Roy de Maistre

The artist
Private collection, United Kingdom; acquired from the above through the New Atlantis Foundation in 1930s; thence by descent

There are stable drying cracks to much of the picture surface, especially confined to the areas of white paint and to the black triangle to the right of the profiled head. There are some paint loss and scratches running along the left hand edge and more minor areas along the top and lower edges against frame rebate. There is a scratch in the blue area (lower right hand corner) approximately 3cm in length. This work has been lined and appears to have a new stretcher. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration.
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New Atlantis is one of the most important and impressive of Roy de Maistre's paintings of the 1930s, both in its own right as a striking admixture of surrealism and synthetic cubism, and as a painting which links two important relationships in the artist's life: with painter Francis Bacon and philosopher Dimitri Mitronovic. The importance of the paintings subject to the artist is indicated by its initially slow and complex gestation, and by its having been preceded and reiterated in several finished versions. The version commissioned by Mitronovic, New Atlantis (circa 1933, National Gallery of Australia) set a record price for de Maistre's work when sold by Sotheby's in April 2006.

The composition of New Atlantis has its origins in a curiously angular but essentially descriptive interior, showing a corner of one of Bacon's London studios, with paintings stacked on either side of a doorway (Francis Bacon's studio, circa 1933, private collection; sold Sotheby's, Melbourne, November 2008). Using this architecture as a geometrical foundation, de Maistre developed a more substantial yet more ambiguous painting in which he begins to blur the distinction between illusionistic and pictorial space, and in which the differences between picture and wall and door and shadow are less clear. This painting, bought by de Maistre's great patron Gladys MacDermot, was unfortunately destroyed in the London Blitz during WWII, but not before it had attracted the attention of another of MacDermot's protégés, Dimitri Mitrinovic, political and aesthetic visionary and polemicist, and founder of the journals New Britain and New Atlantis. MacDermot's painting featured as the frontispiece of volume 1, number 1 of the latter publication.

Heather Johnson records that 'Mitrinovic commissioned a version of the work for himself ... almost identical to the original work owned by MacDermot. Several other versions and variations of the work were also produced: a third, smaller work done for Mitrinovic and given to a follower, Jack Murphy, who subsequently moved to Canada ... a fourth work also done for Mitrinovic and presently in a private collection associated with the New Atlantis Foundation [the present work]; a fifth work, in a private collection (reproduced Eagle, Australian Modern Painting..., plate 32, p. 50); and a sixth work, White Figure (Art Gallery of Western Australia).'¹  To this list we can also add a related work, Annunciation (circa 1933, private collection; sold Sotheby's, Melbourne, November 2008), which features two abstracted figures standing in a very closely comparable faceted interior.

The present painting is a key work in this extended and most important sequence, and is a fine example of de Maistre's idiosyncratic surrealism of juxtaposition. In Johnson's words, it is 'a superior and fascinating abstracted pattern of the hard-edged, angled shapes skillfully devised from the corner of the room, but made inexplicable by the linear and stylistically out of place form in the doorway and [the] strangeness of the subject matter in the pictured painting on the right.'²  The cool realism of the initial study having undergone a degree of refinement, of increased abstraction in the Canberra version, in the present work all traces of illusion are eliminated. Here, over a monochrome grey ground, the edges of forms – walls, floor, door, pictures – form a schematic or diagrammatic frame of strong black lines. Over this geometric web de Maistre then casts two large, irregular white shapes, a handful of black shadow-shards, and primary colour highlights: red edging around the door frame, a flare of yellow beneath the head and two blue 'curtains' billowing on either side of the right hand of the painting.

The overall effect – the flattening of the surface, the strong graphic quality, the seemingly random overlays of colour – is very close to that found in the work of Pablo Picasso in the 1920s, especially the artist and model pictures such as The artist and his model (1926, Musée Picasso, Paris), Artist and his model (1927, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art) and Painter and model (1928, Museum of Modern Art, New York). Interestingly, the latter work incorporates a floating 'classical' profile, a device which Picasso employed from the mid 1920s: in La danse (1925, Tate), for example, and Bust of a woman with a self-portrait (1929, private collection). This motif, too, has been borrowed by de Maistre, for the head in the doorway. Bacon and de Maistre were both great admirers of Picasso's work at this time, and they would have had the opportunity to see a wide range of old and new work in London, at the Lefevre Gallery retrospective Thirty years of Picasso in June 1931.

This climactic version of New Atlantis shows how readily, how unashamedly and how successfully de Maistre integrated the work of the great modernist pioneer into his own practice, and marks a key development in his continuing exploration of the cubist mode.

1.  Heather Johnson, Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930-1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 77
2.  ibid., p. 79