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The Life and Work of Godfrey Clive Miller, 1893 - 1964

PhD thesis by Ann Wookey

Introduction (link to notes)

Godfrey Clive Miller [born 1893 and died 1964] is one of only a handful of twentieth century English-speaking visual artists who had enlisted for World War I and survived to go on to create significant art. However, he did not emerge unscathed from this experience; in corollary many conflicts and difficulties occur in the details of his life. This is found also for Miller’s artistic endeavour. The role of the art historian in such circumstances is not to present a “tidy” picture of the artist’s life story but rather to unravel these conflicts and set the known facts into their context. Miller remains the least known and most misunderstood Modernist painter in Australian art. This thesis sets out to redress this neglect.

Miller lived in Sydney after 1939. By that time an accomplished Modernist of abstract inclination he was also a private and solitary man who bordered on being a full recluse. Consequently he did not exhibit until 1952 when almost sixty years of age [the forerunner to this “ordeal” was his becoming in 1948 a part-time teacher at the National Art School in Sydney 1]. The two paintings displayed in 1952 stunned Sydney’s art community by their intricacy and subtlety and Miller was almost immediately accorded a place in Australian art history. Seven years later he was accorded a retrospective by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, only the third given to a living local artist. Over the twelve years following his first exhibition through until his death, and in spite of his continued reluctance about exhibiting, Miller’s artistic reputation flourished both in Australia and abroad 2. So did the mystique and myth that surrounds him still. These, the mystique and myth, came not only from Miller’s social tendencies. They resulted also from his not having believed in biography. Loathe to discuss himself, Miller was often either simply inaccurate about significant dates in his life or embellished his story a little. A poor memory may have contributed. The possibility, particularly after his death, of further erroneous garnering of the facts of his life cannot be discounted either. Therefore, much biographical comment about Miller is found wanting in accuracy.

No comprehensive biographical and critical monograph has yet been published. Laurie Thomas and Bernard Smith were the first authors to provide brief, generalised outlines of Miller’s life story and, apart from reviews of the 1950-60s, of his artistic inheritance and pictorial ambitions 3. Excepting for short catalogue entries and reviews little else was written about him until after his death. With that event in 1964 came notices and obituaries in Australian and New Zealand newspapers and magazines. Four at least [those from Sydney artist-critics James Gleeson, John Henshaw and Daniel Thomas, and the Melbourne critic Alan McCulloch] drew on personal recollections of Miller’s opinions and activities through the 1950s and 1960s 4. The first comprehensive essay about Miller as a painter was Henshaw’s foreword to the Godfrey Miller Memorial Exhibition held at Sydney’s new Darlinghurst Galleries in February 1965 5. This drew on Miller’s letters held by his Estate as much as Henshaw’s friendships from the 1950s with the artist and his stepbrother, Lewis Miller. In 1966 Henshaw’s more ambitious and substantial book, Godfrey Miller, brought a broad selection of the artist’s paintings and a few drawings to the public’s attention 6. Its reproductions were each accompanied by a critical comment and the whole by a chronological outline of his career. The volume is invaluable as a visual guide to Miller’s work but, largely because of brevity, less successful as an account of his life and as a guide to the forces that informed his art. The critical comments on the paintings have an esoteric and mystical edge in keeping with both Miller and Henshaw having been involved with Sydney’s Anthroposophical Society and the writings of Rudolf Steiner. Henshaw’s biographical notes mostly repeat those that accompanied the 1965 memorial exhibition. Inaccuracies that have been identified through the course of my research concern the artist’s mother, Isabella, his training in architecture and war service, and some dates such as when Miller visited Greece and began teaching in Sydney. Most of these errors are carried into later commentaries. Lastly for the 1960s a mystique that attends Miller even today was firmly established late in 1967 by two articles in the popular magazine, The Australian Women’s Weekly. The first of these is focused on the strangeness of Miller’s isolated life and his endowment to Australian painting 7. Since then only relatively brief items about the artist and his paintings have appeared in general art texts, encyclopædias and the catalogues for exhibitions where his work has appeared 8.  Of particular significance biographically are McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Robert Hughes, Daniel Thomas’ Outlines of Australian Art:  the Joseph Brown Collection, Douglas Dundas, Ronald Millar, Ernest Smith, and Bernard Smith’s entry for The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Art 9. A more extensive survey of Miller’s behaviour and reputation among Sydney artists after 1950 appears in Geoffrey Dutton 10. Although enthralling, the details of some recollections are untrue. Moreover, Dutton’s own account of Miller’s prolonged dealings from Sydney during the early 1960s with the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne over their possible acquisition of paintings is biased in the artist’s favour. With Rosemary Crumlin the facts given about the artist’s life become particularly inaccurate and the attribution by Mary Eagle of Miller’s experimenting with dynamic symmetry into the late 1920s is questionable 11. Thus we see a continuing degeneration of the Miller “data base” which was a rather inaccurate source from the beginning. Miller’s artistic reputation also appears to have declined slightly over recent years. He is no longer listed among the Australian artists in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Art.  However, this position has received some redress by way of Christopher Marshall’s fine critique of Miller’s Madonna in the Newman College Collection at the University of Melbourne 12. As far as a market for the work goes, Miller’s art has never been overwhelmingly accepted by collectors. To be fair, many of the thirty or so paintings offered between July 1987 and April 1993 by Australia’s two major art auction houses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, were not always of the highest quality or, coming from Miller’s transitional phase, were stylistically unknown to the broader buying public. Consequently, and in the face of a depressed art market, none of the three pictures offered by Sotheby’s in April 1993 found buyers 13. Despite such adversity the artist is claimed by one dealer to be currently no more difficult to handle than other local “blue-chip” painters 14.

