James Cant was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1911 and undertook art training at various institutions in Sydney. Moving to London in the early 1930s to further his artistic career, he joined the British Surrealist Group in 1936, the first Australian artist to be directly involved with the European Surrealist movement. During his first London phase, he produced the most progressive art of his career, latterly developing an art informed by social realism during the war years, before returning permanently to Australia in 1955.
Artist James Cant was born on 26 July 1911 in Melbourne, Australia. He began his art training at the studio of the émigré Italian painter Antonio Dattilo Rubbo in Sydney and later continued at East Sydney Technical College and Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School.
In order to further his artistic career, in 1934 Cant left for London where he connected with the Australian artist Roy de Maistre, who had also also studied at Julian Ashton’s school and been an early influence in Sydney. De Maistre introduced him to modernist art, artists and galleries. Cant's works were well received and in 1936 he was invited to join the British Surrealist Group, led by Roland Penrose, Julian Trevelyan and Herbert Read; he was the first Australian artist to be directly engaged with the European Surrealist movement. In London Cant produced the most forward-looking art of his career, experimenting with the late Cubist style of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as exemplified by his Still Life (1935) and The Merchants of Death (1939), as well as with the surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico and René Magritte. Cant’s Surrealist Hand (1936, Art Gallery of South Australia) was among the earliest examples of Surrealism in the history of Australian art. In this ironic work, revealing the influence André Breton and Sir Roland Penrose, Cant placed a human hand made of plaster and painted in lively colours under a glass dome, where one would expect to find a taxidermy arrangement or a jewel. In 1936 Cant, together with his friend Geoffrey Graham and other members of the British Surrealist Group, were involved in a clinical trial of the effects of the hallucinatory drug mescalin. Knowing that Surrealist artists were interested in accessing their subconscious, doctors had specifically asked members of this group to participate. After taking the drug the artists were invited to draw their visions, and Cant’s drawings Floating Head, Screaming Man Buried in Landscape (Art Gallery of South Australia) were possibly inspired by this experience. Among Cant’s most well-known works were Found Objects and Constructed Object, in which he used assembled objects in odd combinations that challenged reason, summoning subconscious and poetic associations. The works were reproduced in The Surrealist Bulletin and included in the Exhibition of Surrealist Paintings at the Mayor Gallery in 1937. In the same year Cant participated in the Surrealist Poems and Objects Exhibition at the London Gallery which was inaugurated by Herbert Read, the chief theoretician of Surrealism in England. During his years in England, Cant made frequent trips to France and Spain, where he met many of the artists he admired, including Braque, Picasso and Magritte.
At the beginning of the Second World War, Cant returned to Sydney, where he joined the Armed Forces. He served as a camouflage officer while developing his interest in the art of the Mexican social realists and muralists, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. In 1945, together with his future wife Dora Chapman, Cant was one of the artists who formed the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) with the aim of ‘bring art into closer relationship to contemporary life’. Employed by the Australian Museum as a display adviser, Cant also painted arid Australian landscapes and works influenced by Aboriginal art. At the suggestion of Australian anthropologist Charles Mountford, he also produced reconstructions of the newly discovered rock art in the Arnhem Land Plateau. In 1950 he was invited by British ethnographic art collector William Ohly to London to exhibit these, as well as his canvases of Aboriginal art at Ohly's Berkeley Galleries, as part of a broader interest in primitive art that was widespread among avant-garde artists. The Times commented: ‘Though these are not intended to be completely accurate reproductions but versions which may serve to show the merits of the paintings, it is clear enough that the style and spirit of the originals must be there, for the paintings have a remarkable vitality and […] feeling of movement […]’ (The Times 1950, p. 9). Cant remained in London for five years, producing art informed by social realism. His subjects included London bridges and streetscapes, peopled by Lowry-like figures, using a wax encaustic medium that conveyed the bleak atmosphere of postwar London, as exemplified by paintings such as Maple Street, Tottenham Court Road and Holloway Road.
Back in Australia in 1955, Cant continued to paint and, when afflicted with multiple sclerosis in the mid-1960s, he managed to execute broadly painted treescapes, until the early 1970s, when he could no longer work. James Cant died on 26 June 1982 at Fullarton, Adelaide, Australia. His work is not currently represented in UK public collections.