James Gleeson
VAULT looks at the queer legacy of Australian surrealist James Gleeson.
Image credit: James Gleeson, The oracle, 1948, oil on canvas, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. Courtesy Art Gallery of New South Wales © Gleeson O’Keefe Foundation
During the interwar period, European Surrealism was introduced to the Australian art scene with an influx of publications landing on the continent’s shores. Gino Nibbi’s Stream (1931), André Breton’s What is Surrealism? (1936) and Herbert Read’s Surrealism (1936) prompted a rapid adoption of the movement by young artists who grappled with the ambiguity of the times. Surrealism’s tenets resonated with local artists, who similarly dismissed the rationality that led to World War I and who felt the undercurrent of unease that began to mount before World War II. In his essay ‘Surrealism in Australia’, Christopher Chapman details this heyday of the movement during the 1930s and 1940s, outlining the antipodean “minor variations” that arose on the continent as the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, among others, began to shift Australian artmaking and criticism. Conceptual tropes derived from André Breton and André Masson of the subconscious, automatism and the libidinal opened a new avenue for Australian art as unique antipodean artistic languages began to form, differentiated from their European counterparts.
Post World War II, these earlier ‘variations’ of Surrealism more clearly break from their European forebears. A distinctly Australian style emerges, one that retains an emphasis on the psychic world yet enfolds an emerging national image. In 1949, Robert Menzies was elected for a second term as Prime Minister, followed soon after by a reactionary re-alignment of Australian ‘values’ at a time of economic stimulus and a red-scare campaign. A distinct strain of Australian Surrealism arose from this new ‘national awareness’, in stark contrast to prior settler artists ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
