COOL CLIMATE ART IN A BOTTLE. With its dramatic, cool climate, the breathtaking Tasmanian landscape is an artist’s dream and a sparkling winemaker’s paradise. This is Méthode Tasmanoise.
kwp!JAN10153
important australian + international fine art Lots 1 – 130 Featuring The Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art and Selected works from The pARTners Art Collective
IMPORTANT FINE ART AUCTION • SYDNEY • 28 AUGUST 2019
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MELBOURNE • VIEWING 105 commercial road, south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 • facsimile: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com
SYDNEY • VIEWING 16 goodhope street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com
SYDNEY • AUCTION cell block theatre, national art school forbes street, darlinghurst, new south wales, 2010 telephone: 02 9287 0600
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sydney auction
melbourne viewing sydney viewing absentee/telephone bids live online bidding
LOTS 1 – 130 WEDNESDAY 28 AUGUST 2019 7:00pm cell block theatre, national art school, sydney forbes street darlinghurst, new south wales telephone: 02 9287 0600 THURSDAY 15 – SUNDAY 18 AUGUST 105 commercial road south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00am – 6:00pm THURSDAY 22 – WEDNESDAY 28 AUGUST 16 goodhope street paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00am – 6:00pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 telephone bid form – p. 229 absentee bid form – p. 230 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction
www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com
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specialists
CHRIS DEUTSCHER executive director — melbourne Chris is a graduate of Melbourne University and has over 40 years art dealing, auction and valuation experience as Director of Deutscher Fine Art and subsequently as co-founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions. He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.
DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 25 years experience in public and commercial galleries, and the fine art auction market. He completed a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001 Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies. HENRY MULHOLLAND senior art specialist Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher & Hackett, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.
CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University. In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 15 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH contemporary art specialist and gallery manager – sydney Lucie completed her studies in Belgium, obtaining Masters of Arts in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art), together with a Bachelors of Art History, Archaeology and Musicology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since returning to Australia in 2014, she has gained sound experience in cataloguing, research and arts writing through various roles with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and with private art advisory firms Tutela Capital and LoveArt International.
ALEX CRESWICK head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 15 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts. Alex is currently completing his CPA.
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specialists
ROGER McILROY head auctioneer Roger was the Chairman, Managing Director and auctioneer for Christie’s Australia and Asia from 1989 to 2006, having joined the firm in London in 1977. He presided over many significant auctions, including Alan Bond’s Dallhold Collection (1992) and The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art (2000). Since 2006, Roger has built a highly distinguished art consultancy in Australian and International works of art. Roger will continue to independently operate his privately-owned art dealing and consultancy business alongside his role at Deutscher and Hackett.
SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.
MARA SISON registrar Mara has a Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines and a Master of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Deakin University. She gained her experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors as a Gallery Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator for MiFA Asian Contemporary Art and Melbourne Fine Art Galleries and as an Administration Officer for Australia China Art Foundation.
MELISSA HELLARD head of online sales Melissa has a Bachelor of Communication (Media) from RMIT University, and a Master of Art Curatorship from The University of Melbourne. Melissa gained experience in the corporate sector assisting companies such as NAB, AFL and Fiat Chrysler Group in a variety of fields including marketing, events and sponsorship. With an enduring passion for the visual arts, Melissa was more recently the Head of Marketing and Client Services for Deutscher and Hackett.
CLAIRE KURZMANN gallery manager - melbourne Claire has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) from the University of Melbourne. She gained several years’ experience working as Gallery Assistant at Metro Gallery, Melbourne, assisting with exhibitions, events and marketing. She has acted as Artist Liaison for the Arts Centre Melbourne, coordinating aspects of artist care and has gained experience as a Studio Assistant for a number of emerging Australian artists.
VERONICA ANGELATOS senior researcher & writer Veronica has a Master of Arts (Art Curatorship and Museum Management), together with a Bachelor of Arts/Law (Honours) and Diploma of Modern Languages from the University of Melbourne. She has strong curatorial and research expertise, having worked at various art museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and National Gallery of Victoria, and more recently, in the commercial sphere as Senior Art Specialist at Deutscher~Menzies. She is also the author of numerous articles and publications on Australian and International Art.
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specialists for this auction
Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 AUCTIONEERS Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333 Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600 ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Lucie Reeves-Smith 02 9287 0600 please complete the absentee bid form (p. 230) or telephone bid form (p. 229) SHIPPING Mara Sison 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Claire Kurzmann 03 9865 633
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contents lots 1 — 130
page 14
prospective buyers and sellers guide
page 222
conditions of auction and sale
page 224
catalogue subscription form
page 227
attendee pre-registration form
page 228
telephone bid form
page 229
absentee bid form
page 230
index
page 243
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IMPORTANT NOTICE
CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS
Some imagery on bark and early western desert paintings in this catalogue may be deemed unsuitable for viewing by women, children or uninitiated men. We sug gest ar t co - ordinators at Aboriginal communities show this catalogue to community elders for approval before distributing the catalogue for general viewing. Co-ordinators may wish to mask or remove certain images prior to circulation. The English spelling of aboriginal names has evolved over the years. In this catalogue every effort has been made to use the current linguistic form. However original information from certificates has been transcribed as written with the result that there are different spellings of the same name, title, language group and story.
Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section: Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au Phone: 1800 819 461 Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), permits are required for the movement of wildlife, wildlife specimens and products made or derived from wildlife. This includes species on the endangered species list. Buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction. Permits must be obtained from: Wildlife Trade Regulation Section Environment Australia GPO Box 787 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: wildlifetrade@environment.gov.au Phone: (02) 6274 1900 Under the provisions of the Wildlife and Protection (Regulation of Exports and Imports) Act, 1982, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items offered at auction (including plant or animal products derived from an Australian native species such as: ivory, tortoise shell, feathers, etc). Permits must be obtained from the Wildlife Protection Section, Environment Australia-Biodiversity Group at the address above, prior to items being export from Australia.
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Important Australian and International Fine Art
Lots 1 – 130 Featuring The Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art Lots 1 – 36 and selected works from The pARTners Art Collective Lots 55 - 71
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART LOTS 1 – 36 Kenneth Francis Plomley (1916 – 2012) (Barbara) Joan Plomley (1925 – 2018)
The art collection gathered together by Ken and Joan Plomley is a microcosm of early Australian modernism. It features an array of notable artists of which, significantly, almost half are women. One key section focuses on the lino-cut prints of the Grosvenor School, whilst a second surveys the career of the pioneer modernist Roy de Maistre, a distant cousin of Ken through his great-uncle Etienne de Mestre, father of Roy. As a child of about 10, Ken lived for a year with Etienne’s widow, his great-aunt Clara and Roy’s sister Biddy in the rural village of Moss Vale in the southern highlands of New South Wales. Etienne de Mestre was the famed horse trainer, who won the Melbourne Cup five times in the race’s first eighteen years, a feat unsurpassed until the arrival of Bart Cummings in the 1970s. On Etienne’s death in 1916, the year of Ken’s birth, the de Mestre family lived in Mt Valdemar, a distinguished mansion in Sutton Forest, now owned by Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. Ken became interested in early Australian life as a boy and made his first art purchase, a print of colonial Sydney, at the age of fourteen. At Sydney University he studied the agricultural methods of the early settlers and completed a B.Sc. (Agriculture) in 1938. Following the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Navy in 1942 and embarked on an officer’s training course in Melbourne, but was diverted into the Naval Victualling Laboratory in St Kilda Road. Here the navy considered he would be of more use to the war effort, working on the huge task of providing naval personnel with enough food, drink and supplies to keep them fighting fit, in whatever part of the globe they might be stationed. One of his talented staff was Joan, who had been recommended straight from school for a job in the Laboratory by her science teacher at Presbyterian Ladies’ College. Together, they helped develop food survival packages for crews whose vessels had been sunk; and in September 1946, Ken took up a position at the Division of Forest Products, CSIRO, in South Melbourne. Three months later, Ken and Joan were married, resulting in a long and happy union of 66 years. At the CSIRO, he became a Principal Research Scientist, described by a colleague as being “the epitome of the perfect gentleman, honourable and cultured, a quiet but very significant scientific achiever. He conducted pioneering work on the use of extractives from the bark of various tree species, which in turn formed the basis for the establishment of the structural wood composites industry, utilising renewable adhesives”. Ken retired in 1981.
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KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY IN THE GARDEN, GLEN IRIS, MELBOURNE
As his art and book collecting expanded, Ken formed close professional relationships with several dealers including Joan McClelland of Joshua McClelland Print Room, and the renowned Dr Joseph Brown. Joan Plomley was always very interested and supportive of Ken’s interest in art and involved in decisions about new acquisitions. The purchase of the painting by Arnold Shore, for example, was no doubt influenced by her connection to the artist who used to stay at the same guest house at Mount Macedon when Joan was a child. Ken’s relationship to the de Mestre family resulted in one of the largest private collections of Roy de Maistre’s paintings in this country. Notable examples here include The Meeting in the Garden, 1929, which records the events of the ground-breaking Burdekin House Exhibition of that same year, and Figure with Guitar, c.1932 – 35, a large oval painting which highlights the artist’s fascination with Cubist technique. The Grosvenor School works include two examples by the school’s teacher Claude Flight, as well as key prints from students such as Dorrit Black, Ethel Spowers and Evelyn Syme. Margaret Preston is also strongly represented with a major early still life painting and a group of five prints. The Queensland modernist Kenneth Macqueen was another Plomley favourite and five of his distinctive watercolours are also featured. Of the colonial images, one significant work is the haunting portrait of Fanny Hardwicke which is referred to in Friendly Mission, a book published 1966, written by Ken’s older brother Brian, an authority on the history and culture of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Here, he mentions Fanny who at one time would have “belonged” to Charles Browne Hardwicke’s household at Norfolk Plains. When Ken Plomley sold his extensive collection of rare books in 2002, collectors around Australia were astounded by the treasures it contained as well as the depth of research knowledge it revealed. The collection of artworks on offer here is similarly remarkable.
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 1 (1894 – 1968) GERBERAS, 1926 oil on canvas 76.5 x 51.0 cm signed and dated lower left: R. de Mestre / 1926 bears inscription verso: 33 estimate :
$80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE Mrs Allan Foott, Sydney Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 23 September 1966, lot 33 (as ‘Interior, with flowers’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED possibly: Annual Exhibition of Society of Artists, Sydney, September – October 1926, cats. 79, 80, 91 (all as ‘Flower Piece’) LITERATURE Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pl. 33, pp. 72, 74 (illus.), 122
Between 1926 and 1930, Roy de Maistre produced an extended series of floral still life paintings, many with the generic title of Flower Piece. Whilst some, such as Gerberas, 1926, bear titles that identify their subject, the anonymity of the series’ designation followed his attitude that all of these works were, in their genesis, aesthetic studies related to his continuing exploration of modernism and its intersections with contemporary design. De Maistre’s peer, Margaret Preston, also shared this belief and in 1929, published a collection of aphorisms concerning art practice. One of particular relevance read: ‘why there are so many tables of still life in modern paintings is because they are really laboratory tables on which aesthetic problems can be isolated’.1 Gerberas is a sophisticated manifestation of this manner of thinking. De Maistre had returned to Sydney from Europe around April in 1926, in time for his solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries which included two works titled Flower Piece. These would have been completed prior to his return and probably reflected the intermediate, experimental technique he had developed during his period away from Australia. Indeed, a still life he exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1924 (Nature Mort) followed his earlier tonal-realist style taught by former tutor Max Meldrum. By May 1926, de Maistre had established a permanent studio at the colonial mansion Burdekin House in Macquarie Street and Gerberas most likely belongs to the ‘flower piece’ works from the following months. These are deliberately sumptuous paintings no doubt reflective of the tastes of the wealthy patrons who were his main source of income, though the motif of floral still life was also extensively
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explored by contemporaneous artists such as Grace Cossington Smith in, for example, Flannel Flowers and Gum Leaves, 1928 (private collection); Elioth Gruner’s Still Life – Mixed Bunch, 1927 (private collection); and Margaret Preston’s Still Life, 1925 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), and Western Australian Gum Blossoms, 1928 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney). De Maistre’s biographer Heather Johnson notes that the cloth used in Gerberas ‘(has) been identified as French fabric, the most modern available at the time;’ 2 and he utilised the same piece as a backdrop within one of the floral paintings exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of Society of Artists in 1927. 3 In a classic modernist strategy, de Maistre tilts the angle of the table in Gerberas to accentuate his own raised perspective. The ‘oriental’ patterning of the cloth contrasts with the smooth elegance of the highly glazed ceramic pots which sit off-centre, another modernist device in opposition to more formal, centralised compositions. De Maistre employs singular brushstrokes to articulate the forms, a technique also used to great effect by Cossington Smith and the society painter George Lambert. On the wall behind the flowers hangs a memento from his early art-pioneering days, Colour Study, 1920,4 a view of boatsheds on Sydney harbour painted according to his ‘colour music’ theories. In this version, de Maistre has altered the chromatic scale of the original’s cool greens and blues to a slightly warmer purple, terracotta and ochre combination, a further indication of his ‘laboratory table’ focus on the objects before him. 1. Preston, M., ‘aphorism no 46’, in Ure Smith, S. and Gellert, L. (eds.), Margaret Preston recent paintings 1929, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1929 2. Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 72 3. See ‘Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition – an excellent display’, Sydney Mail, Sydney, 14 September 1927, p. 27 (illus.) 4. Colour Study, 1920, oil on cardboard, 26.5 x 34.5 cm, private collection
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 2 (1894 – 1968) THE MEETING IN THE GARDEN, c.1929 oil on canvas 67.0 x 76.5 cm signed lower right: R de Mestre bears inscription verso: 29 estimate :
$150,000 – 200,000
PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, on long term loan to S.A. Parker Frames, Sydney until c.1960 Private collection Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1986 EXHIBITED A Group of Seven Exhibition, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 26 March – 5 April 1930, cat. 29 Contemporary Group Exhibition, Farmer’s Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, 14 – 25 August 1934, cat. 29 (as ‘Meeting in the Courtyard, Burdekin House’) Australian Art: Colonial to Modern, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 9 – 25 April 1986, cat. 90 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE ‘Art Exhibition at Macquarie Galleries’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 26 March 1930, p. 13 Tildesley, B., ‘Art Notes’, Sydney Mail, Sydney, 9 April 1930, p. 28 ‘A Group of Seven Exhibition’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 32, June – July 1930, pl. 21 (illus.) Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pl. 37, pp. 2 (illus.), 77, 122
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 2 (1894 – 1968) THE MEETING IN THE GARDEN, c.1929
The Meeting in the Garden, c.1929, is one of the most significant Australian paintings by Roy de Maistre ever to appear on the market. Not only is it a record of events at the ground-breaking Burdekin House Exhibition, it is also an exemplar of the vanguard of modernist technique as practiced in Australia at the end of the 1920s. Since returning to Australia from Europe in 1926, de Maistre had involved himself in a wide variety of art and design activities, including a collaboration with the noted photographer Harold Cazneaux on a series of influential highsociety portraits for The Home magazine. The exhibition at Burdekin House marked the culmination of these activities and was de Maistre’s final modernist gesture in his home country before leaving permanently for London in March 1930.
ROY DE MAISTRE, MRS RODNEY DANGAR, MRS GEORGE VIVARS, MRS CHARLES WALKER AND MR T. H. KELLY IN THE COURTYARD AT BURDEKIN HOUSE, 1929 photograph by Harold Cazneaux courtesy of National Library of Australia, Canberra
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Burdekin House was a grand colonial mansion built in 1841 opposite Parliament House in Macquarie Street, Sydney. In 1924 the house was sold to T. E. Rofe, a prominent local businessman and philanthropist, and through him, the rear courtyard and the central spaces on the ground floor were given over to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Ladies’ Auxiliary for fund-raising events. The upstairs rooms were let as studios for artists and the residence subsequently earned a reputation for being ‘the centre of so much society and politics of the town’.1 Shortly after his return from Europe, 2 De Maistre moved into ‘a large room on the first floor … (b)ed in one corner, screen with a table (‘Kitchen’), no sink and just a ‘loo on the turn of the stairs … the rest of the room was his studio, easels, plants, folds of stuff, jars of dried flowers, pots and pots of paintbrushes’. 3 The idea of an art-and-design fundraiser for the Hospital had its genesis in conversations between de Maistre, John D. Moore, Basil Burdett and Thea Proctor; and De Maistre was photographed by Cazneaux in the courtyard discussing preparations for the exhibition with prominent society figures including Mrs. Rodney Dangar and Mr. T. H. Kelly.4 Whilst the lower levels were to be filled with antiquities loaned from wealthy patrons such as these, the top floor became the truly revolutionary project, a series of rooms designed by leading modernist practitioners. Here, de Maistre designed a man’s study,5 an austere room featuring modern French rugs, armchair, recessed bed, Russian patchwork curtains and a ‘skyscraper’ bookcase interpreted from a design by the American Paul Frankl. Paintings by de Maistre also decorated the walls of Hera Roberts’ dining room and Professor A. L. Sadler’s living room.6
Opening on 8 October 1929, the three-month exhibition lived up to its promise ‘to be the greatest of its kind [ever] held in Australia’,7 and became an active symposium into the benefits of a modernist vision. Associated lectures and events were held in the rear courtyard, one of which is the subject of The Meeting in the Garden. 8 Viewed from the upper balcony outside de Maistre’s studio, a group sits listening to a speaker under the canopy of the courtyard’s cabbage-tree palms and honey locust tree. De Maistre’s compositional design draws the eye around the canvas through the serried rows of the seated audience and the animated brush marks of the green and caramel passages, all anchored at the centre by the vivid red of the girl’s dress and the armchair on the stage.9 Given the subsequent demolition of Burdekin House, The Meeting in the Garden exists not only as an important statement by the country’s leading modernist artist, but also as a significant painterly record of Sydney’s historic past. 1. ‘Sydney S’Amuse’, The Home: an Australian journal of quality, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 7, no. 1, January 1926, p. 40 2. Burdekin House first given as the artist’s address in 1926 when he signed the Government House Visitors Book, 20 May 1926 (‘Roi de Mestre, Burdekin House, Macquarie Street). See Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 90. He changed the spelling of his name to ‘Roy de Maistre’ from late 1930. 3. Foott, B., 1986, quoted in Johnson, H., The Sydney art patronage system, 1890 – 1940, Bungoona Technologies, New South Wales, 1997, pp. 151, 152. Other artist residents included Frank Weitzel and Adrian Feint, Aletta Lewis, Lorna Nimmo and the future ‘street poet’ Bea Miles. 4. See ‘Spring Sunlight’, The Home: the Australian journal of quality, vol. 10, no. 11, 1 November 1929, p. 36 5. De Maistre also acted as the exhibition’s convener and manager. The other room designers were Adrian Feint, Frank Wenzel, Hera Roberts, and Prof. A. L. Sadler. 6. In Prof. Sadler’s room was de Maistre’s painting Harbour Entrance, St Jean de Luz 1926, whilst Roberts’ room featured a larger re-working of lot 5 Bridge in Spain (Alcantara Bridge, Toledo), 1926. 7. ‘Art Notes’, The Home: the Australian journal of quality, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 10, no. 10, 1 October 1929, p. 102 8. In December, de Maistre provided the design for a production by Dora Wilcox performed in the courtyard and titled “At ‘Waratah’ in the early ‘Fifties”. See ‘Art Notes’, The Home: the Australian journal of quality, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 10, no. 12, 2 December 1929, p. 15 9. Burdekin House was demolished for a new St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church to replace the existing one in Phillip Street, itself demolished for the extension of Martin Place.
ROY DE MAISTRE, Furnishing for a Man’s Bedroom, Burdekin House Exhibition photograph by Harold Cazneaux, 1929 courtesy of National Library of Australia, Canberra
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 3
(1894 – 1968) FIGURE WITH GUITAR, c.1932 – 35 oil on board 72.5 x 99.0 cm (oval) signed lower right: R. de Maistre signed and inscribed with title verso: FIGURE WITH GUITAR … / BY / ROY L DE MAISTRE / 13 ECCLESTON ST SWI label attached verso: James Bourlet & Sons, Ltd London bears inscription on frame verso: 2 estimate :
$100,000 – 150,000
PROVENANCE Roland and Beatrice Instone, Sydney, c.1940s Christie’s, Sydney, 1 October 1974, lot 70 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Contemporary Group Exhibition, Farmer’s Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, 21 – 30 June 1939, cat. 53 LITERATURE Thomas, D., ‘the art collectors 8: Roland Instone’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 6., no. 2, September 1968, pp. 113 (illus.), 114 (illus. in interior) Ingram, T., ‘Saleroom. De Maistre – not a discordant note among those who mattered’, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, 26 September 1974, p. 28
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 3 (1894 – 1968) FIGURE WITH GUITAR, c.1932 – 35
Figure with Guitar, c.1932 – 35, is a major early example of Roy de Maistre’s fascination with Cubism. Its large ovato tondo shape is unique in his oeuvre and features as its subject a female guitarist that the artist had first sketched ‘in front of the bridge in Toledo’,1 seen looming behind her. De Maistre had already painted two realist studies of the Alcántara Bridge, an arched stone construction dating from the Roman Empire (see lot 5) but in Figure with Guitar, the location is of little importance. Instead, de Maistre uses the motif as the basis for a complex examination of artistic possibility within design and composition, features which mark the majority of his paintings done in Europe following his relocation to London in 1930. For de Maistre and many of his peers in Sydney’s artworld, Picasso was recognised as a giant, a seemingly endless font of ideas and strategies. However, little of Australia’s modernist artwork from the 1920s actually bore signs of his influence. Partially this was due to local opposition to the extremes of the European avant-garde as well as the fact that few in the country had ever seen an original by the Spanish master. In this regard, de Maistre’s Train, c.1930 (private collection) is possibly the first painting executed in this country which utilises the Cubist strategy of divided planes and angles to suggest multiple, simultaneous viewpoints. Of the London paintings, The Crucifixion, 1932 – 46 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), bears the earliest date for a painting displaying Cubist roots. De Maistre’s approach to Cubism has sympathies with the similar variations that the artists André Lhote and Jean Metzinger employed. Juan Gris should also be added to this mix, the painter once described by Robert Hughes in Shock of the New as having brought a ‘broader, more cogent, almost classical air’ to Cubism, allied with ‘a mind of the
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coolest analytical temper’. 2 Such a description could easily be applied to de Maistre, who would refuse to open the door when he was working, such was his focus. In Figure with Guitar, as with all his artwork, there is never a line out of place, each is considered and composed, augmented by shifts in colour, however subtle, which recall the luminosity of his ‘colour-music’ paintings of 1918 – 20. Further, Figure with Guitar was painted during the period when de Maistre and his young protégé Francis Bacon were forensically examining and responding to Picasso’s art. The artist’s affinity to the guitar player should also be considered as De Maistre was a trained violinist. A related and much reproduced drawing, Seated figure (Margaret McLeod), 1935 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), likewise features a lute next to the chair and is also a Cubist response to the subject. 3 In 1968, Daniel Thomas wrote an article about the prestigious Roland Instone Collection for Art in Australia. Featured in the photographs was Figure with Guitar hanging over the fireplace in the centre of the room amidst a cluster of other significant paintings, the position it had held since its purchase in the late 1940s. This auction marks only the second time Figure with Guitar has been offered for sale since it left the Instone Collection in 1974, described at the time in the media as being ‘probably the most important de Maistre to come on the auction market in recent years’.4
WOMAN WITH GUITAR ON SITTING ROOM WALL AT INSTONE HOUSE, SYDNEY photograph by Kerry Dundas courtesy of Art and Australia
1. Thomas, D., ‘the art collectors 8: Roland Instone’, Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, vol. 6, no. 2, September 1968, p. 113 2. Hughes, R., The Shock of the New, BBC, London, 1991, p. 34 3. Seated figure (Margaret McLeod) was first reproduced in the second edition (1935) of Herbert Read’s influential book Art Now: An introduction to the theory of modern painting and sculpture, Faber and Faber, London, 1933 4. Ingram, T., ‘Saleroom. De Maistre – not a discordant note among those who mattered’, The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, 26 September 1974, p. 28
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 4 (1894 – 1968) PAYSAGE AUTOMNE (IN THE LUXEMBOURG GARDENS), 1923 oil on canvas on board 46.0 x 38.0 cm signed lower left: R de Mestre. signed and inscribed with title verso: 30 2 Paysage Automne / 13 / R de Mestre bears inscription verso: Mrs McCall estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Miss Jean Thomson Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 14 August 1989, lot 309 (as ‘Paysage Automne (In the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris)’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Australian Artists in Europe: Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, The Faculty of Arts Gallery, London, 23 June – 12 July 1924, cat. 59 (as ‘Automne, Jardin du Luxembourg’) Oil Paintings by Roi de Mestre, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 6 – 17 April 1926, cat. 13 (as ‘In the Luxembourg Gardens’) LITERATURE ‘Art Exhibition: Mr. De Mestre’s Paintings.’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 6 April 1926, p. 12 (as ‘In the Luxembourg Gardens’) Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 16, 1 June 1926, p. 17 (illus. as ‘In the Luxembourg Gardens’) Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, fig. 9, p. 69 (illus., as ‘In the Luxembourg Gardens’) Ingram, T., ‘Art Market’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 27, no. 2, Summer 1989, p. 292 (illus. as ‘Paysage Automne (In the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris)’)
The Luxembourg Gardens are one of the centres for leisure in Paris. Sited next to the Luxembourg Palace, the Gardens comprise twenty-five acres of formal plantings, trees, fountains and statuary bisected by multiple gravel paths and grassed lawns. Originally created on the initiative of Queen Marie de Medici in 1612, their central location and extensive diversions make them a magnet for families and tourists. Not surprisingly, they have also attracted artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh; and Australians including Kathleen O’Connor, and Ethel Carrick Fox. Away from the delighted squeal of children riding the ancient carousel or laughing at a puppet show, and the soft ‘donk’ of pétanque balls hitting the gravel, the Gardens are also rich in quiet, contemplative nooks, places of dappled sunlight and shadow. In Paysage Automne (In the Luxembourg Gardens), 1923, Roy de Maistre gives us one such vista, a view of the palace’s side wing seen through a silent colonnade of trees. De Maistre first visited France in the autumn of 1923, after arriving in London following his award of the Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship. Disappointed with London, its light and its relatively listless local art scene, he travelled on to Paris where he exhibited one work in the 1924 Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. He also visited other French locations – Arles, Compiègne and St. Jean de Luz – and took a side trip to Spain (see lot 5 Bridge in Spain (Alcántara Bridge, Toledo)). During this extended period, he painted ceaselessly, building continuously on the skills he had developed during his previous years in Australia. He was also able to examine the work of master artists in the flesh for the first time, particularly van Gogh and Paul Cézanne. There is also the echo of the earlier and equally influential Barbizon School whose artists were among the first to take their easels outside and capture landscapes en plein air. As its title suggests, the painting was created in the northern hemisphere’s autumn months (September to December). The crisp morning light is reminiscent of one of The Art Gallery of New South Wales’ most popular purchases in the years before de Maistre’s departure, Elioth Gruner’s Spring Frost, 1919. Against one trunk in Paysage Automne (In the Luxembourg Gardens) is a small stack of the Gardens’ collection of folding ‘Simplex’ chairs. The shadows of the trees fall in ordered rows across the gravel and in the background, the looming masonry of the Palace is rendered in cool tones of grey-blue. De Maistre, it would seem, empathised with the underlying concept that the Gardens are a cultivated environment, one which reflects that very French sensibility of an experience directed at the taming and ordering of nature in the interests of humanity. Paysage Automne (In the Luxembourg Gardens) stands as a wonderfully harmonious image on its own, full of rich colour in spite of its subdued tenor, demonstrative of an artist in absolute control of his medium. ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 5 (1894 – 1968) BRIDGE IN SPAIN (ALCÁNTARA BRIDGE, TOLEDO), 1925 oil on board 38.0 x 46.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower right: R. de Mestre / Spain 1925 bears inscription verso: … bridge To… / 23 estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1979 EXHIBITED probably: R. de Mestre, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 11 – 21 July 1928, cat. 6 (as ‘Sketch – Alcántara Bridge, Toledo’) Autumn Exhibition 1979, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 78 (illus. in exhibition catalogue as ‘Spain, 1925’) LITERATURE Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pl. 16, pp. 49, 53 (illus. as ‘Bridge in Spain’) RELATED WORK Alcántara Bridge, Toledo, exhibited in The Burdekin House Exhibition, 1929, illus. in Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, p. 129
In 1923, Roi de Mestre (as he then spelled his name) was awarded the Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship and journeyed to Europe. One of the paintings he entered for the award was Still life, c.1922, a moody rendering of white blooms painted in the manner of the ‘tonalist’ artist Max Meldrum. De Maistre, and his colleague Roland Wakelin, studied with the controversial Meldrum for a year following their landmark exhibition Colour in Art held in Sydney in 1919. Presented as a high-coloured, modernist vision, that exhibition polarised opinion within the small community of local art buyers and, sensitive to such rebuttals, the two men sought to continue their painterly research by studying with Meldrum. In Bridge in Spain (Alcantara Bridge, Toledo), 1925, de Maistre’s attempts to reconcile such divergent theories is made apparent. Travelling first to London where he is presumed to have seen a major exhibition by Van Gogh at the Leicester Galleries, de Maistre found himself disappointed by the quality of English light, even though he had arrived late in the northern Summer. Seeking alternate inspiration, he travelled to Paris (see lot 4 Paysage Automne (in the Luxembourg Gardens)), Arles and Compèigne in France, before renting a studio for three months in the Basque resort of St. Jean de Luz in 1925.1 He also exhibited one work in the 1924 Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris though this painting Nature mort, known only through black-andwhite reproduction, appears to follow the tonal realism taught by Meldrum. Following his arrival in St. Jean de Luz, colour re-appears in de Maistre’s paintings as does evidence of exploratory phases into new realms of depiction, which, as his biographer Heather Johnson notes, ‘hint at the ‘cubist’ style of de Maistre’s later work’. 2 In Bridge in Spain (Alcántara Bridge, Toledo) de Maistre’s focus is on the western tower and arches of the Puente de Alcántara which spans the Tagus River in Toledo, Spain. Built of stone, it was constructed on orders of the Roman emperor Trajan between the years 104 and 106 AD. De Maistre’s painting looks toward the eastern shore where patches of trees and parkland remain to this day. Then, as now, the bridge is a place of strong tourist interest, as evident by the artist’s portrait of an enterprising local street musician in the related lot 3 Figure with Guitar. De Maistre maintains a looseness to his brushwork in this painting, which sets off a visual rhythm as the strokes play in opposition to the more considered, evenly flattened passages which articulate the bridge itself. The curves of the two arches rhyme with those of the continuing riverbank, the small stand of trees and the ascending road in the upper right of the landscape. Although subtle, de Maistre’s celebration of colour is evident in the greens, blues and purples which punctuate the dominant warmth of the ochre. It is a considered painting full of existing strengths combined with unabashed painterly doubt, evidence of a maturing artist confidently seeking new ways to articulate his vision of the world around him. 1. See Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pp. 42, 46 2. Johnson, H., op cit., p. 49
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 6 (1894 – 1968) MAN READING (PORTRAIT OF G. DAVIS), 1926 oil on plywood on composition board 45.5 x 37.0 cm signed and dated lower right: R. de Mestre / 1926 estimate :
$18,000 – 24,000
PROVENANCE John Young, Sydney Thence by descent Mrs John Young, Sydney Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 18 November 1965, lot 229 (as ‘Portrait Study’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne LITERATURE Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pl. 14, pp. 48 (illus.), 49, 121
ROY DE MAISTRE AT ‘THE GRANGE’, SUTTON FOREST, NSW, MARCH 1926 courtesy of State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
In 1926, Roy de Maistre returned to Australia after two-and-a-half years’ study in Europe following his award of the Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship. Prior to this, he had already been identified as one of the country’s leading modernist artists through his own theories on the harmonious relationships between colour and music, and had undertaken further studies with the ‘tonalist’ Max Meldrum. On his return to Sydney, de Maistre took a studio in Burdekin House in Macquarie Street, a grand colonial mansion sadly destined for the wrecking ball. Once ensconced, he set about re-establishing his position in the local
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art scene dedicating himself to his art, and to the cross-over possibilities between modernism and interior design. Man Reading (Portrait of Davis), 1926, dates from the first seven months of de Maistre’s return to Australia and in it is evidence of many of the artistic directions that his art was now taking. Apart from his name, the identity of the sitter is unknown but he could almost be a stand-in for the artist who was himself an avid wearer of the distinctive ‘plus fours’ outfit. The location is de Maistre’s studio, identifiable by the distinctive fireplace mantelpiece and the armchair, which was upholstered in a rich floral jacquard fabric. These elements feature in two other notable paintings by de Maistre, Studio, Burdekin House, 1928 (location unknown), and the vibrant At Burdekin House Studio, c.1928, formerly in the collection of John Young, the influential Director of Macquarie Galleries. Additional identification for the location is provided by two of the artist’s paintings neatly stacked to the left of Davis’ shoulder. There are many numbers of paintings featuring a person with a book and this subject has been interpreted as reflecting the rising status of reading amongst the middle classes.1 Similar examples amongst de Maistre’s modernist peers include Grace Cossington Smith’s The Reader, 1916 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) which utilise both her sisters as models; Roland Wakelin’s Man Reading, 1933 (Collection of John Wakelin); and Margaret Preston’s The Studio Window, 1906 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), depicting a woman reclining on a lounge reading a magazine. 2 Man Reading (Portrait of G. Davis) is a fine example of de Maistre’s contemporaneous ideas, from the sculptural planes defining the sitter’s face and hands, to the rhythmic application of single brushstrokes running down the mantelpiece and delineating Davis’ clothing. The use of plywood as a support was also a recognisable modernist statement, being a recently developed industrial material that spoke volumes to like-minded artists engaged in interpreting life in the rapidly changing twentieth century. 1. See: Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 49. Johnson also argues that it creates a ‘distancing’ device between de Maistre and his subject 2. There is a photograph of an almost identical study of ‘Davis’ in the collection files pertaining to de Maistre in the National Gallery of Australia’s archives.
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 7 (1894 – 1968) INTERIOR (SAM COURTAULD’S VILLA, FRANCE), 1948 oil on canvas 61.0 x 51.0 cm signed and dated lower left: R de Maistre, 48 estimate :
$60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 29 April 1996, lot 29 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne RELATED WORK Summer, c.1955, oil on board, 39.5 x 29.0 cm, illus. in Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930 – 1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pl. 22, p. 51
It is fascinating to consider Roy de Maistre’s networking achievements in London in the 1930s. Within three years of his arrival, he counted key members of England’s avant-garde as his colleagues, including artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson. He also connected with significant modernist influencers including Herbert Read and the wealthy collector-patron Samuel Courtauld IV. Born to a family of prominent textile makers, Courtauld became fascinated with post-Impressionist art in the 1920s, buying many important works including Édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergere, 1882; Paul Gauguin’s Evermore, 1897; and Vincent van Gogh’s poignant self-portrait featuring a bandage around his head following his attempt to sever an ear in 1889. Courtauld set up a Trust for the Tate Gallery to purchase works of equivalent stature, but following his wife’s death in 1931, relinquished their former house (designed by Robert Adam) and its artworks to the nation through the University of London, allowing for the creation of the Courtauld Institute for the study of art history. De Maistre had first met Courtauld’s daughter, Sydney, when she visited Australia on her honeymoon in 1927. Her husband was Rab Butler, a young politician who would eventually become Deputy Prime Minister, then Foreign Secretary for the United Kingdom in the 1960s. De Maistre was quick to rekindle the friendship on his return to London,1 and through them became known to other members of the Courtauld family. He was a welcome visitor to the Butler’s palatial home Stanstead Hall, where he was provided with ‘a room at the back of the house, and … hampers of vegetables to take home’. 2 The Butlers would further extend their patronage in 1937 by purchasing a three story building at 13 Ecclestone Street, Belgravia, and allowing de Maistre to live there rent-free until his death in 1968. In return, de Maistre painted a series of portraits of family members.
