Charles Meere

(1890-1961)

Diamonds are a girl's best friend 1959

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Savill Galleries, Sydney
Australian & International Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper, Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 25 April 1999, lot 49 (illus.)
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1999


In Diamonds are a girl's best friend 1959, Charles Meere1 casts his gently sardonic eye on contemporary décor and mores, through a playful take on the still life tradition.

Art Deco style, with its explicit rendering of the subject, suited Meere's rather cerebral art practice, which relies on a teasing interplay between clearly articulated elements, rather than on painterly suggestion. This aesthetic is apparent here in the calculated design, firm lines and restrained use of colour. A still life arrangement of hard-edged geometrical forms softened by the tangle of a climbing plant occupies the central area, against a series of receding planes. The spectator looks down on the low coffee table at close range, drawn into a slightly surreal space defined at left by the oddly tilted edge of the blue cupboard, at right by a shadowed doorway. The palette seems as limited as the colour scheme of such a room might be, in pinks, blues, shaded whites and cream, but subtle washes of yellow and purple enrich the paint surface.

The image is dominated by the piggy-bank, its motto taken from Marilyn Monroe's song in the 1953 comedy Gentlemen prefer blondes. The piggy-bank also refers obliquely to the film's character Sir 'Piggy' Beekman, an aging diamond mine owner as keen to shower diamonds on Marilyn as she is to accept them. The pink, diamante-studded pig, complete with the smile and the eyelashes, is paradoxical: cheap kitsch touting precious stones; promotion of the pursuit of wealth mocked by the slot made for saving pennies.

It stands on a stock piece of 1950s furniture – the Danish-modern splay-legged coffee table – along with the terracotta pot that holds a philodendron tied to the obligatory piece of driftwood with a pink ribbon bow. Garlands of artificial flowers have somehow found their way into this arrangement. The plant is a climber, heading up beyond the top of the canvas, a metaphor for the social climbing suggested by the motto.

The bow, the garlands and the pig together sketch a pink cornucopia, a symbol of abundance that curves down to the road-to-riches motto. The white garland both highlights the implied form and breaks the continuity of the pink elements - a visual ploy to distract attention from what might otherwise be a too-obvious motif; a typical Meere manoeuvre, leaving scope for the spectator.

Meere's introduction of kitsch artefacts into fine art challenges the modern still life practice - including his own - of setting up simple domestic objects, bowls, fruit, flowers, in a casually well-balanced composition, aestheticising the good things of daily life in a time-honoured way. Instead he creates a serio-comic inversion of the seventeenth century still life tradition of painting precious objects and sumptuous flowers to symbolise the virtues and vices, the pleasures and transience of earthly life. He depicts tacky objects, with an amoral motto endorsing, not censuring, avarice, and artificial flowers that raise questions of taste rather than intimations of mortality.

Charles Meere maintains in this late work the allusive, ironic character of his major paintings, such as Australian beach pattern, 1940.2

Joy Eadie

1 Charles Meere, 1890-1961, born and educated in London, served in France in the 1914-18 War, then studied at the Royal College of Art. He lived in France for some years before settling in Sydney 1933
2 Joy Eadie, In time of war: Charles Meere's Australian beach pattern, Art Monthly Australia, No. 186, December 2005 – February 2006, pp. 26-31