James Gleeson | Queer Australian Art

Bio

James Gleeson (1915-2008) was regarded as Australia's foremost surrealist painter, though was also known for his simultaneous career as a prominent poet, critic and writer. Gleeson's interest in the Surrealist movement began after he read Salvador Dali's 1935 book The Conquest of the Irrational. Though his work remained invested in the realms of the subconscious and the psychoanalytic, Gleeson's practice shifted in its style and subject matter across his long career. In 1949 during three months abroad in Italy, Gleeson became fascinated by the work of the Renaissance painter Michelangelo, becoming a self-declared "classicist" for a time. Similarly inspired by Michelangelo and their shared identities as homosexual men, Gleeson looked to the nude male form as a symbol of beauty. In later work, he would turn away from a direct depiction of male beauty, eschewing more realist depiction for increasingly abstract and distorted forms as a means of showing the equal presence of ugliness in life. Gleeson also made contributions to Australian art history as a writer, including texts such as 1969's Masterpieces of Australian Art and monographs on the work of fellow Australian painter William Dobell (1964) and Robert Klippel (1983).

Gleeson met his life partner Frank O'Keefe, a former designer for David Jones, in 1948. The pair lived together in their home studio in Northbridge, NSW (which Gleeson had built in 1952) for nearly sixty years until O'Keefe's death in 2007. The entire Gleeson O'Keefe estate was gifted as a bequest to the Art Gallery of New South Wales upon Gleeson's death in 2008.