John PERCEVAL

Australian 1923–2000

When John Perceval began painting, at an early age and self-taught, he was living in the middle of an experiment in new directions in Australian art. Perceval met Arthur Boyd when both were drafted into the army in 1941 and he soon began living at Open Country at Murrumbeena, the home of the extended Boyd family. At first, Perceval slept in Arthur Boyd’s studio, then built his own place on the property.

By the time he married Mary Boyd in 1944, Perceval was a radical, even revolutionary, artist. To the cartoon-like qualities of his 1940s paintings, embracing as they do the styles of artists banned or exiled by the Nazis, such as Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso and Emil Nolde, and simultaneously embracing the social-realist style sanctioned by the Communist Party, Perceval added fear-filled scenes from his childhood. These memories were realised as poignant and nightmarish encounters in the city. His art was most radical in the early 1940s, typified by Boy with a kite, Fitzroy, 1943. The red, feral boy, his animal nature exuding through his monkey feet and hands, grimaces from a childlike mask. The boy rises with his kite, levitating in fact and imagination over Fitzroy backyards and roofs that could have come from a painting by Danila Vassilieff. An émigré, this older expressionist artist, together with the young Yosl Bergner, introduced European expressionism, child art and first-hand knowledge of the School of Paris to young artists like Perceval in the Contemporary Art Society.

Jennifer Phipps

Perceval used the Public Library’s extensive collection of art books and journals, as well as the overseas art journals in bookshops, to learn about art. The famous exhibition French and British Contemporary Art, 1939–40, brought out by the Herald newspaper, had shown Australians a remarkable Salvador Dali, a number of works by Picasso, and beautiful van Gogh landscapes and portraits. Perceval’s admiration for the latter artist meant he changed the way he applied his paint. Less wild, more directed towards letting the paint texture and brush strokes articulate the forms in the painting, this change is seen at its best in the beautiful Potato field, 1948; the title and subject paying tribute to van Gogh. Perceval’s style changed completely to this after the end of the war, invoking as well Jan Breughel old-master compositions, similar to those of his close friend Arthur Boyd.

Jennifer Phipps

Perceval painted outside, and landscape was his main subject. He painted several series on the Williamstown docks and shipyards. In the first series, from the mid 1950s, paint is pushed and touched irresistibly onto sparkling surfaces to shape tugs in rocking motion on the waves and, like Potato field, the space stretches in dynamic directions far back in the canvas.

Jennifer Phipps

Although a landscape painter, Perceval was, in the 1950s, best known for his pottery. Observing his young family, he threw and modelled gnomic and elfin figures based on them, clay fired and glazed in miraculously fine details. These ambiguous, sometimes grotesque creatures, called Angels, glazed red as though exposed to atomic radiation, recall sculptural heads by Jacob Epstein. Perceval finished making his Angel sculptures in 1961. He had shown six of them, and several Williamstown paintings, in the Antipodean Exhibition in 1959.

Jennifer Phipps