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Samuel Courtauld also sat for two portraits by de Maistre, both dated 1947, and it is quite likely they were painted at his villa in France, the subject of the painting on offer here. Apart from his love of French painting, Courtauld had family connections to the country stretching back to the seventeenth century. He shared de Maistre’s own affection for France and particularly St Jean de Luz, a Basque-country resort where the villa was located, and where de Maistre had himself painted regularly since his first visit in 1923. There are also accounts of their friendship ‘ranging from de Maistre’s accompanying Courtauld on painting buying trips in Europe, to nursing him before his death’. 3 Interior (Samuel Courtauld’s Villa, France), 1948 was painted the year following the philanthropist’s final illness and may therefore be considered as an homage or farewell. The doors are ajar, and what must have been an oft-occupied chair now stands empty as if Courtauld’s spirit has just left the room. De Maistre regularly painted works in series, reinterpreting them into orchestrated designs of colour and decorative-Cubist fracture; and three other variants of this painting are recorded. One of these is Summer, 1955, a larger version exhibited as part of the artist’s Retrospective held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1960.4 1. De Maistre first visited Europe between 1923 and 1925 on a Travelling Scholarship. 2. Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930 – 1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 15 3. ibid., p. 41 4. The watercolour sketch for Summer is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROY DE MAISTRE 8 (1894 – 1968) STILL LIFE WITH MELON AND BELL oil on canvas 46.0 x 35.5 cm bears inscription on frame verso: “Still Life with Melon & Bell” Painting by Roy de Maistre / stamped with the facsimile of his signature by his Executor Doris de M Fischer artist’s studio stamp on frame verso estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, London, 1980 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, c.1982 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne
Roy de Maistre’s studio at 13 Eccleston Street, Belgravia, was on the ground floor of an otherwise nondescript three-storey building. On stepping inside, a personal paradise was revealed, described famously as being like an Aladdin’s Cave, ‘a visual delight glowing with colour … a cavern of colour and intimacy’.1 Patrick White, who lived upstairs in 1937, wrote memorably that ‘in Eccleston Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met … important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, (and) Francis Bacon. 2 After many years at the forefront of his London activities alongside such members of the British avant-garde, de Maistre retreated to his studio, an enduring source of renewal and inspiration. Of his alternating painterly sequences, the still lifes and studio interiors from these years are amongst his most collected work.
Another feature of the studio was the collection of the artist’s own paintings, a living testament to his extensive career, where ‘paintings dating back to his earliest works, (were) always displayed on the walls, on tables leaning against the walls, and on easels, … parts of de Maistre’s self he loathed to part with’. 4 The fact that Still Life with Melon and Bell stayed within the artist’s estate is testament to his own affection for this particular painting. Despite his almost hermitic existence, de Maistre was still championed by certain galleries. In 1956, for example, he was included in the Exhibition of Contemporary British Art at the E. & A. Silberman Galleries in New York, alongside Bacon, Sutherland, Ceri Richards, Ben Nicholson, William Scott and others. The National Gallery of Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales are important collectors of de Maistre’s studio-interior paintings, and other examples related to Still life with Melon and Bell include Still Life, 1954 (Tate Gallery, London); Still Life with Bottle and Fruit, 1940s – 50s (Deutscher and Hackett, 29 August 2018, lot 20); and Still Life with Pineapple, c.1954 (formerly collection of Caroline de Mestre). 1. Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The English Years 1930 – 1968, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 48 2. White, P., Flaws in the Glass, Jonathon Cape, London, 1981, p. 62
In Still Life with Melon and Bell, the viewer is drawn to a corner of the studio, an action of sighting memorably described by the artist’s friend and supporter, Sir John Rothenstein, who wrote that de Maistre ‘looks with fascinated intensity about the (studio) and this scrutiny, searching yet affectionate, has made him a kind of intimiste. … Each object of contemplation (has) been combined in lucid, close-knit arrangements expressive of the painter’s relation to his surroundings’. 3 These are works which still retain the echo of aspects of Picasso’s Cubist divisions but there is also the presence of Matisse, Max Beckmann, Juan Gris and, of course, the artist himself. The strong black outlines, which first appear in de Maistre’s oeuvre in works such as Marriage, 1936, form yet another linkage, this time with the mannered cubist style of the English Vorticist painter Wyndham Lewis. De Maistre utilises a repeating, curvilinear pattern to animate the surface of the bell in Still Life with Melon and Bell and this, in turn, responds to the semi-circular edges of the melon’s ripe interior. Both objects sit upon a richly patterned cloth, and De Maistre was already well known for his use of modern European fabrics as a prop in his paintings, as Gerberas, 1926 (lot 1 in this auction) demonstrates.
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3. Rothenstein, J., ‘Introduction’, Roy de Maistre: A Retrospective. Exhibition of Paintings from 1917 – 1960, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, May 1960, p. 9 4. Johnson, J., ibid., p. 52
ANDREW GAYNOR
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 9 (1875 – 1963) INDOOR STILL LIFE, 1913 oil on canvas 53.5 x 65.5 cm signed twice lower right: M. R. Macpherson / M. R. Preston estimate :
$150,000 – 200,000
PROVENANCE Mrs John S. Teulon, Melbourne Mrs Lambert Latham, Victoria Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1978 EXHIBITED Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts Salon, Grand Palais, Paris, 13 April – 30 June 1914, cat. 811 (as ‘La Cuisine (Nature Morte)’) New English Art Club (Winter), RBA Suffolk Street Gallery (Galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists), London, December 1914, cat. 114 (as ‘The Kitchen’) Forty-Fifth Autumn Exhibition of Modern Art, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England, 9 October 1915 – 8 January 1916, cat. 1002A (as ‘The Kitchen’) Society of Women Artists, Sixty-Second Annual Exhibition, Galleries of the Royal Society of British Artists, London, 4 February 1917, cat. 198 (as ‘Indoor Still Life’) Exhibition of Paintings etc. by Misses Margaret R MacPherson and Gladys Reynell, Preece’s Gallery of Australian Art, Adelaide, 15 – 30 September 1919, cat. 1 (as ‘The Kitchen’) Royal Art Society of NSW, Forty-First Annual Exhibition, Exhibition Gallery, Department of Public Instruction, Sydney, 9 August 1920, cat. 3 (as ‘Indoor Still Life’, label attached verso) Early Australian paintings and prints, Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne, December 1978 (as ‘Summer morning, still life’, c.1916’) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring in 2006 to, Ian Potter Centre, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (as ‘Still Life: Sunshine Indoors’, 1914)
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LITERATURE Express and Daily Telegraph, Adelaide, 10 January 1914, p. 12 Fry, E., ‘Australian Artists in Paris’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1 July 1914, p. 5 (as ‘The Kitchen’) ‘New English Art Club’, Morning Post, London, 2 December 1914, p. 3 ‘New English Art Club’, Standard, London, 2 December 1914, p. 2 (as ‘The Kitchen’) Rutter, F., ‘Society of Women Artists’, Sunday Times, London, 11 February 1917, p. 5 (as ‘Indoor Still Life’) ‘Society of Women Artists’, Morning Post, London, 15 February 1917, p. 4 Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, vol. 16, no. 2, Summer December 1978, p. 105 (illus., as ‘Summer morning, still life, c. 1916’) Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 37 (illus.), 282 (as ‘Still Life: Sunshine Indoors’, 1914) Margaret Preston Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, monotypes and ceramics, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, CD-ROM compiled by Mimmocchi, D., with Edwards, D., and Peel, R. (as ‘Still Life: Sunshine Indoors’, 1914)
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 9 (1875 – 1963) INDOOR STILL LIFE, 1913
On 8 February 1912 Margaret Rose Macpherson sailed for Europe on a second study tour. Her sights were set on Paris, where she hoped to pick up ideas about design and colour. Her preferred field was still life — a genre where an artist might create her subject and not be its servant. Convinced both that ‘art is personal and of the spirit’1 and that an emotive subject was not a pre-requisite, she saw her tools of expression as colour and drawing. In Paris she joined like-minded artists, Bessie Davidson, Rupert Bunny and his circle (of whom Georges Oberteuffer and Richard Miller later claimed to have taught her) and countless others, including those responsible for the exciting Rhythm magazine, in analysing Japanese art, Post Impressionist paintings, and the ways by which practitioners in the arts of music and dancing evoked mood, spirit and bodiliness. Eighteen months later Macpherson summarised what had impressed her in Paris. 2 One painting had stirred her deepest feelings, Gauguin’s Ia Orana Maria, 1891. Gauguin’s methods were incalculable, however, so she looked to another Post Impressionist whose work attracted her. Although Edmond-François Aman-Jean’s palette lacked Gauguin’s inspired boldness and his symbolism, ‘a little sad but full of feeling,’ as well as his daring intuition, he had the advantage of having been a fellow student and for a few years shared a studio, with Georges Seurat, and believed, with him, that ‘a sense of order is the basis of all art’. 3 Systematised colour and design, rife in Paris, was a springboard for the personal expression Margaret Macpherson was looking for. There was an added advantage too, in that Aman-Jean was now a prominent leader and power-broker in exhibiting circles in Paris. He was on the judging panel for the Société National des Beaux-Arts (or New Salon) where, in April 1913, Macpherson had her first painting accepted for exhibition.
MARGARET PRESTON AND GLADYS REYNELL WITH LITTLE JIM, c.1915 courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
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Macpherson, and one of her ex-students from Australia, Gladys Reynell, worked for four summer months (June – September 1913) on the Île de Noirmoutier, off Brittany. Indoor Still Life, 1913 was painted looking into the garden of the house where they were staying, with Macpherson harnessing her newly found skill to a vision of warm and cool colours that was both unusual and satisfyingly – even brilliantly – natural. She employed Aman-Jean’s delicate palette of greens, pale yellows, pinks, blues, white and black, but where the French painter intermingled warm with cool hues, Macpherson divided the colours into two groups and
applied them in separate zones, thereby giving the concept of divided colour a fresh significance. The colour of light differs from one corner of the canvas to the other. In the upper-right, the sun beats down upon the garden, perfuming the pink roses and relaxing and fattening the textures of green leaves and sandy soil. (Earth and foliage is similarly sunlit and slack in The Windmill, a small landscape dating from that summer.) In the lower segment, reflected light sparkles coolly in shadow, bouncing with restless mobility from surface to surface of glazed white porcelain, glassware, metal knives and forks. Indoor Still Life attests to the sensuous truth in the theory, so memorably stated by Seurat, that gaiety is expressed by luminous hues and lines rising upwards, and calm is expressed through an even balance of light-and-dark and warm-andcool colours, and by lines in a horizontal direction. Margaret Macpherson – soon to be Margaret Preston – was not a prolific painter. Most if not all her major paintings, of which this is one, involved time and many sketches, as the artist sought, fought for and eventually found a composition and colour scheme that expressed a resonantly individual idea. Stylistically, Indoor Still Life stands near the beginning of a key group dating between 1912 and 1917. On the cusp of two periods in the artist’s career, it is both a tour de force in the painting of reflected light (her previous interest) and introduces a rhythmic, sculpturallyinformed composition and colours keyed like music. Another still life from Île de Noirmoutier, Holiday Still Life 1913, with richer colour and less interest in reflected light, represents a further step into the new style. Macpherson and Reynell left France for London at the end of the summer. Visiting Macpherson a couple of months later an Australian columnist was shown a painting (not one of two paintings currently on exhibition) which seems to be the work now known as Indoor Still Life:4 I saw one picture of Miss Macpherson’s of an out-of-doors breakfast table, every inch of it painted with the extraordinary technical skill that has made her work notable in Australia. The whole is bathed in soft sunlight, and beyond there is a little garden path winding away between green garden beds, that gives a delightful air of romance. In all the pictures there is a rare originality of conception and breadth of treatment. 5
The column, dated 5 December, focused on how London was responding to Macpherson’s paintings: Miss Margaret R. Macpherson ... has begun her career in London triumphantly, by having two of her brilliant still life pictures accepted and hung at the “New English Art Club’s” exhibition. This is one of the shows where you can only exhibit by invitation, and even then your work may not be accepted ... In this case the secretary simply swooped down on Miss Macpherson, carried off the pictures, and the deed was done. The critics greeted her appearance in the most flattering way, and she has had remarkably fine notices from all sides. This clever Adelaide girl’s latest work has a fascinating and very modern note in it to add to her always remarkable technique, and her first London success is pretty certain to be followed by many more. In fact, one noted artist here tells me that there are few people to touch her in her particular line.6
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 9 (1875 – 1963) INDOOR STILL LIFE, 1913
Macpherson’s London reputation grew from year to year between 1913 and 1917 (by which time her war work had swallowed most of the hours previously given to painting). Reports of her success relayed by the Australian press did not encompass the contexts in which she was praised. Art criticism was unapologetically misogynist at that time of suffragette action in the UK and wartime hysteria also weighed heavily against women. Of those who wrote about Macpherson’s paintings, Frank Rutter dissented from the general tone of heavy-handed masculine pomposity and clubbishness. Others, including Sir Claude Phillips, praised her work but did not disguise their belief that women by virtue of their gender were incapable of creative art. The following obscurely phrased preamble from the Athenaeum’s anonymous critic is typical:
MARGARET PRESTON IN HER ADELAIDE STUDIO, c.1909 courtesy of State Library of South Australia, Adelaide
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On not a few occasions in recent years we have recognised in women artists considerable capacity in the painting of still-life — a department of art in which there is, indeed, considerable scope for originality and initiative, but in the practice of which an attitude of mind or code of principles can, when once assimilated, be applied with tolerable precision. This makes it an excellent field for exercises under – or after — a master, and the works to which we have referred usually look as if they might have been produced under those conditions. While they thus cannot be adduced to confound the profane who would deny women’s possession of creative power in the arts, they are none the less useful in providing the wide range of concrete examples by which alone, perhaps, an existing method may penetrate to the remote corners where predestined genius catches the hint of a further development. Miss Margaret Macpherson’s ... are examples of such “school-pieces.” Bringing nothing new into art, they may nevertheless disseminate certain sound principles of painting not yet (as is evident enough in other parts of the exhibition) common property in all circles. Based apparently on the work of, say, Mr Peploe and Mr William Nicholson, they seem to us the best things on the walls. (Athenaeum, 20 February 1915, 172)
Her supposed inferiority as a woman incapable of creative effort affected Macpherson only to the extent that she set herself, and art history, some unnecessary hurdles to jump over. Marrying soon after the war, in midcareer, having made a ‘name’ for herself in the art circles of London and Australia, she chose to switch her professional name to Preston, as if to start again. Exasperatingly, she showed a similar lack of concern for maintaining the title of a painting from exhibition to exhibition. For that reason it has proved difficult if not impossible to establish the original title and subsequent exhibiting history of many of Macpherson’s pre1920 paintings — including this work. To illustrate the difficulty, the painting she showed in the New Salon in 1913 as Novembre sur le balcon (nature morte), had another name, Still life: December Sun, at the New English Art Club (NEAC) in December 1913 and in Adelaide in 1919 was December Sunlight, Paris. The problem of title-shift is complicated by the artist using the same title for more than one work (The Window shown in 1914 is different from a work of the same title shown in 1916, for example). This is compounded by the generic nature of the artist’s subjects – flowers, fruit, crockery, tables, windows, indoor light, outdoor light – and ambiguities of representation. More often than not, her still lifes do not stage a situation that could be enacted in real life. There will be knives and forks but no plates, coffee pots but no cups, a water jug but the adjacent glass will be filled with flowers. Ditto with the setting: the table in Indoor Still Life may be indoors against an open window (if so, the pane lies flat against the outside wall like a shutter); equally, it could be outdoors in the corner of a terrace and separated from the garden by a low wall. Macpherson chose and composed her objects, setting, light effects for their formal values. Accordingly, her idea of a picture was not always what a superficial view would identify as the subject. Some of the more obscure titles identify an aspect of a work that only the artist, or like-minded viewers, would regard as significant. The Window, 1916, an opulent work that was much praised when it appeared in the Royal Academy in 1916, now carries the title Anemones in response to its clamorous flowers, bright-coloured and intensely-patterned; the window of the original title barely shows at the top of the picture, where the edge of a curtain, striped white, black, blue and violet, states the colour-key and the top-and-bottom notes for the work as a whole.
The title Indoor Still Life (a firm title, since it is written on an exhibition label pasted to the back of this canvas) dates from 1920, when a reviewer mentioned that the work had been shown at the New Salon.7 Macpherson showed only two paintings at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts Salon (SNBA): the first is ruled out by its contents, which leaves us with the prosaically named ‘La cuisine (nature morte)’ [Kitchen still life], shown at the SNBA in April 1914, 8 when the excellent journalist Edith Fry reported from Paris: Miss Macpherson ... has sent to the National one of her stilllife studies, which she calls ‘The Kitchen’. Miss Macpherson is unequalled as a painter of white, and her execution of white china on a light tablecloth shows consummate art. 9 1. Preston, M., ‘Meccano as an ideal’, Manuscripts (Geelong) No 2, June 1932, p. 91 2. Margaret Macpherson letter to Norman Carter from the Ile de Noirmoutier, 18 August 1913 (Norman Carter papers, ML MS 471/1) 3. Aman-Jean letter to Gustave Coquiot, 2 August 1923, published in Herbert, R. L., Georges Seurat 1859 – 1891, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 1991, Appendix B, pp. 377 – 78 4. In favour of Indoor Still Life being the work described in a ‘letter from London’ dated 5 December 1913, it is the only work in Macpherson’s known output from the years 1912 – 1918 to have a ‘a path winding away between green garden beds’ that might be said to impart ‘a delightful air of romance’ (Holiday Still Life 1913 has a garden path that is straight and ends swiftly and unromantically at a fence). Additionally, this is the only painting from 1913 – 18 with scintillating light effects on glass, metal and porcelain – that being ‘the extraordinary technical skill that ha[d] made her work notable in Australia’. 5. Exile, ‘Woman’s Letter from London’, 5 December 1913, Chronicle, Adelaide, 10 January 1914, pp. 56 – 57 6. ibid. 7. ’Mrs Preston’s Paintings’, Sunday News, Sydney, 15 August 1920 [http://pressclippings. ag.nsw.gov.au/libItemDetail.asp?searchWords=mrs+preston&itemID=2929] 8. Between first exhibition and 1920, The Kitchen appeared at the NEAC in December 1914, at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool in October 1915, at the Society of Women Artists in February 1917 (as Indoor Still Life, 20 gns’), and as The Kitchen, 20 gns’ in Macpherson’s joint exhibition with Reynell in Adelaide in September 1919 where a catalogue note stated that it had been shown at the NEAC and SNBA. 9. Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1 July 1914, p. 5
MARY EAGLE
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
PRINTS BY MARGARET PRESTON After spending the First World War in England, Margaret Preston returned to Australia in full possession of herself, happily married and with a newfound freedom of financial security. The time was right to assert her originality. The twenties felt like a period of fast growth and change, particularly in urban centers such as Sydney, where she and Bill now lived. Stepping up to an equally fast pace, and addressing as wide a public as she could reach, Preston pushed a concept of a uniquely Australian aesthetic, one that encompassed ‘more than one vision’1 of Australia and of art. The 1920s in general saw a closing of the gap between art and craft. This was particularly true for Preston.
Preston first came face to face with Japanese art as a young woman studying in Paris. Her teacher, Rupert Bunny, ‘sent her to study Japanese art at the Musée Guimet, to let her learn slowly that there is more than one vision in art’.6 The staggered line of birds in flight and the decorative ripples of water in Black Swans, Wallis Lake, N.S.W., 1923 acknowledge a debt to the Japanese woodblock technique and relate closely to a wood panel of wild geese carved by Koyetsu (illustrated in Preston’s copy of Japan and Its Art 7), but Preston was not one for emulation for its own sake: the nod to Japan is in the context of a uniquely Australian scene, one she described in an article for The Home:
She had always been craft-oriented. Introduced to woodcut printing in 1898 in her art school days in Adelaide, where the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts had a strong alliance with England’s Arts and Crafts movement, she had pursued printmaking and other crafts during the war, and now found her stride in woodcut prints. These went onto the covers and into the pages of popular magazines and journals, so fulfilling her wish to reach a wide audience. 2 By 1927 her paintings had taken a stark cue from her prints. The restraint of paintings such as Implement Blue, 1927, and Western Australian Gum Blossom, 1928, (both Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) arose from the rigours of emulating Aboriginal designs and the restrictions of wood-cutting. She told Gavin Long in 1935, ‘In my search for forms which will suggest Australia I prefer wood-blocking to painting, for the wood hinders facility and compels the worker to keep forms in his composition severe’. 3
The trip is delicious. Starting early, the launch winds its way through the Wallis Lake, passing the little town until it enters the wide lagoon; from time to time regiments of black swans are seen, that slowly rise to flight as the boat comes in sight. 8
In articles for The Home and Art in Australia Preston advocated the role of crafts in developing a truly Australian aesthetic. In 1925 she explained, ’I have studied the aboriginals’ art and have applied their designs to the simple things of life, hoping that the craftsman will succeed where, until now, the artist has certainly failed’.4 For Preston the decorative arts and crafts, with their practical and aesthetic values, would ensure that a native aesthetic remained alive and relevant to a modern and cosmopolitan Australia; additionally, a national aesthetic based on craft would have women as its spearhead. Her vision knowingly echoed the role of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e), which ‘had entered ordinary Japanese homes as inexpensive objects, where they represented the qualities of national character’. 5
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Writing for Art in Australia in 1927 Preston recalled that as a student ‘the standardized beauty for art of landscapes, sunsets and ladies did not interest her … So she simply didn’t try’.9 Through woodcutting she developed an unstandardised way to address the Australian landscape that suited her and her time. In Mosman Bridge, c.1927 it is not just the Japanese accent that confronts the prevailing Australian landscape tradition; the urban subject matter declares Preston’s identity as a modern artist. The eye treks along a suspended walkway across the upper reaches of Mosman Bay, lingers on the elegantly cut calligraphy of the wooden bridge and the sharp shapeliness of a pictorial segmentation that encompasses whole groups of flat, coloured objects within firm black lines. Sydney’s modern artists preferred urban subjects, especially those that celebrated the public life of a city rapidly emerging as the contemporary core of Australian culture. The Bridge from North Shore, c.1932 captures one of the most popular subjects of Sydney’s modern artists: the newly erected Harbour Bridge. Preston does not showcase the fashionable urban metropolis on the south side of the harbour, rather our gaze travels over the industrial hub of Lavender Bay towards Milsons Point. The gentle gradation of blue sky is reminiscent of landscape prints by nineteenth century Japanese artists Hokusai and Hiroshige, which paradoxically makes us notice all the more that The Bridge from North
Shore is firmly grounded in its urban locality. Our eye is caught by the spire of the St Francis Xavier Church whose red blaze against the gentle wash of the sky aroused Jindyworobak poet Rex Ingamells to write of this print: Red-roofed two-story house and red-roofed church, its spire a flame of red. Between the two the backyards bath in golden sun. But search one inch to find the Harbour’s joy of blue. Sydney Ure Smith linked the artist’s personality to her art: Margaret Preston is the natural enemy of the dull. [Her] work is based on an unerring and instinctive knowledge of colour and pattern. Her chief assets are strength, vitality and an indubious originality in aesthetic values.10 Arguably these qualities shone brightest in Preston’s still lifes. As a teenager at the National Gallery of Victoria School she had been relieved when she was allowed to ‘work quietly at still life’ rather than fight for a place before the life model.11 Still life allowed her to pursue the formal and symbolic values that interested her and it was here that she evolved a supple modernist style. Flannel Flowers Etc., c.1936 contrasts the detailed texture of the banksia varietals against the broad, flat colour planes of native heath, Sturt Desert pea, Golden Glory pea, Feathery cassia, Morning iris, Sturt Desert rose and Flannel flowers. It is thus both a formalist study of colour, pattern and texture and a celebration of Australian native flowers that expressed an Australian aesthetic.
trunks, over the grass, rocks and sky, flattening the picture plane, and imparting a mysterious obscurity to the scene. Do we see in this work a die-hard modernist hell bent on taking on a subject her younger self had shied away from, the nineteenth century tradition of Australian landscape painting? It is not surprising that Preston, journeying beyond the frontiers of her own sensibility, chose as her guide the craft of printmaking. In 1950 she looked back, ’Whenever I thought I was slipping in my art, I went into crafts’.13 From the young artist who faced the prospect of ’bringing nothing new into art’ 14 she became, through the alternative visions opened to her by craft, the artist whom Daniel Thomas once proclaimed, ’was, without a doubt, the best painter working anywhere in Australia between the wars’.15 1. Preston, M., ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 22 (Margaret Preston Number), Sydney, December 1927, p. 50 2. Preston’s prints were included in publications such as Women’s World, Wentworth Magazine, Manuscripts, and Sydney Ure Smith’s The Home, Art in Australia, and Australia National Journal. 3. Margaret Preston quoted in Long, G., ‘Some Recent Paintings by Margaret Preston’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 59, May 1935, p. 18 4. Preston, M., ‘The Indigenous Art of Australia’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 11, March 1925, p. 52 5. Edwards, D., ‘Transitions 1920s’in Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 84 – 5 6. Preston, M., ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, op. cit., pp. 50 – 51 7. Huish, M., Japan and its Art, Batsfod, London, 1912, p. 227 quoted in Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Melbourne, 1987, p. 83 8. Preston, M., ‘An Ideal Australian Tour’, The Home, November 1926, p. 46 quoted in Butler, op. cit., p. 83 9. Preston, M., ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, op. cit., p. 49 10. Ure Smith, S., ‘Editorial’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 22 (Margaret Preston Number), Sydney, December 1927 11. Preston, M., ‘From Eggs to Electrolux’, op. cit.
