O Soul O Spirit O Fire

Since its  inception fifty years ago, the Blake Prize has had a profound, cumulative effect on Australian art. This current selection of works from the Prize’s history reflects major shifts in post-war art, from figuration to abstraction, to postmodernism and beyond. It also follows changing understandings of the meaning of ‘religious’ art, which today encompasses a broad diversity of spiritual beliefs.

The Blake Prize for Religious Art began in  Sydney in 1951, led by a young Jesuit priest, Michael Scott, and his friend, Jewish businessman Richard Morley. Appalled by the sacred art in Australian churches, they conceived the idea of the prize, Morley putting up 100 guineas and Scott forming a committee to establish it. Though including work from artists based all around Australia, the exhibition remains a Sydney institution.

This exhibition’s title, O Soul O Spirit O Fire comes from a poem by William Blake, the English poet and mystic. It was decided to name the prize after Blake because, in the words of its founders, ‘Blake is timeless, and though not possessing allegiance to any particular denomination, was perhaps the most God-possessed painter of all time’. Accordingly, the exhibition is strictly non-denominational, featuring art inspired by not only by Christianity, but by  Buddhism, Judaism and other faiths embraced by Australia’s culturally diverse population. In recent years, the Prize has been enhanced by a growing proportion of indigenous art.

Over the years, the Prize has attracted this country’s major painters and sculptors, including Justin O’Brien, Donald Friend and Arthur Boyd in the 1950s, John Coburn, and Leonard French in the 60s, Salvatore Zofrea and Alun Leach-Jones in the 80s, and in the last decade a great diversity of leading and lesser-known contemporary artists, such as Hector Sundaloo Jandany, Hilarie Mais, George Gittoes, Marion Borgelt, John Adair, Julie Rrap and Janet Laurence.

The curator Rosemary Crumlin says that ‘To walk through this exhibition is  to understand something of the complexity and promise of religious experience and the art of this country over the last 50 years. It is also, I believe, to arrive at a kind of ending. What now for religious art?’