Max MELDRUM

Scottish 1875–1955
emigrated to Australia 1889, worked in France 1904–11, 1926–31

Max Meldrum won the 1899 Travelling Scholarship offered by the Gallery School at the National Gallery of Victoria. He chose to study in France and only returned to Melbourne in 1911. He became a controversial and divisive figure in the Melbourne art world and for decades pursued a theory of seeing and representing that he eventually detailed in his book The Science of Appearances published in 1950. This theory sprung from his study of optics and the old masters, and is based on tonal relationships, colour and form. It became known as Tonalism, and still has its adherents today.

Interior, c. 1943, was painted in the studio that Meldrum built in the grounds of his Kew house in 1938. The room was hung with old-gold velvet draperies and furnished with the mid-Victorian chairs and sofas the family collected. Lighting was important to Meldrum: he preferred electric light for its unchanging reliability, and prized sharp contrasts between light and dark. His critics referred to the latter as ‘Meldrum gloom’. In a way these details are immaterial for Interior is essentially an abstract picture, a demonstration of Meldrum’s tonal theories: the paint is applied in patches of pure colour, tone against tone. Thus the surface of the painting becomes a mosaic of colour and form.

Many of Meldrum’s interiors are homages to or reminiscences of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (in the collection of the Museo del Prado), a picture he had made so deep a study of that it became part of his own consciousness. In Interior the influence is more tenuous, more suggestive. Like Velázquez, though, Meldrum included his own self-portrait on the left-hand side of the picture.

Terence Lane