et citrous from 1940 is among Miller’s papers. Similarly Picasso may have inspired Miller’s use of the musical instrument motif since there is also a reproduction with his papers of Picasso’s The ascetic of 1903, which pictures an old man entranced by his own guitar playing. British Modernists of the 1930s favoured the guitar also; for instance, Ben Nicholson whose work was likely to have been known to Miller 66.
Various art historians have recognised still life painting as the painter’s theme for the inherent motionlessness permits an extensive enquiry of painterly concerns, especially the interplays of light and colour about the model. Rarely, however, is this practice acknowledged as the raison d’être of the genre. Schapiro has argued, even if reservedly, of the capability of still life under the artist’s contemplation to become ‘a mystery, a source of metaphysical wonder. Completely secular and stripped of all conventional symbolism, the still life object, as the meeting point of boundless forces of atmosphere and light, may evoke a mystical mood’. He believes that as painted by Cézanne these works existed ‘for contemplation alone’ by virtue of their detachment from life 67. These observations are pertinent to Miller’s mature still life paintings such as Still life with green curtains (and objects) [Plate 70]. Beyond the underlying structural matrix that is itself symbolic of life and growth, the flux of line and colour can be held to be a metaphor for the chaos from which form [that is, life] emerges and to which all returns. The objects depicted are likewise symbolic. Miller’s writings support this contention. By 1940 the items he painted represented ‘illusions . . . valuable only as indications or evidences of what is behind them’ 68. Behind these lay “process”, or the altered relationships and metamorphosis that stretched backwards and forwards in perpetuity 69. A demonstration of the nature of the unseeable attached to Still life with green curtain (and objects) lies in Miller’s having perceived stemmed glasses and compotes and trees to be of the same form. The fruit present symbolise new life and growth since these hold the seeds of renewed creation - Miller made this association obliquely when he wrote, ‘Round us is the great seed - unseen life: the existence of the paper is minor’. He also held the conception that forces, now to be understood as those of unseen life, emanated from fruit and that these forces at times conflicted with other unseen forces 70. The idea ultimately is about discordance in life. Miller in 1936 had conceived the process of flowering to reflect the act of “releasing”. Sixteen months later he related them directly to life, writing ‘[T]here is that great inevitable conclusion Death before each of us . . . [C]olours and flowers and other light things are with us in Life’ 71. This connecting of flowers with light and life finds correlation in paintings like Still life with green curtain (and objects) [Plate 70] by way of his placement of the vase and floral arrangement always in the higher keyed colour sector of the canvas. Consequently, the lighter side in Still life with green curtains (and objects) corresponds to life and the darker with death 72. Lastly, Miller claimed that Still life (Still life with green curtain), a very similar painting to Plate 70, portrayed his ‘one-world concept’ of ‘East and West together’. On an earlier occasion, in 1954, he stated that the picture’s two parts in their “extreme differences” represented the balancing of diverse thought. In 1958 Still life with green curtains (and objects) [Plate 70] itself was given to embody the principles of plus and minus or the poles of existence recognised in Chinese philosophy - in other words the idea of Yang-Yin. Miller’s concept here was essentially that of “completion” 73. The achievement of the whole was typified by counterpart events that occurred through time, or in the ‘convex and concave [that] produce the orange skin’ 74. The artist thus set out in these still lifes to balance the diverse “forces” inherent to living so to represent peaceful coexistence. The levels at which he attempted this were the physical, the emotional and the spiritual. The point is given by various notebook jottings; for instance:
The Choice is Bomb Form or
My Still Life Form.
Elsewhere in the same notebook Miller referred to “The holy Form” as answer to the hydrogen bomb and talked of the possibility of “violent juxtaposition” providing “calm evocation” 75. These contemplations connect quite directly with the series of still life paintings represented here by Still life with green curtains (and objects) [Plate 70].
As we have seen Miller’s interest in symbolism burgeoned before leaving England in 1938. The symbolism he came to paint is perhaps closer to the category of paleosymbol identified by Arieti and Fingesten, as considered earlier in this chapter, rather than one readily understood by the viewer. In 1957 Miller admitted how he had:
. . . watched the lines on the water and . . . how on the next day I perceived the same lines, movements in my object at my work. It is thus one goes over to the world of analogies. . . Thus one moves from the physical object, to analogies, to ideas, feelings, images concepts visionary impulses. And thus one, incidently, comes to see - actually see these things in the objects 76.
