LEONARD FRENCH

The Bridge, Leonard French Paintings, Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 28 September - 17 October 1985, cat. 4, illus.
The Qantas Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14-26 November 1995

The art of Leonard French celebrates the epic and dwells in the realms of heroes, his larger paintings having the grandeur of murals. As early as 1956 the Legend of Sinbad featured on the walls of Melbourne's Legend Espresso Bar, and he achieved national fame with his Campion paintings in 1960-61. The Creation series followed, and monumental works spread into thick glass in the ceiling of the then new National Gallery of Victoria, at Monash University, and elsewhere.

In 1984 French completed a five-metre long mural commission, The Bridge, 1982-84, for the Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg. Sasha Grishin, in his monograph on French, described this as 'an anti-apartheid manifesto' with its clash of cultures and peoples.¹ Paintings relating to the mural, including The Crossing and its study, were exhibited in Melbourne in 1985. While French retained the image and metaphor of the bridge, he added an ennobling touch through the introduction of horses in armour and their blindfolded riders. The imagery is reminiscent of Paolo Uccello's celebrated The Battle of San Romano, the connection with the Quattrocento Florentine master of perspective strengthened by the three-dimensional quality of the horses, leaping across the picture plane and into the viewer's space. Significantly, John Brack was painting his pencil battle pictures at this time, his Uccello's Rout of 1981 being inspired by Uccello's panel in the National Gallery, London. While battles provide handy metaphors for social conflict and cataclysm, in French's art the eye is always seduced by the beauty of his glazes worked across the low reliefs of his inventive imagery.

1. Grishin, S., Leonard French, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 56.