Leonard French

by Sasha Grishin

Like the European artist Fernand Leger, Leonard French's work has often been executed on a monumental scale and is imbued with a philosophy of bringing art into life. His major commissions in glass such as the ceiling of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Blackwood Hall window at Monash University, as well as the huge murals and panel paintings including the Seven Days in Canberra, have become icons in Australian art. People have often been attracted to the beautiful luminosity of his surfaces and to the powerful yet lyrical emblematic symbols in his images, but few have been prepared to attempt to penetrate the surface and to arrive at some sort of understanding of his whole philosophy of art. This book opens the way to a number of possible readings of his art and for the first time presents an extensive corpus of his work in many mediums tracing its development over the past half century.