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The Life and Work of Godfrey Clive Miller, 1893 - 1964
PhD thesis by Ann Wookey
thesis summary
This thesis is the first comprehensive biographical and critical monograph yet produced on Miller, an important Australian Modernist painter. Miller's career had three major phases: early, transitional and mature. In my examination of each of these, initially Miller's life experiences are established, with childhood and youth ushering in the first period. His changing insights and beliefs reflect through the paintings in his treatments of space, line and colour. Secondly, for each phase the experiential and theoretical influences on Miller's changing perceptions and their impact on his formal artistic practices are identified and analysed. During his earliest phase Miller worked in a conservative, naturalistic expressive mode grounded in nineteenth century artistic traditions. In his second phase he became a Modernist. Moving quickly through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Abstraction, he developed a geometrical style based on the abstraction of natural forms. The examination of the ideas and concepts Miller came to hold during the 1930s makes an important contribution to understanding the issues of Modernism at that time. Inseparable from his emergence as a Modernist was his adoption of Neo-Platonism with its symbolist implications. This was critically important for the meaning he intended for his mature painting. From 1940 another metaphysical system, anthroposophy, confirmed him a mystic while also impacting on his mature painting practice. Essentially Miller melded the discursive streams of early twentieth century practice and theory of picture making with symbolic traditions, including that of geometry, to express an enigmatic, poetical mysticism.
thesis index
Chapter 1. The years of innocence and early manhood: New Zealand and Australia, 1893 - 1929
Chapter 2. The years of great excitement: Miller's meeting with Modernism, London, and Europe, ca 1929 - 1938
Chapter 3. Miller, Modernism and the evolution of a personal æsthetic, ca 1933 - 1938
Chapter 4. The objective means to expression in Miller's thought and practice, ca 1935 - 1940
Chapter 5. Miller's application of mathematics in painting, ca 1929 - 1942
Chapter 6. Life and work in Sydney, 1939 - 1964
Chapter 7. Miller and the Germans: Goethe, the Gestalt School of Psychology and Steiner
Chapter 8. Miller's pictorial sources and expressive intentions for the paintings of his maturity
Appendix 1. Letters and published material concerning Godfrey Clive Miller
Appendix 2. Biographic detail: family, friends, other artists, etc, and organisations
Appendix 3. Miller's paintings by period and dimensional ratio
Appendix 5. Catalogue: works by and attributed to Godfrey Clive Miller [part A]
post-research addenda (update of PhD thesis material; mostly still to come)
about the author
Ann Wookey: B Comm (Melb), Dip Arts (RMIT), B A Hons (La Trobe), PhD (La Trobe), Postgrad Dip in Art Curatorial Studies (Melb)
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