Miller is an artist who does not deserve to be forgotten. Although not well known to the public at large, he greatly impressed Sydney’s young contemporary painters of the 1950s and early 1960s in addition to making a mark then on the broader Australian and international art worlds. His influence on the younger generation came most notably from his being in essence an Abstractionist [one of the few at that time in Australia], the depth of his cultural knowledge and his philosophical views. His artistic impact locally was consequently stronger even than the more evident stylistic influence of fellow Sydney teacher and painter John Passmore. Miller’s contribution to Australian art alone is more than adequate justification for this study.

Three major phases for Miller’s œuvre can be identified: the early, transitional and mature periods. This three-stage identification has been adopted for my thesis presentation. Each period begins with an outline of Miller’s life and artistic achievement. For the earliest phase, before 1929, the discussion goes no further. The transitional and mature phases are each expatiated around a central focus, the elements of his expression. This enables my identification of the derivation of Miller’s thought and artistic practices and their placement within the art historical context of his time. In two-dimensional visual expression the parameters are form and image, the formal elements of tone, line and colour, and proportion and the companion field of design [in its organisational sense]. My final chapter examines the themes of his mature work. Of special concern are previously unidentified pictorial sources for these and the meaning he wanted to convey.

Four reasons justify my three-phase methodology. The first concerns dating. Not only did Miller’s work remain largely unexhibited during his lifetime but also he never dated drawings and paintings and rarely wrote of individual pieces 15. Therefore, attribution of his paintings to any period of his life is necessarily made mostly on stylistic grounds. The accuracy that can be achieved by stylistic analysis alone is limited. As a result, the possibility of undertaking a strictly chronological study of the artist’s life and œuvre is severely restricted if not impossible. A “period” attribution thus becomes all that can be hoped for or expected.

The second reason is that the grounds for understanding the paintings are gradually revealed, and at a pace that aligns with Miller’s own changing comprehensions and beliefs. By the late 1930s in London [when about forty five years old] Miller had arrived at a view of perception that aggregated the seen and the sensed. This appreciation of visual perceptual practice was rooted firmly in twentieth century psychological theory. It would be translated into later canvases painted in Sydney during the 1940s and after. The forms of Miller’s mature paintings are not depictions of physical entities, whether places, people or material objects, or of events in their reality. Rather, there are shapes that combine by way of line and colour field to form images of a kind that further associate into the gestalt that is the picture. As such, each work represents a totality of being, in and of itself. There is a simultaneous fluxing, and so transcendence, of time and space to reflect a deeper core of human experience. The kernel of Miller’s beliefs about artistic expression became set during the 1930s.  As he wrote then:

The artist . . . draws through a labrinth [sic] of a particularities feeling, with a grace got from non-agression [sic] and with a relentlessness got from intellectual experience, expressing the generalities which pervade all things. . . When another person draws he, not feeling this all pervading thing draws the particular. In the world the particularities are attended to 16.

