Conflict, 1932 Roy de Maistre
Roy de Maistre Conflict 1932, Art Gallery of New South Wales
After visiting Europe in the mid 1920s, Roy de Maistre moved permanently from Sydney to London in 1930. Before leaving Sydney, he had retreated from his earlier experiments with abstraction; finding there was little interest in or market for these works, he adopted a modern representational style. His paintings became more progressive again in London, influenced by European cubism and the emergent surrealist movement.
Conflict is an important example from this period, painted when de Maistre was sharing a studio with the young furniture designer Francis Bacon, who was probably also his lover. De Maistre encouraged Bacon to paint, and for a time in the early 1930s de Maistre’s influence on Bacon’s emergent style is apparent. Later in the decade, de Maistre briefly became lovers with the Australian novelist Patrick White, encouraging White to focus on contemporary life as a rich source of subjects for his writing.