Miller believed that there existed a universal mind where time had “faded” and space was “nothing” and that travelled across the centuries - ‘Art in the extremest [sic]’, he commented 77. Certainly some of the forms in his work [the circle and upwardly pointed triangle for instance] are commonly regarded as archetypal, universal symbols of completeness and spirituality recognised by many viewers, if subconsciously. Fingesten contends that universals are strictly iconic. That is, form and idea are in close identity. Colours and object-forms that recur through Miller’s paintings are often iconic symbols in this sense; for instance, green and trees, his variously coloured fruit, flowers, the golden nimbii, the mother-figure, the crucifix. However, in as far as they contribute to conveying his central idea, the unity of all, most are non-iconic. This is equally so for other artistic factors present, such as the structural matrices. Indeed, many of these elements verge on being essentially paleosymbolic or arbitrarily chosen and thus ‘“highly individual, subjective, emotionally loaded and unverifiable”’. Miller would not have been worried at all by this. For him, individuality and the subjective emotions were what art was partly about. Moreover, as Miller indicated in the quotation given above, allegory was clearly intended in much of his work. However, these allegorical meanings are not easily deciphered. Consequently they more properly lie in the area of paleosymbology. It is important to emphasise that in true Symbolist fashion Miller’s pictures can be read on more than one level - which one depends on the viewer’s own knowledge. In particular, the extent to which he or she has been “initiated” into esoteric thought and belief. The following general observations can be made in conclusion. When Miller used little known symbolic means, such as the grids drawn from proportional rhythm theory or the colour schemas of Anthroposophical belief, those aspects will be readily appreciated only by the few viewers holding similar interests. The symbolism reflective of a more traditional source such as in the religious paintings will be more widely comprehended. Many of these pictures are thus fully comprehensible only to those immersed in metaphysics in the way that Miller was himself. Finally, the deeply personal meanings the artist is believed to have brought to some pictures are unlikely to be realised without recourse to his personal history. Ultimately, whether his work was of high or a lesser symbolist order is inconsequential to the viewer’s appreciation of this very fine painter.
This discussion of Miller’s motifs closes by acknowledging some thoughts on still life that he published in 1959. The artist spoke of the need to ‘incorporate elements devised [invented] by Man’ into the creation of unities. A quotation from Dante follows, ‘“All things are arranged in a certain order and this constitutes the form by which the Universe resembles God”’ together with ‘That is a splendid approach to painting a still life’ 78. His views accord with Romanticism, an expressive mode to which Miller quite obviously belonged. His desire to create unities reflected the Monist metaphysical position he had arrived at during the 1930s. The “certain order” by which the objects of living took on religious implications and moved into accord with this philosophy referred to symbolic expression. However, this arose not only from what articles could legitimately signify by way of the symbolic tradition. Equally important was the manner of their representation and arrangement that was in many ways the new symbolic order of the 1920s and 1930s. Miller never denied the importance of tradition. Rather, as he wrote in 1937, ‘What is the reason for the new, or different ideas. Even when one has them, the great portion of the proposition is to fit them into the line of tradition on which we all were at the first place’ 79. The successful integration to his Modernist painting practices of inspirations from artistic traditions that stretch as far back as ancient Egypt is evidence of remarkable knowledge and achievement. Miller stands squarely as an artist in the Symbolist tradition as this evolved out of nineteenth century metaphysics and esoterism. While locating him in that stream, the twentieth-century Modernism of his work is equally evident. The elements he drew from there were both formalist and expressionist in nature: formalist in his emphasis on the picture as flat plane and interest in abstraction and Modernist colour practices; expressionist by way of that edge to his art identified as paleosymbolic and his concern always with expressing “poetic thought” and the lyrical in painting. Miller himself spelled out the ultimate aim of his art as early as 1936 when he wrote:
The great secret . . . is to get Emotional Urges and Rational designs finely coinciding, each helping forward each other . . . [in] harmony and cooperation . . . [A]ll urges shld [sic] be reconciled - the Physical, Rational Emotional Spiritual 80.
He succeeded. In so doing, the discursive streams of early twentieth century practice and theory of picture making were melded. At the same time, and in true Modernist fashion again, Miller’s integrity as a creator and an individualist is never in question.
return to top