Opening remarks given by Professor Sasha Grishin
at the exhibition of Margaret Cilento: Circus – Dream and Reality
on Saturday 18 June 2005

Margaret Cilento is a great Australian artist whose work I had been admiring for several decades and who is a household name in Australian painting and printmaking circles.  Having lived in Melbourne for the past four decades and not having shown in Sydney for a very long time, this is a rare opportunity of catching a glimpse of the work of this great Australian veteran artist.  I had the privilege of spending a couple of hours with this exhibition and was struck by three things.  And these three observations will form the basis of my remarks this afternoon.

Firstly, I was struck by what I would term the triumph of visual intelligence.  On the Australian art scene we have many young and highly prized show ponies who make clever and effective pictures that appeal to those innocent of an art training and to trendy curators.  In Margaret Cilento’s work, when you see the mastery of draughtsmanship, the compositional conceits and the colouristic vibrancy, you should realise that this reflects a lifetime of knowledge, experimentation and experience. 

Fifty years ago, when Margaret Cilento and Francis Lymburner were themselves show ponies and were both praised as brilliant and intuitive draughtsmen, that judgement was accurate.  That intuitive and lucid economy of line is still with her today, but now it has been tempered by half a century of experience.  Don’t take my word for it, just look on how the network of lines has been drawn and articulated in the large and incredibly ambitious The trapeze painting of 2004, or the wonderful linear articulation of the anatomies in the Two jugglers from Circus Oz of the same date.  The point isn’t that she’s over 80 years old, there are plenty of bad old painters about, the point is that she was brilliant to start off with and has spent a lifetime extending, honing and refining her skills.  The same applies to her compositions and their incredible complexity and the really quite remarkable and unconventional things that she has been doing with colour. 

Those of you who work professionally in art must realise that Anna on the Tissu Trapeze II is an incredibly difficult picture to pull off.  Margaret Cilento does it flawlessly and apparently effortlessly.  And in this lies her brilliance, she achieves remarkably ambitious compositions, reconciles colours which are by nature irreconcilable, demonstrates a virtuosity in her drawing and does all of this in an unlaboured way.  The exhibition does not reek of an artist‘s sweat, but is like a single breath of creation.  It is this triumph of visual intelligence which runs throughout the exhibition.

The second thing that struck me about this exhibition is its imagery drawing on the theme of the circus.  The circus is quite a well known theme in art – Daumier, Manet, Rouault, Renoir, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Sickert, Picasso, Alexander Calder, Léger and Dubuffet  - all of these and many others come quickly to mind. What I found more difficult was thinking of many Australian examples – there is the odd work or two by Fred Willimas, Martin Sharp, John Perceval, George Baldessin, Leonard French, Salvatore Zoffrea and Justin O’Brien, which could be related to a circus theme with some figures on tightropes, harlequin costumes or a sad clown or two, and Andrew Sibley and Francis Lymburner did circus series, – but I cannot instantly bring to mind many major Australian artists who have made the circus into a major theme in their art in the same way that Margaret Cilento has. 
For me this raised quite a big question was this a deliberate flash back to distinctly European modernism or was she trying to say something else?  Margaret Cilento is a very well informed artist and in her whispering clowns one can catch echoes of Daumier, Picasso’s harlequins and Léger’s acrobats may inform her vision, but the whole series of paintings is certainly not an anachronistic excursion into a European daydream. 

What I did find instructional was the artist’s subtitle: Circus: Dream and Reality.  At one stage she noted: “The circus is a marvellous subject, especially the extraordinary physical feats and odd colour combinations.  Dream and reality seem to merge in the surreal world of circus performances.  Yet always looking behind the freedom and strange glamour of the big top is the gritty, ephemeral nature of circus life”.  As with all major artists, Margaret Cilento’s work is not about reproducing literally a known reality – for that, thank God, we have photography and digital technologies, although some people who paint still have not woken up to this fact.  I think in this series Margaret Cilento sees the circus as an excuse to take the artist’s imagination for a walk. 

Going out a bit on the limb, by saying what I think a series of work is all about in front of the artist, I see it really as an allegory for the human situation, exploring relationships between people, stresses, love, attraction, rejection, loneliness, in other words - the human condition.  But this is not done in a heavy-handed, didactic manner of an old dogmatic moralist, but through the conceit of the theme of the circus.  The way in which I read the work is that through the Dream of the circus you can see glimpses of reality.  Conceptually this is a very adventurous show – it is as if two worlds collide – on the one hand, the dream and the fantasy of the circus with the costumes, lights, fanfare, props and glitter – and on the other hand, the world of the gritty reality.

When you walk around the exhibition, in some ways neither world is shown – it is as if in the seam where the two worlds collide we get a glimpse of that other reality that deals with the more permanent questions of being.  In some ways, that is what Daumier, Picasso and Dubuffet were also all on about.  So on one level, there is an Australian reality anchored in the performances of Circus Oz, the Flying Fruit Fly circus and other circuses which have performed in Australia, but on another level, the paintings allude allegorically to much more universal themes.  Finally, the third thing that strikes me about this exhibition is the whole philosophy of Margaret Cilento’s art making.  She paints as a humanist – man is the centre of all things and her art explores what it is like to be a human being.  We are surrounded by a very bleak world, where the most inhumane acts are performed on other people, even in our own country. 

Personally, I do not feel that Margaret Cilento paints an escapist world of dreams and fantasies, but instead she celebrates the freedom of the human spirit and the sense of dignity which should distinguish us from other species.  It is a very old humanist precept which goes back to the first century BC and Horace’s Ars poetica, where it is argued that the role art is to celebrate the nobility of the human spirit.  It is the celebration of the nobility of the human spirit that is the main achievement of this most beautiful exhibition. 

It is a great honour to officially open Margaret Cilento: Circus – Dream and Reality in Sydney.

Professor Sasha Grishin

Click here to return to Margaret Cilento's exhibition 'Circus - Dream and Reality'
Click here for Margaret Cilento's biography (summary)
Click here for Margaret Cilento's full biography
Click here for an essay on Margaret Cilento's Circus paintings