A decade later and Preston’s art had changed. For Dry River Crossing, N.T., 1946 Preston, in her seventies, utilised the monotype, a technique she had experimented with during the First World War, when she had been consciously opening her art to a number of alternative visions. The monotype process has its own ‘vision’ of the world that is very different from the graphic woodblock print.12 The result here is a softening of line and a blending of colour that at first glance seem more akin to the Impressionist than the modernist. At a sustained reading one sees, in the complex play of hazy sunlight and deep shadow, a formalist’s obsession with texture. Textures like those of bark spread from the
12. In Ireland in 1915 and again at Seale-Hayne Neurological Military Hospital in Devon in 1918 as part of an experimental rehabilitation program. In 1939 she explained the monotype technique: ‘This craft was done with a small piece of plate glass, zinc or copper, a soft hair brush, a roller, a rag, and some blotting paper. The worker began by rubbing a little oil and paint onto the glass. This he tried to get fairly even. Then he drew his design on to this, wiping out the white parts to be, and the highlights with the rag. Then he quickly placed a piece of paper onto this drawing, rolled it over with his roller, and pulled it off the face of the glass.’ Preston, M., ‘Crafts that Aid’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 77, November 1939, p. 30 13. The artist quoted in ‘Margaret Preston’s Two Artistic “Lives”’, Sunday Herald, Sydney, 3 September 1950, p. 11 14. Athenaeum, London, 20 February 1915, p. 172 15. Thomas, D., Sunday Telegraph, Sydney, 2 June 1963, p. 43
HESTER GASCOIGNE
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 10 (1875 – 1963) THE BRIDGE FROM NORTH SHORE, c.1932 (ALSO KNOWN AS ‘SYDNEY BRIDGE’) hand-coloured woodcut 19.0 x 23.0 cm signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 3rd print Bridge from N. Shore Margaret Preston estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE probably: Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Sydney Harbour Bridge Celebrations, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 21 March – 3 April 1932, cat. 145 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts etc. by Margaret Preston, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, September 1933, cat. 24 (another example, as ‘Bridge from North Shore’) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. P.25 (another example, as ‘Sydney Bridge’) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring (another example, as ‘Sydney Bridge’) Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013, (another example) O’Keefe, Preston, Cossington Smith. Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 12 October 2016 – 19 February 2017 and touring, cat. 51b (another example, as ‘Sydney Bridge’)
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LITERATURE Butel, E., Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, exhibition catalogue, Penguin Books, Victoria, 1985, p. 88 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 158, p. 159 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Peel, R., and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 83, 93 (illus., another example), 260, 286 Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 107 (illus., another example), 315 O’Keefe, Preston, Cossington Smith. Making Modernism, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2017, pp. 127 (illus., another example), 196 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 11 (1875 – 1963) MOSMAN BRIDGE, c.1927 hand-coloured woodcut 25.0 x 18.5 cm signed with initials in image lower right: MP signed below image: Margaret Preston estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Original Art Auctions, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 1969 EXHIBITED A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 28 (another example, dated as c.1926) The Alan Renshaw Bequest, S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 9 January – 25 February 1979, cat. 47 (another example, illus. on exhibition catalogue front cover) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. 13 (another example, dated as c.1925) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. P14 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 36 (another example) A Selection of 19th and 20th Century Australian Art, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 23 November – 8 December 1989, cat. 34 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002 (another example, illus. in exhibition catalogue) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring (another example) Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013, (another example)
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LITERATURE Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 35 (illus., another example, as ‘Mosman Bridge (large) N.S.W., c.1926’) Deutscher, C., and Butler, R., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 28, p. 21 (illus., another example, dated as c.1926) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, cat. P.13, pp. 36 (illus. another example, dated as c.1925), 53 Butel, E., Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, exhibition catalogue, Penguin Books, Victoria, 1985, p. 87 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 113, p. 127 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., Peel, R., and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 82 (illus., another example), 286 Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 162 (illus., another example), 315 Harding, L., Margaret Preston. Recipes for Food and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2016, p. 105 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 12 (1875 – 1963) DRY RIVER CROSSING, N.T., 1946 colour monotype 20.5 x 25.5 cm signed and inscribed with title below image: Dry River Crossing N.T. Margaret Preston estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Mrs Marcus Sheldon, by 1949 Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 5 November 1986, lot 18 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Drawings, Sculpture Exhibition, Contemporary Art Society (Fourth State Exhibition), Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 23 March 1948, cat. 23 (as ‘Dry River Bed, Flinders Ranges’) Pictures from the ‘Back Room’, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 25 January – 4 February 1956, cat. 23 (as ‘Dry River Bed Crossing, N.T.’) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring (dated as ‘c.1947’) LITERATURE Ure Smith, S. (ed.), Margaret Preston’s Monotypes, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1949, p. 66 (as ‘Dry River Bed’) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 314, p. 250 (as ‘Dry river bed, Flinders Ranges, 1946’) Edwards, D., Peel, R., and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 231 (illus.), 232, 285 (as ‘c.1947’) Margaret Preston Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, monotypes and ceramics, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, CD-ROM compiled by Mimmocchi, D., with Edwards, D., and Peel, R. (dated as ‘c.1947’)
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 13 (1875 – 1963) FLANNEL FLOWERS ETC., c.1928 hand-coloured woodcut 27.5 x 27.5 cm signed with initials in image lower left: MP signed and inscribed with title below image: flannel flowers etc woodcut Margaret Preston estimate :
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in June 1974 EXHIBITED Forty-Fourth Annual Exhibition, Art Society of Tasmania, Town Hall, Hobart, 14 – 23 February 1928, cat. 136 (another example) Margaret Preston Woodblocks, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1936, cat. 14 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts etc., The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 9 – 24 December 1936, cat. 147 (another example) Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 27 (as ‘Flannel Flowers etc., c.1926’, illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 21) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. P.33 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 38 (another example)
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LITERATURE Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 66, February 1937 (illus. front cover, another example) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 123, p. 134 (illus., another example) Butel, E., Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, exhibition catalogue, Penguin Books, Victoria, 1985, p. 89 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Victoria
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
MARGARET PRESTON 14 (1875 – 1963) BLACK SWANS, WALLIS LAKE, N.S.W., 1923 woodcut 19.0 x 27.0 cm edition of 50 signed with initial in image upper left: P signed and inscribed with title below image: Black Swans Margaret Preston estimate :
$5,000 – 7,000
PROVENANCE Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 1980 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Woodcuts, Tyrell’s Art Galleries, Sydney, 1923 (another example) Society of Artists, An Exhibition of Etchings and Drawings, Farmer’s Exhibition Hall, Sydney, 17 – 27 November 1924, cat. 46 (as ‘Flight (woodcut)’, another example) Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor Exhibition, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 18 November – 2 December 1925, cat. 40 (as ‘Black Swans’, another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 45 (as ‘Black Swans’, another example) Margaret Preston and William Dobell Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 19 March – 16 April 1942, cat. 1 (as ‘Swans’, another example) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 23 May – 22 July 1980, cat. P6 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 8 (another example) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005 and touring (another example)
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LITERATURE Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 22, December 1927 (as ‘Swans’) Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 49 (as ‘Black Swans, Wallis Lake, c.1925’) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, cat. P6, p. 52 (illus., another example, dated as c.1923) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 26, pp. 82 (illus., another example), 83 Butel, E. (ed), Art and Australia by Margaret Preston: Selected Writings 1920 – 1950, Richmond Ventures, Sydney, third edition, 2003, p. 71 (illus.) Edwards, D., Peel, R., and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 105, 262 (illus., another example), 285 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collection of the Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales and of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
IMPORTANT PRINTS FROM THE GROSVENOR SCHOOL He is a small man with very bright eyes, little bits of sidecurls, and one feels instantly at one’s ease with him. During the summer he lives in a cave in France, a very attractive cave, apparently … and in the winter he comes out of his cave to teach lino-cutting to students of the Grosvenor School.1 This is how the Australian modernist, Dorrit Black, described her teacher Claude Flight, the Englishman who revolutionised printmaking in the 1920s and 30s through his passionate advocacy of the colour linocut. Born in London in 1881, Flight came to art late, enrolling at Heatherley’s School of Art at the age of thirty-one after working in a series of varied professions including bee keeping, farming and engineering. His first colour linocuts were produced around 1919 and, in keeping with the prevailing fashion, used powdered pigment mixed with water brushed onto the printing block in the Japanese style, the aim, to achieve images with delicate colour saturation and subtle gradations of tone that mimicked the effects of watercolour. Soon after however, Flight began to experiment and the first of his colour prints using oil-based inks applied to the linoblock with a hard roller (resulting in denser solid colour) were exhibited in the annual exhibition of the Seven and Five Society in the early 1920s. 2 One of Flight’s best-known prints, Speed, c.1922, was first exhibited in 1922 and exemplifies both his technical and philosophical approach. Combining a boldly designed image in four colours – cobalt blue and yellow ochre (oil paint), vermilion and Prussian blue (printing ink) – from four carved blocks, it is unusual in that it was printed on the reverse of the sheet, the fine translucent paper allowing the colour to show through to the front. 3 Depicting red double-decker buses speeding through a London street, walking figures dwarfed by tall buildings that bend and curve, it evokes the movement and dynamic pace that he perceived as characterising twentieth century life. Flight saw the colour linocut as the modern medium for the modern age, writing that, ‘Time seems to pass so quickly now-a-days. Everybody is in a hurry … this speeding up of life in general … is one of the interesting and psychologically important features of to-day … everybody is on the rush either for work or pleasure: business is hustle, the Cinema, all movement … The Painter cannot but be influenced by the restlessness of his surroundings’.4 Located in Pimlico in central London, the Grosvenor School of Modern Art was founded in 1925 by Scottish artist, Iain Macnab. It had a decidedly modern outlook, aiming to ‘encourage students to express
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their own individual ideas rather than be forced to accept worn-out academic theories’ 5 and to that end, Macnab established a small, hand-picked team of teachers whose forward-thinking ideas matched his own. Various classes were offered, including life drawing, painting, composition, lithography and etching, and from 1926 – 30 Flight taught the art of colour linocutting one afternoon per week. In addition to teaching, he enthusiastically promoted the colour linocut through numerous publications including, Lino-Cuts. A Hand-Book of LinoleumCut Colour Printing (1927), the first major book on the subject which quickly became the standard manual used by artists across the world. Flight was tireless in his promotion of the medium, organising almost annual exhibitions of his and his students’ work between 1929 – 37 in London and touring shows which travelled to regional galleries across Britain, as well as to venues in the United States, China and Australia. The medium received the official stamp of approval in 1929 when prints were purchased from the first group exhibition at London’s Redfern Gallery for the collections of the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Two of Flight’s colleagues at the school, Cyril Power, an architect and fellow teacher, and Sybil Andrews, the School secretary, joined him in his enthusiasm and commitment to the medium, each becoming skilful exponents of the colour linocut whose work is now highly prized. Power’s c.1932 print, The Tube Station, sits alongside Flight’s Speed in its depiction of a subject that is quintessentially London. A station master waves a full train off on its journey through the Tube, the lights and shadows of the platform creating a crisp geometric pattern that is combined with a series of sweeping curves to once again communicate a strong sense of energy and movement in the image. The Tube Station was printed in five colours – sometimes overlaid to create more variety and depth of colour – and produced in two editions, the first around 1932 numbering sixty impressions, and the second of the same size made for successful exhibitions in America about 1935. The original print has often been described as a democratic artform, its identical (or near identical) and multiple versions – typically limited in quantity and numbered by the artist – making it more affordable and accessible than unique works of art. Flight imagined that as well as being the medium most suited to contemporary life, the colour linocut would adorn the walls of every home and flat, writing that, ‘Linoleum-art colour prints could be sold … at a price which is equivalent to that paid by the average man for his daily beer or his cinema ticket’.6 While Flight’s
prints cost much less than a watercolour or more expensive oil painting, typically selling for 2-3 guineas each during the late 1920s, they were still however only within the reach of the middle and upper classes. Unusually, the Grosvenor School didn’t offer fixed terms but allowed students to join classes at any time during the year and to stay for as long, or short a time, as they wished. This must have been appealing for foreign students and is surely one of the reasons why so many Australians joined the ranks of Grosvenor School alumni. After studying at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts and later with Julian Ashton in Sydney, Dorrit Black travelled to England in late 1927, attending classes with Flight for several months and absorbing his example of the use of bold colour, the reduction of subject matter to simplified shapes, and patterns based on a dynamic system of opposing rhythmic lines and forms. Bush Wind Mill, 1927 – 28 (sometimes titled The Windmill) depicts a simple, handmade structure Black knew from a friend’s farm in Western Australia and, pictured beside a small timber outbuilding in the shadow of a tank stand, it proudly declares its rural Antipodean origins. Although this print is said to have been produced in an edition of fifty, as was often the case with relief prints (linocuts and woodcuts) by Australian artists at the time, it is unlikely that the entire edition was ever completed. This is an especially rare print by Black, the only catalogued public holding of it being in the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 1928 Eveline Syme purchased a copy of Flight’s 1927 book from the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria and in it, discovered ‘something new and different, lino-cut no longer regarded as a base form of woodcut, but evolved into a distinct branch of 20th Century Art’. She continued, ‘I had seen nothing more vital and essentially modern in the best sense of the word than the reproductions in this book’.7 Soon after she enrolled in linocut classes at the Grosvenor School, following her friend Ethel Spowers who had enrolled at the end of 1928. One of only twentyfive catalogued linocuts by Syme, Sydney Tramline, 1936 uses three colours to describe the path of a tram along a steep Sydney road, past factories, high-rise apartment blocks and terrace houses, terracotta coloured rooftops contrasting with the vivid green of the trees. Creating some of the most lyrical colour linocuts of the period, Ethel Spowers followed Flight’s example of depicting movement, but rather than the speed of the modern machine age, her imagery focussed on slower and more gentle motion, such as sinuous plumes of smoke from picnickers campfires rising through the air as seen in Bank Holiday, 1935 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) and the sudden blast of air that has sent
CLAUDE FLIGHT AND EDITH LAWRENCE OUTSIDE FLIGHT’S ‘CAVE’ RESIDENCE AT CHANTEMERLE, NEAR PARIS, FRANCE, c.1926 courtesy of Parkin Gallery, London
a bundle of papers flying from the hands of the figure depicted in the delightful print, The Gust of Wind, 1930 – 31. Although each of Flight’s Australian students found their own subjects and developed a distinctive approach to the medium, together they were instrumental in bringing the ideas and techniques of the colour linocut to Australia and contributing to what was a vital thread within modernism in this country. 1. Black, D., quoted in Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Aldershot, 1995, p. 13 2. Coppel, ibid., p. 12 3. Impressions of Speed were sometimes mounted on yellow-toned paper which shifted the appearance of the printed colours. All technical and edition information in this essay is drawn from the catalogue raisonné by Stephen Coppel, ibid. 4. Flight, C., ‘Dynamism and the Colour Print’, The Original Colour Print Magazine, 2, 1925, p. 56 quoted in Coppel, ibid., p. 17 5. Grosvenor School prospectus quoted in Coppel, ibid., p. 12 6. Flight, C. quoted in Coppel, ibid., p. 19 7. Syme, E., quoted in Butler, R., Printed: Images by Australian Artists 1885 – 1955, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, p. 199
KIRSTY GRANT
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
CLAUDE FLIGHT 15 (1881 – 1955, British) SPEED, c.1922 printed 1929 colour linocut 21.5 x 28.0 cm edition: (USA) 14/50 signed, numbered and inscribed in image upper left: CLAUDE FLIGHT 14/50 USA estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE probably: Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Third Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by the Seven and Five Society, Walker’s Galleries, London, 1922, cat. 65 (another example) Exhibition of Oils, Watercolours, Lino-Cuts and Sculpture by Claude Flight, The Redfern Gallery, London, 1927, cat. 29 (another example) Exhibition of Textiles, Drawings and Lino-Cuts by Claude Flight, The Redfern Gallery, London, 1928 Exhibition of Lino-Cuts by Claude Flight, Albany Gallery, London, 1932, cat. 28 (another example) Exhibition of Modern Colour Prints, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1935 – 36, cat. 33 (another example, as ‘Speed, London Bus’) Exhibition of Modern Lino-Cuts, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, 1939, cat. 65 (another example) Colour Lino-Cuts, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1947, cat. 29 (another example) Out of the Book and On to the Wall: The Relief Print, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 20 February – October 1984 (another example, UK edition) Claude Flight and His Followers: The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 April – 18 July 1993 and travelling, cat. 33 (another example, USA edition) Dynamism and Colour: British linocuts of the 1930s, Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 20 August 2009 – 15 February 2010 (another example, USA edition) Drawings and Prints: Selections from the Permanent Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29 April – 14 July 2014 (another example, UK edition)
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LITERATURE Rutter, F., Sunday Times, London, 12 June 1927 Konody, P. G., Observer, London, 19 June 1927, p. 14 Laver, J., ‘Recent Etching and Engraving’, Artwork, London, vol. 3, no. 11, September – November 1927, p. 151 ‘Flight’s Method of Depicting Motion’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia, 25 January 1925, p. 71 Flight, C., Lino-cuts: A hand-book of linoleum-cut colour printing, John Lane, the Bodley Head, London, 1927, pl. 1 (and illus. frontispiece, another example) Konody, P.G., Daily Mail, 8 November 1928 Parkin, M., ‘Claude Flight and the Linocut’, The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, vol. 6, Autumn 1987, fig. 2, pp. 28, 29 (illus., another example, dated as c.1922, UK edition) Carey, F., and Griffiths, A., Avant-Garde British Printmaking 1914 – 1960, British Museum, London, 1990, cat. 54, p. 76 (illus., another example) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. CF7, pl.2, pp. 12, 18, 20, 74, 75 (illus., another example, USA edition) Corbett, D., The Modernity of English Art 1914 – 1930, Manchester University Press, New York, 1997, fig. 18, p. 84 (illus., another example) Ackley, C. S.(ed.), Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914 – 1939, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2008, cat. 46, pp. 95, 102, 215 Gulliver, K., and Tóth, H., Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience, Routledge, London and New York, 2016, fig. 6.3, p. 128 (illus., another example, USA edition) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK edition); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (UK edition); The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (USA edition); Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington (USA edition), and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (UK edition)
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
CYRIL POWER 16
(1872 – 1951, British) THE TUBE STATION, c.1932 colour linocut 26.5 x 29.5 cm edition: (UK) 23/60 signed, numbered and inscribed with title in image lower right: “The Tube Station’ / No. 23/60 Cyril E Power estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE probably: Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Modern Colour Prints, Redfern Gallery, London, 21 July – 20 August 1932, cat. 2 (another example) Modern Colour Prints and Wood Engravings from the Redfern Gallery, Old Bond Street, London, Collins House, under the auspices of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, Melbourne, 7 – 23 December 1932, cat. 28 (another example) Out of the Book and On to the Wall: The Relief Print, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 20 February – October 1984 (another example, US edition) The Grosvenor School. British Linocuts Between the Wars, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and touring, cat. 45 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 67, another example, US edition) Avant Garde British Printmaking 1917 – 1960, British Museum, London, September 1990 – January 1991 (another example) Rhythms of Modern Life: British Prints 1914 – 1939, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 30 January – 1 June 2008 and touring, cat. 49 (another example) Modern Britain 1900 – 1960, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 15 November 2007 – 24 February 2008 (another example, USA edition) Speed and Flight, Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki, Auckland, 14 April – 15 July 2012 (another example, US edition) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (UK edition); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (USA edition); Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland (USA edition) and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario (USA edition)
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GROSVENOR SCHOOL ADVERTISEMENT, The Studio, London, August 1926
LITERATURE ‘Redfern Gallery’, The Times, London, 23 July 1932, p. 8 Rutter, F., ‘Modern Colour Prints. A Democratic Art’, The Sunday Times, London, 7 August 1932, p. 5 Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. CEP 32, pp. 98 – 99 (illus., another example) Vann, P., Cyril Power Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2008, cat. 32, p. 85 (illus., another example, USA edition) Ackley, C.S. (ed.), British Prints from the Machine Age: Rhythms of Modern Life 1914 – 1939, Thames and Hudson, London, 2008, cat. 49, pp. 94, 215 (illus. front cover and p. 105, another example)
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ETHEL SPOWERS 17 (1890 – 1947) THE GUST OF WIND, 1930 – 31 colour linocut 22.0 x 16.5 cm edition: 16/50 signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in May 1982 EXHIBITED The Artists’ Society of Canberra, Third Annual Exhibition, Sydney Buildings, Canberra, 14 – 28 March 1930, cat. 87 (another example, as ‘The Newsboy’) Exhibition of Linocuts, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 10 – 24 December 1930, cat. 25 (another example, as ‘The Newsboy’) Third Exhibition of British Lino-Cuts, Redfern Galleries, London, August 1931, cat. 2 (another example) Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 1932, cat. 41 Exhibition of Linocuts, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 5 – 16 April 1932, cat. 17 (another example) Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers. Lino-cuts, Wood-cuts and Watercolours, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 1932, cat. 3 (another example) Exhibition of Colour Prints and Water Colours by Ethel Spowers, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 25 July 1936, cat. 3 (another example) BA, Melbourne, 1937, cat. 70 Melbourne Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, 1981, and travelling (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Elyse Lord, Thea Proctor, Ethel Spowers, Margaret Preston, Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne, 20 – 30 April 1982, cat. 4 Out of the Book and On to the Wall: The Relief Print, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 20 February – October 1984 (another example) The Grosvenor School. British Linocuts Between the Wars, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 22 January – 20 March 1988; Cleveland Museum of Art, 9 August – 2 October 1988; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 22 October – 18 December 1988, cat. 46 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 67 another example)
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Claude Flight and His Followers: The Linocut Movement between the Wars, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, and touring, cat. 78 (another example) The work of art: Australian women writers and artists, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 August 1995 – 11 February 1996 (another example) Modern Australian Women: Paintings and Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 24 November 2000 – 25 February 2001, and touring (another example) Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013, (another example) LITERATURE Streeton, Argus, Melbourne, 9 December 1930, p. 5 (as ‘The Newsboy’) Times, London, 13 July 1931 Streeton, Argus, Melbourne, 5 April 1932 ‘Gladys Owen and Ethel Spowers. Lino-cuts, Wood-cuts and Watercolours’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 6 December 1932, p. 4 Butler, R., and Deutscher, C., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900/1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 161, pp. 72, 84 (illus., another example) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, pl. 35, cat. ES15, pp. 37, 66, 67, 170, 171 (illus., another example) Mendelssohn, J., ‘Women’s Work’, The Australian, 25 August 1995, p. 15 (illus., another example) Hylton, J., Modern Australian Women: Paintings and Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 56, 58 (illus., another example), 126 Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 178 (illus., another example), 316
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
EVELINE SYME 18 (1888 – 1961) SYDNEY TRAMLINE, 1936 colour linocut 24.5 x 18.0 cm edition: 4/25 signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE probably: Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Exhibition of Pictures by the Contemporary Group of Artists, David Jones’ Galleries, Sydney, July 1937, no. 93 (another example) A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900/1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978, cat. 180 (another example) Melbourne Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, 1981, and travelling (another example) Out of the Book and On to the Wall: The Relief Print, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 20 February – October 1984 (another example) Claude Flight and His Followers: The Linocut Movement between the Wars, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, and touring, cat. 100 (another example) Modern Australian Women: Paintings and Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 24 November 2000 – 25 February 2001, and touring (another example) Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013, (another example)
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LITERATURE Butler, R., and Deutscher, C., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900/1950, Deutscher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, cat. 180, pp. 91, 118 (illus., another example) Butler, R., Melbourne Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria, 1981, unpaginated (illus., another example) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, pl. 43, cat. ESy20, pp. 184 – 185 (illus., another example) Hylton, J., Modern Australian Women: Paintings and Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 57, 81 (illus., another example), 126 Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 71 (illus., another example), 316 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
DORRIT BLACK 19 (1891 – 1951) BUSH WIND MILL, 1927 – 28 colour linocut 26.0 x 23.0 cm edition: 10/50 numbered below image estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE possibly: Theodore Bruce, Adelaide, 15 June 1986, lot 96 (as ‘Watertank and Windmill’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Dorrit Black, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 20 September 1930, cat. 24 (another example, as ‘Bush Wind Mill’) Exhibition of Linocuts, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 5 – 16 April 1932, cat. 5 (another example) Drawing, Print and Watercolour, Contemporary Arts Society, Adelaide, 1952, cat. 29 (another example) Claude Flight and His Followers: The Linocut Movement between the Wars, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992 and touring, cat. 21 (another example, as ‘Bush Wind Mill, c.1930’) Modern Australian Women: Paintings and prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 24 November 2000 – 25 February 2001, and touring (another example) Dorrit Black, Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (another example, as ‘The Windmill’)
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LITERATURE ‘Miss Dorrit Black’s Pictures’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 11 September 1930, p. 7 (as ‘Bush Windmill’) ‘Tribute to Artist’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 2 December 1952, p. 9 ‘Unusual Sculpture for National Gallery’, The Advertiser, Adelaide, 24 December 1952, p. 5 North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Art Gallery of South Australia and Macmillan, Adelaide, 1979, cat L.11, p. 131 (as ‘Bush Wind Mill, c.1930’) Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. DB11, pp. 154 – 155 (illus., another example, as ‘Bush Wind Mill, c.1930’) Hylton, J., Modern Australian Women: Paintings and prints 1925 – 1945, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 57 (illus.), 58, 121 (another example, as ‘Bush Windmill, c.1930’) Lock-Weir, T., Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 160, 162 (illus.), 199 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ETHEL SPOWERS 20 (1890 – 1947) MELBOURNE FROM THE RIVER, c.1924 colour woodcut 19.0 x 22.5 cm edition: 6/20 signed, numbered, and inscribed with title below image estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE possibly: Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne EXHIBITED Victorian Artists Society, Melbourne, Spring 1924, no. 235 (as ‘Town from the River’) Exhibition of Works by Ethel Spowers, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 15 August 1925, cat. 36 (another example) LITERATURE ‘Art Notes. Watercolours by Miss Ethel Spowers’, The Age, Melbourne, 4 August 1925, p. 9 ‘The Studio. Miss Spowers’ Watercolours’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 8 August 1925, p. 44 Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. ES A/7, p. 189
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
CLAUDE FLIGHT 21 (1881 – 1955, British) DESCENT FROM THE BUS, c.1927 colour linocut 31.5 x 15.5 cm edition: 8/50 signed and numbered lower right within image: CLAUDE FLIGHT 8/50 PROVENANCE Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne (as ‘Design for a Window’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1980 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oils, Watercolours, Lino-Cuts and Sculpture by Claude Flight, The Redfern Gallery, London, 1927, cat. 32 (another example) Exhibition of Lino-Cuts by Claude Flight, R.B.A, Albany Gallery, London, 1931, cat. 4 (another example, as ‘Descent from Omnibus’) British Printmakers 1812 – 1940, Mathiesen Fine Art, London, December 1979 (another example) Out of the Book and On to the Wall: The Relief Print, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 20 February – October 1984 (another example) The Grosvenor School. British Linocuts Between the Wars, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 22 January – 20 March 1988; Cleveland Museum of Art, 9 August – 2 October 1988; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 22 October – 18 December 1988, cat. 20 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 27) Claude Flight and His Followers: The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 April – 18 July 1993 and touring (another example) British Modern Prints from the British Museum: from the Great War to the Grosvenor School, University of San Diego, San Diego, 10 February – 19 May 2017 (another example) LITERATURE Konody, P. G., Observer, London, 19 June 1927, p. 14 Laver, J., ‘Recent Etching and Engraving’, Artwork, London, vol. 3, no. 11, September – November 1927, p. 151 Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. CF22, pl.7, pp. 78 (illus., another example) estimate :
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$4,000 – 6,000
RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the British Museum, London and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
EILEEN MAYO 22 (1906 – 1994) SPANISH KITCHEN, c.1945 colour lithograph 35.0 x 28.0 cm edition: 17/25 signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image estimate :
$1,000 – 2,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 2 December 1991, lot 146 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ROLAND WAKELIN 23 (1887 – 1971) THE PAINTER’S FAMILY, EASTER, 1927 oil on pulpboard 43.0 x 55.5 cm signed and dated lower right: R. Wakelin 1927 estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Toorak Art Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in March 1968 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 22 August – 1 September 1928, cat. 17 (as ‘The Family’) probably: Exhibition of Mr. Roland Wakelin’s Work: 1913 – 1930, the residence of Ethel Anderson, Ball Green, Turramurra, 20 – 27 September 1930, cat. 51 (as ‘The Painter’s Family’) Exhibition of Recent Paintings by Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 18 August 1937, cat. 50 (as ‘The Family’) Roland Wakelin Loan Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 14 May – 11 June 1942, cat. 35 (as ‘The Family at Chatswood’) (lent by John Young, Esq.) Roland Wakelin Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 – 30 April 1967 and touring: Newcastle City Art Gallery, Newcastle, 10 – 13 May 1967, cat. 31 (as ‘The Painter’s Family (Easter 1927)) (label attached verso) (lent by Roland Wakelin) RELATED WORK The Artist’s Family, c.1928, oil on board, 50.5 x 61.0 cm, private collection Sewing machine, 1928, oil on composition board, 59.8 x 90.1 cm, in the collection of Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria
By 1927, when this delightful painting was created, Roland Wakelin was one of Australia’s leading modernists. He had already achieved considerable notoriety in 1919 when, with his art school colleague Roi de Mestre (later Roy de Maistre), he mounted the landmark exhibition Colour in Art at Gayfield Shaw’s gallery in Sydney. He followed this with an intense period of study under Max Meldrum before travelling to Europe between 1922 and 1924. On his return, Wakelin’s family and local environs increasingly became the subject matter of his paintings and in The Painter’s Family, Easter, 1927, he captures the intimacy of their kitchen in Johnston Street, Chatswood, occupied by his wife Estelle, son Roland Jnr, the ten-month old baby Judith, and Weedy, the cat. This was one of the many houses and flats which the family lived in near to Sydney Harbour, and indeed, by the time Judith was fifteen, she had already lived in twelve different places.1
Although he came later to discount the ‘colour-music’ theories developed with de Maistre, there is no doubt that this period ‘was influential upon Wakelin’s visual expression long after he consciously abandoned these ideas. Colour remained the most enduring quality in his paintings using it intuitively rather than following a formulaic method’. 2 The time spent studying with Max Meldrum was also influential as he championed his own controversial theory of the ‘science of appearances’, which was based on a close scrutiny of tonality and light. During Wakelin’s journey to Europe, he was able to see firsthand the work of master artists, such as Van Gogh, whose paintings he had only known previously via monochromatic reproductions. 3 All of these inspirations found fruition in Wakelin’s capable hands and on his return to Australia, he determined to follow his own path focusing on family life. Here, he found inspiration in ‘the ordinary, [passing such subjects] through the refining fire of his creative processes so that they emerge on canvas as images in which the ordinariness has been transformed by a quiet but unmistakable dignity’.4 Whilst in London, Wakelin’s friend, the framer John Young, was also there with his family, and the two men would meet weekly to explore galleries together. After his return, Young partnered with the critic Basil Burdett to open the highly influential Macquarie Galleries in Bligh Street, Sydney, and Wakelin was invited to mount the inaugural show. In the catalogue introduction, Margaret Preston wrote: ‘Roland Wakelin is a modern … (His work) is personal and thoughtful, full of aesthetic qualities; above all introspective, and characterised by a fine colour sense’. 5 She also bought one of the exhibited works. The Painter’s Family, Easter was included in Wakelin’s second exhibition at Macquarie in 1928 (he held more than twenty with them during his life), a collection which featured companion scenes drawn from the nearby locales of Ball’s Head, Berry’s Bay, Kerosene Bay and North Sydney. In related paintings, the domesticity celebrated in The Painter’s Family, Easter, is echoed in The Artist’s Family, c.1928 (private collection), and the engaging black-and-white Weedy takes central position in Cat in the Window, c.1929 (private collection), peering out from the Wakelin’s next family residence in Edward Street, North Sydney. 1. See Murray, L., ‘Selected works by Roland Wakelin from the Estate of the artist’s daughter, Judith Murray, Sydney’, Deutscher and Hackett, November 2016. [https://www. deutscherandhackett.com/selected-works-roland-wakelin-estate-artist%E2%80%99s-daughterjudith-murray-sydney] (accessed 28/05/2019) 2. Pegus, A., ‘Roland Wakelin’s Colour Music’, Colour in Art: revisiting 1919, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2008, p. 18 3. De Maistre was also in London at the time so it is highly plausible he accompanied his colleague to the Van Gogh exhibition. 4. Gleeson, J., ‘Art: Roland Wakelin: a style all his own’, Sun Herald, Sydney, 6 June 1971 5. Preston, M., ‘Foreword’, Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 15 April 1925
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ROLAND WAKELIN 24 (1887 – 1971) PORTRAIT OF MARJORIE FEAR, 1931 oil on pulpboard 76.0 x 50.5 cm signed and dated lower right: R. Wakelin / 31 bears inscription verso: 2 estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Toorak Art Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in May 1968 EXHIBITED probably: Inaugural Exhibition, Modern Art Centre, Sydney, c.1932 Roland Wakelin Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 – 30 April 1967 and touring to Newcastle City Art Gallery, Newcastle, 10 – 13 May 1967, cat. 41 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) (label attached verso, lent by Roland Wakelin) Roland Wakelin, Toorak Art Gallery, Melbourne, 12 – 29 May 1968, cat. 2 LITERATURE Johnson, H., Roy de Maistre: The Australian Years 1894 – 1930, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, pl. 46, pp. 88 (illus.), 100 Watson, A. The Art of Roland Wakelin, Master Thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1975, pl. xi, pp. 54, 193 (illus.) [https://ses. library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/8682] (accessed 2/05/19)
Portrait of Marjorie Fear, 1931, is a significant essay in Australian modernist painting, not least for its depiction of a self-assured young woman. Although nothing is known about her life and personality, Fear’s fashion and attitude reflect an inner pride as she sits, hands clasped, whilst her eyes contemplate the middle distance. With a softly enigmatic smile on the lips, she presents ‘a tonal and compositional stillness that evoke(s) the dream of quiet gentility’.1 It was most likely painted in Roland Wakelin’s home studio at 52 Edward Street, North Sydney, completed in the hours outside his full time employment as a commercial artist with the O’Brien Publicity Company. With two young children and the looming clouds of the Depression, Wakelin sought stability and support within his family’s structure, and utilised local streets, people and domestic scenes as the framework through which to articulate his painterly thoughts and processes. In 1928, Wakelin had written a brief article on the early years of modernism in Sydney, a period in which he was a key player alongside Roy de Maistre and Grace Cossington Smith. 2 In it, he argued that ‘(m) odern painting aims at the setting down of essentials in the clearest
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and most direct manner possible’; and in Portrait of Marjorie Fear this attitude is abundantly clear. Through his use of a ‘simplified composition, a reduction of complex forms and a reduced perspective’, 3 there is a marked tension in the painting as the eye first takes in the finely balanced harmony of the central figure, before moving around new discoveries within the paint application and colours. Due to the high viewpoint, Fear’s body is slightly elongated with the tilt of her head mirrored by the angle of her clasped hands. In spite of the boldness of her highly fashionable (and probably self-made) striped jacket, the vertical lines provide logical linkage between the face and hands; and the shimmering green finds chromatic allies in the blue of the cushion, and that of the visible dado to her left, itself punctuated by the soft terracotta stripe. Like her clothing, Fear’s hairstyle (a bob with soft waves) marks her as a modern woman, and in this she has painterly companions in similar female portraits by contemporaneous artists such as Cossington Smith, Margaret Preston, Adelaide Perry and Grace Crowley. By 1931, Wakelin had exhibited widely, including a modest ‘retrospective’ at the house of his ardent supporter Ethel Anderson. In 1925, a solo show by the artist launched the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, run by his close friend John Young, and Wakelin followed this up with a second in 1928. In her opening remarks for the latter show, Anderson noted that in the artist’s paintings, there was ‘no attempt at softening of outline, no striving after glowing atmospheric effects. The colouring is hard and masculine, the contours are emphasised by definite lines. Here the quality of design is pronounced’.4 Portrait of Marjorie Fear is not an example of modernism in the sense of the radical avant-garde; rather it is a quietly compelling statement, ‘a kind of painterly truth, [utilising] art as a reflection of natural order’. 5 1. McAuliffe, C., Art and Suburbia, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 58 2. Wakelin, R., ‘The Modern Art Movement in Australia’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 26, December 1928, unpaginated 3. Pegus, A., ‘Roland Wakelin’s Colour Music’, Colour in Art: revisiting 1919, exhibition catalogue, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 2008, p. 16 4. Anderson, E., in ‘Mr Wakelin’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 22 August 1928, p. 10 5. Adams, B., ‘Wakelin’s search for the aesthetics of nature’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 April 1987
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ROLAND WAKELIN 25 (1887 – 1971) DE MESTRE’S HOUSE, 1943 oil on pulpboard 35.5 x 45.5 cm signed and dated lower left: R Wakelin ‘43 bears inscription on label verso: 76 Roland Wakelin PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Treania Smith, Sydney Sotheby’s, Sydney, 29 November 1991, lot 260 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne estimate :
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$8,000 – 12,000
EXHIBITED Roland Wakelin, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 November 1943, cat. 17 Contemporary Australian Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, May – June 1960, cat. 86 (label attached verso, lent by Treania Smith) Pioneer Contemporaries, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 23 November – 2 December 1960, cat. 34 Tribute to Roland Wakelin, Bank of New South Wales, Sydney, May – June 1962 Roland Wakelin Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 8 – 30 April 1967 and touring to Newcastle City Art Gallery, Newcastle, 10 – 13 May 1967, cat. 65 (as ‘De Maistre’s House’) (label attached verso, lent by Treania Smith) Treania Smith Collection, The Painters Gallery, Sydney, 18 June – 6 July 1985, cat. 76 (illus. in catalogue, p. 13) LITERATURE Watson, A. The Art of Roland Wakelin, Master Thesis, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1975, pl. 64, cat. 124, pp. 77, 173 (illus.) [https://ses.library.usyd.edu. au/handle/2123/8682] (accessed 2/05/19)
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ROY DE MAISTRE 26 (1894 – 1968) THE RAILWAY STATION, MOSS VALE, c.1926 (VERSO: PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN) oil on plywood 38.0 x 45.5 cm signed lower left (painted over and indistinct): R d [illegible] estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Sydney (as ‘Wahroonga Railway Station, c.1924’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in May 1968
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LLOYD REES 27 (1895 – 1988) ROCKY SHORE, SYDNEY HARBOUR, 1935 pencil on paper 20.0 x 28.0 cm signed and dated lower right: L REES / 1935 estimate :
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$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne (as ‘Drawing, 1955’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1970
THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 28 (1892 – 1984) THE RIVER BANK, c.1942 – 44 oil on composition board 40.5 x 46.0 cm signed lower right: G. Cossington Smith PROVENANCE possibly: Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in August 1968 estimate :
$18,000 – 24,000
EXHIBITED possibly: 17th Annual Exhibition of the Contemporary Group, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 3 – 22 June 1942, cat. 28 (as ‘National Reserve, Fuller’s Bridge’) RELATED WORK The Weir at Fuller’s Bridge, c.1944, oil on pulpboard, 36.5 x 29.5 cm, private collection, illus. in James, B., Grace Cossington Smith, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, pl. 79, p. 118
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ARNOLD SHORE 29 (1897 – 1963) FLOWER PIECE, 1944 oil on canvas 77.5 x 65.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Shore ‘44 signed verso: Arnold Shore signed and inscribed with title on frame verso: SHORE / Mt Macedon Vic / Arnold Shore / “Flower piece” / Arnold Shore Mt Macedon / Vic. estimate :
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$6,000 – 8,000
PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne , acquired from the above in March 1977 EXHIBITED Autumn Exhibition 1977: Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 7 – 22 March 1977, cat. 57 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
THE KEN AND JOAN PLOMLEY COLLECTION OF MODERNIST ART • LOTS 1 – 36
ALISON REHFISCH 30 (1900 – 1975) FUSCHIAS AND OTHER FLOWERS, c.1958 oil on hessian 51.0 x 41.0 cm signed lower right: Rehfisch bears inscription verso: c1958 bears inscription on frame verso: ALISON REHFISCH SYDNEY PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne , acquired from the above in May 1976 EXHIBITED George Duncan (1904 – 74) and Alison Rehfisch (1900 – 75): Retrospective Exhibition, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 4 – 16 February 1976, cat. 59 estimate :
$4,000 – 6,000
EDITH HOLMES 31 (1893 – 1973) MOUNT DIRECTION, TASMANIA, 1948 oil on canvas on board 36.5 x 59.5 cm signed lower left: Edith Holmes bears inscription verso: MOUNT DIRECTION PROVENANCE Chapman Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in December 1974 EXHIBITED Edith Holmes, Chapman Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne, 2 – 18 December 1974, cat. 37 (as ‘Mount Direction’) estimate :
$3,000 – 5,000
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IMPORTANT WORKS BY KENNETH MACQUEEN After serving in the First World War, Macqueen returned to Australia and, with his brother, purchased a farm in Queensland’s Darling Downs. From 1922, the artist lived there, at Murralah, situated on the crest of a hill near Millmerran, working the land and enjoying its panoramic views of undulating hills and sweeping skies. Macqueen’s watercolours display a strong formalist and graphic impulse, featuring bold lines and panes of vibrant colour in semi-abstract compositions. Having mapped out the stylised forms of the landscape in pencil en plein air, Macqueen worked quickly in the studio, systematically applying wet-on-wet washes of watercolour pigment and often leaving areas of his white paper support untouched. The resulting patterns, while simple and easily legible, are characterised by a sense of freshness and spontaneity.
KENNETH MACQUEEN photo by Revan Macqueen
‘I try in my work to express the joy of living […] Australia is not a sinister country, nor is she harsh. Her bush is not drab. It is full of gaiety if one will trouble to seek. She has her grim moods […] and there is always the glory of her skies, and when she smiles, it is of transcending beauty’.1 Kenneth Macqueen embodied the romantic figure of the farmer-artist, a man whose love and appreciation of the land upon which he lived shone through in his lyrical landscape paintings. With crisp light and line, and an astounding formal simplicity, Macqueen’s watercolours are patently modern, infusing in the genteel medium a dynamic vitality. The post-war decades in Australia were characterised by optimism, protectionism, and the creation of a national idiom in landscape painting, rehabilitating the impressionist ideal of the Australian pastoral. 2 In attempting to adapt landscape painting to the specificities of the Australian environment and to the stylised techniques of Modern painting, Macqueen joined pioneering Sydney modernists Elioth Gruner, Roland Wakelin and Roy de Maistre, exhibiting with them annually at Society of Artists and Contemporary Group exhibitions.
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Forming a chronicle of life in rural Queensland, Macqueen’s subjects were an immediate and truthful depiction of his experience: planting, harvesting, ploughing and fencing. Finding solace in the monotony of rural life, Macqueen delighted in the stillness and expansive space. Bodumba Lands, 1927 is a crisp sweeping view of the immediate surrounds of Millmeran, with rolling peaks and contrasting strips of recently tilled fields. Farmer’s Fence, 1928, similarly traces the sinuous man-made profiles of a fence and worn path against a dramatic backdrop of a young crop of wheat and freshly ploughed hill. In the 1930s and 1940s, Macqueen made regular holiday trips to the Sunshine and Gold Coasts, creating dramatic paintings of the coastline and sea, as can be seen in Early Morning, 1934 and Sea and Reef, c.1938. Amongst the Paperbarks, a mature work focussed on formal patterns, explores the shadows and forms of a eucalypt forest, punctuated by a flowering banksia in the foreground. 1. Macqueen, K., Adventures in Watercolour, The Legend Press, Sydney, 1948 2. Edwards, D., ‘Landscapes of Modernity 1920s – 1940s’, Sydney Moderns, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2012, p. 217
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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KENNETH MACQUEEN 32 (1897 – 1960) THE FARMER’S FENCE, 1928 watercolour and pencil on paper 37.5 x 44.0 cm signed and dated lower left: KENNETH MACQUEEN / 1928 estimate :
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 20 July 1988, lot 126 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne
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KENNETH MACQUEEN 33 (1897 – 1960) EARLY MORNING, 1934 watercolour and pencil on paper 37.0 x 41.5 cm signed and dated lower right: KENNETH MACQUEEN / 1934 inscribed with title verso: 28 Early Morning estimate :
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$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne
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KENNETH MACQUEEN 34 (1897 – 1960) BODUMBA LANDS, 1927 watercolour and pencil on paper 36.5 x 43.5 cm signed and dated lower right: KENNETH MACQUEEN / 1927 bears inscription verso: BODOMBA [sic] LANDS estimate :
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne
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KENNETH MACQUEEN 35 (1897 – 1960) AMONGST THE PAPERBARKS, c.1940 watercolour on paper 31.5 x 40.5 cm signed lower right: KENNETH MACQUEEN inscribed with title verso: ‘In the paperbark scrub’ (erased) / ‘Amongst the paperbarks’ estimate :
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$5,000 – 8,000
PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 1977 EXHIBITED Winter Exhibition 1977: Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 14 July 1977, cat. 73 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) A Selection of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Australian Art, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 24 May – 9 June 1989, cat. 56 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
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KENNETH MACQUEEN 36 (1897 – 1960) SEA AND REEF watercolour and pencil on paper on card 31.5 x 39.0 cm signed lower left: KENNETH MACQUEEN inscribed with title verso: sea and reef estimate :
$4,000 – 6,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 11 May 1977, lot 1122 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection of Modernist Art, Melbourne
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PROPERTY OF VARIOUS VENDORS
GODFREY MILLER 37 (1893 – 1964) SCENE BELOW, PADDINGTON, 1955 – 59 oil, pen and ink on canvas 35.5 x 45.5 cm bears inscription verso: JH 43 estimate :
$40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE Estate of the Artist, Sydney Mr and Mrs John Henshaw, Sydney Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2004 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Godfrey Miller Memorial Exhibition, Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney, 16 February – 27 March 1965, cat. 29 (as ‘Scene below Paddington’) Godfrey Miller, Leveson Street Gallery, Melbourne, 12 – 23 September 1965, cat. 51 Godfrey Miller, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 2 – 28 September 2004, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Art and Furniture II, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 9 April – 2 May 2015, cat. 6 LITERATURE Henshaw, J., Godfrey Miller, Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney, 1965, pl. 48 (illus.)
A visionary who rejected the materialism of his age, Godfrey Miller stands alone in the canon of Australian art with his meticulously executed, deeply cerebral works that invoke the simplicity of complexity to explore the unity of the universal, ‘… to capture a feeling for the essence of things in the perpetual flux of changing experiences’.1 Deceptively modest in scale, composition and technique, thus his paintings reveal upon closer contemplation an astounding breadth of experience – a mystic resonance that betrays the artist’s lifelong quest to embrace the subjective, transcendental Eastern philosophic experience with the more objective reason and logic of Western thought. Born in Wellington, New Zealand in 1893, Miller began his career in architecture, studying at the Otago School of Art and Design before enlisting with the New Zealand Army upon the outbreak of World War I. Seriously wounded in action, Miller resumed his artistic studies shortly thereafter – first at the School of Art, Dunedin, and subsequently, at the National Gallery School, Melbourne and the Slade School of Art, London. Significantly, it was during this London sojourn that Miller became a determined, fully-fledged modernist, ‘call[ing] upon the shapes of planar and solid geometry for imagery, and [assigning] symbolic meaning there’. 2 Although drawn to the exacting models of Cézanne and Picasso in his search for archetypal forms, Miller’s distinctive idiom was also indelibly influenced by his experience of travelling throughout China
and Japan, as well as his anthroposophical pursuits, 3 and avid reading of authors as diverse as Plato, Goethe, Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti. A domestic landscape inspired by Sydney’s urban environment, Scene Below, Paddington, 1955 – 59 offers a stunning example of this highly individualistic, geometric style gleaned from a rich array of formal and spiritual inclinations. Featuring the complex structure of Miller’s mature period, accordingly the canvas is intricately criss-crossed with hundreds of ruled vectors, minutely re-adjusted and re-aligned, to form a labyrinthine grid of innumerable small squares or diamonds of colour – thereby creating a shimmering mosaic or prism-like effect. If differentiated from his other Paddington paintings by the unusual perspective here – looking down from the first floor, a viewpoint evoking both an uneasy tension and sense of intimacy – ultimately however, the scene conveys very little sense of the experience of modern city living, imbued rather with a detached passion reminiscent of Paul Klee. For Miller indeed, the external environment was merely the visible emanation of the invisible forces of Nature – a ‘symptom’ to be first recognised and understood, before then elevated from the mundane to the arcane, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. In a manner echoing his own selfeffacing nature, Miller thus gradually pared back his subject (often over the course of years or even decades) to its very essence where ‘natural appearances are never entirely eradicated, being held as it were in flight between interpenetrating grids …’4 in order to establish a new reality –one rooted in a deep symbolism and anthroposophical mysticism, ‘… made of cadences, rhythms, intervals, chords, qualities – all that science ignores’.5 A shy, contemplative figure, Miller deliberately eschewed publicity and the machinations of the art establishment, notably choosing not to exhibit his work publicly until the final decade of his life; as he poignantly mused, ‘I don’t want competition with my fellow humans. I happen to be one of those who work best, or can work at all, right outside the competitive element. I do not want to struggle up to carry things through … It is a matter of subsiding at the heart of things’. 6 Notwithstanding such reticence, fortunately Miller today occupies an unrivalled place in Australian art – his legacy represented in most major public and private collections throughout the country, and abroad, at the Tate Gallery, London. 1. Smith, B., Australian Painting 1788 – 1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 302 – 303 2. Wookey, A., ‘Godfrey Miller and Mathematics’ in Edwards, D., Godfrey Miller 1893 – 1964, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 111 3. Miller joined the Sydney Anthroposophical Society in 1940, and found particular affinity with the teachings of German esoteric Rudolf Steiner, who sanctified the role of the artist as ‘bringer of the Divine to Earth’. 4. Smith, op. cit., p. 303 5. Miller quoted in Edwards, op. cit., p.56 6. Miller quoted in Edwards, p. 80
VERONICA ANGELATOS
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DONALD FRIEND 38 (1914 – 1989) DOUBLE BAY, 1956 oil on canvas 77.0 x 102.0 cm signed and dated lower right: DONALD FRIEND 56 estimate :
$35,000 – 45,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 26 October 1987, lot 684 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Two Exhibitions: Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 8 – 27 May 1957, cat. 13 LITERATURE ‘Drawings by Drysdale. Paintings by Friend.’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 8 May 1957, p. 2
Double Bay, 1956, is a painting which celebrates the enduring friendship between Donald Friend and Russell ‘Tas’ Drysdale, one which stretched back to the earliest days of World War Two. In the later 1940s, the two artists spent time together painting in the former gold mining town of Hill End in New South Wales, and many of the works they produced there are now highlights within the canon of Australian mid-century art. In 1947, Friend bought a cottage in the village and during the 1950s would return for extended periods in between bouts of immersive travel interstate and overseas. On his frequent visits to Sydney, he would often stay at the Drysdales’ house at 29 Sutherland Crescent, Darling Point. On moving there in 1952, ‘Tas’ had undertaken renovations to ‘two small rooms (which) were turned into a large studio’.1 The view from here took in the entire sweep of Double Bay, an aspect which inspired Friend when he stayed in August 1956 working prodigiously ‘every day … in the glorious big studio, sometimes from eight in the morning until the light failed’. 2 He took with him four large canvases, one which he prepared for ‘an Archibald (Prize) portrait, one for a Blake (Prize for Religious Art)’. 3 The other two, including the painting on offer here, were transmuted into joyous interpretations of the scene beyond the windows. Double Bay is set between the wealthy enclaves of Point Piper and Darling Point and gets its name from the small promontory which bisects it. In the early days of European settlement, the colony’s elite started building mansions there and its continuing reputation as a prosperous suburb began. The enviable harbourside position gave rise to a profusion of pleasure craft traversing its waters and in the 1930s, the foreshore was upgraded to support these activities, including the building of a
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stone sea wall at the edge of Steyne Park, visible in the lower right of Double Bay. Friend was a former resident in the area having lived in 1946 at ‘Merioola’, an artist’s colony located near the diagonal row of white marks at the top of the canvas, and his lingering affection for the locale is evident. Behind the boats and the small sandy beach, the cacophony of houses and apartments clutter back up the hill towards New South Head Road, their architectural forms punctuated by bursts of colour indicative of the bougainvillea, jacaranda and flame trees which grow in abundance. Technically, Friend was experimenting with a form of semi-abstraction that he called ‘topo-diffusionism’, elements of which can be seen in his treatment of the dissolving reflections on the waters of the Bay, emphasised by gestural brush marks and unexpected colour contrasts. Friend returned to Hill End in September 1956 and worked solidly towards a proposed two-person exhibition with Drysdale to be held at the Macquarie Galleries the following year. At the core of his production were the ‘new disintegrated abstract canvases … (and) those big views of Double Bay (from) when I was staying at the Drysdales’.4 Friend never tired of the optimistic energy that the scene transmitted and in 1968, he exhibited a further twelve studies of Double Bay at Von Bertouche Galleries in Newcastle, again based on the view from that perfectly located studio. 1. Klepac, L., The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, p. 133 2. Hetherington, P. (ed.), The Diaries of Donald Friend: volume 3, National Library of Australia, Canberra, 2005, p. 345 3. ibid., p. 337. Friend had won the Blake Prize the previous year with St John and Scenes from the Apocalypse. 4. ibid.
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ROLAND WAKELIN 39 (1887 – 1971) HOTEL SCENE, c.1950 oil on canvas 102.5 x 121.0 cm signed and dated indistinctly lower right: R. Wakelin / 5 (ind.) estimate :
$45,000 – 65,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 August 1996, lot 226 Private collection, Sydney
Roland Wakelin was an artist who delighted in depicting the everyday. A devoted family man, his subjects included his wife and children, augmented by views sourced from locations near to his home and work. From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Wakelins lived in a variety of flats and houses in North Sydney, Waverton and Potts Point, all suburbs with proximity to the harbour’s foreshore. Having survived the financial precariousness of the Great Depression, Wakelin never under-estimated the necessity of paid employment and spent many years working for O’Brien Publicity at their substantial offices near Circular Quay. This left the weekends free for painting, a task he dedicated himself to and through which he created a fascinating painterly record of the changing landscape of the city and its people. From the 1950s, Wakelin painted regularly in the company of John Santry, George Lawrence and Lloyd Rees, all of whom lived nearby. Together they would walk the foreshore finding suitable locations to paint, before discussing each other’s work afterwards over a relaxed picnic. The setting for Hotel Scene, c.1950, still feels familiar today. In a bustling urban pub, a businessman sits eating a modest lunch, schooner of beer to one side and buttered toast on the other. Like three of the other male customers, he still wears his hat, coat and tie, and the number of overcoats indicates that the weather is chilly outside. To the left, the pub’s chef engages in a conversation whilst two modestly attired barmaids tend to their duties. Intriguingly, it appears that the central character is eating a bowl of spaghetti, a then relatively new taste sensation for the average Australian given impetus by the post-war emigration of many Italians and other Europeans. The fact he attempts to do so using a knife and fork is part of the common cultural collisions of the decade, memorably portrayed by Nino Culotta (John O’Grady) in his book They’re a Weird Mob (1957).1
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Wakelin’s use of rich, sonorous colours in Hotel Scene enhances his depiction of the warmth of the pub’s interior, and the easy camaraderie of its clientele. Unlike other artists such as James Wigley and John Perceval who preferred to depict the raucously undignified atmosphere of the notorious ‘six o’clock swill’, Wakelin reveals a less critical view of humanity. It was an attitude he shared with that other great chronicler of Sydney, Herbert Badham, whose Oxford Street Interior, 1942 (State Library of New South Wales, Sydney) is a prime example. Like Badham, Wakelin doesn’t patronise or sentimentalise his subjects, he simply catches them as they are, with affection and the keen interest of an artist’s eye, creating lasting images of ‘remarkable solidity and depth (in which) each object in a scene, through a concentration of its essential elements, becomes a forceful and individual entity in the general ensemble’. 2 Three decades after his debut as one of this country’s modernist precursors, Wakelin’s Hotel Scene is the work of a man content with life and full of generosity towards others, but one underpinned by many years of painterly practice, all of which combine to the benefit of this quintessentially Australian interior scene. The author thanks fashion historian Nicole Jenkins for assistance in analysing this work. 1. For example, in July 1952, The Australian Women’s Weekly published their first ever recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese. A key ingredient was Worcester Sauce. The author thanks Kelly McLean for this information. 2. Wilkinson, K., ‘Roland Wakelin’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 56, August 1934, p. 29
ANDREW GAYNOR
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ARTHUR BOYD 40 (1920 – 1999) BERWICK LANDSCAPE, c.1948 oil on canvas on composition board 51.0 x 61.5 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd estimate :
$45,000 – 65,000
PROVENANCE Mr and Mrs Hal Hattam, Melbourne Christie’s, Sydney, 5 October 1971, lot 259 D.R. Sheumack Collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 25 August 1997, lot 186 Private collection, Sydney
Elder. Originally inspired by Bruegel’s expression of historical subjects, Boyd’s pure landscapes were increasingly influenced by the Flemish painter in their typically high viewpoints and ’the tuning in of the intimacy of the closely seen – the slope and mould of the fat brown earth, the way a path rises and filters into a copse … with the fulness of a complete world of wide horizons, high sky and distant hills’.1
EXHIBITED The D.R. Sheumack Collection of Australian Paintings, S. H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 17 May – 12 June 1983, cat. 9 (as ‘Berwick Landscape II’)
Berwick, situated some thirty kilometres east of Melbourne in the foothills of the Dandenong ranges, was a region adorned with a bucolic ambiance. Yet, as Franz Philipp describes when writing of Boyd’s Berwick period, the area maintained an equally primordial quality which captivated the artist:
LITERATURE Christie, R. and Miller, J. (eds), The D. R. Sheumack. Collection. Eighty Years of Australian Painting, Sotheby’s Australia Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1988, cat. 108 (illus. as ‘Berwick Landscape 2’) RELATED WORK Landscape near Berwick, 1948, oil on canvas, 50.9 x 73.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Spanning his entire creative oeuvre, Arthur Boyd’s landscapes provide some of the most perceptive insights into the Australian countryside and its many idiosyncrasies. Following his discharge from the army in 1944, Boyd delved into a series of works that were steeped with allegory and symbolism, addressing his personal reaction to the tragedies of World War Two. However, as the war receded further into the past, Boyd’s paintings, and particularly his landscapes, became gradually more relaxed, reflecting an increasingly peaceful disposition. In 1948, Boyd’s uncle, novelist Martin Boyd, invited him to paint a mural for the dining room at ‘The Grange’–the Boyd family home in Harkaway. This invitation (and the artist’s first major commission) enabled the artist to extricate himself from the busy day-to-day operation of the Murrumbeena pottery he managed with his brother-in-law and fellow artist, John Perceval, and devote himself entirely to painting. Boyd was, while painting these allegorical Harkaway frescoes, enchanted by his surrounds and inspired to paint some of his most beautiful landscapes. For Boyd, it was a period of high achievement, as he applied the study of the techniques of the Old Masters, most notably Pieter Bruegel the
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’With its undulating hills, its spinneys of gums, with its cultivated fields, grassy paddocks, small dams and iron windmills it is finite, formed, half wild, half pastoral, smaller and more densely inhabited than Australian landscape generally is. It offers both intimacy and width of horizon. Arthur Boyd – I have already called him a born landscapist – responded to it with love and joy’. 2 In Berwick Landscape, c.1948, the fertile land is cultivated, yet the foreground is thick with brambles and untamed trees. From the spindly growth emerge two grazing cows, a reminder of the human habitation in the region. The eye is drawn to this pocket of agrarian activity, yet this intimacy does not lessen the impact of the overall breadth and scale of Boyd’s vision. Much like Bruegel’s Return of the Herd, 1565, the scene is pastoral, yet it preserves traces of the land’s primeval character, ultimately depicting a breezy panorama in which man and nature coexist peacefully. Once owned by Boyd’s fellow artist and friend, Hal Hattam, Berwick Landscape, c.1948 is a splendid example of Boyd’s ’poetry of wonder’ 3 and his immense ability to interpret the rural Australian environment. 1. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 60 2. ibid., p. 59 – 60 3. ibid., p. 64
MELISSA HELLARD
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SIDNEY NOLAN 41 (1917 – 1992) DUST STORM OVER DARWIN, 1951 oil on composition board 75.0 x 106.0 cm signed and dated lower right: NOLAN 51 signed and inscribed verso: AIR / NOLAN estimate :
$80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London The Landau Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1963 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 25 August 1997, lot 244 Nevill Keating Pictures, London Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Summer Exhibition, Redfern Gallery, London, June 18 – September 1963, cat. 408
It was the success of Sidney Nolan’s exhibition of Queensland outback paintings in March 1949 that provided him with the financial means to travel to Central Australia later that year. With his new wife Cynthia and her daughter Jinx, Nolan left Sydney on June 22, staying overnight in Adelaide before a two-day train journey that would take them to Alice Springs, the starting point of a two-and-a-half-month trip. The experience transformed Nolan’s vision of the landscape: after seeing the country from the air he wrote in his diary that it was both ‘transparent and at the same time, impenetrable’1 and later, back in the studio and grappling with what he had seen, ‘Now that one knows it for an old, fragile & transparent land that is the way the paintings must tend’. 2 The exhibition of the now celebrated Central Australian landscapes opened at David Jones’ Gallery, Sydney at the end of March 1950 and the positive response was immediate, with seventeen paintings being sold by the end of the show, including Dry Jungle, 1949, which was acquired by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. The National Gallery of Victoria had purchased Central Australia, 1949 before the exhibition and later, the series achieved international recognition with a painting being purchased by the Tate, London in 1951 and another by the esteemed British art historian, Sir Kenneth Clark. 3 James Gleeson recognised the significance of the exhibition, describing it in a contemporary review as ‘one of the most important events in the history of Australian painting … future art historians will date the birth of a predominantly Australian idiom from this exhibition … Nolan has been able to bring the vision of the poet and a respect for the objective facts of Nature into a single focus’.4
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The desert landscape became the setting for many of the paintings Nolan produced during the following three years, from the brilliant reinterpretation of religious subjects such as Temptation of St Anthony, 1952 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne), to images including Dust Storm Over Darwin, 1951, that describe the distinctive vernacular architecture, personalities and very physical experience of outback Australia. Here, a slightly ramshackle building, its doors and windows shaded by a long verandah, sits behind a trio of thin trees, their bare top branches a stark reflection of the tough natural environment. A lone figure at the right of the picture is painted in such a way that he almost merges with the landscape, a subtle reflection perhaps of Nolan’s realisation of the deep connection that exists between Indigenous Australians and the land. As he wrote to his friend and fellow artist, Albert Tucker, following the trip to Central Australia, ‘they show you that the country is a gentle dreaming one, the barrenness & harshness is all in our European eyes’. 5 Apart from a few flashes of red and white paint, Nolan’s palette in this work is almost exclusively restricted to shades of ochre and brown. Despite this uniformity of tone, there is great variation in his application of the paint – from the lively sections of parallel brush marks that define the bare earth to the softness of the dust-filled sky, where the paint has been rubbed back to reveal glimpses of the blue expanse beyond – which gives the work a kind of swirling pictorial energy that echoes the experience of the event it depicts. 1. Sidney Nolan, diary notes, Alice Springs, 28 June 1949, Jinx Nolan Papers, quoted in Smith, G., Sidney Nolan: Desert and Drought, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 16 2. Sidney Nolan, diary notes, Sydney, 24 September 1949, Jinx Nolan Papers, quoted in ibid., p. 19 3. For more detail about sales from this exhibition see Smith, ibid., p. 25 and exhibition checklist, pp. 145 – 155 4. Gleeson, J., ‘Landscapes triumph for Aust. Artist’, Sun, Sydney, 31 March 1950, p. 19 5. Sidney Nolan to Albert Tucker, Sydney, 26 January 1950, Albert Tucker Papers, La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 12
KIRSTY GRANT
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CHARLES BLACKMAN 42 (1928 – 2018) SCHOOLGIRL, 1953 oil on canvas on composition board 63.0 x 75.0 cm signed lower right: BLACKMAN bears inscription verso: 7 estimate :
$150,000 – 200,000
PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in June 1988 EXHIBITED Charles Blackman: The Schoolgirl Years, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 10 June – 2 July 1988, cat. 7 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 4 March – 18 June 2017, cat. 40 LITERATURE Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, cat. 1.20, pp. 21 (illus.), 142 Morgan, K. (et. al), Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 2017, cat. 40, pp. 4 (illus.), 70 (illus.)
The paintings of schoolgirls, and numerous related drawings and prints, that Charles Blackman created between 1952 and 1954 are now regarded as one of the most significant groups of modern works produced in Australia during the immediate post-war years. When he began the series, Blackman was in his early twenties, recently arrived in Melbourne with his new wife, Barbara, and finding his feet as an artist. He later acknowledged that the imagery was, in part, an expression of youthful anxieties – ‘[they] had a lot to do with fear, I think. A lot to do with my isolation as a person and my quite paranoid fears of loneliness …’1 – but these compelling images marked a significant turning point, representing the first sustained sequence of work within his oeuvre and bringing his practice to the attention of both the critics and the broader public. 2 At the time Blackman lived in Hawthorn, an inner-eastern suburb of Melbourne, and it was here that he observed uniformed girls on their way to and from school, finding a subject that was without precedent and which also had strong personal relevance. The primary impetus for the series came from his response to the murder of Betty Shanks, a university friend of Barbara’s, in Brisbane in 1952. Blackman also recalled the notorious murder of a schoolgirl at the Eastern Market in Melbourne some thirty years earlier as having had a profound effect on
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him and his image of childhood. 3 It is the contrast between his depiction of the playful innocence of the schoolgirls and the underlying sense of menace and potential threat from an unseen source that pervades the series and through which it achieves its psychological power. Blackman knew of John Shaw Neilson’s poetry, however it was Sunday Reed who, after seeing some of the first schoolgirl paintings, introduced him to poems that seemed to Blackman to be ‘full of kinship; the sort of thing I was painting fitted in with it perfectly’.4 Setting the scene, a stanza from Neilson’s evocative Schoolgirls Hastening was reproduced in the list of works that accompanied the first exhibition of paintings from the series in 1953. Schoolgirl, 1953, is one of a group of paintings within the series that is distinguished by the boldness of its composition and the intensity of its colour. Dramatic contrasts of light and dark, and long deep shadows, create a deliberately unsettling atmosphere. Strident colours, which Blackman later considered ‘quite unbeautiful’, 5 reverberate across the picture, acidic citrus tones standing in stark relief against the soft purples, blue and pink of the figure’s uniform and hat. Pictorial detail is dramatically pared back, an architectural structure marked by a series of dark open doorways the only element apart from the schoolgirl herself, whose large central form dominates the scene. Lying on the ground, legs bent and arms folded protectively across her chest, the pose of the schoolgirl prompts uneasy questions – did she fall, was she pushed, and if so, by whom? Combining aspects of his inner emotional world with a unique perspective of contemporary life, Blackman created a body of work that was deeply felt and singularly personal, and which, almost seventy years on, still has something to say about Australian culture, both past and present. 1. Blackman quoted in Shapcott, T., Charles Blackman, André Deutsch, London, 1989, p. 11 2. See Morgan, K., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls, exhibition catalogue, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2017, pp. 7 – 8 3. See St John Moore, F., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, p. 38 4. Blackman quoted in Shapcott, op. cit. 5. Morgan, op. cit., p. 24
KIRSTY GRANT
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CHARLES BLACKMAN 43 (1928 – 2018) ALICE TALL, 1956 tempera and oil on composition board 121.5 x 41.5 cm signed lower left: BLACKMAN bears inscription verso: J Gallery / … / 34 estimate :
$400,000 – 600,000
PROVENANCE Barbara Blackman, Melbourne, a gift from the artist in 1957 Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1984 EXHIBITED probably: Paintings from Alice in Wonderland, Gallery of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 12 – 22 February 1957 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Charles Blackman, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 4 – 21 September 1966, cat. 22 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Charles Blackman, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, 21 – 30 March 1967, cat. 29 Charles Blackman ‘Alice in Wonderland’, David Jones’ Art Gallery, Sydney, 14 – 26 October 1968, cat. 34 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ painted in 1956 – 57 by Charles Blackman, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Victoria, 24 May – 10 July 1983, cat. 31 Lauraine Diggins Gallery, Melbourne, October – November 1984, cat. 37 (as ‘Tall Alice’) Innocence and Danger: An Artist’s View of Childhood, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Victoria, 6 June – 19 July 1987, cat. 19 Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 August – 15 October 2006, cat. 22 LITERATURE Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, pp. 31 (illus.), 34 Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, pp. 22 (illus.), 24, 142 Carroll, L., Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Illustrated by Charles Blackman, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Sydney, 1982, p. 120 (illus.) Holloway, M., ‘Blackman’s World of Alice a Delight’, The Age, Melbourne, 8 June 1983, p. 14 (illus.) Smith, G., and Moore, F. St. J., Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 21, 82, 83 (illus.), 137
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CHARLES BLACKMAN 43 (1928 – 2018) ALICE TALL, 1956
INSTALLATION VIEW OF THE CHARLES BLACKMAN EXHIBITION Alice In Wonderland, Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 4-21 September 1966 photograph by Arthur Davenport courtesy of James Hardie Library of Australian Fine Arts, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane
Just at this moment her head struck against the roof of the hall: in fact she was now rather more than nine feet high, and she at once took up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door. Poor Alice! It was as much as she could do, lying down on one side, to look through into the garden; but to get through was more hopeless than ever: she sat down and began to cry again. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself’, said Alice, ‘a great girl like you’ (she might well say this), ‘to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!’ But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a great pool all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall.’ 1 Of all Charles Blackman’s myriad achievements, none have captured the public imagination more powerfully than his images inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Simultaneously amusing and quietly disturbing, these boldly coloured, lyrical depictions of Carroll’s absurd tale not only encapsulate the duality that is a hallmark of Blackman’s oeuvre – innocence and experience, fantasy and fact, dream and nightmare. More poignantly perhaps, the series also reveals the existential, often strongly autobiographical nature of Blackman’s art, offering valuable insight both into his own inner world, and the human condition more universally. As Thomas Shapcott suggests, Alice was the subject that ‘[released] in Blackman the artist the imaginative capacity to explore freely, without the worry of strict realism or logic, that world of experience, of feeling, which exists in all of us’. 2
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Growing up in a house devoid of books, remarkably Blackman had never encountered Carroll’s famous masterpiece until 1956 when, listening to an audiobook of Alice’s adventures that his wife Barbara (who was legally blind) had borrowed from the library, he was immediately struck by unmistakable parallels between the protagonist’s fantastical experiences and the miraculous process of transformation he was currently witnessing in Barbara with her first pregnancy and increasing blindness. As Barbara eloquently described Alice (but could equally have been writing of herself), ‘…moving enquiringly, questioningly, trustfully, bemusedly, changefully, into a new and strange world, trying with good sense and honesty to get her bearings in it, however often she seemed to change body shape and whereabouts’. 3 Just as pregnancy had heralded Barbara’s transition from innocence into womanhood, so too it ended her work as a life model, thereby curtailing the earnings that had previously supplemented her pension for the sight-impaired and allowed Blackman the freedom to paint full time. Accordingly, the artist was prompted to find employment as a short-order cook in the Eastbourne Café (better known in its later incarnation as The Balzac Restaurant) in Wellington Parade, East Melbourne. Owned by his friend, European émigré Georges Mora, the bustling restaurant significantly afforded not only a source of income, but a rich repertoire of motifs for his Alice in Wonderland series. As Blackman later recalled, ‘I went to work … at 5pm … and … finished at 12 and then came home and my head was full of spinning plates and teacups, and Barbara would say I brought the rabbit into the restaurant at night and it would help me to do the work, and next day l would paint it all. The restaurant came into the paintings’.4
as Nadine Amadio elucidates, ‘memory of those bursting explosions of childhood when reality and imagination become so entangled they burst at the seams … to shoot up like the tallest adult or close down like the tiniest child – to remember the anguish and joy at the sheer size of the world…’.6 Although the inaugural exhibition of the Alice paintings at the Gallery of Contemporary Art, Melbourne in February 1957 was far from a commercial success, within the decade critics had begun to appreciate more fully Blackman’s unique vision. Today, the series remains one of the most highly acclaimed in the canon of Australian art, with examples held in most major private and public collections around the country. Highlighting the enduring power of Blackman’s legacy, indeed Gertrude Langer astutely observed at the opening of the artist’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ show at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane in 1966, ‘… I feel certain these paintings will live when much that is now fashionable is forgotten … One is transported into a world of magic … The intensity and articulateness of Blackman’s poetical feeling and imagination are matched, equally by his resources as a painter. The bold, as well as sensitive and expressive structure of his works, the luminosity and intensity of his colours and their rare juxtapositions and harmonies, the freshness with which the colours are put down ...’ 7 1. Carroll, L., ‘The Pool of Tears’, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Macmillan and Co., London, 1866, pp. 17 – 18 2. Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, Andre Deutsch, London, 1989, p. 30 3. Barbara Blackman quoted in St John Moore, F. & Smith, G., Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006, p. 4 4. The artist quoted in Shapcott, op. cit., 1989, p. 23 5. St John Moore & Smith, 2006, op. cit., p. 82
A soulful example from the celebrated series, Alice Tall, 1956 features the protagonist occupying the full height of the composition’s vertical format, squeezed in a tight pictorial corner, her head off-centre, wedged between her yellow hair, grey weeping walls, sloping ceiling and slipping floor. Despite the comic nature of her predicament, Blackman presents her bearing a serious face with tears, represented by the creamy brushstrokes, streaming down her arms and hair into her gushing skirt. Notably reminiscent of the starched pinnies worn by restaurant waitresses, the full apron here perhaps offers a whimsical play on the notion of ‘waiting’, while her tears no doubt also bear allusion to the ‘real’ Alice (Barbara) and her predisposition to crying during her pregnancy. 5 Portraying tangibly the tender vulnerability of a little girl’s growing mind – her fantasies and fears, her romantic spirit and sense of humour, the mystery and beauty of her days of wonder – thus Blackman evokes,
6. Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, A.H. & A.W. Reed, Sydney, 1980, pp. 24, 29 7. Langer, G., ‘Blackman’s Genius in his ‘Alice’ Series’, Courier Mail, Brisbane, 7 September 1966, p. 2
VERONICA ANGELATOS
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FRED WILLIAMS 44 (1927 – 1982) BURNT GRASS, LYSTERFIELD, 1968 gouache on paper 56.5 x 76.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams artist’s label attached verso with number, artist’s name, medium and size estimate :
$35,000 – 45,000
PROVENANCE Skinner Galleries, Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1970 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED probably: Fred Williams, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 5 – 29 November 1969, cat. 6 (as ‘Burnt Landscape’, label attached verso) Fred Williams: Perth Festival Exhibition, Skinner Galleries, Perth, 23 February – 16 March 1970, cat. 19 We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.
Fred Williams’ distinctive views of the Australian bush can be read as exercises in form and gesture, with the barest of markings highlighting the rare landmarks in an otherwise uniform landscape. The series of oils and gouaches created in February 1968, in the immediate aftermath of a devastating bushfire whose path ran right up to artist’s home in Upwey, near Lysterfield, however, are quite literal in their empty desolation. Burnt Grass, Lysterfield, 1968 is an expansive, almost birds-eye view of the ravaged landscape, its singed foundations laid bare in uneven washes of ashy ground. The undergrowth stripped back by the fire, the Burnt Grass, Lysterfield landscape leaves only isolated tree stumps, clusters of smouldering trunks, rendered with casual dots and brushmarks supplemented by streaks of fresh local charcoal and splashes of red madder live embers. The horizon line imperfectly bisects heaven and scorched earth, the hazy sky hanging low and quiet. Williams’ view, while impersonal in its panoramic amplitude, was in fact recorded en plein air. The personal experience of an environmental disaster on this scale was keenly felt by the artist, his awe feeding directly into a frenzied artistic output which produced masterpieces such as Burnt Landscape, 1968, and After the Fire, 1968, a gouache, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. Burnt Grass, Lysterfield was first exhibited at Rudy Komon Gallery in Sydney in November 1969, alongside two oil paintings and one other gouache from the Bushfire series. It was then sent to Perth, early the following year, for the Perth Festival of the Arts, where the artist presented a major survey of works produced between 1966 – 1969, reflecting on transitions and resolutions between his most recent series. The Bushfire works had three successive themes: the approaching fire, the burnt landscape, and the subsequent regeneration of ferns. The logical succession of these themes expressed Williams’ appreciation for the awesome magnificence of the Australian landscape. The resulting works, of which Burnt Grass, Lysterfield is no exception, are amongst his most emotionally charged pictures. The unsettling hazy stillness gives way to a romantic dramatisation of the national experience. Patrick McCaughey notes in his 1980 monograph: ‘It was as though the country were seen in negative and the fragmentary remains of the bush seen correspondingly with flickering brilliance and clarity, set off against the ground in pure hues’.1 1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1980, p. 203
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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FRED WILLIAMS 45 (1927 – 1982) SILVER LANDSCAPE, 1968 oil on canvas 88.5 x 106.5 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams artist’s label attached verso with title, date, medium, dimensions and artist’s name estimate :
$380,000 – 450,000
PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in November 1969 Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 9 May 2007, lot 24 Private collection, Sydney We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.
Bushfires are part of Australian life, art and history, two outstanding early examples of threatening infernos being Eugene von Guérard’s Bush Fire Between Mount Elephant and Timboon 1857, 1859, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria and John Longstaff’s Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898, 1898, in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Fred Williams once lived at Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges, southeast of Melbourne. Its mountainous topography and highly inflammable forests of eucalypts and natural litter made it one of the most dangerous bushfire areas in the world. The summer fires of 1968, which threatened Williams’ home, had a deep effect on his art. It resulted in the fire series on which he spent much of that year. A new perception of the landscape emerged, Williams again leading the way in which we see and understand our natural environment. The series consists of three groups – the approach, as in the ominous column of smoke in Approaching Bushfire, 1968, a gouache in the National Gallery of Victoria; the aftermath, the wild beauty of the transformed landscape seen in a trio of gouaches, After Bushfire 1-3, 1968, also in the National Gallery of Victoria; followed by the miracle of regeneration in the oil painting Burnt Ferns, 1969 in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Fascinated by the dramatic changes, Williams first captured the striking beauty of destruction in numerous gouaches painted directly from the motif, followed by oil paintings and prints. In Silver Landscape, 1968, our painting on offer, Williams bridges the gap between devastation and new life with a new brilliance. By transforming the blackened scene into one of silvery beauty, Williams mirrored the miracle of recreation. Undergrowth has gone. The land is laid bare. Yet, the bold panorama of horizontal strokes and undulating earth entices. Richly dark in parts, ochre blends with silver in others. There is a new openness and depth, a sweeping grandeur. This spaciousness is shared with other major paintings in the series, especially the two versions of Burnt Landscape, 1968 in private collections, enriched by their unique blend of primordial appeal and regeneration.1 Patrick McCaughey wrote of one: ‘Rarely before had [Williams] made distance so integral a part of the conception’. 2 The vertical accent of tree trunks in Silver Landscape, nevertheless, provides the classical balance, echoed in its colours. Some trees are gaunt. Others are touched with regrowth. Seen from a high viewpoint, even the splendour of its breadth allows for those characteristically enriched surfaces of textured crusts and swirls of impasto in a veritable feast of paint. Scrubbiness has returned. The singularity of Williams’ vision, combined with his deep understanding of art and technique, gives his paintings the appeal and authority through which our understanding and appreciation of the Australian landscape continues to be renewed and extended. So it is with Silver Landscape. 1. Both versions of Burnt Landscape, 1968 are illustrated in Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 126, and McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney 1980, plate 109, respectively. 2. McCaughey, ibid, p. 203
DAVID THOMAS
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IAN FAIRWEATHER 46 (1891 – 1974) MOON IN WELLS, c.1963 – 64 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on card on composition board 71.0 x 95.0 cm inscribed lower right: Moon in Wells PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (as ‘Moon in Wells’) Robert Shaw, Sydney, acquired from the above in May 1965 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 November 1998, lot 47 (as ‘Moon in Wales, c.1965’) Private collection, Darwin Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Exhibition of the Private Collection of Robert Shaw Esq., Gallery A, Sydney, arranged by the exhibitions committee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 13 – 16 August 1966, cat. 11 (as ‘Moon in Wales, 1965’) Collectors Exhibition, Great Synagogue, Sydney, 13 – 15 July [year unknown], cat. 13 We are grateful to Murray Bail for his assistance with this catalogue entry. estimate :
$150,000 – 200,000
Described by Murray Bail as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality’,1 Ian Fairweather represents without doubt one of the most highly individualistic artists ever to have worked in Australia. Born in Scotland and raised by his aunts until the age of 10, Fairweather undertook formal training at the Slade School of Art in London under Henry Tonks, while spending his evenings learning Japanese and Chinese – a pursuit which prompted him to question at an early age the primacy of the Western visual tradition. A reclusive, eternally restless spirit, throughout the 1930s and 40s he led a largely peripatetic existence, travelling extensively from London to Canada, China, Bali, Australia, the Philippines, India and beyond – ‘…always the outsider, the nostalgic nomad with a dreamlike memory of distant places and experience’. 2 After his notorious attempt to sail from Darwin to Timor on a raft made of old aircraft fuel tanks, in mid-1953 Fairweather finally settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where for the rest of his life he lived and worked in a pair of primitive thatched huts salvaged from driftwood and scrap material. Perhaps ironically, it was during these last two decades spent in rudimentary surrounds and relative solitude that Fairweather would produce some of the finest paintings of his career, drawing with a newfound tranquility upon recollected emotions and
experiences to explore beyond the merely tangible, that one enduring motif of his art – humanity. Significantly, during this period Fairweather also began to achieve international recognition, with paintings included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961); the Sao Paulo Biennial (1963); and the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65); and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work was organised by the Queensland Art Gallery. Dating from c.1963 – 64, Moon in Wells exemplifies well Fairweather’s confidence as a mature painter, oscillating between the figurative and an increasingly calligraphic abstraction; as he mused at the time, ‘between representation and the other thing - whatever it is. It is difficult to keep one’s balance.’ 3 As with many of his greatest works from this decade such as Monastery, 1961 and House by the Sea, 1967 which reference Fairweather’s seminal experiences in China thirty years earlier, or Turtle and Temple Gong, 1965 inspired by his Balinese travels, it is probable that the present work similarly derives from ‘some relic of subjective reality’,4 a mental image or memory from the artist’s itinerant life. Having recently translated and illustrated the Chinese folktale, The Drunken Buddha (published by the University of Queensland Press in 1965) Fairweather would also have been freshly attuned to the indelible influence of Chinese art – discerned here stylistically in the use of highly gestural brushstrokes and ideograms, and more philosophically, in his approach to the landscape subject which reflects the Chinese perception of nature as imbued with humanity (the shadowy trees, for example, looming large over the blue pools like ghostly figures in the moonlight). At the same time, the work may equally betray ‘an aura of his adopted landscape’ not only in its possible reference to Indigenous art, but with its strong yet meditative parched earth palette and overall ‘raucousness’ which suggests an untidiness not dissimilar to the wild, dry-tangled landscape of northern Australia. 5 Indeed, as Murray Bail astutely reiterates, Fairweather’s paintings are ‘essentially ‘written’ by his own experiences’ 6 – each offering a rich palimpsest of heavily textured surfaces and allusions, their myriad layers eventually yielding to the inner depth or spirituality so fundamental to his highly idiosyncratic vision. For although Fairweather did not adhere to religion in a strict, ordered sense, he nevertheless appreciated the spiritual connection it could afford, comparing the experience of the faithful to that of his own artistic creativity; ‘Painting is a personal thing. It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people’.7 The culmination of a lifelong quest to attain or comprehend some deeper existential meaning, thus the contemplative abstractions of Fairweather’s maturity powerfully transcend time or circumstance to elucidate emotions universal to all human experience. As Laurie Thomas, appreciating the originality of Fairweather’s legacy, reflected at the time: ‘He paints what he sees. But what he sees nobody else had seen until now’. 8 1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220 2. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 54 3. Fairweather quoted in first interview with Hazel Berg, 30 March 1963, Hazel de Berg Papers, National Library of Australia. 4. Fairweather quoted in letter to Treania Smith, 11 November 1959, Macquarie Galleries archive. 5. Bail, M., 1981, op. cit. p. 220 6. ibid. 7. Fairweather quoted in Hetherington, J., Australian Painters: Forty Profiles, Cheshire, Melbourne, 1963, p. 51 8. Thomas, L., ‘Ian Fairweather’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1963, p. 35
VERONICA ANGELATOS
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JEFFREY SMART 47 (1921 – 2013) THE TUSCAN FARMHOUSE, 1980 oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 71.0 x 134.0 cm signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART bears inscription on frame verso: A.G 10 estimate :
$600,000 – 800,000
PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1982 EXHIBITED Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 October – 7 November 1981, cat. 10 (as ‘Tuscan Farm House’) LITERATURE Millar, R., ‘Parr’s black beauties’, The Herald, Melbourne, 29 October 1981, p. 30 Newman, J., ‘The surreal images of Smart’, The Age, Melbourne, 3 November 1981, p. 21 (illus.) Malouf, D., ’Jeffrey Smart: Recent Works’, Art International, Lugano, Vol. XXV, No. 7/8, 1982, p. 66 (illus.) Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 775, pp. 85 (illus.), 117 McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 226, p. 160 RELATED WORK Drawing for ‘Tuscan Farmhouse’, 1980, ink on paper, 30.0 x 40.0 cm, private collection Study for ‘Tuscan Farmhouse’, 1980, oil on canvas, 45.0 x 60.0 cm, private collection We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.
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JEFFREY SMART 47 (1921 – 2013) THE TUSCAN FARMHOUSE, 1980
JEFFREY SMART, Self Portrait at Papini’s, 1984 – 85, Pieve a Presciano, near Arezzo, Tuscany
In 1965, Jeffrey Smart returned to Italy to live. Six years later, he settled in an old farmhouse at Posticcia Nuova, near Arezzo in the heart of Tuscany. Close to the great works of the Renaissance master Piero della Francesca, whose passion for stillness, light and geometry so inspired him, it was to be his home for the rest of his life. Many recall the beauty of the landscape, the nightingales, olive groves and sheep, crowned by the villa and gardens, in turn enlivened by the personality of its host – witty, gregarious and gifted. The Tuscan Farmhouse, 1980, while based on another nearby, is redolent with such memories and recollections. Peter Quartermaine, in an early monograph on Smart, wrote: ‘There is no mystery to the farmhouse: its perspectives neither puzzle nor deceive and we can attribute a practical use to every detail, even the oil drums. This transparency of surface lends the picture a silence which impresses and intrigues. Seeing the original building was a shock, almost a disappointment’.1 Smart’s mastery of presenting the familiar as unfamiliar is at the fore. We see it through Smart’s eyes, a masterpiece of isolation, enigmatic, mysterious. Its genesis was typical. As it progressed from ink drawing, through oil sketch to final painting, possibilities were detailed and determined to perfection. Stillness, which Smart likens to good design, leads to eye-catching, hard-edged exactitude. Married to light: ‘It’s always the light. [Smart said] Obviously it must be the light. Without light you don’t see anything’. 2 Its inventive use, he added, ‘casting shadows and making shapes that never existed before’. 3 For Smart, light is a metaphor, a revelation and a reality. As forms advance or recede, participants are placed as purposefully as those on a chessboard, dressed in colours enticing or resistant. And frontal directness flirts with deep shadows angled sharply. In The Tuscan Farmhouse the usual figures, which Smart says he employs to give scale, are replaced by oil barrels, another fascination.4 The anthropomorphic presence is as real as the magnificent geometry of the architecture and its echoing arches. All is set in splendid isolation against a precipitous skyline edge – enveloped in a timeless frisson – surreal. Standing alone, with reminiscences of other paintings reaching back to Wasteland II of 1945 in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. While Smart warns about reading too much into his pictures, he puts much there to be seen. It is part of the absorbing paradox that is Jeffrey Smart. Inspiration found in the everyday is the hallmark of his art. For him it is ‘To recrystallise a moment of ecstasy: ecstasy or a moment of feeling about something. Sometimes the feeling is not so much
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visual. Sometimes it’s a feeling about a certain place or area of Rome or Florence, or the country where there’s a garage’. 5 This is carried over into the act of painting, for, as Smart says, ‘… the making of a picture is such pleasure’, a pleasure shared with the viewer.6 The preparatory ink drawing and oil study for The Tuscan Farmhouse were shown in Smart’s 1980 exhibition at Rudy Komon’s Sydney gallery, which also presented the classic, The Guiding Spheres II (Homage to Cézanne), 1979 – 80 (private collection). The Tuscan Farmhouse made its appearance in Smart’s following show at the Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 1981. Its prestige company included Portrait of David Malouf, 1980 (Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth) and Night Stop, Bombay, 1981 (private collection). The two versions of Autobahn in the Black Forest (both private collections) had been painted in 1979 – 80, each heralding golden years of achievement. In Melbourne, Ronald Millar writing for The Herald, referred to ‘Smart’s decaying Tuscan farms’,7 while Judy Newman in The Age commented on his surreal images, ‘Road signs, petrol trucks, autostradas –all trappings of 20th century life …’. She continued, ‘Even a petrol hose can take on a menacing, surreal aspect at the hands of this artist and a group of petrol drums standing in front of an old Tuscan farmhouse can appear vested with an ominous presence’. 8
JEFFREY SMART’S FARMHOUSE, ‘POSTICCIA NUOVA’, NEAR AREZZO IN TUSCANY, ITALY courtesy of Stephen Rogers
A singular art of meticulous clarity and allusions, impersonal and emotional, intellectual and sensuous, contemplative and poetic, balance and proportion, is weighed in scales of detachment. Jokes private to those less subtle, a sense of humour runs throughout. Of his objective reality? It is the persona, the actor’s mask worn to face the world. 1. Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, p. 85 2. De Groen, G., ‘Where the light must rule: Conversation between Geoffrey De Groen and Jeffrey Smart, Sydney – an excerpt’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 19, no. 2, 1981, p. 190 3. ibid. 4. This fascination is such that in 1992 he devoted The Oil Drums (private collection) to them. 5. Smart, J., quoted in Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 8 6. ibid. 7. Millar, R., ‘Parr’s black beauties’, The Herald, Melbourne, 29 October 1981, p. 30 8. Newman, J., ‘The surreal images of Smart’, The Age, Melbourne, 3 November 1981, p. 21
DAVID THOMAS
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HOWARD ARKLEY 48 (1951 – 1999) FLORIATED ADDRESS, 1995 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 203.0 x 153.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Name Howard Arkley / Title Floriated Address / Date 1995 / Size 203 x 153 cm / Medium Acrylic on Canvas signed and dated on stretcher bar verso: Howard Arkley 95 estimate :
$600,000 – 800,000
PROVENANCE Bellas Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above in 1995 Bellas Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in May 2000 LITERATURE Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http://arkleyworks.com/blog/2019/07/31/floriatedaddress-1995/] (accessed 31/07/19) RELATED WORK Floriated Residence, 1994, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 203.0 x 153.0 cm, The Vizard Foundation Art Collection of the 1990s, on loan to the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, illus. in Crawford, A. & Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001, (p.115 and (detail) front cover) Floral Exterior, 1996, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 174.5 x 134.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
‘The day I came back, I realised what I needed to do: I was Australian and had to deal with that. This sounds like something Sidney Nolan might have said in 1945, but it’s true. I was astounded because, like many other artists, I had denied it. I had left the suburbs never to return.’1 Renowned as the painter of Australian suburbia, Howard Arkley made the depiction of local vernacular architecture his own. Having begun his career as an abstract artist, creating images that miraculously incorporated his love of line and pattern within a cool Minimalism, Arkley’s revelation came after returning home following residencies in Paris and New York, as well as extended travel through Europe, in the late 1970s. In Paris he had photographed hundreds of decorative doorways, fascinated by the sinuous Art Nouveau designs of the early twentieth century and the stylised geometry of Art Deco, and visiting his mother in suburban Melbourne upon his return, discovered an Australian version literally at the front doorstep. ‘I pressed the buzzer and I’m standing there waiting for the door to open and I see it. This flywire security door was like a revelation. There’s very few times the light goes on – like in a cartoon. This was it. It reminded me of Paris, but it was so different. We’ve got our own Parisian doorways … so I got my camera and photographed the whole street – every flywire door.’ 2 Arkley’s lightbulb moment didn’t lead directly to the production of suburban house images, but initially opened up the sources of his bowerbird-like collecting of visual material to include details drawn from the domestic environment. Alongside the popular culture references that filled the pages of Arkley’s scrapbooks – comics, children’s book illustrations, advertising material, details from newspapers and magazines, and so on – were added images of the ubiquitous flywire door, patterns of Laminex and the linoleum that covered the kitchen floor. At Prahran College in the early 1970s Arkley was introduced to the airbrush, a tool that was to become his trademark, by teacher and fellow-artist Fred Cress. Associated with the production of commercial rather than fine art, the airbrush was a radical choice and at first, Arkley was criticised for using it. Its particular qualities however appealed to Arkley – the solid line and distinctive blurry edges, and perhaps the speed with which it allowed him to get his imagery down – who later said, ‘The airbrush is neutral, I like that. I like the fact that the imagery
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Š The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
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HOWARD ARKLEY 48 (1951 – 1999) FLORIATED ADDRESS, 1995
looks like it is printed; it looks like a reproduction of a painting, rather than a painting’. 3 The making of Primitive, 1981, (private collection, Melbourne) a vast work on paper produced during an all-night session of frenetic, creative energy, marked a move towards the use of more figurative imagery in Arkley’s art and the first house painting, Suburban Exterior – inspired by an image from a children’s comic book and real estate advertising – was shown in his 1983 exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne. It was several years later that this subject became a more primary focus of Arkley’s oeuvre and that major works including Triple Fronted, 1987 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) and the diptych, House and Garden Western Suburbs, Melbourne, 1988 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) began to be produced.
HOWARD ARKLEY IN VENICE, 1999 photograph by Alison Burton
There were few precedents of this new subject within Australian art. John Brack’s images of 1950s suburban life, deadpan depictions that typically made viewers laugh, despite the artist’s humanist motivations, are the most obvious and later, artists including Robert Rooney, and others of Arkley’s generation such as Jenny Watson, Aleks Danko and Bill Henson, had all found inspiration in the familiarity of suburbia. While some found the suburbs soulless places where nothing ever happened, some saw beauty (think of the glistening tiled rooftops of Henson’s mid-1980s photographs), and others detected a dark underbelly behind the well-tended gardens and repetitive domestic facades. Arkley’s own attitude towards the suburbs was ambivalent and changeable. In 1989 he described his subject as reflecting ‘the suppressed Australian experience in the suburbs ... not very expressive, and tight … it’s all neat and clean, the lawns are all mowed’. 4 Almost a decade later, by which time he and his partner, Alison Burton had moved to live in Oakleigh, an outlying eastern suburb of Melbourne, he challenged an interviewer’s assertion that suburban life was tedious, declaring, ‘It’s a myth, an elitist view. I’m having a great time’. 5 As John Gregory has written, ‘depending on his state of mind, Arkley could see suburbia in either golden or melancholy light … [and] the contradiction itself should be seen as significant, unveiling a struggle in the artist’s own psyche’.6 Whatever his feelings about the suburbs, the subject offered Arkley the artist fresh material with which he could say something meaningful – and he believed, inevitable – about the country in which he lived.
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While few had contemplated the idea that the suburban vernacular could be worthy of serious aesthetic consideration,7 Arkley realised that this was a subject through which he could forge a new tradition of the Australian ‘landscape’ based on the urban environment in which most of the population lives. He explained, ‘What I’m trying to do, I believe, is explicitly the right thing, and if it isn’t me it will be someone else. It has to be done. And we’re not talking just about doing the work, but about inspiring a whole generation of future artists to delve into this area and exploit it. It looks like overstatement, like it’s obvious, and I would much rather make some subtler art, but I don’t think it will get across’. 8 Arkley continued, ‘What I would actually like to do is equivalent to when you’re driving along in the country and you look at the landscape and you say “Oh, there’s a Fred Williams.” You change the way people see it. And you make people look at it. In the same way that David Hockney has changed the way that people can look at Los Angeles, the swimming pools. Hollywood’s Mulholland Drive, good God, that could be Lower Templestowe Road! I just want people to see it’.9 Painted in 1995, Floriated Address is part of a group of works in which Arkley’s use of decorative pattern and contrasting colour reaches a spectacular crescendo. Merging an aspect of domestic interior decoration with a view of the exterior, a stencilled ornamental pattern (borrowed from wallpaper and fabric designs) covers every element of the doublefronted house, as well as the lawn, low-lying plants to the left, and letterbox. Each area is demarcated by Arkley’s black airbrushed line and features variations of multiple colour combinations, the single element in the painting not decorated in this way, a tall orange bush behind the letterbox. The visual intensity of this painting and others, including Floral Exterior, 1996 (National Gallery of Australia), reveals Arkley in his element, balancing colour – sometimes jarring but always brilliant – pattern and detail within an image that is at once familiar, but in his hands, utterly transformed. The description of viewing the closely related work, Floriated Residence, 1994 (The Vizard Foundation Collection of the 90s, on loan to the University of Melbourne) as ‘something like a sensation of awe in the face of our ordinary domestic environment’ is equally pertinent here where, again, ‘the patterns heighten the mystery, like a series of lace veils, encouraging the fascinated eye to probe the subtle and exotic shifts of hue and curlicue, turning the humble house into a temple of ornamental intricacy and paradoxically fabulous craftsmanship’.10
In 1999 Arkley represented Australia at the 48th Venice Biennale with The Home Show, introducing his unique take on the Australian suburbs to an international audience at the world’s most important contemporary art exhibition. The Home Show was ‘the culmination of [his] suburban enterprise, fulfilling a long-standing ambition to transform an entire exhibition into a stylised simulacrum of an Australian suburb’.11 Nine exterior paintings (including Floriated Residence and Houseomorphics, 1996, both closely related to the current painting) comprised a ‘Residential Subdivision’ on the entrance level and on the floor below, paintings from the Outside-Inside-Outside and Fabricated Rooms series formed a striking panorama of vividly coloured interiors, almost twenty metres long. Widely regarded as one of the highlights of the 1999 Biennale,12 the exhibition was followed by a successful commercial show in Los Angeles and increasing international attention which acknowledged the power of Arkley’s vision beyond its antipodean context – what the art critic, Marco Livingstone, described as ‘the purely pictorial dynamic on which the success of each picture depends … it is [ultimately] as paintings that they finally weave their spell’.13 1. The artist quoted in Crawford, A., & Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, p. 26 2. ibid. 3. ibid., pp. 14 – 15 4. Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2006, p. 10 5. ibid. 6. ibid. 7. Morrell, T., ‘Howard Arkley: The Home Show’ in Howard Arkley: The Home Show, Australian Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale, exhibition catalogue, Australian Council for the Arts, Sydney, 1999, p. 15 8. Crawford & Edgar, op. cit., p. 89 9. ibid. 10. Gregory, op. cit., p. 75 11. Gregory, J., Arkley Works, http://arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/21/howard-arkley-the-homeshow-venice-biennale-june-nov-1999/, accessed 22 July 2019 12. ibid. 13. Livingstone, M., ‘Some Kinds of Love: Howard Arkley’s Urban Suburban Environment’ in Howard Arkley: The Home Show, op. cit., p. 9
KIRSTY GRANT
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BEN QUILTY 49 born 1973 CRASH PAINTING, 2010 oil on canvas 140.0 x 190.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Ben Quilty / 2010 / Crash / painting estimate :
PROVENANCE GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney Private collection, Sydney
Proceeds from the sale of this work will go to support the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Sydney Modern Capital Campaign.
$60,000 – 80,000
Within the broader context of Ben Quilty’s painting it is his images of cars which many people identify with the artist and they remain amongst his most sought-after works. Quilty arrived at his Smashed Car paintings after turning the mirror on himself and his car loving mates. The resulting images explored the adolescent males search for identity through ritual rites of passage, some of which involved driving dangerously in fast cars; recollections of youth when anything was possible, when young lads fuelled by alcohol felt they were ten-foot-tall and bulletproof. The nuggetty Holden Torana, with its V8 engine crammed under the hood, became Quilty’s favourite car. The Torana entered Australian folklore in 1972, when Peter Brock drove it to victory against the dominant Ford Falcons at Bathurst’s annual orgy of booze and petrol on Mount Panorama. In the decades that followed the popular Torana (an Aboriginal word meaning ‘to fly’) became the choice of young men when buying their first second-hand car. By the time Quilty got his ‘P’s, the choice was easy. With Brocky’s place in the male psyche secure and John Meillon’s Victoria Bitter jingle as the sound track, Quilty and his mates took to the road in their adolescent quest for meaning and direction, all the while dangerously testing the boundaries of common sense. The mangled appearance of Quilty’s Smashed Cars is well suited to his preference for thick oil paint amply applied. The cars become flesh-like as they rest on the road side, leaking fluids seeping from the wreckage and forming eerie shadows. The sharp contrast between the straight panels of the vehicle and the soft, smashed area goes someway to creating an image reminiscent of road kill. This juxtaposition allows the artist to contrast form with abstraction, a helpful device which amplifies the expressive qualities of the opposing approaches. Poised in a moment between the violence of the event and stillness of the aftermath, Quilty’s image hovers between order and chaos. A focal point within the violent tangle is the crimson red mark near the centre, which takes on the appearance of an exposed vein and further presses the notion of a freshly killed pulsing carcass. Crash Painting, 2010, features a distant horizon beyond a landscape devoid of trees which evokes a sense of the frontier. It is a frontier of reckless abandon where young white males test themselves against each other in deadly games of one upmanship and where testosterone overrides common sense, the deadly mix of alcohol and petrol fuelling a game of Russian roulette. Quilty’s paintings ooze paint and metaphor. His technique of applying paint in broad, thick swathes using cake decorating tools creates a fleshy sculpted surface, which in itself echoes the youthful bravado these paintings aim to depict. Bulking up his colour with white, Quilty’s use of paint results in a soft harmonising effect that belies the artwork’s chaotic and ominous undertow and, as is his intent, takes the viewer along for the wild ride. HENRY MULHOLLAND
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DALE FRANK 50 born 1959 WHEN ASKED HOW HE ACQUIRED HIS FINE COLLECTION OF FRENCH EMPIRE CLOCKS, PAUL KEATING, THEN PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA, DESCRIBED HIS METHOD THUS; ‘MOST PEOPLE CATCH ANTIQUES WHEN THEY ARE TAME, IN FASHIONABLE SHOPS. I CATCH MY CLOCKS WHILE THEY ARE STILL WILD, IN OUT-OF-THE-WAY PLACES’, 2005 varnish and synthetic polymer paint on canvas 200.0 x 200.0 cm signed and dated twice verso: Dale Frank / 2005 estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s Australia, Melbourne, 26 November 2013, lot 41 Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Dale Frank, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 27 May 2006, cat. 15 LITERATURE Cockington, J., ‘Big Names at Low, Low Prices’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 20 November 2013
Featuring glistening marbled flows and ponderous slides of emerald, violet and coral pink poured across the canvas in layers of varying viscosity and translucency, When asked how he acquired his fine collection…, 2005 offers a particularly stunning example of the sumptuous, glossy abstractions for which Dale Frank has become so widely acclaimed. Brilliantly evocative in their epic scale, intense colouration and mesmerising, plasma-like reflections, such works typically engage with paradigms of science, poetics, spatialisation and time to offer a continually evolving dialogue upon the individual’s relationship to the immersive universe. Thus possessing the remarkable ability to completely absorb the viewer’s consciousness, Frank’s ‘performances’ not only complicate the customary roles of artist as creator and audience as passive observer, but powerfully highlight the psychological dimension inherent in perception itself. Indeed, despite their inordinately specific, often witty titles and the swirling tides of sensuous tinted varnish which seem to convey the forces of nature in a manner reminiscent of Romantic painting, Frank is emphatic in his eschewal of any reference to the literal – his works are neither real nor imagined. Rather, each performance ‘creates itself’, evolving over time through the movement and chemical reactions between layers of strident, pulsating varnish in its molten liquid form (‘a living entity’). As Frank elucidates, the blank white canvas is never
a pristine ground that must be filled, rather ‘a black space’ where the final outcome is ‘forced upon the Painting by the vagaries of its own Nature and makeup: its environment and material personality determine its image, its future, its relations within the world’.1 If Frank’s technique appears ostensibly random or unpredictable however, such spontaneity belies a painstaking process of ‘endurance and isolation’. As the luminous pools of pigmented varnish are poured onto the horizontal canvas and immediately begin to resist and coalesce, the artist must remain continuously attentive to the passing of time, the variations of climate, and the actions required by him at every stage – adding more varnish or changing the angle of support as necessary. As Frank reveals, ‘It is a totally hands on and cerebral way of painting ... The process can take up to twenty-four hours where I have to be permanently standing over the painting, constantly considering every minute aspect’. 2 With his visionary eloquence and technical ingenuity, Frank occupies an esteemed position at the forefront of Australian contemporary art practice. Awarded the prestigious Red Cross Art Award by John Olsen at the tender age of sixteen, his was a precocious talent and within only five years, he had achieved international recognition with solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe and America. Significantly, in 1983, his work was selected for display alongside Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, Italy, and in 1984, he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney mounted the touring survey exhibition of his work Ecstasy: 20 years of painting; in 2005, Frank won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria and in 2007, his achievements were documented in the magnificent monograph So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980. Today, his paintings are held in every major public collection across Australia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections around the world. 1. Frank, D., quoted in Chapman, C., ‘Dale Frank: Performance into Painting’ in Frank, D., So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980, Schwartz City Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, p. 134 2. Frank, D., quoted in Crawford, A., ‘Dale Frank’, Art & Australia, Sydney, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, p. 214
VERONICA ANGELATOS
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PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD 51 (c.1922 – 2007) THOOWOONGGOONARRIN, 2006 ochres and pigment with acrylic binder on Belgian linen 150.0 x 180.0 cm signed with initials verso: PB bears inscription verso: title, William Mora Art Fair, and Jirrawun Arts cat. PB 6-2006-258 estimate :
$120,000 – 160,000
PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2006 EXHIBITED William Mora Galleries at Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 2 – 6 August 2006 Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 6 December 2006 – 15 April 2007, then touring to: Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 12 May – 22 July 2007; Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 11 August – 16 September 2007; University Art Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 16 November 2007 – 1 March 2008 LITERATURE Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, pp. 116 (illus.), 159 (illus.)
Painting for Paddy Bedford was multi-layered; an expression of country and cultural memory, as well as a declaration of identity and statement of claim to the land itself. As Michael Dolk argues, painting suggests a physical and tactile relation to land, ‘To behold painting is to hold country and to remain beholden to its ancestral tradition’.1 Painting his first works in 1997, aged 75, Paddy Bedford soon became recognised as an innovator and important artist through his unique depictions of East Kimberley history and he is credited with evolving the artistic tradition forged earlier by Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji. Crafting his own representations of country, Bedford’s formal language is characterised by a symbiotic relationship between bold forms and an elegant, balanced composition. His painting evokes rocky escarpments, rivers and other amorphous features of the Kimberley landscape, whilst at the same time containing a learned and poetical knowledge of the land and its creation stories. As curator Russell Storer observes, ‘his paintings articulate a complex dialectic between modern materials and traditional pictorial conventions, contemporary experience and ancient belief systems’. 2 Executed in 2006 and catalogued as painting PB 6-2006-258 in the chronological index of Bedford’s works, this painting represents the country of Thoowoonggoonarrin, also known as Tunganary, located to the south of Bedford Downs in his mother’s country. Tunganary Gorge is home to a permanent waterhole and is the dreaming place for Thoowoonggoonarrin, a large tree with dark leaves that is related to the fig tree (Celtis philippinensis). The artist’s maternal aunt is buried at this place. Thoowoonggoonarrin, 2006 was one of the last paintings executed by Bedford and can be seen as a culmination of the innovative changes in style and technique he developed to create his own representations of country. Here, large dominant forms along with the interplay between positive and negative space create a strikingly beautiful rendering of country. A sublime encrusted surface with washes of white and grey create a unique translucent quality, a consequence of the artist’s wet on wet painting technique. It is important to note that multiple narratives intertwine in Bedford’s paintings. Family stories, historical events and a deep connection to his country are often masked by the simple, bold starkness of his imagery and technique. 1. Dolk, M., ‘Are we Strangers in this Place’ in Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 20 2. Storer, R., Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 11
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EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE 52 (c.1910 – 1996) EMU ALL OVER, 1990 synthetic polymer paint on linen 150.0 x 121.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, and Delmore Gallery cat. 0L07 estimate :
$50,000 – 70,000
PROVENANCE Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs Thomas Vroom Collection, Amsterdam LITERATURE Isaacs, J., Smith, T., Ryan, J., Holt, D., and Holt, J., Emily Kame Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, pl. 10, p. 53 (illus.) RELATED WORK Ankerr (Emu), 1989, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 150.6 × 121.8 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in Isaacs, J., Smith, T., Ryan, J., Holt, D., and Holt, J., Emily Kame Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, pl. 2, p. 45 After the Rain, 1990, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 210.8 × 121.6 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in Neale, M., Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Alhalkere, Paintings from Utopia, Macmillan Publishers, Melbourne, 1998, pl. 53, cat. 36, p. 86 and Neale, M. (ed.), Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2008, cat. D-14, p. 126
‘All the paintings of Emily Kngwarreye, so spectacular and diverse in style, express a central theme – that of her identification with the earth and land itself: Anmatyerre country, the country of the yam and the emu’.1 Emily Kngwarreye’s paintings are complex and vibrant visions of her country (Alhalkere) and women’s ceremonies (Awelye). Despite finding artistic recognition late in life, her practice had been developing for many years and was fundamental to her role as a senior Anmatyerre woman, painting women’s bodies and objects for ritual and ceremonies. It was this knowledge and history that informed her work and which the detailed surface of Emu All Over, 1990 brings together in a shimmering example. Emu all Over is a significant early work, replete with a full complement of the artist’s stylistic elements. Painted on a black ground, the underlying tracery of dusky pink lines signifying the meandering roots of the yam below the earth and the tracks of the travelling emu above, are covered by layers of green, ochre and pink dots which represent the surrounding seeds, flowers and leaves. Fundamentally, this work depicts the relationship between the emu and country. Beneath the soil the bush potato (anatye) is ready for digging, while above, there is a flurry of movement as the male emu moves across the landscape feeding on various seeds. Responsible for caring for the eggs and vulnerable hatchlings, the emu eats and regurgitates seeds onto the ground for his chicks to eat, keeping them close by and protecting them from predators. It was during the 1990s that Emily Kngwarreye emerged as one of Australia’s leading contemporary painters, the demand for her work unprecedented as international and local collectors and museums clamoured to obtain an ‘Emily’. In the years until her death in 1996, Kngwarreye was hailed as ‘an outstanding abstract painter, certainly among the best Australian artists, arguably among the best of her time’. 2 Although she had little contact with the outside world for most of her life, she produced a body of work which radically altered the way in which we view and appreciate modern Aboriginal art. 1. Isaacs, J., ‘Anmatyerre Woman’ in Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 12 2. Smith, T., ‘Kngwarreye Woman Abstract Painter’, ibid., p. 24
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CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 53 born 1960 EUCALYPT FOREST, 2000 watercolour on incised woodblock 62.0 x 122.5 cm signed lower right: Cressida Campbell estimate :
$75,000 – 95,000
PROVENANCE Nevill Keating Pictures, London Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2001 EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell: Recent Paintings, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 6 – 27 July 2001, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Eucalyptus Forest’) LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2008, cat. W0002, p. 352 RELATED WORK Eucalypt Forest, 2000, woodblock print, 62.0 x 121.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. P0002, pp. 148 –149
The late Nick Waterlow, the esteemed art historian, wrote in the introduction of Cressida Campbell’s first solo exhibition at Nevill Keating Pictures in London that her distinctive artworks ‘provide constant reminders of the unique wonders of nature in this ancient continent’ and ‘a wonderfully refreshing antidote to all those forces that want to separate us from our surrounding environment’.1 Cressida Campbell’s incised and hand-painted woodblock, Eucalypt Forest, 2000 is immersive and calming, an awe-inspiring glimpse into one of Australia’s primeval landscapes. Drawn from life, Eucalypt Forest is the crown jewel in a suite of works created from the view of the sub-tropical bush around the Stella James House in Avalon, on Sydney’s Northern beaches. The artist and her husband, Peter Crayford, lived in this heritage-listed Walter Burley Griffin house over the summer of 1999 – 2000, and its vast surrounding area of pristine open native forest appears in several woodblocks and prints of these years, often featuring a combination of Pittwater’s distinctive eucalypts and Cabbage Palms. Tightly cropped and framed in the lower corners by fanned palm leaves, the composition of Eucalypt Forest is dominated by the strong vertical lines of the trunks of these gum trees, which tower way beyond the limits of our vision. In the foreground, an elegant sapling stretches its spindly branches across the width of the plywood block, welcoming the viewer into the composition and drawing the eye delicately throughout its dense bush, amongst the trunks, leaves and into the shifting mist beyond. Campbell’s view of this eucalypt forest is wide and undivided. The colours here are stronger and brighter than in its printed related work, hinting at the vibrant health of this preserved ecosystem. The artist’s unusual and painstaking practice of painting her woodblocks with watercolour, using a technique similar to cloisonné, lends a chalky, mottled texture to both finished artworks. In Eucalypt Forest, the inconsistencies and velvety textures left on the block’s surface after the printing process, provide a tactile evocation of the peeling bark and rough surfaces of its subject matter. The simplified forms of tree trunks beneath the canopy dissolve into the damp and shady depths of the forest, keeping a sense of mystery within its detailed naturalism. Campbell’s prints and blocks display a fragment of her reality, laying clues within the delicate symbolism of her compositions to hint at what lies beyond the frame. With reverence, Campbell translates the ancient grandeur of Australia’s native flora, and in evoking its unique beauty, silently entreats the viewer for its continuing respect and preservation. 1. Waterlow, N., Cressida Campbell Recent Paintings, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 2001
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CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 54 born 1960 MILTON PARK, 1989 unique colour woodblock print 71.0 x 75.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title below image estimate :
$40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Anne Schofield, Sydney Sotheby’s Australia, Sydney, 28 April 2015, lot 64 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell Wood Block Prints, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 17 October – 4 November 1989, cat. 10 (label attached verso) Timeless: The Art of Cressida Campbell, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 10 January – 22 February 2009 and touring to Queensland University of Technology, Art Museum, Brisbane, cat. 47 LITERATURE Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. P8910, pp. 315 (illus.) 342
By 1989, Cressida Campbell, not yet thirty years old, had already won two major prizes for her idiosyncratic woodcuts and monoprints. Reaching far beyond an appreciation of her mature handling of a difficult medium, the enduring attraction of Campbell’s work instead lies in its subject matter: an exaltation of the simple and calm beauty of life. She devotes the same degree of attention to all her subjects, intimate still lives and spectacular panoramas alike. This unique print, Milton Park, 1989, is one of the latter, displaying a dense and harmonious pattern of botanic luxuriance. Milton Park, located in Bowral in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands, is a grand country estate from the early twentieth century, transformed in the 1980s into a luxury hotel and its vast gardens opened to the public. Established by Anthony Hordern, wealthy grazier and retailing heir, and his second wife Mary Bullmore, Milton Park is considered one of Australia’s greatest private gardens, housing a wide range of rare European trees and botanical specimens. With a temperate climate, removed from the humidity and heat of the East coast, the Highlands have long since provided a bucolic sanctuary for pastoral homes, boasting a genteel refinement and cultivation of the land.
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In Milton Park, Campbell’s view of a tranquil pond bordered by grassy knolls and flowering fruit trees is tightly cropped, and with its slightly asymmetric balance is a good example of Campbell’s Japanese aesthetic. The powdery and mottled surface created by her printing process from watercolour pigments is well suited to the range of textures found in this garden. Gently incising the contrasting outlined forms of different botanical specimens, from the elegant reflected stems of floating yellow irises in the foreground, to the spare branches of an ancient Fir tree beyond the horizon, Campbell demonstrates a sophisticated handling of composition and design. In contrast to her industrial harbourside images, floral still lives and panoramas of the spiky Australian bush, Milton Park is a view of a distinctly European garden. The print nevertheless shares the same a clear connection to and understanding of place found in the rest of Campbell’s oeuvre. This landscape is transformed, its flora introduced from far-flung climates and tamed into herbaceous borders and stepped flower beds. The grounds of Milton Park burst forth in Campbell’s print with springtime exuberance. Quietly optimistic and unpretentiously displaying a delight for simple sensory pleasures, Milton Park is reminiscent of Stanley Spencer’s English garden paintings, so admired by Campbell. A serene richness is created by evoking other sensory experiences, particularly floral fragrances and sonorous qualities of rippling pools and wind in leaves. LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71 Assembled over a decade, between 2006 and 2016, this cohesive collection contains key examples of Australian Contemporary Art. Using pooled knowledge and resources, a group of art enthusiasts from Melbourne, pARTners, worked together to acquire works of living Australian artists, a survey of current art. Purchasing directly from commercial galleries, pARTners displayed keen foresight in creating a collection of museum quality artworks by their contemporaries. These include works by Gordon Bennett, Brook Andrew, and Danie Mellor, artists well represented and exhibited in public institutions in Australia and overseas and a selection of photorealistic paintings by Sam Leach, Natasha Bieniek, Juan Ford and Jan Nelson.
GORDON BENNETT 55 (1955 – 2014) NOTES TO BASQUIAT: MODERNITY, 1999 synthetic polymer paint on linen 182.5 x 182.5 cm signed and dated twice, and inscribed with title verso: 16-10-1999 / G Bennett / G Bennett 1610-1999 / “NOTES TO BASQUIAT: MODERNITY” / … estimate :
$40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (stamped on stretcher bar verso) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in July 2007 EXHIBITED Gordon Bennett Notes to Basquiat: One Tense Moment (episode two), Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 5 November – 4 December 1999, cat. 6 (stamped on stretcher bar verso) Midwinter Masters: (What’s so funny ‘bout) peace, love and understanding…?, The Gallery, Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre, Melbourne, 22 June – 18 August 2013 (illus. on exhibition catalogue front cover) LITERATURE Aulich, A., ‘Visual Arts’, The Melbourne Review, Melbourne, issue 21, July 2013, pp. 30 (illus.), 31
Gordon Bennett was a painter of history and histories. A critically and politically engaged artist, Bennett presents alternative historical narratives of Australia and of contemporary world events, creating provocative works that place identity politics front and centre. In the late 1990s, he embarked on two consecutive series of paintings, the Home Décor series, and Notes to Basquiat. Both series used a conspicuous ‘sampling’ of other artists work, re-contextualising these images into symbols of the wider exclusion and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples. Notes to Basquiat: Modernity, 1999 is a bridge between these two series, synthesising the main motifs of each into a tightly articulated composition exposing how words and images shape our cultural identity. The array of appropriated motifs within Notes to Basquiat: Modernity tesselate to create a dynamic composition, their collaged intuitive
arrangement providing a decidedly contemporary aesthetic. In the upper left-hand corner, a Margaret Preston stylised female figure tumbles, caught in a modernist lattice reminiscent of the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. The ideals of pure colour and form of early 20th century De Stjil abstraction appeared to Bennett as another form of exclusion. On the opposite corner, however, a pair of heads labelled “Caucasian” and “black/abo” stare blankly into the void. The former emerges from a Klansman conical shroud, the gears of his brain communicating directly with those of his subordinate comrade, like the mechanisms of a ventriloquist’s doll. Quoting the raw graffiti expressionism of Philip Guston and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bennett identifies a more authentic form of modernist painting, intimately connected to notions of “race”, “ancestry” and “nation” scrawled in lists close-by. Playing with the flatness of the picture plane so exalted by Modernist theory, Bennett’s layers of text and appropriated images jostle for prominence. His sophisticated mimicry becomes two-fold in his quotation of Margaret Preston’s woodcut design of a fish. Preston, though well-meaning in her quest to create a truly national artistic style, produced works that corrupted sacred aboriginal motifs, and presented aboriginal people as little more than stylised caricatures of the ’noble savage’. In addressing these notes, the paintings, to the departed American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bennett expressed what he felt was ‘histories of shared experience’, an affinity felt through mutual exclusion from a eurocentric contemporary art world. A humanist at heart, Bennett created works which are grounded in personal experience and an authentic voice. Bennett’s Notes to Basquiat collectively have had an extensive exhibition history, with a selection exhibited in the Kwangju Biennale 2000: Man + Space, Korea and the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial in 2001. Others are held in regional, state and national collections (National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales) as well as international collections including Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam. LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
BROOK ANDREW 56 born 1970 AUSTRALIA I, 2012 mixed media, silkscreen and gold foil on Belgian linen 200.0 x 300.0 cm edition: 2/3 estimate :
$40,000 – 50,000
PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in September 2012 EXHIBITED The Basil Sellers Art Prize, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 3 August – 4 November 2012, cat. 1 (another example) DARK HEART Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1 March – 11 May 2014 (another example) LITERATURE Wearne, S., ‘Brook Andrew’, Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2012, pp. 8 (illus., another example), 9 Nelson, R., ‘Lofty Jocks Strapped for Meaning’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 19 September 2012 McSpedden, S., ‘Howzat! : An Australian Spin on Sport and Art’, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts, Eyeline Publishing Limited, Brisbane, issue 78/79, 2013 [https://www.eyelinepublishing.com/ eyeline-78-79/review/howzat-australian-spin-sport-and-art] (accessed 3/07/19) Mitzevich, N., DARK HEART: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2014, pp. 54 – 64 (illus., another example, dated as 2013), 184 Thomson, J., ‘Dark Heart: Adelaide Biennial’, Asian Art News, vol. 24, no. 3, May / June 2014, p. 44 (illus., another example) Pesa, M., ‘Dark Heart: 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Almanac, Sydney, March 2014, p. 47 (illus., another example) Laurie, V., ‘Indigenous gems book passage to Asia for art tour’, The Australian, Sydney, 18 October 2018 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Australia IV, 2013, mixed media on Belgian linen, 200.0 x 300.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Australia VI Theatre and remembrance of death, 2014, mixed media on Belgian linen, 200.0 x 300.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Humans are social creatures, relying on sense of collective identity to ensure emotional and physical wellbeing. Brook Andrew’s impressive tableau, Australia I, 2012, is an acknowledgement of the vital role collective physical activity plays in the creation of a community. Based on a colonial ethnographic study from the late 1850s, the work depicts
a group of Nyeri-Nyeri men from north-western Victoria participating in a game of marngrook, an indigenous precursor to Australian Rules football.1 Consequently, Australia I, 2012 was included in the 2012 Basil Sellers’ Art Prize, an award celebrating contemporary art works addressing sport, creating a bridge between the nation’s most revered pastime and its cultural counterpart. This work is one of six large-scale historical scenes (Australia I – VI, 2012 – 2014) that re-present a selection of etchings by Gustav Mützel, a German artist who never stepped foot on the Australian continent. Commissioned by Prussian geologist and naturalist William Blandowski to immortalise the findings of his expedition to the Murray Darling basin in 1856 – 57, Mützel used original ethnographic sketches executed by Blandowski himself and his colleague Gerard Kreft to create composite illustrations. The drawings since lost, many of these images only remain in the minuscule photographic albumen prints composed by Mützel (each measuring 70 x 40mm) published in the illustrated account, Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen, 1862, only two full copies of which are extant in libraries in Europe. 2 The image upon which Australia I is based also exists as a photographic print in the Anthropology Library of the British Museum. Largely unseen by Australian people, indigenous or otherwise, these archives have recently been excavated by scholars and artists, stimulating a post-colonial critique of documentary images of indigenous Australians during the colonial period. Already employed in Andrew’s earlier series, The Island, 2008, examples of Blandowski’s visual documents are appropriated and transformed, their well-worn format blown up to a vast scale and applied by a screen-printing process to a coloured foil support. The resulting effect is not dissimilar to that of a noble history painting of the Western canon. The drama of the cultural activities performed remains mysterious and opaque, their sacred nature concealed to uninitiated viewers. The subjects of this picture clamour for the invisible possumfur ball or ball of plant roots, seeming to struggle to attain something intangible. Harnessed by a highly reflective gold foil, the light of discovery shines unevenly across the surface of the artwork. Throwing light on the glorification of the ‘noble savage’ in colonial archives, Brook Andrew’s Australia I takes this romantic view one step further, displaying it on the heroic scale hitherto denied to ‘ethnographic’ subjects. Andrew questions the very nature of representation, and the interaction between a truthful observation and voyeuristic colonial curiosity. 1. Wearne, S., ‘Brook Andrew’, Basil Sellers Art Prize 2012, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2012, p. 9. The role of Marngrook or Marn-grook in the formation of AFL football in Victoria in 1858 has been suggested by numerous historians since the 1980s, and in 2008 it was included in the official history of the game by the Melbourne Football Club. 2. Allen, H., ‘Authorship and Ownership in Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen’, Australasian Historical Archaeology, Sydney, vol. 24, 2006, p. 32
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
DANIE MELLOR 57 born 1971 BAYI DAMBUN (GLADES OF DUSK AND SHADE), 2014 pencil and pastel on paper 100.0 x 120.0 cm estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in September 2014 RELATED WORK Bayi dambun bala mila, 2014, mixed media on paper, 300.0 x 360.0 cm, 9 panels, each 100.0 x 120.0 cm, in the collection of the TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria
Bayi Dambun is the name of a legendary spirit of the rainforest, an unseen presence and energy who features in ancient dreaming stories and cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of North Queensland, including the Mamu, Ngagen and Jirrbal clans of Danie Mellor’s maternal ancestors.1 This immersive tableau of dense rainforest displays, with some ambiguity, the connection that Australian indigenous people have had to the land since time immemorial. Creating a bridge between the artist’s earlier vignettes and his current large-scale photographic installations, Bayi Dambun (Glades of Dusk and Shade), 2014 is entirely hand drawn, the highly detailed level of sophistication created through layered observations and colonial photographic records; spiritual depth married to spatial depth. For all the technical skill with which the rainforest undergrowth is translated, the artifice of Mellor’s hand is still apparent. By applying a melancholic blue hue to his views, the artist enforces a removal from the landscape. The viewer adopts an outside perspective, altering the true appearance of the ancient natural landscape. It becomes a transformed environment. Inspired by the exotic scenes depicted on blue and white Spode china contemporaneous to the European arrival on Australian shores, Mellor has adopted this strategy as a means of evoking a sense of ’otherworldliness’, a lens of romantic exoticism. Untouched by this doctored view are diminutive indigenous figures and native animals, appearing throughout Mellor’s scenes as curiously dislocated and transposed from their environment. Mellor addresses thus, with enticing beauty, the continuing presence of aboriginal people and their sovereignty over this land. Bayi Dambun (Glades of Dusk and Shade), closely related to a portion of the enormous, nine-panel Bayi Dambun Bala Mila in the collection of the TarraWarra Museum of Art, is a seductive and immersive image exploring a subtle post-colonial presentation of the natural landscape. Cool and damp, the stillness of this image reflects a deeper cycle of life, death and regeneration. This is the foil of the rainforest, it is beautiful and deadly in equal measure. Dwarfed by the strangler vines and sprawling buttress roots of a fig tree, a man sits cross-legged on a platform with his back to the viewer. Surrounded by woven bicornal baskets, jarwun, this man is performing sacred funerary rites. As intruders to this scene, both metaphorically and physically, we silently bear witness to this ritual, only grasping the beguiling aesthetic mystery of its surface. 1. Danie Mellor Exotic Lies Sacred Ties, exhibition catalogue, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2014, p. 17
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PATRICIA PICCININI 58 born 1965 THE OFFERING, 2009 silicon, fiberglass, steel, possum fur 12.0 x 24.0 x 28.0 cm edition: 7/9 PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in November 2009 estimate :
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$8,000 – 10,000
EXHIBITED Patricia Piccinini: Evolution, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 13 March – 14 June 2009 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Unforced Intimacies, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 22 October – 21 November 2009 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Hold Me Close to Your Heart, Arter, Istanbul, 21 June – 21 August 2011 (another example) The Shadows Calling: Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey, Detached in association with Dark Mofo, Hobart, 12 June – 2 August 2015 (another example) Hyper Real, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 20 October 2017 – 18 February 2018 (another example) Patricia Piccinini: Curious Affection, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 24 March – 5 August 2018 (another example) LITERATURE Patricia Piccinini Online Catalogue Raisonné: [https://www.patriciapiccinini.net/90/60] (accessed 18/04/19)
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
SAM LEACH 59
born 1973 RHINOS WITH EVOLUTION OF COLOUR TERMS, 2014 oil and resin on wood 76.0 x 66.0 cm each 76.0 x 132.5 cm overall each signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rhino with evolution of colour terms / Sam Leach 2014 estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000 (2)
PROVENANCE Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney (label attached verso) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in September 2014 EXHIBITED Paradox of Research, Sullivan + Strumpf at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 14 – 17 August 2014 LITERATURE Frost, A., ‘Melbourne’s tale of two art fairs: paintings, perfume and a Rolls-Royce’, The Guardian, Sydney, 18 August 2014 (illus. in installation photo)
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DAVID NOONAN 60 born 1969 UNTITLED, 2015 silkscreen on linen collage 75.0 x 55.0 cm signed and dated verso: 2015 David Noonan estimate :
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$6,000 – 8,000
PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 2015 EXHIBITED David Noonan, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 26 March – 25 April 2015
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
JUAN FORD 61 born 1973 A VIEW WITH DUPLICITY, 2015 oil on linen 122.0 x 107.0 cm signed and dated verso: Juan Ford / 2015 estimate :
$14,000 – 18,000
PROVENANCE This Is No Fantasy, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in March 2016 EXHIBITED Juan Ford, This is No Fantasy, Melbourne, 14 November – 20 December 2015 This is No Fantasy: Dianne Tanzer and Nicola Stein at Art 16, London, 20 – 22 May 2016
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
JANET LAURENCE 62 born 1947 LAST GLANCE IN THE GLASS I, II AND III, 2008 Duraclear, polished aluminium, and acrylic 70.0 x 100.0 cm each PROVENANCE ARC One Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso on I and II) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in August 2008 estimate :
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$10,000 – 15,000 (3)
EXHIBITED Janet Laurence: Crimes Against the Landscape, ARC One Gallery, Melbourne, 19 August – 13 September 2008 (illus. on exhibition invitation) LITERATURE Nelson, R., ‘When the natural world and consumerism collide’, The Age, Melbourne, 13 September 2008 (illus. detail of ‘Last Glance in the Glass I’) Vandevelde, S., ‘Collector’s Dossier: Janet Laurence’, Australian Art Collector, Sydney, issue 49, July – September 2009, p. 168
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
JAN NELSON 63 born 1955 WALKING IN TALL GRASS, LUCY 2, 2010 oil on linen 77.5 x 59.5 cm signed, dated, and inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: Walking in Tall Grass: Lucy. / Jan Nelson 2010 / (Lucy 2) 2010 … estimate :
$12,000 – 16,000
PROVENANCE Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2011 EXHIBITED Jan Nelson: Marshland, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, 3 June – 2 July 2011, cat. 2 (illus. in installation view) RELATED WORK Walking in Tall Grass, Lucy, 2010, oil on linen, 77.5 x 57.5 cm, in the collection of the McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Victoria
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TIM JOHNSON 64 born 1947 (in collaboration with NAVA CHAPMAN) WHITE TARA, 2010 synthetic polymer paint on linen 183.0 x 122.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: WHITE TARA 2010 / Tim Johnson / & Nava Chapman estimate :
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$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in March 2010 EXHIBITED Tim Johnson Worlds Apart, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 25 February – 1 April 2010, cat. 2
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
IMANTS TILLERS 65 born 1950 NATURE SPEAKS: BZ, 2010 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 16 canvas boards 100.0 x 141.5 cm overall each panel numbered sequentially with stencil verso: 85573 – 85588 estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000 (16)
PROVENANCE ARC One Gallery, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 2010 EXHIBITED The Blossoming World, ARC One Gallery, Melbourne, 19 October – 13 November 2010
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
KATE SHAW 66 born 1969 BJÖRK (BIRCH), 2013 synthetic polymer paint and resin on board 60.0 x 180.0 cm signed and dated verso: Kate Shaw 2013 PROVENANCE Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 2013 estimate :
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$4,000 – 6,000
EXHIBITED Fjallkonan, Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne, 19 October – 9 November 2013 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) In Your Dreams, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick Civic Centre, Melbourne, 9 May – 9 June 2014 LITERATURE Hugo, S. ‘In Your Dreams’, Artshub, 19 May 2014 [https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/visual-arts/ sama-hugo-/in-your-dreams-243703] (accessed 28/03/19)
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
NICHOLAS HARDING 67 born 1956 PARIS POND IRISES (1), 2013 oil on Belgian linen 112.0 x 107.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Paris pond irises (I) / 2013 / Nicholas Harding estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000
PROVENANCE Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in November 2013 EXHIBITED Nicholas Harding, Paris, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, 19 November – 7 December 2013
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WORKS FROM THE pARTners ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT
68
(1935 – 2013) CLUSTER WITH PURPLE BEAKERS, 2011 Limoges porcelain eight pieces (2 bottles, 4 beakers, 2 bowls) 33.0 cm width each stamped at base with artist’s roundel PROVENANCE Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2011 EXHIBITED Gwyn Hanssen Pigott. Porcelain, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, 18 May – 11 June 2011, cat. 9 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Spring, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 October 2018 estimate :
$5,000 – 7,000 (8)
KEN YONETANI 69 born 1971, Japanese/Australian UNTITLED, 2009 porcelain 46.0 cm height PROVENANCE Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009 RELATED WORK Dead Sea, porcelain, 57.0 x 42.0 x 42.0 cm, exhibited in The Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize 2009, Woollahra Council Chambers, Sydney, 24 October – 1 November 2009, cat. 41 estimate :
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$5,000 – 7,000
WORKS FROM THE PARTNERS ART COLLECTIVE • LOTS 55 – 71
NATASHA BIENIEK 70 born 1984 NICHOLAS, 2016 oil on aluminium 9.0 x 14.0 cm signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: NATASHA BIENIEK / NICHOLAS / … / 2016 PROVENANCE Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane (label attached verso) pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne EXHIBITED Bloombox, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, 1 – 26 November 2016 estimate :
$7,500 – 9,500
MARIAN DREW 71 born 1960 LORIKEET WITH GREEN CLOTH, 2008 – 9 (FROM ‘AUSTRALIANA / STILL LIFE’ SERIES) digital print and archival pigment on Hahnemühle paper 90.0 x 112.0 cm image 112.0 x 140.0 cm sheet edition: 1/5 signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image PROVENANCE Dianne Tanzer Gallery + Projects, Melbourne pARTners Art Collective, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009 EXHIBITED Marian Drew, Turner Gallery, Perth, 20 November – 16 December 2009 This Is No Fantasy at Art Stage Singapore, Singapore, 24 – 27 January 2013 (another example, as ‘Lorikeet and Green Cloth’) 30x: Three Decades, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, 2 February – 13 October 2013 (another example) This is No Fantasy at Volta 10, Basel Art Fair, Switzerland, 16 – 21 June 2014 (another example) Illuminance, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide, 24 June – 22 July 2017 (another example) Australian Exotica, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 21 April – 1 July 2018 and travelling (another example) estimate :
$1,500 – 2,000
LITERATURE Martineau, P., Still Life in Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2010, cat. 77, pp. 14 (illus., another example) 111 RELATED WORK another example of this photograph is held in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, United States of America
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PROPERTY OF VARIOUS VENDORS
ATTRIBUTED TO FREDERIC HARDWICKE 72 FANNY HARDWICKE: A NATIVE WITH A RINGTAILED POSSUM, VAN DIEMEN’S LAND, c.1822 – 24 ink and watercolour on paper 27.5 x 22.0 cm inscribed with title lower centre: Fanny Hardwick [sic] / a native with a ringtailed possum, of / Van deimans [sic] Land. estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 7 November 1979, lot 99 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne LITERATURE Plomley, N.J.B (ed.), Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian journals and papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Bellerive, Tasmania, 1966, p. 105 Anderson, S., Charles Browne Hardwicke: an Early Tasmanian Pioneer, Wentworth Books, Sydney, 1978, pp. 60, 61 (illus.), 63 Fletcher, M., Costume in Australia, 1788-1901, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1984, pl. 6 (illus.), p. 31 Broadbent, J., and Hughes, J. (eds), The Age of Macquarie, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 151 (illus.) Kerr, J. (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 347 (illus.) Coleman, D., Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005, fig. 14, pp. 196 (illus.), 197 – 98
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ATTRIBUTED TO FREDERIC HARDWICKE 72 FANNY HARDWICKE: A NATIVE WITH A RINGTAILED POSSUM, VAN DIEMEN’S LAND, c.1822 – 24
The separation of indigenous children from their families and their institutionalization or adoption by Europeans is a familiar colonialethnocidal practice. The existence of such abuses in the Australian setting is well-known, being most recently and most comprehensively documented in the Bringing them home report.1 They were certainly commonplace in early settler Van Diemen’s Land – indeed, well before the Black War of the late 1820s, we find Lt-Gov. William Sorell making reference to the ‘Outrages of Miscreants … who sometimes wantonly fire at and kill the Men, and at others pursue the Women for the purpose of compelling them to abandon their Children…’. 2 At the 2019 Dark Mofo festival, as part of the outdoor exhibition Dark Path, contemporary Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough presented a haunting installation entitled Missing or Dead. This work – comprising ‘wanted’ posters attached to trees in the bush of the Hobart Domain – documents the lives of 185 Tasmanian Aboriginal stolen children whose traces Gough has been able to find in settler archives. In addition to written records, the tragic lives of these orphan First Nations children of Van Diemen’s Land are recorded in two poignant watercolour portraits. One is Thomas Bock’s well-known image of Mathinna, a Lowreenne girl born in exile on Flinders Island in 1835. She was ‘given’ to Lt-Gov. Sir John Franklin and his wife in 1840, only to be abandoned to the Queen’s Orphan School when the vice-regal couple returned to England three years later. Bock’s drawing shows the ‘unconquerable’ 3 seven-year-old wearing a ‘red frock. Like my father’,4 but with bare feet. 5 The present work, though obviously not as carefully-observed or technically adept as Bock’s, has a comparable historical significance and a similar affective power. Like Mathinna, Fanny Hardwicke is dolldressed in European clothes – in this case an empire line printed muslin day dress, with capped long sleeves and a triple-tucked hem. She, too, is without shoes. However, it is not the pathos of a barefoot black child in a cast-off English dress that gives this work its appeal, but rather the evident strong character of the sitter. Fanny’s gaze is direct and open, and her cherry-lipped mouth smiles warmly at the viewer. In her right hand she holds by the tail what is evidently a pet, but which also serves as a sign of her Aboriginality: a little ring-tailed possum (Pseudocheirus peregrinus).
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Although the name Frances was not uncommon in this period, and there has been some confusion between the several Indigenous Fannys that appear in the archive,6 it seems likely that Fanny Hardwicke is the sealer’s woman interviewed by George Augustus Robinson in the Hobart Town Gaol in October 1829. Robinson’s journal describes ‘Fanny, who speaks English well and knows not a word of the aboriginal tongue,’ clear evidence of a settler upbringing, though she evidently retained the native name Mitteyer. Robinson also notes ‘that she could navigate a schooner, could hand reef and steer. In make she was of middle stature, strong and very robust, and of quick intellect; and had been baptised by a clergyman at Launceston, Reverend Youl’.7 Originally a Trawlwoolway from Ringarooma, at the time of her meeting with Robinson, Fanny was the companion of a Bass Strait sealer named Baker, later living and working with ‘Norfolk Island Jack’ Williams, both at the Kent Group and on Kangaroo Island. The northern Tasmanian settler who presumably raised the girl was Charles Hardwicke, a former Royal Navy officer who arrived in Sydney on the infamous General Hewart voyage of 1814. 8 Granted permission to remain in the colony and awarded a land grant of 200 acres, Hardwicke established a successful pastoral venture at Norfolk Plains (Longford). 9 According to a descendant, ‘Hardwicke extended kindness to the native Tasmanians, and had one of them in his home as a servant, and sought to educate and train her’.10 The drawing is evidently the work of an amateur, and in Joan Kerr’s Dictionary of Australian Artists… it is attributed to Hardwicke himself.11 However, it is worth noting that Charles’ younger brother Frederic, who arrived in the colony in 1822, was at least something of an artist; Charles’ chart of his maritime expedition from Port Dalrymple to North West Cape in that same year is illustrated with three landscape sketches by Frederic.12 It is here proposed that Frederic is the artist of the present work.
1. Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 1997 2. ‘Government and General Orders’, Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, Hobart, 13 March 1819, p. 1 3. The adjective is Lady Franklin’s, from a letter to her sister of February 1843, quoted in Kolenberg, H., ‘Unconquerable spirit’, in Thomas, D. (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 years of art 1788 – 1988, International Cultural Corporation of Australia/Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1988, p. 95 4. Letter to Lady Franklin 14 November 1841, transcribed by Mathinna’s adoptive sister Eleanor Franklin, National Library of Australia, Gell and Franklin family papers 1800 – 1955 (Australian Joint Copying Project), Reel M379 5. The fragmentary letter also says ‘I have got sore feet and shoes and stockings.’ In a classic piece of cultural sublimation, for many years the drawing was housed in an oval mount which obscured the child’s obnoxious pedal extremities. 6. Two others are listed by N.J.B. Plomley from the journals of George Augustus Robinson: an adolescent girl who died in 1831 and Wutapuwitja (Wortabowidgee), also known as ‘Jock’, who was the wife of Tunnerminnerwait (‘Jack’), one of Robinson’s ‘friendly natives.’ Curiously, the eldest child of Charles Hardwicke, Fanny’s presumed adoptive father, was also named Frances (b. 1820). 7. Plomley, N.J.B., (ed.), Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829 – 1834, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery/Quintus Publishing, Launceston, second edition, 2008, pp. 91 – 92. Baptismal records show that Rev. Youl baptised a ’native child of about eleven years of age’ on 12 January 1820. Church Registers of the Anglican Parish of St John’s, Launceston, Archives Office of Tasmania, NS748/1/3 8. See Bateson, C., The Convict Ships, Library of Australian History, Sydney, 2004, pp. 198 – 199 9. By 1829 his landholdings had expanded to a total of 3,000 acres; he is today largely remembered as a pioneer of horse-breeding and racing in Tasmania. See Pretyman, E.R., ‘Hardwicke, Charles Browne (1788–1880)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/hardwicke-charles-browne-2154/text2751, published first in hardcopy 1966, accessed online 13 July 2019. 10. Anderson, S., Charles Browne Hardwicke: an Early Tasmanian Pioneer, Wentworth Books, Sydney, 1978, p. 63 11. Kerr, J. (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 346 – 7. Kerr’s even more determinedly feminist online successor, Design and Art Australia Online suggests the drawing may be by Charles’ wife Elizabeth (née Chapman). See https://www.daao.org.au/bio/charles-browne-hardwicke/ (accessed 16 July 2019) 12. Archives office of Tasmania, 343/1/3. Frederic’s technical understanding is illuminated in a remark in a letter from his brother to Lt-Gov. Sorell: ‘My brother … begs me to assure your honour that he is sorry for not being able to furnish some views he had taken, by this conveyance, for the want of two or three particular colours, but hopes soon to be able to send them.’ Letter, 23 January 1824, quoted in Anderson, op. cit., p. 35
DR DAVID HANSEN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, CENTRE FOR ART HISTORY AND ART THEORY, SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
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CONRAD MARTENS 73 (1801 – 1878) VIEW OF SYDNEY COVE, 1838 watercolour and scraping out on paper 43.0 x 63.0 cm signed and dated lower right: C. Martens / Sydney 1838 estimate :
$160,000 – 240,000
PROVENANCE John Gilchrist (1803 – 1866), Sydney Thence by descent William Oswald Gilchrist (1843 – 1920), United Kingdom, the eldest son of the above Clara Elizabeth Gilchrist (née Knox) (1851 – 1930), United Kingdom, wife of the above Thence by descent Sir Edward Ritchie Knox (1889 – 1973), Sydney Thence by descent Edward Geoffrey Knox (1924 – 1983), Canberra Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra RELATED WORK ‘Sydney from the North Shore Jany 8. 1836’, pencil on paper, 25.7 x 37.0 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXC 295, f. 23) ‘Sydney Cove from the North Shore’, 1836, watercolour with scraping out on paper, 32.0 x 47.8 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (DGD 8/f. 5) [Shore line scene, seated figure in right foreground – unfinished], pencil on paper, 13.0 x 22.0 cm, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (PXC 391, f.39a)
This is a quintessential Sydney view painted by one of the best known colonial artists. The vantage point is from Milsons Point looking directly across the Harbour to Fort Macquarie, built during the term of Governor Macquarie as a defence, but never used, with Sydney Cove and warehouses and ships’ masts to the right. The Sydney Opera House is now on the site of Fort Macquarie. As well as a celebration of the magnificent harbour setting, the painting also documents the flourishing settlement. In his preliminary sketch for this work (Mitchell Library PXC 294, f. 23) Martens gave a key to the main buildings, which include from left to right: the first St Mary’s Cathedral, Hyde Park Barracks, part of the Legislative Council Chambers (one of the former ‘Rum’ hospital buildings), Government Stables; and on the western side, the Sydney Barracks, and Government Warehouse (Commissariat Building) on the shore of Sydney Cove. Painted some two years after the sketch, Martens
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made some amendments in this finished work: the old windmill tower near present day Governor Phillip’s statue had been demolished, and the partly built new Government House, begun in 1837, is clearly visible above the fort. Unusually for Martens, he has placed an artist (himself?) with sketchbook and easel seated on a rock as a focal figure in the foreground near where the northern approaches to the Sydney Harbour Bridge now stand. A preliminary study for this figure is in one of his sketchbooks (Mitchell Library PXC 391, f. 39a). Martens had been in Sydney since April 1835 and quickly established himself as the artist of choice for the colonial merchants, officials and landowners. This success is reflected in an increasingly confident handling of his materials and subjects. Smaller, earlier versions of the subject of this painting (Mitchell Library, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Newcastle Art Gallery) are all simpler, albeit competent watercolours. In this ultimate version, Martens has completely altered the scale, mood and complexity using rich indigo tones and contrasting highlights to achieve a dramatic stormy sky looming to the south of the city. This contrasts with the sunlit sandstone of the fort emphasising the focal point of the view in the middle distance. To the left of the fort is one of the local paddle steamers Experiment or Australian, identified by the smart black and white horizontal stripes on the tall funnel. Apart from its intrinsic quality as one of Martens’ best works done at a time when his career was blossoming, this work has an impeccable provenance. As recorded in Martens’ account book in an entry which gives its title as ‘View of Sydney Cove’ dated 22 November 1838, it was acquired for fifteen guineas (Martens’ highest price at the time for a large work) by the Scottish merchant John Gilchrist (1803 – 1866) who had been based in Sydney since 1828. Like others involved in the local shipping trade, he lived at first at Millers Point. After his marriage he built Greenknowe at Darlinghurst (now Potts Point) in the mid-1840s and lived there with his family until returning to England in 1854. His eldest son William Oswald Gilchrist (1843 – 1920) followed his father in the firm and married Clara Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Sir Edward Knox, founder of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. This painting of Sydney Cove passed into the Knox family and has remained with their heirs until the present time. ELIZABETH ELLIS OAM EMERITUS CURATOR, MITCHELL LIBRARY
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GEORGE FRENCH ANGAS 74
THOMAS SHOTTER BOYS
(1822 – 1886) (1803 – 1874) lithographer THE CITY AND HARBOUR OF SYDNEY FROM NEAR VAUCLUSE, 1852 hand-coloured lithograph 31.5 x 55.5 cm PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 March 1974, lot 360 Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne estimate :
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$4,000 – 6,000
EXHIBITED Australian Paintings and Some Important Prints, Joshua McClelland Print Room, Melbourne, 27 March – 6 April 1969, cat. 24 (another example) Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 14 September 1982, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, another example) LITERATURE ‘Fine Arts for England’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 April 1853, p. 1 Tregenza, J., George French Angas. Artist Trail Traveller and Naturalist 1822 – 1886, 1980, cat. 51, p. 83 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
GEORGE EDWARDS PEACOCK 75 (1806 – c.1890s) VIEW OF SYDNEY HARBOUR oil on card 17.0 x 24.0 cm bears inscription verso: 856 / 2 bears inscription on backing board verso: 10/58 nos estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Maggs Bros. Ltd., London Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in November 1958 RELATED WORK Sydney Harbour near Watson’s Bay, 1851, oil on canvas, 26.1 x 36.5 cm, in the collection of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Vaucluse Bay, South Side of Port Jackson, New South Wales, oil on board, 17.0 x 22.0 cm, private collection
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W.E. RILEY 76 (1807 – 1836) PORTRAITS OF A PRIZE RAM AND EWE, 1828 lithograph 22.5 x 29.5 cm inscribed below image: Exhibited at Paramatta Oct. 1828 before the Agricultural Society of New South Wales from the Electoral Saxon flocks of Raby. PROVENANCE Private collection Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1987 EXHIBITED Australian and Australian-Related Art: 1830s – 1970s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 25 November – 11 December 1987, cat. 2 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney and the National Library of Australia, Canberra estimate :
$4,000 – 6,000
ELLIS ROWAN 77 (1848 – 1922) LARGE BLACK AND GREEN BUTTERFLY AND NATIVE PASSION FLOWERS OF QUEENSLAND watercolour and goauche on paper 32.0 x 38.5 cm signed lower right: Ellis Rowan inscribed with title verso: Large black & green butterfly / & native passion flowers of Queensland PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne estimate :
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$2,000 – 3,000
CONRAD MARTENS 78 (1801 – 1878) VIEW OF SYDNEY FROM ST. LEONARDS, 1842 (ALSO KNOWN AS ‘SYDNEY FROM THE NORTH SHORE’) printed 1843 hand-coloured lithograph 26.5 x 49.5 cm signed and dated in image lower left: C. Martens 1842 dated and inscribed lower right: Sydney from the North Shore, 1842 PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne estimate :
$4,000 – 6,000
EXHIBITED Autumn Exhibition 1974, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 18 March – 1 April 1974, cat. 4 (another example) Conrad Martens Centenary Exhibition, S.H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 24 May – 23 July 1978, cat. 45 (another example) LITERATURE Thomas, D., Outlines of Australian Art. The Joseph Brown Collection, Macmillan, Melbourne, third edition, 1989, cat. 20 (illus., another example, unpaginated), p. 58 de Vries-Evans, S., Conrad Martens on the Beagle and in Australia, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1993, p. 139 Ellis, E., Conrad Martens Life and Art, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, pp. 51 (illus., another example), 160, 198 RELATED WORK Sydney from St Leonards Novr. 1841, oil on canvas, 47.0 x 65.6 cm, in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
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FREDERICK McCUBBIN 79 (1855 – 1917) VIEW FROM MOUNT MACEDON, c.1907 oil on canvas 35.5 x 51.0 cm signed lower left: F McCubbin estimate :
$60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Kathie Robb Fine Art, Sydney Ken and Rona Eastaugh, Melbourne, acquired from the above c.1990 Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED possibly: Exhibition of Pictures by Frederick McCubbin, Guild Hall, Melbourne, 17 – 31 May 1907
When Frederick McCubbin exhibited his triptych The Pioneer in 1905, critics noted that he had repainted part of the right wing ‘in the manner of Turner’.1 A summation of his early works narrating the toils of the pioneer, it was painted with detailed realism and elaborate finish. The reworked part heralded a striking new development. McCubbin had a lifelong interest in the art of the great English painter, J. M. W. Turner, known at first only through illustration and reproduction. While the sale of The Pioneer to the National Gallery of Victoria through the Felton Bequest in 1906 assisted McCubbin to travel to England to see his hero in the original, his paintings prior to this trip of 1907 had come increasingly under the British master’s influence, particularly in their breadth and spontaneity. McCubbin’s move to Macedon in 1901 played a significant part, numerous landscapes of the following years revealing his response to the vivacity of light, expressed through vibrating touches and dashes of paint. The first Macedon landscapes are more quietly and closely observed, as in A Bush Scene, 1903 (Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria). Soon they give way to the broader, treed landscapes of 1904, in turn leading to the panoramas of 1906. A rather grand example is Looking North from Mount Macedon, 1906 (once in the collection of the Commercial Travellers’ Association of Victoria). While 1907 is celebrated as the year in which McCubbin’s painting underwent great change through his visit to England to see his beloved Turner face to face, he produced a number of outstanding landscapes before he went. These include The Road to Braemar, 1907 (Mildura Arts Centre, Victoria) and Wattle Glade, Macedon, 1907 (once in the distinguished collection of Sir Baldwin Spencer). Our painting, View from Mount Macedon, c.1907, has
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an affinity with The Road to Braemar, sharing tall noble gums, sweep of distant hills and valleys, the broad expanse of sky filled with imposing cumulous clouds. There is also a humanising touch, which McCubbin never quite abandoned in his landscapes. Seen earlier in Campsite Near Narbethong, c.1904 2 and Looking North from Mount Macedon, 1906, in View from Mount Macedon evening shadows begin to fill the foreground as smoke from the campfire ascends, all capturing the peaceful mood of end of day. The influence of the gifted colonial painter Louis Buvelot was very present in McCubbin’s paintings. ‘I remember as if it were yesterday, [McCubbin wrote in 1916] standing one evening a long time ago, watching the sunset glowing on the trees in Studley Park, and it was largely through Buvelot that I realised the beauty of the scene’. 3 In further comment, McCubbin almost describes our painting: ‘The feeling of closing day, approaching night and rest, the billy fire, and the smoke ascending from the burning gum branches, typify so much of life along the Victorian roads’.4 In its assured translation of the influences of Buvelot and Turner, View from Mount Macedon provides a masterly example of McCubbin’s development towards his dazzling final manner. 1. Hoff, U., ‘The Phases of McCubbin’s Art’, Meanjin, Melbourne, vol. 15, no. 3, 1956, p. 304 2. Campsite Near Narbethong, c.1904, oil on canvas, 24.3 x 34.3 cm, sold Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 August 2009, lot 41 3. McCubbin, F., ‘Some Remarks on the History of Australian Art’, in MacDonald, J. S., The Art of Frederick McCubbin, Lothian Book Publishing, Melbourne, 1916, p. 85 4. ibid., p. 86
DAVID THOMAS
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ETHEL CARRICK FOX 80 (1872 – 1952) FLOWER MARKET, c.1926 oil on wood panel 26.5 x 35.0 cm signed lower left: Carrick Fox bears inscription on old label verso: Flower Market estimate :
$25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Cheltenham, United Kingdom Private collection, London RELATED WORK Flower Market (France), oil on board, 27.0 x 35.0 cm, private collection, illus. in De Vries, S., Ethel Carrick Fox: Travels and Triumphs of a Post-Impressionist, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1997, p. 54
The flower market was a popular subject for Ethel Carrick Fox, providing ideal opportunities for creating lively figure subjects in masses of bright colour with the rapid handling of paint. The immediacy of Flower Market, c.1926 and other like paintings is a fundamental part of their appeal, the captured moment enticing the senses. By now, the sketch for Carrick, compared with the thoroughness of the academic approach, had become the finished work of art. Faces are left blank so as not to divert, nor other detail detract, achieving a pleasing overall harmony, wedded to vivacious surfaces. Carrick’s interest in life, colour and flowers was so infectious that it readily caught the eye of the French critics. Henri Breuil, writing for the Parisian Les Tendances Nouvelles, praised the work she exhibited in the 1908 Salon d’Automne with the apt comment: Mlle Ethel Carrick fires the enthusiasm of art lovers. One might compare her paintings to bouquets of flowers. Nothing could be more precise or more loving. The quiet modesty of the artist conceals real knowledge about how to see, how to place the strokes side by side and to understand … .1 Carrick exhibited in all the major Paris salons, especially the modernist Salon d’Automne of which she was a sociétaire. Over the years, her paintings of the flower markets of Paris, Chartres and elsewhere provided many highlights. Marché aux Fleurs, for example, was exhibited in the 1910 salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and others of Nice were shown in the 1932 salon. Again, Marché aux Fleurs (Nice) was in the 1927 Salon d’Automne.
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Flower Market, c.1926, the painting on offer, displays striking use of inventive form, particularly in the angularity of the colourful blooms’ wrapped presentation. This same wrapping appeared years before in French Flower Market, 1909 (private collection) with much less emphasis. 2 A comparison of the two paintings reveals many changes. The belle époque elegance of the latter has given way to the more robust age of the former, the twenties reflected in dress, greater informality of composition and painterly freedom. An absorbing feeling for the abstract inspires much of Carrick’s work. Bold, repetitive shapes evoke a celebratory note. A seeming chorus line dances across the picture surface, as form is allied to colour. In its illusion of the visual world, the background of sparkling sunlight contrasts with and balances the weighty darkness of structures and costumes. Of Carrick’s paintings devoted to the market, special mention must be made of the notable Flower Market (France), c.1910 (McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Victoria), Flower Stall, c.1920s (Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria), and those later works of Nice, In the Nice Flower Market, c.1926, (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and Flower Vendors, Nice, c.1930, (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth). Le Marché aux Fleurs, c.1928, is in the collection of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. Among these, Flower Market provides a carnival of colour, light and form, in which the illusion of reality is enlivened by abstract invention. 1. Breuil, H., ‘Promenade travers les Salons de Salon d’Automne’, Les Tendances Nouvelles, Paris, vol. 30, no. 39, December 1908, quoted in Goddard, A., ‘An artistic marriage’, Art, Love and Life: Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2011, p. 24 2. French Flower Market, 1909, illustrated in Goddard, op. cit., p. 69
DAVID THOMAS
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RUPERT BUNNY 81 (1864 – 1947) THE FALLING STAR, c.1909 oil on canvas 81.0 x 54.0 cm signed lower left: Rupert C. W. Bunny estimate :
$140,000 – 180,000
PROVENANCE Mr J.M.C. Forsaythe, Sydney Thence by descent Mrs Phyllis Leishman, New South Wales Christie’s, Sydney, 6 October 1976, lot 325 (as ‘Two Ladies on a Balcony’) Private collection Christie’s, London, 26 October 1983, lot 125 (as ‘Two Ladies on a Balcony, Looking at the Stars’) Blue Boy Art Gallery, Melbourne Private collection Blue Boy Art Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Rona Eastaugh, acquired from the above in 1985 Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009 EXHIBITED Days and Nights in August, The Baillie Gallery, London, 22 April – 12 May 1911, cat. 10 Exhibition of Pictures by Rupert Bunny, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 24 July – 14 August 1911, cat. 81 Exhibition of Pictures by Rupert Bunny, Lawson & Little Galleries, Sydney, 22 September – 7 October 1911, cat. 53 LITERATURE ‘On Rupert Bunny’s Exhibition’, VAS, Melbourne, no. 2, 1 August 1911, p. 6 Souter, D. H., ‘Rupert Bunny and His Pictures’, Art and Architecture, Sydney, vol. VIII, no. 2, September – October 1911, p. 349 Eagle, M., The Art of Rupert Bunny, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1991, pp. 72, 78 Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny: A Catalogue Raisonné, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, vol. II, cat. O301, p. 44
When The Falling Star, c.1909 was shown in Rupert Bunny’s solo exhibition at London’s Baillie Gallery in April of 1911, he was hailed as ‘the greatest figure painter that Australia has produced’.1 The writer for The British-Australasian added that Bunny ‘holds an assured position among the leading artists in Paris’. Such praise was not alone. Earlier in the month, Bunny’s paintings and forthcoming exhibition were featured over two pages in London’s Black and White magazine under the heading, ‘A Fresh Note in Modern Figure Painting’. 2 Some of Bunny’s then finest works were illustrated, including Après le Bain, c.1904, now in the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris and Une Nuit de Canicule,
c.1910, which was later to break the $1million barrier for an Australian painting sold at auction. 3 The London writer described Bunny as ‘a young Australian artist, whose choice of subject and methods of treatment single him out from the generality of modern painters without reference to his masterly technique and brilliancy of colouring’. Admiration for the ‘sensuous elegance of his work’ is supported by many of the paintings in the exhibition, especially The Green Caterpillar, c.1908, a work of special beauty.4 While narrative in Bunny’s paintings is reserved for the senses, their enveloping presence in his art is part of its magic. Delight in the caress of light on flouncy dresses, the feel of silk, intimate conversation, the indulgent warmth of a summer night in August. Others in this series evoke music by title, colour and composition as in The Song in the Distance, c.1909 (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane) and A Nocturne of Chopin, c.1908/9 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). The Falling Star adds another element – excitement. The two women, one seen from behind, the other a side view, strike an informal note, composed to invite the viewer’s participation. Contrasted against the pulsating darkness of the summer evening, you can almost feel the warmth of the night air. Yet, like the falling star, all is transient. The falling star has long been a token of good luck – and seemingly lots of other things. The wish you make might come true. Bunny’s favourite model, his beautiful wife Jeanne, attracts attention by her action and the focus on his favoured colours of red and green. When shown in Bunny’s 1911 exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, The Falling Star was singled out for mentioned by the critics. 5 The writer for The V.A.S. asked enticingly, ‘ … is it a little like Paul Veronese?’.6 Throughout his life, Bunny was inclined to work in series – classical mythologies, in the gardens or on the beach, a new book or indoor indolence, red and white striped blinds as the balcony balanced life between indoors and out, then late mythological decorations and the dreamlike landscapes of spring in the south of France. Their constant was beauty. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the full flowering of la belle époque, centered on Paris. Elegance, feminine beauty and fashion achieved their apogee. Bunny’s paintings captured all. 1. ‘Art Notes’, British-Australasian, London, 27 April 1911, p. 16 2. ‘A Fresh Note in Modern Figure Painting’, Black and White, London, 15 April 1911, pp. 90 – 91 3. Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 2 November 1988, lot 125, sold for $1,250,000 4. Black and White, op. cit., p. 91. The Green Caterpillar, (La Chenille Vert), c.1908, sold for $516,000 at Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 17 May 2011, lot 75 5. ‘On Rupert Bunny’s Exhibition’, VAS, Melbourne, no. 2, 1 August 1911, pp. 6 – 7; and Souter, D. H., ‘Rupert Bunny and His Pictures’, Art and Architecture, Sydney, vol. VIII, no. 2, September – October 1911, p. 349 6. The V.A.S., op. cit., p. 6
DAVID THOMAS
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CLARICE BECKETT 82 (1887 – 1935) SUMMER MORNING, BEAUMARIS oil on pulpboard 22.0 x 31.0 cm signed lower right: C. Beckett bears inscription with title verso: Summer Morning Beaumaris bears inscription on frame verso: Mr Morton paid 65 estimate :
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$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Morton collection, acquired from the above in 1971 Thence by descent Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 25 August 2002, lot 175 (as ‘Across the Bay’) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Homage to Clarice Beckett, Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 30 October – 20 November 1971, cat. 65
CLARICE BECKETT 83 (1887 – 1935) BEACH oil on pulpboard 25.5 x 36.0 cm signed lower right: C. Beckett estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Adelaide Sotheby’s, Sydney, 25 August 2002, lot 115 Private collection, Sydney
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ARTHUR BOYD 84 (1920 – 1999) SHOALHAVEN RIVER WITH BOAT, c.1980s oil on canvas 91.0 x 122.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd estimate :
$60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 31 July 1990, lot 164 Private collection, Melbourne
Arthur Boyd returned to Australia in 1971, eager to rediscover his antipodean roots having spent over a decade in the lush English countryside. A short time after his homecoming, art dealer Frank McDonald invited Arthur and his wife Yvonne to visit his property by the banks of the Shoalhaven River, on the south coast of New South Wales. On this sweltering hot day Boyd commenced a sketch of the Shoalhaven River, thus beginning a love affair with the region and its many moods. Boyd and his wife proceeded to purchase two properties adjacent to the Shoalhaven River, ‘Riversdale’ and later ‘Bundanon’, the wild landscape becoming one of Boyd’s most enduring subjects, painted well into his final years.
‘While Boyd in general chooses to portray the Shoalhaven landscape more identified with Von Guerard and Buvelot, at other times he cannot resist the temptation to paint the landscape in the manner of the early Box Hill painters ... Despite their reliance on a realistic approach to the subject, the Boyd Shoalhaven landscapes are more varied in technique and style than one might suppose. With his prodigious ability the artist is able to take the nature of the subject and render it in a manner which captures the essence of its particular properties at that time, or imbue it with a sense of character and meaning which is the result of his own immediate emotional or psychological response’. 3 Having always delighted in his painting trips along the river, Boyd believed his magical Bundanon property should belong to the Australian people. In 1993 the property was gifted to the Australian Government, to be preserved forever, in the hope that future generations may also be inspired by the beauty and brilliance of the Shoalhaven River. 1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Press, London, 1994, p. 42
The majesty of the soaring cliffs which border the Shoalhaven remained a perennial image of the series, with the sunbathed Nowra sandstone standing timelessly above the tranquil river. As Janet McKenzie has observed; ‘The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly. His paintings are a celebration of the grandeur and wonder of Nature. It is to Boyd’s credit that a single landscape can inspire such diversity of work. He gives us the impression that in life there are infinite possibilities, as long as we train ourselves to see’.1 Shoalhaven River with Boat, c.1980s is a pure landscape, celebrating the unspoiled bush, completely removed from urban life. The piercing blue of the sky above the still waters of the river, creates a scene that ‘glow[s] with well-being, joy and a sense of youth’. 2 The boatman, quietly drifting in the sunshine, is dwarfed by the landscape surrounding him. Boyd uses scale to great effect, with the dramatic rock face and sweeping sky conspiring to press Boyd’s ideas about our place in the landscape. Local of scene, yet national in imagery, Shoalhaven River with Boat, c.1980s is unquestionably Australian in colour, light and atmosphere. As Sandra McGrath describes:
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2. McGrath, S., The Artist and the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 62 3. ibid, p. 63
MELISSA HELLARD
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JOHN OLSEN 85 born 1928 FLOODED RIVER PASSING THE SIMPSON DESERT, 2007 oil on canvas 122.0 x 152.0 cm signed and dated lower left: John Olsen 07 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “Flooded River Passing / the / Simpson Desert” / John Olsen 07 estimate :
$90,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE Olsen Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Queensland, commissioned from the artist in 2007
With a vast and varied oeuvre spanning more than seven decades, John Olsen has quite deservedly been hailed Australia’s greatest living artist. From the pulsating, larrikin energy of his You Beaut Country series, to the quieter, more metaphysical paintings inspired by his expeditions to Lake Eyre, or the exquisitely lyrical works immortalising his halcyon days in Clarendon, Olsen’s unique interpretations of the natural environment in its manifold moods have become indelibly etched on the national psyche, revolutionising the way in which we now perceive the Australian landscape. Indeed, where artistic predecessors such as Russell Drysdale and Sidney Nolan had presented visions of a parched, inhospitable land where figures stand as sentinels in the wilderness, Olsen instead highlights the teeming activity and incident within this remote region, inviting the viewer to experience his sheer wonderment at the redemptive, life-affirming properties of mother nature: ‘The urge for life is a staggering thing and we just ought to take notice … There is such fecundity in this universe’.1 Painted in 2007, Flooded River Passing the Simpson Desert encapsulates Olsen’s remarkable ability to capture both the immensity and intricacy of the Australian landscape. Employing his signature ‘all-at-once’, multiperspective approach – ‘I’m down on the canvas one moment and up flying the next, or looking sideways or underneath’ 2 – thus the work possesses a remarkable breadth and spaciousness which conveys tangibly the sight as well as the feel of this sparse terrain. Map-like, the aerial view details the solid but sinuous form of the flooded river meandering through the folds of the surrounding ochre gorges and plains –here evoked through an irreverent tangle of squiggling lines and pattern. As the eye ascends upwards through the picture plane, it is brought back to reality by the illusion of depth suggested in the conventional horizon line and flat field of blue sky beyond. Even within this expansive scene however, importantly Olsen still incorporates delightful details of the local birdlife – encouraging the viewer to appreciate the relationship between the tiny and the vast, the microcosm and macrocosm in a manner reminiscent of his first responses to the area three decades earlier (when travelling to Lake Eyre in 1974). Witnessing first-hand the arid, salt-encrusted plains of the South Australian desert erupting into a veritable oasis, ‘a carnival of life’ following the extraordinary floods of
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1973 (only the second such occurrence since white settlement), Olsen had been immediately awestruck by discovery of the monumental in the miniature: ‘My devotion to Chinese art and philosophy finds fulfilment in this experience. Nothing too small or too strange should escape my attention – an insect’s wing, the leap of a frog, the flight pattern of dragonflies. They all induce poetic rapture’. 3 Far from being a despondent image of the wild, desolate reaches of the country’s interior, the present work resonates with a vitalistic energy – betraying a sense of not only keen observation, but joyful celebration derived from a lifetime dedicated to physical and spiritual immersion in the landscape. For ultimately, as Olsen poignantly muses, the Australian outback offered more than mere topographical phenomena to be accurately recorded. More fundamentally perhaps, the experience was the catalyst for a myriad of ideas and metaphorical connections that reaffirmed his Taoist belief in the total interconnectedness of all living forms, thereby heralding a new spirituality in his art: ‘The enigma of it all. It is a desert and it can be full. After the rains, it is so incredibly abundant; so what you are looking at in one place, as if through an act of the Dao, becomes full … It has an effect on you when you are there because all the time it is impossible for you to accept fully the sense of impermanence and transitoriness. Somehow it affects you – you realise that you are looking at an illusion really. I don’t think that there is anything more Buddhist than that’.4 1. Olsen quoted in Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 123 2. Olsen quoted in Hawley, J., ‘John Olsen’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1993, p. 129 3. Olsen quoted in Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 116 4. Olsen quoted in Hart, op. cit., p.135
VERONICA ANGELATOS
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ROGER KEMP 86 (1908 – 1987) SEQUENCE, c.1968 – 75 synthetic polymer paint on paper on canvas 151.0 x 300.0 cm estimate :
$40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 September 2005, lot 43 Company Collection, Sydney
Confident, international, and boldly contemporary in its creative ambition, Sequence, c.1968 – 75 stands at the forefront of Roger Kemp’s mid-1970s work. He was of the same generation as America’s abstract expressionists, and the art of this diligent Australian master was uncannily on a similar wavelength. Kemp had begun crafting semiabstract pictures of visionary figures while still a young modern painter in the 1930s. Human progress was his driving theme as he arranged those figures into geometric patterns, aspiring to convey our changing place in the cosmos. Sequence represents the culmination of what had been a long, solitary road. Painted soon after a sojourn working and exhibiting in London, it shows a gutsy mature style approach where the artist stepped up scale, gained luminosity in his handling of colour, and, most of all, achieved an unmistakable expressiveness. Kemp would unfurl and staple wide rolls of imported paper across his studio wall, before drawing a loose compositional structure in conté crayon. Then he energetically set to work, applying paint in a quick steady manner. Using a roller to set in rectangles, then his brush to establish a strong structural armature, then taking up his roller, again, set in coloured squares. And so it went on for day upon day as Kemp refined his visual idea. There was a symbolic intent guiding Kemp’s Sequence works through the mid-1970s. The art historian Patrick McCaughey, a devoted supporter who saw them painted, explains, ‘Roger believed the forms and rhythm of his brush configured on the canvas or sheet of paper were the visible forms of an unseen rhythm of the universe, of the physical world’.1 With this composition square and circle represent the scientific and the spiritual, those alternate outlooks humanity unceasingly strives to resolve.
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Sequence was painted in systematic steps. What is necessarily an intricate composition being built from elemental shapes: squares and rectangles, with the suggestion of fugitive circles. Kemp arranges them using his preferred palette of red and blue with shades of purple or mauve, deploying white accents to set positive visual notes, while firmly establishing structure with thick black strokes. The artist, who studied music in his youth, would liken this to classical composition, showing studio visitors how he carefully built up visual structures in an integrated semi-harmonic manner not unlike Bach, his favourite composer. The rhythmic looseness to Sequence is characteristic of Kemp’s best 1970s work, geometry being handled with a jaunty confidence. His sure command of improvised form accounts for a strong sense of compositional balance in what is an asymmetrical work. The left side of the composition is not a mirror image of the right, but in a design sense the painting’s right visually stabilises or completes the left. In this the viewer will also see how Kemp animates the composition with a joyous sense of restless activity. Sequence strongly holds its own in pictorial terms. Representing Roger Kemp at his best, this is sophisticated art for the mature eye—like a brooding passage from Bach, Sequence resonates with a musical richness. 1. Patrick McCaughey, The Bright Shapes and the True Names: A Memoir, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2003, p. 102
DR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE
The major retrospective exhibition, Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist, is currently showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, 23 August – 1 December 2019
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LEONARD FRENCH 87 (1928 – 2017) THE ARRIVALS, 1981 enamel on composition board 137.0 x 121.5 cm signed lower left: French estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 24 July 1988, lot 348 (as ‘The Animals’) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Leonard French: Dark Circus, Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney, 8 August – 2 September 1981, cat. 2
From relative obscurity, Leonard French forged his own path to astonishing popularity. One of the most idiosyncratic talents in Australian art, French trained as a signwriter, while supplementing his training with part-time art classes. The artist was taken under the wing of Melbourne Technical College lecturer Victor Greenhalgh, who identified his prodigious talent and later gave French a teaching position. French was further captivated by the Melbourne art scene when he frequented the Swanston Family Hotel in Swanston Street after classes, an establishment also patronised by numerous emerging artists including Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh, Charles Blackman and John Olsen. The combination of his teaching and signwriting studies, together with regular debates among his artist peers at the Swanston Family Hotel (such congregations were later known as ‘Len French’s University’1), enabled French’s burgeoning artistic vision to solidify. From the late 1950s, French’s ascent was meteoric, winning in quick succession the Crouch, Perth, Peace Congress, Sulman and Blake prizes, the latter of which he won a second time in 1980. While the Australian art scene in the late 1960s and 1970s was dominated by movements such as colour field abstraction, French, ever the isolate, plunged into the figurative idioms that defined his late work. Describing himself in 1981 as a ‘dog among the fairies’, 2 French charged further into the dark allegories of captivity and death first established in his Death of a Revolution some years earlier. Exploring the rich subject of the circus, replete with dynamism and excitement yet undercut with melancholy and alienation, French embarked on his Dark Circus series, saturating all imagery with an advancing gloom.