Although cryptically stated, these words are a clear indication of the intention and practice that was developed in Miller’s drawing and painting then, and which would sustain him as an artist. The world of physical objects and events are disclaimed as the real concern of the creative mind. Instead the poetic imagination moves to symbolically portray universals of human existence and experience. The achievement of Miller’s mature expression arose out of a slowly evolved personal comprehension of perceptual theory and practice and the associated field of epistemology. This knowledge was simultaneously affected by his increasingly wide experience of art in all its forms and both traditional and modern modes. Miller’s changing acumen and beliefs are reflected in the different phases of his work, particularly in his use of line, colour and space. Accordingly, the examination of the formal components of his art is a means to uncovering these ideas and thus provides the grounds for greater understanding of his mature pictures.

Thirdly, the major vehicles by which Miller instilled symbolic meaning into the mature paintings were form, the organisation of space or design, and colour. His comprehension of form came to lean heavily on conceptions that derived ultimately from Neo-Platonic and Monist metaphysics. Therefore, the “form” of Miller’s art, and this is a broader conception than the imagery alone, is in correspondence both with nature’s form and with God, in the typical fashion of late nineteenth century Symbolist æsthetics. As such, the separate examination of form adds significantly to the knowledge available for understanding his work. Proportional rhythm theory, that design system of “skeletons” or structural matrices over which Miller spatially orchestrated form and colour, corresponded likewise with nature and Godhead, but now by way of inherent symbolic associations. The same can be claimed for Miller’s mature uses of colour. As one of the more mysterious phenomena of the sensible world, colour engrosses and at times confounds philosophy, science, psychology and the arts alike. Consequently it is often the most difficult of the formal expressive means available to the visual artist for creating works carrying a significant æsthetic. Excepting the exploratory sketches and largely unfinished works, Miller’s paintings repeatedly achieve a quality of “significant æsthetic”. In large part, this is precisely because of the intricate, subtle and brilliant colour harmonies that allow Miller to be judged a fine “colourist”. Yet he was to imply in later life that considerable uncertainty accompanied his achievement with colour, almost that he knew little of it. His opinion reinforces the view of colour as an inherently elusive and therefore mysterious expressive medium. However, the study of Miller’s colour æsthetic assists quite considerably in comprehending his artistic intentions.

Lastly, the discovery that proportional rhythm theory informs all the pictures provides an analytical tool for identifying the three periods of Miller’s œuvre. In 1959 the then elderly Miller identified the significant phases of his development as a painter in these words:

Period (1) The working in monochrome. Period (2) The coming of colour. (3) The accent on drawing or, as Professor Tonks would call it, the science of drawing, plus the entrance into modelling and matters of the third dimension as plain third dimension. These three features seem to me the most important in what I have done. The endeavour - rather pitifully determined - to build and create in sepia certainly gave the germ or setting for later imports. . . The elementary features of that way of working could produce Claude Lorraine [sic] and Turner’s early work - simplicity, dignity, power and light. The second period - the coming of colour - could be called the awful one. For a time it destroyed, by ruffling the expression in the rhythms, the creative work of the sepia. But it brought a new power. But is it, I still ask, allied to and incorporated in tone? Or is it set against and antagonistic to tone? The third, the science of drawing, grew out of the need . . . to have something more tangible and crucial in the mixture of tone colour existence 17.

Miller thus signified his progress as having had three phases connected to his changing experiences with tone, colour and drawing. Because of its generality, the statement does not assist greatly with the temporal identification of these three periods. However, proportional rhythm theory proved of great assistance for this task. As the name implies the application of proportional rhythm theory lies with dimension. For the present discussion, the interest is the exterior dimensions of Miller’s pictures - the proportional ratio of one side’s length to the other. Analysis shows that only ten different dimensional ratios occur throughout Miller’s œuvre. This is despite the wide variations in actual mount size encountered 18. Moreover these dimensional ratios are precisely the series of harmonic progression and dynamic symmetry ratios that comprise proportional rhythm theory. Importantly, the presence of quite different subsets from the series permits the separation of Miller’s career into three phases. This pattern, therefore, is a means to isolating the work of each phase. In addition, and most conveniently, the three periods coincide almost exactly with Miller’s living in three places around the world. The early period corresponds largely with his first Australian stay between 1918 and 1929. The second, the transitional period, was essentially the London years from 1929 to 1938 but extending into the early 1940s. His mature period came some years after his return to Sydney in 1939.

Finally it needs to be noted that Miller paintings sometimes bear quite unsatisfactory titles. This is especially so when a transitional work is designated a locality. Since Miller exhibited so very little himself, titles to much of his œuvre were allocated after his death by the beneficiaries to his Estate assisted by his fellow Sydney artists. These inaccuracies result from their lack of information about his life and painting.

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