Peter BOOTH

English 1940–
emigrated to Australia 1958

Peter Booth came to widespread attention through his inclusion in The Field in 1968, the inaugural exhibition for the new National Gallery of Victoria building. One of the primary catalysts for The Field had been the arrival in Melbourne in 1967 of the Museum of Modern Art’s travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, providing a crucially important opportunity for a young generation of artists to critically assess the previous generation of internationally acclaimed and highly influential painters. The Field focused on the work of a younger generation artists, many of who were pursuing an international style of abstraction, the distinct aesthetics of which included hard edge and colour-field formats, post-Pop, conceptual and minimal practices.

Booth was represented by his large-scale, hard-edge ‘block’ paintings. The compositions were straightforward and eschewed visual trickery, and were geometrically precise and assertive in the application of colour. The painterly texture of the works and the evident hand of the artist, however, were Booth’s attempts for increased emotional content in a non-objective picture, and hinted at a necessity for feeling to be more overt in the painting. The evidential marks of Booth’s painting process and the tactile materiality of the viscous, glossy, painterly surface were at odds with the cool and reductive surfaces of several of his contemporaries in The Field, but it is remarkable to consider how the gesture embedded in Booth’s early work is unleashed in the dark skies and cosmological phenomena of his later figurative works.

In Untitled painting, 1966–67, there is an almost inevitable landscape reading. The dominant black form, as in so many of the block paintings and subsequent ‘doorway’ paintings, operates alternately as a frontal slab or recessive void, and may recall the war-ravaged and blackened industrial landscape of Sheffield where Booth was raised.

In his works of the late 1960s through to the completion of the ‘doorway’ paintings in 1974, Booth used black pigments in various densities and tones that allowed him, as he has stated, to explore his sense that black was ‘strong and beautiful—the colour of the universe’. He added at the same time that ‘the abstract paintings reflected my state of mind then. Whether a picture is abstract or figurative is not the issue—it’s what the painting says about the human condition’.

Jason Smith