Merchants of Death

Merchants of Death was painted in London during James Cant’s most progressive and experimental artistic period, and while he was a member of the Surrealist Group. Painted under the influence of the hallucinatory drug, mescaline, the painting demonstrates Cant’s surrealist desire to tap the unconscious mind and his interest in late cubist pictorial techniques. The artist’s experience visiting Spain in 1936 – arriving in Barcelona in the same year the Spanish Civil War broke out – and the angular, passionate frenzy of Picasso’s Guernica, 1937, have clearly influenced this work. Similar to Picasso’s overhead lamp in Guernica, two central beams of light cast a shadow of black lines over the composition, fragmenting and flattening a group of anthropomorphic figures.

During this period, Cant created some of the most avant-garde works of any Australian artist working in the early twentieth century, including Surrealist hand, 1936, and Welcome to Empire Day, 1938, both in the Gallery’s collection.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture