James Gleeson

James Gleeson
James Timothy Gleeson (21 November 1915 – 20 October 2008) was an Australian artist. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Australia.
Early life
Gleeson was born in the Hornsby in 1915 and attended East Sydney Technical College from 1934 to 1936.
Gleeson's family owned the hotel at the Central Coast NSW town of Gosford and the cool room was sometimes used as a makeshift morgue. During his teacher education, Gleeson was exposed to the works of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung who were to become major influences in Gleeson's phantasmogoric work.
Work
Gleeson's worked with Robert Klippel in his early year.
]] In 1944 Gleeson created Millet influenced work The sower referencing Jean-François Millet's 1850 painting of the same title. Rather than showing a landscape with a conglomerate main figure, Gleeson presents an daliesque mindscape. Gleeson's later work featured the male nude, as a gay artist he was a rarity in the middle of the twentieth century. His work had homoerotic suggestions and was not as sexualised as his contemporary, the gay artist, Tom of Finland.
Since the 1970s Gleeson generally made large scale paintings in that have been described inscape genre. The works outwardly resemble rocky seascapes turning into strange biomorphic forms. Gleeson's phantasmogoria referred to the artists mindscape and sometimes a self portrait would pop out from the morass of muscular male nudes and weird forms under a stormy sky.
In the late 1970s, Gleeson interviewed 98 Australian artists in their studios, about their work being acquired by the National Gallery. Gleeson was known to be a soft newspaper art critic, although his dossiers of significant Australian artist proved to be more discriminating.
In 2008, the James Gleeson Oral History Collection's significance was recognised by it being inscribed into the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register. The inscription was announced at the program's conference, Communities and Memories: A Global Perspective in Canberra.
His retrospective in 2004–2005, Beyond the Screen of Sight, included 120 paintings and was exhibited in Melbourne and Canberra. The Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibited Gleeson's drawings for paintings in 2003 and The Ubu diptych in 2005 to celebrate Gleeson's 90th birthday. The Ubu diptych is regarded as one of his greatest.
In September 2007, the largest collection of Australian surrealism ever collected was donated to the National Gallery of Australia by Ray Wilson. The collection included various works by James Gleeson.
Death
Gleeson died in Sydney on 20 October 2008, aged 92. His life partner Frank O'Keefe died in 2007.
See also
Art of Australia
References
External links
Grandi Artisi - James Gleeson - collection of his paintings
Eva Breuer Art Dealer - more of his paintings
James Gleeson artworks (for sale) on art.net.au
James Gleeson at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
James Timothy Gleeson at Australian Art
James Gleeson passes away, 20 October 2008, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, Australia
James Gleeson: Surrealist painter, art critic and curator who drew dark inspiration from contemporary events (Obituary), Kathy Marks, The Independent, 29 October 2008
1915 births
2008 deaths
Australian art critics
Australian gay artists
Artists from Sydney
National Art School alumni
Australian LGBT poets
20th-century Australian male artists
20th-century Australian poets
Australian male poets
20th-century Australian male writers
Members of the Order of Australia
Officers of the Order of Australia
Australian male painters
20th-century Australian LGBT people
Australian gay writers
Australian mid-20th century modern painters