FANTASY MODERN: LOUDON SAINTHILL’S THEATRE OF ART AND LIFE
By Andrew Montana. NewSouth Publishing. Colour plates. $89.99.

Bernard Hall was the longest-serving director of the National Gallery of Victoria in its history, as well as the head of the Gallery Art School. He took up these positions in 1892 at the age of 32, and retained for more than 40 years, until his death in 1935.

Although he was frequently ill or in poor health and for long periods incapacitated in his painting arm, longevity was ultimately on his side.

Hall was an English-born, English-trained artist, who had no intention of travelling to Australia, until he met beautiful Australian Elismore (Elsie) Shuter. With his head in a whirl, he put in a late application for the directorship in Melbourne and got the job.

His arrival in Melbourne was far from plain sailing, because the local art community felt, with some justification, that the job should have gone to the acting director, Australian-born Frederick McCubbin, an artist of the Heidelberg School fame.

Despite challenges to his authority and position, Hall hung on and, before the end of 1894, he married the woman who had caused his antipodean adventure, but his salary was severely cut because of the economic depression that was affecting all the colonies.

For much of his life, he was forced to exist on limited means. His marital bliss was short-lived and less than seven years after their marriage, while in the late stages of pregnancy with their second child, both Elsie and the unborn child died.

Hall's early students included the mercurial Hugh Ramsay, George Bell, Max Meldrum, Violet Teague and Rose MacPherson (Margaret Preston), all of whom ultimately moved away from his tradition of painting and arguably all of whom were to become finer painters than their teacher. They had been properly trained and knew what they wanted to rebel against.

Hall's art practice was dominated by portraits and titillating neo-classical nudes, painted in a rather dull 19th-century English academic style. It found favour with the conservatives in the Melbourne and Sydney art scene, including Lionel and Daryl Lindsay, and J.S. MacDonald. Hall's fear and loathing of European modernism guaranteed his neglect after his death.

Historian Gwen Rankin has painstakingly assembled a mass of documentation from family archives to give us a detailed account of Hall's life, his struggles with the trustees of the gallery and later with the Felton Bequest, his passions and his friendships. It is a very empathetic biography of a person whom many found difficult to like.

Described by some as aloof and arrogant, in this biography he emerges as a slightly tragic figure, one whom his second wife, Grace Thomson, rescued from oblivion through holding on to all the documentation on the life of her husband. His employers and many of his friends, in contrast, abandoned him after his death, and funds could not be found to bring his ashes back from England, where he died.

From this book, we certainly know a good deal more about the enigmatic Hall, but I doubt that our overall assessment of his role in the history of Australian art will be changed substantially.

If Hall, with some justification, has been called the artist whom the art world forgot, Loudon Sainthill is an artist who for many in the art world has been long buried. Art historian Andrew Montana, in his detailed and empathetic biography, not only resurrects Sainthill, but also makes his monograph into a double biography and considers in considerable detail the life of Sainthill's partner for more than 30 years, the brilliant publicist and part-time art critic Harry Tatlock Miller. This makes it quite a long book.

Sainthill, or ''Loudie'' as he was known in the trade, was an inspired theatre artist associated with the stylistic and highly decorative and ornamental language associated with the Ballets Russes. He could be described as the Australian Leon Bakst, the Russian flamboyant genius theatre artist who in the early 20th century could have been described as Europe's most famous artist.

Loudie and Miller lived in Australia at a time before there was a legal gay subculture. At the first opportunity after World War II, they left homophobic Australia and in 1949 settled permanently in England, remaining until Sainthill's sudden death in 1969, at the age of 51, of heart failure.

Miller, who was five years older than Sainthill, outlived him by another 20 years and devoted his exceptional energy to perpetuating the memory of Sainthill and his art with targeted publications, exhibitions and a Sainthill Memorial Scholarship.

Until fairly recently, theatre and ballet arts, costume design, stage-set designs and images of performers were relegated to the ephemeral category and it is thanks to Miller that so much of Sainthill's art has survived and has found institutional homes. In this sense, the book is also written in terms of a great love story between two creative men.

The strength of Montana's book is that it is not simply an account of two people's lives but a discussion of the whole cultural milieu within which his subjects operated. This included people such as Cecil Beaton, Robert Helpmann, Noel Coward, Rex Nan Kivell, Sidney Nolan, Henry Moore, Laurence Olivier and Helene Kirsova.

It also examines the group of artists who came together at Merioola in Woollahra and the artists of the Redfern Gallery in London. Richly illustrated, the book celebrates the exotic erotic fantasies which play a significant role in the artistic culture of Australia and Europe.

These two monographs from NewSouth books make a valuable contribution to 20th-century Australian art.