Loudon Sainthill (1918–69) was one of the most loved and admired Australian artists of his generation. He was shy, often solitary in public, but physically beautiful and charming; many found his reticence seductive. He seemed always to be painting or drawing – for one exhibition he painted more than eighty studies of dancers in a few weeks – although the couple held and attended plenty of dinners, parties, and excursions. In addition to his own work, he was constantly devising interior decors and mural commissions, working on friends’ exhibition,s or redecorating the places he lived in. Presciently, Ballets Russes ballerinas Nina Verchinina and Hélène Kirsova commissioned his first stage designs.

Harry Tatlock Miller (1913–89) made friends easily, including several influential men such as that angel of art publishing, Sydney Ure Smith, but his assertive presumption in anticipation of a favour, funding, or a job could offend. Importantly, he won the support of Rex Nan Kivell, director of the prestigious modern art establishment the Redfern Gallery, where Miller would later work with (and replace) him; he was a voracious collector of early colonial Australiana and an equally voracious homosexual. He became friendly with influential women of the upper echelons: Maie Casey for instance, wife of Richard Casey, Australia’s first ‘Minister for America’, later governor-general, and his neighbour at the elegant, early modernist Alcaston House at the corner of Collins and Spring Streets in Melbourne.

Sainthill, photographed by Marjorie Wood soon after he met Tatlock Miller, c. 1936

As children, both men endured their fathers’ irrationally high expectations, a tyrannical form of abuse that left lifelong scars of insecurity and anxiety. Young Harry already excelled in athletics, writing, and debating at Geelong Grammar, whereas Loudon was fat and what we would now recognise as dyslexic. He was so seriously bullied that he abandoned school, with his mother’s approval. The city became his playground, the theatre his education, be it watching Pavlova when he was nine, or, later, Coral Browne in Hedda Gabler. Wandering the city exposed him to new art and design, graphics and architecture, which may well have inspired him to enrol at the Melbourne Technical College, under the innovative leadership of artist Mervyn Napier Waller. Harry, too, bailed out before matriculation, survived through loving, aesthetics-minded friendships, and at the age of eighteen opened The Book Nook in Geelong. A year later he published a journal of arts and letters called Manuscripts, which was distributed over five years in the six state capitals, New Zealand, and London, where it was praised. But Melbourne’s attractions and freedoms drew him away and he began as he would continue, making things happen, writing books and reviews, curating exhibitions, and meeting anyone who was artistically interesting. Luckily for Miller, Sainthill, whom he met in a Melbourne bookshop around 1935, was adept at hanging exhibitions, illustrating programs and posters, and interior decorating.

Prospero’s cell, with the figure of Miranda, for The Tempest, 1951

The impact of Colonel de Basil’s three Russian Ballet companies, which toured Australia from 1936 to 1940, has been widely surveyed in recent years, but Montana’s account of this era, which closed in the tumult of war, is most evocative. One can sense the way that Sainthill, Miller and other artists like furniture designer Fred Ward were embedded in the dancers’ daily lives. The ascent of the not-so-old Woollahra mansion ‘Merioola’ as a home for artists, the hottest party in town and a place of queerness, licence, and hard work under the worldly eye of its chatelaine, Chica Lowe, is atmospherically resurrected. Montana’s treatment of its eccentric and exotic list of passing characters is charming and candid, especially his depictions of the quick-tongued Jocelyn Rickards, Australia’s first famous designer for film.

Still, at the heart of the book is Montana’s dedicated championing of Sainthill’s art with particular attention to precise terminology and descriptions, which some may find rather formal, even pedantic. However, Montana aims to make clear the uniqueness of Sainthill’s oeuvre and its defining elements as they evolved from his strangely ephemeral style of linear forms influenced by English modernists Christopher Wood and Henry Moore, and others. Under the irresistible if overwhelming influence of great Diaghilev Ballets Russes artists like Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and Georges Rouault, as well as Bérard and Masson in the de Basil company repertoires over four years, Sainthill was liberated, assisted by what one critic would call his ‘aesthetic perceptiveness’. His art would flourish into extraordinarily coloured fantasies influenced by Surrealism, Neoclassicism, English and Australian Modernism.

Inevitably, the men would have to sign up for the war, although Sainthill was deemed unfit for active service. Yet he insisted on being involved, and by some extraordinary planning and pleading, Miller managed to get them assigned as orderlies to hospital ships plying the oceans from Egypt to New Guinea and ports between treating the wounded and traumatised services personnel. This work allowed Sainthill to undertake informal therapeutic art classes with the patients while Miller created new exhibition proposals. They even managed to live in the same bases when back in Australia.

Tatlock Miller downstairs at the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1975 (photograph by Alec Murray)

After testing the waters of London in 1939, travelling with de Basil’s second company, the Covent Garden Russian Ballet, their sights irrevocably became set on returning to London, as they did in 1949. In 1951 Sainthill designed a ballet Ile des Sirènes, for Robert Helpmann and Margot Fonteyn, watched by Michael Benthall, Helpmann’s precocious and prodigiously talented lover. They met when Helpmann was performing at Oxford and Benthall was an undergraduate, another talent who bailed out soon after their meeting to forge an amazing directorial career and avoid joining the family business. Sainthill’s costumes impressed him; within weeks Sainthill submitted the sets and costumes for Benthall’s production of The Tempest for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Oxford. The results were astonishing and marked his breakthrough into the theatre. Two Helpmann productions, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Le Coq d’Or for the Royal Opera at Covent Garden, and Aladdin, a Cole Porter pantomime at the Coliseum – with The Tempest – represented the apogee of Sainthill’s theatre career.

Meanwhile, Benthall became director of the Old Vic Theatre, where he audaciously produced the entire thirty-six plays in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s oeuvre in just five years. Sainthill designed many of these shows for such stars as Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Sybil Thorndike, Helpmann, and the young Australian Zoë Caldwell. Film and new musicals rounded out what had become an international career at which he worked so hard, still maintaining his painting practice, that it would eventually kill him the day he was due to receive his Tony Award for costumes in the musical The Canterbury Tales in New York.

Miller continued in his role as director of the prestigious Redfern Gallery for another decade or so, and died still mourning ‘Loudie’ as he called him on New Year’s Eve 1989. Securing Sainthill’s legacy was his last major project and with Bryan McDonald, director of London’s Whitechapel Gallery, he published a book of the Loudon Sainthill Memorial Exhibition at the David Jones Gallery in 1972. He distributed Sainthill’s principal archive to the National Gallery of Australia and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and established an ongoing prize in Sainthill’s honour. Anna French, who continues to design for dance and theatre today, was the first Australian winner.

Andrew Montana has treated these rich, twinned lives and sexualities with restraint, as Miller inevitably would have preferred. Sainthill had compiled an erotic scrapbook of what Montana sees as Kinseyan significance, which Miller destroyed. One can only conjure what twenty-first century acceptance of homosexuality might have done for these two men and their indomitable commitment to their art.