CREATIVITY

Claude Brizay nearly didn’t make it to Australia at all. In late January 1942, he was at Singapore airport with his mother, Madeline, an artist, and his three younger brothers, Yvon (FB’49), Ronald (Ju’48), and Jean Pierre (Ju’48), waiting to board a plane to Australia when they were caught in a heavy air raid. As glass shattered around them, they took shelter in a sandbagged room among the aerodrome buildings. Bombs exploded within metres of their hideout, destroying several planes on the tarmac. Remarkably, the Brizay family escaped without a scratch, covered in plaster dust. “I wasn’t frightened of the Japanese,” a brave 11-year-old Claude told a news reporter. “It was just the noise the bombs made.” Shortly afterwards, Madeline and her children departed Singapore for Darwin on the last seaplane to leave before the British surrendered to the Japanese on 15 February.

In the Paris home of Mme Hélène Brizay there is a pottery figure of Napoleon Bonaparte – unremarkable, if not for the fact that it was made almost 80 years ago at Geelong Grammar School by Hélène’s late husband, the artist Claude Brizay (FB’48). When he died in 2013, it had been more than six decades since Claude had set foot in Australia, but he continued to be inspired by the wide-open spaces and changing colours of the landscape around Corio, where, as a boy, he unexpectedly found a home.

The boys’ father, Emile Brizay, a well-known French engineer, managed to escape on a Dutch ship which had detached from a convoy of ships that was sunk. He too, miraculously, made it to Australia, arriving on 5 March. The Brizays left everything behind – their beautiful home, furniture, and their car which, according to family legend, was personally acquired by General Tomoyuki Yamashita himself. The Japanese had been keen to ensnare

Emile, not only to curtail his resistance activities – he hosted a radio program in support of Free France and harboured refugees – but because he had expertise in the new reinforced concrete techniques developed by Eugène Freyssinet. Before the war, Emile had designed most of the bridges in Malaya, the church of St Teresa, and the Ford Factory in Bukit Timah where General Arthur Percival signed the instrument of surrender.

The Brizay family settled first in Sydney but moved to Melbourne, believing it to be a more intellectual city which would better suit their interests. General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, heard that Emile was in Australia, and offered him work through the building firm Hornibrook Construction designing timber-trussed ‘igloo’ aircraft hangars for an aerodrome near Brisbane. It is said that Emile nominated as his fee the price of schooling for his four sons, that the Americans chose one of the best schools in Australia, and thus the four Brizay boys came as boarders to Corio.

Separated from her husband and children, Madeline found herself facing challenges in an unfamiliar country where her accent and European flair set her apart from others. Sadly, she became depressed, leaving her children emotionally isolated. School was hard at first for the Catholic Brizay boys. With their poor English and strange ways, they were labelled ‘frog eaters’. Claude became seriously ill with pleurisy, underwent a major operation, and convalesced for a full year afterwards. As he regained his health, he threw himself into a variety of sports, earning kudos from his peers when he became the Junior School’s outstanding athlete of 1945, winning the 100 yards, 220 yards, hurdles and long jump. In Senior School, he won House Colours in Football and Cricket.

Claude’s recovery, both mental and physical, was greatly assisted by the care shown to him by another ‘alien’, the German artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (Staff 1942-57) who was himself a refugee and had spent almost two years in an internment camp before he was offered a position as the Art Master at GGS in 1942. It could only have been fate that brought together a man who had once studied under Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and a boy who was destined to work in the studio of Salvador Dalí, in the most unlikely environment of Corio. Hirschfeld-Mack identified, and then nurtured, Claude’s nascent artistic talent. The pottery Napoleon was made under Hirschfeld-Mack’s guidance, and in 1947, Claude’s design for a stained-glass window for the cathedral in the city of Dodoma, Tanzania, was selected as the winning entry in a school competition. ‘Mr Hirschfeld is very keen for this kind of work to be executed for people outside the School, as it stimulates our interest and makes our world useful’, noted the Corian.

The artistic philosophies that HirschfeldMack had developed as a student at the Bauhaus before the war were fostered on the young Claude, who found inspiration in the idea of reimagining a new way of living through creative expression. When he returned to France to join his parents, at the end of 1949, it was with, as Hirschfeld-Mack fostered, “the soul of an artist and the mind of an engineer”. Claude enrolled in the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, specialising in interior architecture and artistic expressions of spatial geometry, where he came under the influence of the social realist painter, Marcel Gromaire. Claude then worked with Jean Lurçat, the artist who had once kept company with Matisse and Picasso, and who was responsible for the revival of French tapestry. Later, in the early 1960s, he worked with Salvador Dalí, making costumes and masks. He continued his artistic practice for the remainder of his life, spending long hours in his studio producing colourful abstract works that reveal more than a little influence of the Bauhaus.

Over time, Claude lost touch with his old life at GGS, but the impressions formed during his childhood in Malaya and Australia never left him. As Claude’s daughter, Valérie, beautifully expressed: “He sought to communicate with others in solitude, through the arrangement of colors and shapes, color representing for him instinct, senses, emotions, and shapes: the intellect. He thus reunited in pictorial language what was lacking in spoken language: the attachment of emotion to intelligence. I see him in a bubble, a separate world, that of a Dreamtime from the land of the bush, or rather a Dreamspace from which it is up to me, as to each of those who contemplate his paintings, to decipher the lively and precise language, memories of previous countries, and violently hidden emotions.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In 2019, while researching the influence of Hirschfeld-Mack at the School, I came across a news article about Claude’s winning design for the cathedral window. Intrigued, I tried but failed to follow the trail of Claude Brizay. Then, by sheer coincidence, in 2021 Nitaye Eliacheff emailed the School Archives, wondering if we had any information about his maternal grandfather, Claude Brizay. This article is the result of our communications. I am grateful to Nitaye for sharing photos of his grandfather’s work, and a beautiful memoir of her father written by Nitaye’s mother, Valérie Brizay.