Smith & Singer are delighted to offer Godfrey Miller's Nude and the Moon (1959-1964) for private sale.

Godfrey Miller’s work is unique in the canon of Australian modern art.  His paintings bring together a diverse range of artistic experiences and influences: early training as an architect, travel through China and Japan, classical drawing training at the Slade School, and the exacting models of painters such as Claude, Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso.  He was also a thinker; a modest, frugal, retiring man who read widely – from Plato to Goethe, from Rudolf Steiner to Krishnamurti – and who strove to express his theosophical-mystical beliefs in concrete pictorial form. 

The result of this complex mix of formal and spiritual inclinations was a very particular, individualistic style.  In Miller’s characteristic mature paintings – in figures, still lifes and landscapes alike – the canvas is criss-crossed by hundreds of lines inked with ruler and compass, which form a grid or matrix for thousands of paint-strokes.

Monochromatic in tone and reductive in construction, the present Nude and the Moon remains a composition that combines intense observation and refined abstraction and acts not only as apogee and summary of the artist’s achievement, but as a refined example of Godfrey Miller’s unique contribution to the history and development of Australian art.

The painting was acquired by fellow painter Clifton Pugh and has resided in his family’s collection for more than sixty years.  

Pictured above 

GODFREY MILLER 1893-1964
Nude and the Moon (1959-1964)
oil, pen and ink on canvas 
62 x 103.7 cm    
For private sale