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’The metaphor of the circus of life has attracted many artists, from the carnivals of Bruegel and Ensor to the clowns and harlequins of Rouault, Léger and Picasso, and in Australian art the ballroom dancers of John Brack, the carnival scenes of John Perceval and the performance arena of Andrew Sibley’s grand circus. French’s arena is a circus of cut-out facades; among them are rocking horses, and toy elephants which he has appropriated from his daughter’s picture books. Behind the facade lies the darkness…’ 3 In The Arrivals, 1981 people haul cut-out circus symbols toward a menacing furnace, reminiscent of the abandoned Hoffman Brickworks where the artist painted as a child. Beneath the spectacle of the ‘circus’ lies something ominous and frightening. The black smoke in the sky and the cavernous eyes of the crowd reflect the sombre emotions that had lingered in the artist’s imagination for some years. However, The Arrivals, 1981, bearing the luscious enamel surface favoured by the artist, does not sacrifice aesthetics for subject matter. In an interview with Jill Tobias in 1985, French explained: “Whatever I’ve got to say in a painting I still want the painting to be beautiful, to be a beautiful object, whatever the idea may be”.4 Owing no debt to other Australian artists of his time, French is a truly individual character in Australian art. 1. Heathcote, C., A Quiet Revolution: the rise of Australian art 1946-1968, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1995, p. 63 2. ‘Leonard French, a man apart’, Weekend Australian, 18 – 19 April 1981 3. Grishin, S., Leonard French, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 53 4. Tobias, J., ‘Leonard French, the Political Hermit’, Bendigo Advertiser, Victoria, 2 February 1985
MELISSA HELLARD
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YVONNE AUDETTE 88 born 1930 CALLIGRAPHY ON AN ANCIENT TABLET, 1965 oil on plywood 57.5 x 47.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 65 signed verso: Audette estimate :
$35,000 – 45,000
PROVENANCE Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 2009 EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette: Salon Exhibition, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, 8 September – 3 October 2009 (label attached verso, as ‘Calligraphy on an Ancient Tablet, No. 2, 1960’) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 66 (illus. inverted, as ‘Calligraphy on an Ancient Tablet, No. 2, 1960’)
Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s firsthand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous mark-making and the textural layering of line and abstract form. After travelling in Europe Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955.1 Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana) who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London. A beautiful example of her work from the mid-1960s, Calligraphy on an Ancient Tablet, 1965 reflects the confidence of an artist who had reached creative maturity. Here we see her manipulating paint with a brush and palette knife, as well as the end of the brush (dragged through the paint), building up a richly tactile surface. Gestural marks play off against this texture, which is balanced against a restrained use of colour, where black, a deep tan, and shades of blue and grey are submerged and emerge through the pale toned ground. The Italian critic, Garibaldo Marussi, could well have been describing this painting when he wrote evocatively of Audette’s work, ‘images and sensations are decanted and purified, until no vestige of contact with the immediacy of objective reality remains. Recalled to the canvas surface, they have become delicate but nevertheless unfaltering images of wholly interior experience, the scanning of the syntax pronounced in moderate tones, without fanfare, almost fragile and yet strong, being endowed with intense evocative power.’ 2 While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for her important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003. 1. Audette lived in Florence until 1963, relocating to Milan before returning to Australia permanently in 1966. 2. Marussi, G., catalogue statement, Yvonne Audette, Galleria Schneider, Rome, 1965, quoted in James, B., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Later Years’, Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 145
KIRSTY GRANT
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KEN WHISSON 89 born 1927 DELICATE BALANCE, 1984 oil on canvas 88.5 x 118.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: (In Bilico) / ‘Delicate Balance’ / 6 / 10 / 84 / Ken Whisson inscribed canvas edge verso: Touches of yellow etc. / added 11 / 8 / 85 / ‘IN BILICO’ / DELICATE BALANCE / PRECARIOUS BALANCE’ 6 / 10 / 84 [illeg] in fact goes equally well either way Ken Whisson In Bilico’ Delicate Balance 6 / 10 / 84 IN BILICO OR ‘OOPLA’ 6 / 10 / 84 estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 4 March 2003, lot 23 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED 30th Anniversary Summer Exhibition, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 13 – 17 December 1994 and 3 – 28 January 1995, cat. 49
In 1977 Ken Whisson moved to Italy, where he lived and worked until 2017. Italy suited the artist’s temperament, having grown up and spent so long in a conformist Australia, he relished the idea of a country where it was accepted that to live as an artist was quite a normal vocation. A further attraction for Whisson was his interest in global politics and the political shifts which were occurring in Europe at that time – living in Italy allowed him to be closer to the action. Delicate Balance, 1984, belongs to a group of works which feature circus animals, clowns, jugglers and street performers. Although the series was created in the early 1980s, the imagery harks back to a visit the artist made to Morocco in 1969. In Marrakech, he watched the street circus performance in the town square ’which seemed to go on all day, every day’.1 In an interview with Barbara Blackman Whisson discussed the imagery in the circus paintings: ‘ … I was thinking about atomic war so much, and nuclear war. Europe was very conscious of it because the Geneva Conference was so obviously a farce, so obviously a front for putting new missiles into Europe, and those missiles are so incredibly dangerous … I had the feeling that there wouldn’t be anything to paint anymore, but nuclear annihilation. I took to thinking what a world it might be … what human relations would need to be, if people were going to relate in such a way that they didn’t have to bring about wars … Now that we all live together as an enormous human family across the whole globe, we might need to relate together by entertaining one another. I thought of the world as a great circus’. 2
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The palette of Delicate Balance is typical of Whisson’s use of bright primary and secondary colours and he presents the forms in a simple, matter of fact way. His basic colour combinations are not dissimilar to those of a sign writer and he uses them with similar intent; he wants his paintings to be noticed, to arrest the viewer’s attention and draw the eye through the narrative in an almost subliminal manner. Apart from his early works where the influence of Danila Vassilieff and Sidney Nolan is evident, Whisson’s images are totally original. The artist used these early influences as a springboard into his imagination, applied his own ideas about painting and never looked back. His paintings are direct and uncompromising pictures in every way. Perhaps it was Whisson’s choice, to live a humble life devoid of excesses and in a foreign country, which enabled him to create such an unparalleled and consistent body of work over so many decades of dedicated practice. 1. Whisson, K., quoted in Ken Whisson Paintings 1957 – 1985, Broken Hill City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 1985, p. 19 2. Barbara Blackman, interview with Ken Whisson for National Library of Australia, Oral History Program, 20 April 1984, 2:2
HENRY MULHOLLAND
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PETER BOOTH 90 born 1940 PAINTING 1983 (APOCALYPTIC LANDSCAPE), 1983 oil on canvas 111.5 x 182.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: FOR MONIKA PETER BOOTH 1983 estimate :
$30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Sydney, 29 November 1993, lot 233 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 4 March 2003, lot 24 Private collection, Sydney
Peter Booth has produced a large and powerful body of paintings and drawings sublimating a critical view of contemporary society into expressive and stylistically rigorous artworks. A key figure in the revival of figurative painting in Melbourne in the 1980s, Booth’s reputation as one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary painters was cemented in the early years of that decade. In 1982 he was chosen (alongside Rosalie Gascoigne) to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, was heralded as the ‘star’ of Eureka!, a seminal survey show of Australian art at the Serpentine Gallery, London, and went on to be included in another, Australian Visions, at the Guggenheim in 1984. Unperturbed by this torrent of accolades, Booth continued to steadfastly create monumental canvases depicting bizarre apocalyptic visions, populated by fantastic ghouls and strewn with cryptic symbols from his own personal lexicon. Painting 1983 (Apocalyptic Landscape), 1983 is an energetic painting, endowed with a rough and sculptural urgency. Painted using a wet-onwet process, Booth has left in full view the force with which new paint has been dragged through an already laden surface. With a reduced palette, Booth’s view is totally imagined, yet portrayed with a raw immediacy. These stylistic qualities closely align Booth’s work of the early 1980s with that of Neo-Expressionist painters overseas, particularly in Germany, for example Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz, all of whom displayed works in the 1982 Sydney Biennale. Extant critical support overseas for this form of expressionism certainly contributed to Booth’s rapid notoriety. Donald Kuspit, the celebrated American critic, in writing of German Neo-Expressionism in a 1982 edition of Art in America, identifies the powerful attraction of such works – ‘It is clearly an art about the power of paint to create a perverse poetry – the power of paint to conjure images that overpower and force the spectator to look beyond his ordinary perception’.1
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Leon Paroissien, in his review of Australian Art between 1982 – 1983, writes that Booth’s apocalypse paintings reveal the artist’s pessimistic view of the general state of society. 2 While global preoccupations such as cold war tensions, widespread deforestation and mass unemployment certainly fed into contemporary art worldwide, it is likely that Booth’s dazzling inferno and devastation of Painting, was inspired by closer concerns, particularly the Ash Wednesday bushfires that ravaged Victoria and South Australia in February of 1983. 3 Save for a few figures, licked by comic-book red flames, the landscape that appears beneath inky-black skies is almost completely obscured by flaming orbs, projectiles and explosive impacts. Beyond the frightening nature of Booth’s dystopia, one can find a sense of freedom in its execution. Rosalie Gascoigne certainly recognised this quality, writing in 1989: ‘it looks… as if the artist really enjoyed putting in … the lavish colours and lurid details!’.4 1. Kuspit, D., Art in America, New York, no. 7, Sept 1982, p. 142 2. Paroissien, L (ed.), Australian Art Review 2, Warner Associates Pty Ltd with Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 10 3. Holloway, M., ‘Calmer Booth Reverses Expectations’, The Age, Melbourne, 9 November 1983, p. 14 4. Gascoigne, R., Peter Booth Drawings 1977 – 1987, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1989
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
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PROVENANCE Private collection, Minneapolis, USA Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 22 November 1998, lot 325 (as ‘Faith’) Private collection, Melbourne Mossgreen, Melbourne, 16 November 2010, lot 60 (as ‘Diuturi’) Private collection, Melbourne
IMANTS TILLERS 91 born 1950 DIEVTURI, 1990 charcoal, synthetic polymer paint, gesso on 48 canvas boards 75.0 x 145.0 cm overall each panel numbered sequentially with stencil verso: 30272 – 30319 estimate :
182
$6,000 – 8,000 (48)
LITERATURE Curnow, W., Imants Tillers and the ‘Book of Power’, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, pl. 30 (illus.), pp. 127, 128, 136 RELATED WORK Faith, 1988, oil stick, gouache, synthetic polymer paint on 48 canvas boards, in the collection of the National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia
KEN UNSWORTH 92 born 1931 FREE FALL SERIES II – STONE CUBE, 1976 river stones and steel 55.0 x 60.0 x 60.0 cm PROVENANCE Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2003 estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000
EXHIBITED Ken Unsworth: the art of flowers, survey 1973 – 2003, drawings, scale models, sculptures, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney, 30 April – 31 May 2003 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 17) RELATED WORK Free fall, 1975, steel, 224.0 cm height, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
183
BEN QUILTY 93 born 1973 SEROQUEL, 2013 oil on linen 170.0 x 160.0 cm signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: Seroquel Ben Quilty 2013 estimate :
$55,000 – 75,000
PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED The Fiji Wedding, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 20 April – 1 June 2013 LITERATURE Flanagan, R., (et al.), Ben Quilty, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 173 (illus.), 346
Almost four hundred years ago, the English poet John Donne wrote the famous stanza ’no man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent’.1 This rallying call for empathy and solidarity amongst men and women is echoed in Ben Quilty’s oeuvre, following his restless transmutations from painterly skulls, babies and Toranas to grotesque portraits and desolate paintings of discarded life jackets, dense with pathos. As his current touring survey exhibition (currently on view at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art and opening at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in November) would attest, Quilty has reached an impressive level of recognition for a living Australian artist, which he has used judiciously to support numerous social causes. The most strident was his advocacy for clemency for Myuran Sukumaran, an Australian who, at the time was awaiting a death sentence in Bali. In 2012, Quilty was posted as official Australian war artist to Tarin Kowt in Afghanistan, documenting in a series of portraits the psychological sequels of active service – paintings whose power Richard Flanagan described as ’impossible to dismiss or diminish’. 2 With his distinctive impasto surface, Seroquel, 2013 was amongst the first paintings created after this series, contemplative and mysterious, yet still containing a Baconian torment in its floating figure. 3 Displayed in a solo exhibition entitled Fiji Wedding, at Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries, Seroquel belongs to a group of pictures in Quilty’s oeuvre that express discomfort with his place in the world, its privileges and responsibilities. Quilty was disturbed by the vast disparity of experience between his deployment and his participation in a luxurious destination wedding in Fiji, in a holiday resort removed from the poverty and squalor of the rest of the island and from pressing global concerns of social justice. Amid the artifice and debauchery of Australians on tour, Quilty’s inquisitive figure is unsettled. One of only three portraits of Myuran painted by the artist, this figure is suspended from the sky, hovering upside down from a sanguine cloud, removed and observing the rippling black tides of contemporary history.4 With a restricted chromatic palette, Seroquel conveys the uncertainty of our times. The island crowned by a single drooping palm tree recurs in several paintings of 2013, including Survivor, Myuran and culminating in an expansive Rorschach painting The Island, exhibited in the 2014 Adelaide Biennial. Using this motif as a condensed metaphor for the trauma and displacement inherent in our island nation, Quilty presents Seroquel as a meditation on responsibility. The floating figure, caught in its thoughts, is however, unaware of the dawning patch of blue sky in the upper right. Quilty, after all, remains an optimist in the face of adversity. 1. Donne, J., Devotions, 1624 2. Flanagan R., (et al.), Ben Quilty, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2019, p. 20 3. Seroquel is the trade name of an antipsychotic medication used to treat mood disorders such as Schizophrenia and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 4. conversation between the artist and Damian Hackett, 31 July 2019
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
184
185
RAMESH NITHIYENDRAN 94 born 1988, Sri Lankan/Australian GOLDEN DICKHEAD, 2013 red terracotta and glaze 24.0 x 37.0 x 30.0 cm PROVENANCE Depot Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2013 EXHIBITED Art Month Speed Dating Finalist Exhibition, Depot Gallery, Sydney, 3 – 7 September 2013 estimate :
$4,000 – 6,000
HOSSEIN VALAMANESH 95 born 1949, Iranian/Australian UNTITLED, c.1980 wood, mud, ceramic, string and brick 134.0 x 40.0 x 40.0 cm PROVENANCE Greenaway Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2006 estimate :
186
$3,000 – 5,000
BEN QUILTY 96 born 1973 SELF PORTRAIT, SAINT DENIS, 2014 oil on linen 61.0 x 50.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Self Portrait, Saint Denis Ben Quilty 2014 estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Galerie Allen, Paris Private collection, Queensland EXHIBITED Ben Quilty. Alien, Galerie Allen, Paris, 17 September — 11 October 2014 LITERATURE Flanagan R., (et al.), Ben Quilty, Penguin Random House, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 205 (illus.), 347
187
PHILIP WOLFHAGEN 97 born 1963 THIRD RECOLLECTION, 1997 oil and beeswax on linen 96.0 x 122.0 cm signed with initial, dated and inscribed with title lower right: W OCTOBER / 1997 / “THIRD / RECOLLECTION” artist’s stamp lower right estimate :
188
$18,000 – 24,000
PROVENANCE Sherman Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1998 EXHIBITED Philip Wolfhagen – Surface Tension, Sherman Galleries Goodhope, Sydney, 12 June – 4 July 1998, cat. 14 (as ‘Recollection no. 3, 1998’)
AIDA TOMESCU 98 born 1955 FLINDERS RED, 2004 oil on linen 183.0 x 153.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Aida Tomescu / FLINDERS / RED / 2004 / … estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2004 EXHIBITED Aida Tomescu, Martin Browne Fine Art at the Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 29 September – 3 October 2004; Martin Browne Fine Art at the Yellow House, Sydney, 12 October – 7 November 2004, cat. 14 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 19)
189
PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 25 August 1998, lot 36 (as ‘Returning Home, Village in Brittany, c. 1888’) Private collection, Sydney
JOHN PETER RUSSELL 99 (1858 – 1930) COTTAGES, BELLE-ÎLE, c.1907 watercolour and pencil on paper 26.0 x 36.5 cm signed lower centre: JOHN RUSSELL estimate :
190
$10,000 – 15,000
RELATED WORK [Landscape with road and cottages, Belle-Ile], 1907, watercolour on cardboard, 25.4 x 33.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Houses, Belle-Ile, 1908, watercolour on paper, 27.5 x 39.0 cm, Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 22 November 1998, lot 255, formerly in the collection of the artist’s daughter, Jeanne Jouve, France
VERA ROCKLINE 100 (1896 – 1934, Russian) NUDE WITH NECKLACE oil on canvas 61.5 x 46.5 cm signed lower right: VERA ROCKLINE estimate :
$15,000 – 25,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 27 May 1981, lot 1000C (as ‘The Pink Necklace’) Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne
191
MARGARET PRESTON 101 (1875 – 1963) BANKSIA AND TRUNK, c.1935 woodcut 30.5 x 30.5 cm edition: unknown signed with initials in image lower right: MP signed and inscribed with title below image: aus,, Banksia woodcut Margaret Preston PROVENANCE Private collection, California, USA estimate :
192
$3,500 – 4,500
EXHIBITED Contemporary Group Exhibition, Farmer’s Blaxland Galleries, Sydney, 13 – 24 August 1935, cat. 91 (another example) Margaret Preston: the art of constant rearrangement, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 December 1985 – 9 February 1986, cat. P28 (another example) Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 July – 23 October 2005, and touring (another example) LITERATURE Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 184, p. 174 (illus., another example)
OLIVE COTTON 102 (1911 – 2003) TEACUP BALLET, 1935 printed 1991 silver gelatin photograph 35.0 x 28.0 cm edition: 34/50 signed, dated and inscribed with title below image PROVENANCE Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1994 EXHIBITED A Century of Australian Women Artists, 1840s – 1940s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June – 3 July 1993, cat. 95 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, pp. 27, 28) Olive Cotton: Photographs 1920s – 1990s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 19 October – 11 November 1995, cat. 4 (illus. in exhibition catalogue back cover, another example) Olive Cotton: Photographs 1920s – 1990s, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 21 October 1995, cat. 43 (another example) Olive Cotton, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 May – 2 July 2000, and National Library of Australia, Canberra, 12 July – 19 September 2000 (another example) Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013 (another example) estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
LITERATURE Hall, B., & Mather, J., ‘Olive Cotton’ in Australian Women Photographers 1840 – 1960, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1986, p. 84 (illus., another example) Edwards, D., and Mimmocchi, D. (eds.), Sydney Moderns: Art For a New World, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 152 (illus., another example), 184, 293, 311
193
GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 103 (1892 – 1984) HILLSIDE AT TURRAMURRA, 1951 oil on canvas on board 37.5 x 45.5 cm signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 51 inscribed with title verso: Hillside at / Evening Turramurra estimate :
194
$18,000 – 24,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, acquired 1980s Phillips De Pury & Company, Sydney 26 July 1998, lot 288 (dated as 1954) Private collection, Sydney
ERIC WILSON 104 (1911 – 1946) STREET SCENE, c.1937 oil on composition board 46.0 x 72.0 cm certificate of authenticity label signed by Leila Myrtle Rowe (née Wilson) and Ian Macdonald, Director of Macdonald Galleries, Sydney estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE Macdonald Galleries, Sydney Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Mr Basil Sellers AM, Sydney Sotheby’s Australia, Melbourne, 23 November 2009, lot 41 (as ‘French Street Scene’) Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Sotheby’s Australia, Sydney, 10 May 2016, lot 68 (as ‘French Street Scene, c.1937’) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED 40 Modern Paintings by Leading Australian Artists, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 2 May – 6 June 1992
195
JOHN PERCEVAL 105 (1923 – 2000) ROMONA RECLINING, 1965 oil on composition board 43.5 x 35.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Perceval 65 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “Romona / Reclining” / 1965 / Perceval bears inscription on frame verso: “ROMONA RECLINING” estimate :
196
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 11 March 1977, lot 119 The Landau Collection, Sydney Lawsons, Sydney, 24 October 1978, lot 101 Private collection Lister Gallery, Perth Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in May 1990 LITERATURE Allen, T., John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p. 164 (as ‘Ramona Reclining’)
ARTHUR BOYD 106 (1920 – 1999) ROSEBUD LANDSCAPE WITH RED HOUSE, 1939 oil on canvas on composition board 49.5 x 57.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Arthur Boyd 39 estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE Mrs A.E. Keates, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 16 April 1986, lot 1335 Private collection, Melbourne LITERATURE Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, cat. 1.79, p. 238
197
LLOYD REES 107 (1895 – 1988) FARMHOUSE AMONG TREES, 1931 pencil on paper 11.0 x 17.5 cm signed and dated lower right: L. REES 1931 estimate :
198
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Property of an Estate, Brisbane Private collection, Queensland, acquired in 1988 EXHIBITED possibly: Pencil Drawings by Lloyd Rees, The Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 16 – 28 November 1932, cat. 6
LLOYD REES 108 (1895 – 1988) SYDNEY HARBOUR, 1933 pencil on paper 18.5 x 26.0 cm signed and dated lower right: L. REES / 1933 estimate :
$15,000 – 25,000
PROVENANCE Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1961 EXHIBITED Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide, 1961 LITERATURE Free, R., Lloyd Rees, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1972, cat. D149
199
JEFFREY SMART 109 (1921 – 2013) UNTITLED, c.1950s gouache, ink and pencil on buff paper 22.5 x 29.0 cm signed lower right: Jeffrey Smart floorplan sketch verso estimate :
200
$6,000 – 9,000
PROVENANCE Prouds Gallery, Sydney Jim Donahue, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.
GODFREY MILLER 110 (1893 – 1964) COMPORT WITH FRUIT SERIES, 1962 oil and pencil on canvas 48.0 x 61.0 cm bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: JH 107 PROVENANCE Estate of the Artist, Sydney Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Artarmon Galleries, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1967 (receipt attached verso) Skinner Galleries, Perth, acquired from the above in 1967 (label attached verso) Christie’s, Melbourne, 1 March 1973, lot 239 (as ‘Comport with Fruit’) Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2004 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Godfrey Miller, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 2 – 28 September 2004, cat. 10 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD-MACK 111 (1893 – 1965, German/Australian) ABSTRACT, 1956 colour monotype 18.0 x 24.0 cm signed and dated in image lower left: L.H. Mack 1956 PROVENANCE probably: Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne estimate :
$2,000 – 3,000
201
JON CATTAPAN 112 born 1956 BLUE CHANNEL NO. 1, 2005 oil on linen 180.0 x 140.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: JON CATTAPAN 2005 / “Blue Channel No. 1” / … / Cattapan 2005 estimate :
202
$15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Melbourne
MICHAEL PAREKOWHAI 113 born 1968, New Zealand ATARANGI #8, 2004 powder coated aluminium, two parts 20.0 x 160.0 x 10.0 cm each 40.0 x 160.0 x 10.0 cm overall estimate :
$15,000 – 20,000 (2)
PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2004
203
HOWARD ARKLEY 114 (1951 – 1999) UNTITLED, c.1983 – 84 synthetic polymer paint on two sheets of paper 97.0 x 57.0 cm PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist LITERATURE Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http://arkleyworks.com/blog/2019/07/13/ untitled-suicide-1984-w-p/] (accessed 31/07/19) RELATED WORK Suicide, 1983, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 160.0 x 120.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http://arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/09/02/ suicide-1983] (accessed 31/07/19) estimate :
$10,000 – 15,000
HOWARD ARKLEY 115 (1951 – 1999) UNTITLED, 1984 synthetic polymer paint on two sheets of paper 98.0 x 44.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed centre right: For Tony 1984 Howard Arkley PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist in 1984 LITERATURE Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http://arkleyworks.com/blog/2019/07/13/untitledcactus-head-1984-w-p/] (accessed 31/07/19) estimate :
204
$8,000 – 12,000
ANDY WARHOL 116 (1928 – 1987, American) SANTA CLAUS, 1981 (FROM ‘MYTHS’ SERIES) colour screenprint with diamond dust on Lenox Museum Board 96.0 x 96.0 cm edition: artist’s proof 9/30, aside from an edition of 200 signed and numbered in image lower right: A/P 9/30 Andy Warhol estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE William Mora Galleries, Melbourne (stamped and label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 2 October 1994, lot 292 (as ‘Father Christmas’) Private collection, Victoria EXHIBITED Andy Warhol’s Myths, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 15 September – 17 October 1981 (another example) LITERATURE Feldman, F., and Schellmann, J., Andy Warhol Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962 – 1987, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, third edition, 1997, cat. II.266, pp. 9, 27, 118, 119 (illus., another example), 270
205
ANDREAS GURSKY 117 born 1955, German UNTITLED, 2008 type C photographs 10.0 x 15.0 cm (each) each signed and dated verso: A Gursky 08 estimate :
PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired directly from the artist, c.2008 Thence by descent Private collection, Hungary
$6,000 – 8,000 (3)
Andreas Gursky creates resplendent photographic tableaux of landscapes and industrial vistas, reproduced in sharp detail and large scale. Living and working in Dusseldorf, Gursky is from a generation of young artists who learnt a conceptual style of documentary photography from Bernd and Hilla Becher (including Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte and Candida Höffer). Applying their principles of clarity and dispassion, Gursky takes photographs that translate real landscapes into almost immersive formalist artworks, revelling in pattern and minute detail. Since 1990, Gursky has used digital technologies to stitch together details from multiple photographs to create his pictures. This triptych of photographs is rare in both its domestic scale, and for the immediacy with which they were created. These photographs were taken with an analogue camera in the Victorian Alpine National Park, while Gursky was in Australia opening his solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in November 2008. The spectacular and immersive vistas of Victoria’s high country are printed here on a modest scale, coupled with an image of a construction site, where strong sunlight across a timber structure creates a patterned surface. These photographs retain Gursky’s predilection for sharp detail, impersonal distance and his distinctly Germanic understanding of the sublime. LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
206
207
PROVENANCE Mori Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney
CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 118 born 1960 STRANGE FLOWERS, 1984 unique colour woodblock print 77.0 x 59.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title below image estimate :
208
$12,000 – 16,000
EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell: Woodblocks, Woodblock Prints and Paintings, Mori Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 30 March 1985, cat. 32 LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, cat. P8405, p. 341
CRESSIDA CAMPBELL 119 born 1960 BOTTOM OF THE GARDEN, 1982 synthetic polymer paint on paper 47.5 x 75.0 cm signed and dated lower centre: Cressida Campbell ‘82 estimate :
$20,000 – 30,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 10 March 2004, lot 327 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell. Paintings and Drawings, Hogarth Galleries, Sydney, 11 March – 30 April 1983
209
NOEL McKENNA 120 born 1956 UNPLACED EFFORT, 1992 enamel on canvas board housed in artist’s frame 40.0 x 50.0 cm signed and dated lower left: N. McKENNA 92 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: N. McKenna 1992 / “Unplaced Effort” PROVENANCE Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above c.2004 estimate :
210
$5,000 – 7,000
EXHIBITED Fair Game: Art + Sport, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 September 2003 – 11 January 2004 (label attached verso) Somewhere in the City, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane, 8 September – 6 November 2005 LITERATURE Craig, G., Somewhere in the City, exhibition catalogue, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane, 2005, pp. 5, 23 (illus.)
ROBERT CAMPBELL JUNIOR 121 (1944 – 1993) LOOKING AFTER BABY, 1988 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 122.0 x 109.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower right: ROBERT CAMPBELL JR / 14.11.1988 / NGAKU estimate :
$12,000 – 18,000
PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1989 EXHIBITED The Cocktail Party, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 30 November – 17 December 1988, cat. 6 Robert Campbell Jnr, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 4 – 22 April 1989, cat. 14
211
BROOK ANDREW 122 born 1970 IGNORATIA (KOOKABURRA), 2003 (FROM ‘KALAR MIDDAY’ SERIES) Ilfochrome print 124.0 x 200.0 cm edition: AP aside from an edition of 5 estimate :
$12,000 – 16,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 21 March 2005, lot 58 Company Collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Brook Andrew - Kalar Midday, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 13 – 27 March 2004 (another example) Brook Andrew Photography and Neon, Stills Gallery, Sydney, 4 August – 4 September 2004, cat. 7 (illus. on exhibition invitation, another example) Brook Andrew – Kalar Midday (land of the three rivers), Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, 13 October – 23 November 2004, cat. 5 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, another example) Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 4 April – 23 June 2007; Penrith Regional Gallery & the Lewers Bequest, Sydney, 18 August – 14 October 2007; John Curtin Gallery, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, 4 April – 30 May 2008 (another example)
212
LITERATURE Crawford, A., ‘Brook Andrew’, Australian Art Collector, Sydney, no. 27, January – March 2004, p. 171 (illus., another example) Crawford, A., ‘Putting Black Beauty Up in Lights’, The Age, Melbourne, 1 April 2004 Newall, M., ‘Brook Andrew’, Photofile, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, issue 71, Winter 2004, p. 69 McCulloch, A., McCulloch, S., & McCulloch Childs, E., The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Aus Art Editions, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2006, p. 1138 (illus., another example) Brook Andrew: Eye to Eye, exhibition catalogue, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 22, 34, 54, 85 (illus., another example) Langton, M., ‘Brook Andrew: Ethical portraits and ghost scapes’, Art Bulletin of Victoria 48, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008 (published online 29 January 2014) [https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/ brook-andrew-ethical-portraits-and-ghost-scapes/] Slocum, C., Beyond the Aesthetic – A Study of Indigeneity and Narrative in Contemporary Australian Art, thesis, Australian National University, Canberra, 2016, vol. 1, pp. 167, 168; vol. 2, fig. 7.9, p. 151 (illus., another example)
213
DAVID NOONAN 123 born 1969 THE CHINESE LANTERN, 2004 gouache on paper 51.0 x 41.0 cm signed verso: David Noonan PROVENANCE Uplands Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2004 estimate :
214
$3,500 – 4,500
EXHIBITED David Noonan: Paintings, Uplands Gallery, Melbourne, 2 March – 3 April 2004 David Noonan, Films and Paintings 2001 – 2005, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 7 April – 11 June 2005 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Fahey, J., David Noonan, Before and Now, Craftsman House, Melbourne, 2004, pp. 23, 24 (illus.)
EXHIBITED Makinti Napanangka New Paintings, Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney, November 2001
MAKINTI NAPANANGKA 124 (c.1930 – 2011) ROCKHOLE SITE OF LUPULNGA, 2001 synthetic polymer paint on linen 122.0 x 153.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists catalogue number MN0107017 PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne acquired from the above in November 2001 estimate :
$18,000 – 25,000
RELATED WORK Kungka Kutjarra (Two Women), 2001, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 121.9 x 153.0 cm, in the collection of the Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield, USA, exhibited in Works from the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia and the Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield, Gagosian Gallery, New York, 3 May – 3 July 2019 This work is accompanied by a certificate from Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs that states: ‘This painting depicts designs associated with the rockhole site of Lupulnga, south of the Kintore Community. The Peewee (small bird) Dreaming is associated with this site. The lines in the painting represent spun hair which is used make hair-string skirts and hair belts which are worn during ceremonies.’
215
MAKINTI NAPANANGKA 125 (c.1930 – 2011) LUPULNGA, 2001 synthetic polymer paint on linen 91.5 x 91.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Papunya Tula Artists cat. MN0110133 estimate :
216
$6,000 – 8,000
PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne
PADDY JAMINJI 126
(c.1912 – 1996) TAWURR THE KANGAROO AT KANMANTURR, c.1984 natural earth pigments and natural binders on canvas board 45.5 x 61.0 cm estimate :
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Painted at Warmun, Turkey Creek, Western Australia Aboriginal Traditional Arts, Perth (Mary Macha) Private collection, Tasmania
217
NICHOLAS HARDING 127 born 1956 NEWRYBAR STILL LIFE, 2014 oil on canvas 91.5 x 91.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Newrybar Still life / 2014 / Nicholas Harding estimate :
218
$8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist in 2014
ZOE YOUNG 128 born 1978 APPLES FOR TEA, 2017 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 122.5 x 91.0 cm inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: APPLES FOR TEA estimate :
$8,500 – 12,500
PROVENANCE Olsen Gallery, Sydney (stock no. 20722) Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2017 EXHIBITED The Orchard House, Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 17 December 2017 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Zoe Young Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http://www.zoeyoung. com.au/the-orchard-house.html] (accessed 26/06/19)
219
DAVID JAMES 129 (1853 – 1904, British) BREAKING WAVES oil on canvas on card 18.0 x 29.5 cm bears inscription on backing board verso: B. / C estimate :
220
$4,000 – 8,000
PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne
MURRAY GRIFFIN 130 (1903 – 1992) MAGPIES (1), 1932 colour linocut 15.0 x 20.5 cm edition: 20/25 signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image PROVENANCE Private collection Ken and Joan Plomley Collection, Melbourne estimate :
$2,000 – 3,000
EXHIBITED Oil Sketches and Lino Cuts by Murray Griffin, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 1932, cat. 35 (another example) Exhibition of Paintings and Colour Prints by V. Murray Griffin, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 1934, cat. 38 (another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Castlemaine Art Gallery, Victoria
end of sale 221
1. PRIOR TO AUCTION CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information). PRE-SALE ESTIMATES The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.
prospective buyers and sellers guide ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE
RESERVES The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold. PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend. SYMBOL KEY ▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price. ● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve. EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars. ARTIST’S NAMES All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne. Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below: a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist. b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part. c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period. d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist. e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist. f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist. g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist. h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist. i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.
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PROVENANCE Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality. 2. THE AUCTION Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion. REGISTRATION Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. CONDUCT OF AUCTION Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve. ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids. RESERVE Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor. BIDDING INCREMENTS Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion): $500 – 1,000 by $50 $1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000 SUCCESSFUL BIDS The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time. UNSOLD LOTS Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.
3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice. PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. A list of those lots is set out in the catalogue on page 242. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. COLLECTION Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight. LOSS OR DAMAGE Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date. TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties. EXPORT Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale. COPYRIGHT The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.
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The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction. By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement. DEFINITIONS 1.
conditions of auction and sale ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE
Definition of terms: a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent. b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent. c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents. d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST). e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 22% charge (plus GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended. g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue. h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.
PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER 2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor. 3.
Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law: a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material. All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact. 4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property. CONDITIONS AT AUCTION 5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion. 6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.
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7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges. GOODS AND SERVICES TAX 8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office. 9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor (a list of lots consigned by GST Registered Entities is set out on page 242 of the catalogue); and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. added to the buyer’s premium. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met. POST-SALE CONDITONS 10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions. 11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full. Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for ser vices rendered by Deutscher and Hacket t, a buyer’s premium calculated at 22% (plus GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide. Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a. 12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of: a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer. The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.
13. Freight: a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer. b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett. 14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied: a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy. The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery. 15. Termination, Breach and Legalities: a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale. b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach: i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages. ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic). iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer. iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion. v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett. vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate. vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions. viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money. 16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held. 17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.
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“A beautiful wine in all respects, its heart soft and generous, its head stern POINTS and serious, the combination as complete as it is complex. It tastes of an assortment of red and black berries, tobacco and cloves, with tremendously well-integrated smoky oak and plenty of tang, tannin, flavour and run through the finish. An exhibition in both power and elegance.�
97
Halliday Wine Companion 2019
Yalumba The Caley Cabernet & Shiraz 2013 available now. Contact Yalumba Wine Room or buy online. T: 08 8561 3200 | E: info@yalumba.com
yalumba.com
CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTION FORM ❑ ❑ ❑ ❑
Fine Art (Single issue) $45* Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160*
❑ Tax invoice required
* Price includes G.S.T. postage and handling. Additional $10 per catalogue for international orders
SALE CODE: PLOMLEY SALE NO.: 058 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 28 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 130 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Business name
Address
City
Telephone/Home
State
Business/Mobile
Post Code
Fax
Subscription Payment by:
❑ Visa ❑ AMEX ❑ Mastercard
Name on card
Card number
Signature
Expiry date
Date
info@deutscherandhackett.com
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ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM SALE CODE: PLOMLEY SALE NO.: 058 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Business name
Address
City
Telephone/Mobile
State
Post Code
SYDNEY AUCTION 28 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 130 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com
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TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: PLOMLEY SALE NO.: 058 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 28 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 130 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Billing address (PO Box insufficient)
Address
City
State
Post Code
1. 2. Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference
Facsimile
Signature (required)
please email, post or fax this completed form to:
LOT NO.
Date
ARTIST/TITLE
COVER BID*
1.
DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
2.
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
4.
info@deutscherandhackett.com
5.
3.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY
DATE
TIME
Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST), as described in the Guide to Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions printed in this catalogue, will be added to the final hammer price. I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.
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ABSENTEE BID FORM SALE CODE: PLOMLEY SALE NO.: 058 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART
(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)
Billing address (PO Box insufficient)
Address
City
State
Telephone
Facsimile
Business/Mobile
Signature (required)
LOT NO.
Post Code
SYDNEY AUCTION 28 AUGUST, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 130 CELL BLOCK THEATRE NATIONAL ART SCHOOL, SYDNEY FORBES STREET DARLINGHURST NSW 2010
Date
ARTIST/TITLE
MAXIMUM BID*
1. 2. 3.
please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 16 GOODHOPE STREET PADDINGTON NSW 2021
4.
tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611
5.
info@deutscherandhackett.com
6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars
INTERNAL USE ONLY
Absentee bids must be received a minimum of twenty-four hours prior to auction. All absentee bids received will be confirmed by phone or fax. In the event that confirmation is not received, please resubmit or contact our office.
RECEIVED BY
Please refer to the Guidelines for Potential Purchasers and Buyer’s Conditions in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified. Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.
DATE
Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 22% (plus GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.
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TIME
NOW CONSIGNING
forthcoming auction of important australian + international fine art melbourne • 27 november 2019 melbourne • 03 9865 6333 sydney • 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com
Shaun Gladwell
Free entry mca.com.au See the work of internationally acclaimed Australian artist Shaun Gladwell, best known for his videos representing the body in motion. Featuring paintings, videos, augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) works.
Until 7 October
Pacific Undertow
Exhibition Patrons Andrew Cameron AM & Cathy Cameron Major Partner
Government Partners
Shaun Gladwell, Approach to Mundi Mundi (production image, detail), 2007, John Kaldor Family Collection, image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne Š the artist
2019 Annual Appeal Help conserve the oldest dress in the Museum’s collection Your donation to the 2019 Annual Appeal will help us to conserve one of the textile treasures of the National Museum of Australia’s collection — a magnificent silk brocade gown from the 1700s. Part of the Springfield–Faithfull Family collection, the dress holds stories of London’s weaving and textile industry, colonial migration, pastoralism at Springfield sheep station near Goulburn and Sydney’s social life. All donations will assist us to research its history, to conserve it and to place it on display.
nma.gov.au/join-support All donations over $2 are tax deductable.
Image: A Silk brocade gown dating from the 1730s. © National Museum of Australia
McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery is the home of Australian sculpture, located 45 minutes from Melbourne. With a wide-ranging collection of more than 100 sculptures, the park comprises eight hectares of designed landscape and vast areas of indigenous Australian bushland. The gallery exhibition program focuses on the development of modern sculpture and various forms of spatial practice, and encourages contemporary artists to address challenging issues in an Australian and global context. Tuesday to Sunday : 10am – 5pm 390 McClelland Drive, Langwarrin VIC 3910 03 9789 1671 www.mcclellandgallery.com
Image: McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery, photograph Dan Magree
DESTINATION PARTNER
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF
PRINCIPAL PARTNER
NGV.MELBOURNE This exhibition is organised by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in partnership with Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau (陕西省文物局), Shaanxi History Museum (陕西历史博物馆), Shaanxi Cultural Heritage Promotion Center (陕西省文物交流中心), and Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum of the People’s Republic of China (秦始皇帝陵博物院) (left) CHINESE Armoured general, Qin Dynasty 221–207 BCE (detail) Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi’an (002524), (right) Portrait of Cai Guo-Qiang, 2009 (detail) Photograph © Mark Mahaney
COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 9 Lot 10 Lot 11 Lot 12 Lot 13 Lot 14 Lot 27 Lot 38 Lot 40 Lot 41 Lot 42 Lot 43 Lot 44 Lot 45 Lot 46 Lot 47 Lot 48 Lot 49 Lot 50 Lot 51 Lot 52 Lot 53 Lot 54 Lot 55
© Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Donald Friend/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2019 © The Trustees of the Sidney Nolan Trust/ Bridgeman Images © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2019 © The Estate of Ian Fairweather/ Copyright Agency, 2019 © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art © Ben Quilty © Dale Frank © courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford © Emily K Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Gordon Bennett, managed by John Citizen Arts Pty Ltd
LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES Lot 50 Lot 86 Lot 112 Lot 113 Lot 122
Dale Frank Roger Kemp Jon Cattapan Michael Parekowhai Brook Andrew
RESALE ROYALTY Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Photography: Graham Baring Design: Sevenpoint Design © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2019 978-0-6483839-3-2
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Lot 56 Lot 58 Lot 59 Lot 60 Lot 61 Lot 62 Lot 63 Lot 64 Lot 65 Lot 66 Lot 69 Lot 70 Lot 71 Lot 84 Lot 85 Lot 86 Lot 87 Lot 88 Lot 89 Lot 90 Lot 91 Lot 93 Lot 94 Lot 95 Lot 96 Lot 97 Lot 98 Lot 101
© Brook Andrew/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Patricia Piccinini © Sam Leach © David Noonan © Juan Ford © Janet Laurence © Jan Nelson/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Tim Johnson © Imants Tillers/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Kate Shaw © Ken Yonetani © Natasha Bienek © Marian Drew © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2019 © John Olsen/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Estate of Roger Kemp © Leonard French/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Ken Whisson © Peter Booth/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Imants Tillers/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Ben Quilty © Ramesh Nithiyendran/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Hossein Valamanesh/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Ben Quilty © Philip Wolfhagen/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Aida Tomescu/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency, 2019
Lot 105 Lot 106 Lot 107 Lot 108 Lot 109 Lot 112 Lot 113 Lot 114 Lot 115 Lot 116 Lot 117 Lot 118 Lot 119 Lot 120 Lot 122 Lot 123 Lot 124 Lot 125 Lot 126 Lot 128
© John de Burgh Perceval/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Lloyd Rees/Copyright Agency, 2019 © courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart © courtesy of the artist and STATION © Michael Parekowhai © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Andreas Gursky/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Noel McKenna/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Brook Andrew/Copyright Agency, 2019 © David Noonan © Makinti Napanangka/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Makinti Napanangka/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Paddy Jaminji/Copyright Agency, 2019 © Zoe Young/Copyright Agency, 2019
index A ANDREW, B. ANGAS, G.F. ARKLEY, H. AUDETTE, Y.
R
J 56, 122 74 48, 114, 115
JAMES, D.
129
REES, L.
JAMINJI, PADDY
126
REHFISCH, A.
JOHNSON, T.
64
88
ROCKLINE, V. K
B BECKETT, C.
82, 83
RILEY, W.E.
KEMP, R.
86 52
27, 107, 108 30 76 100
ROWAN, E.
77
RUSSELL, J.P.
99
BEDFORD, PADDY NYUNKUNY
51
KNGWARREYE, EMILY KAME
BENNETT, G.
55
L
SHORE, A.
29
BIENIEK, N.
70
LAURENCE, J.
62
SMART, J.
47, 109
19
LEACH, S.
59
SMITH, G.C.
28, 103
BLACK, D. BLACKMAN, C, BOOTH, P. BOYD, A. BUNNY, R.
SHAW, K.
42, 43 90 40, 84, 106 81
C CAMPBELL, C.
53, 54, 118, 119
CAMPBELL JUNIOR, ROBERT
121
CATTAPAN, J.
112
COTTON, O.
102
DREW, M.
SPOWERS, E. M MACQUEEN, K. MARTENS, C.
71
73, 78
TILLERS, I.
McCUBBIN, F.
79
TOMESCU, A.
McKENNA, N.
120
MELLOR, D.
57 37, 110
N
FLIGHT, C.
UNSWORTH, K.
92
VALAMANESH, H.
95
WAKELIN, R.
23, 24, 25, 39
63
WARHOL, A.
116
NITHIYENDRAN, R.
94
WHISSON, K.
89
NOLAN, S.
41
WILLIAMS, F.
44, 45
60, 123
WILSON, E.
104 97
O OLSEN, J.
85
FORD, J.
61
FOX, E. C.
80
P
FRANK, D.
50
PAREKOWHAI, M.
FRENCH, L.
87
PEACOCK, G.E.
FRIEND, D.
38
PERCEVAL, J.
105
PICCININI, P.
58
PIGOTT, G. H.
68
G
98
U
WOLFHAGEN, P. 15, 21
65, 91
NELSON, J.
NOONAN, D. 46
18
V 124, 125
F FAIRWEATHER, I.
17, 20
T
22
NAPANANGKA, MAKINTI 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 26
SYME, E.
66
32, 33, 34, 35, 36
MAYO, E.
MILLER, G.
D DE MAISTRE, R.
S
Y YONETANI, K.
GRIFFIN, M.
130
POWER, C.
GURSKY, A.
117
PRESTON, M.
YOUNG, Z.
69 128
113 75
16 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 101
H HARDING, N. HARDWICKE, F. HIRSCHFELD MACK, L. HOLMES, E.
67, 127 72
Q QUILTY, B.
49, 93, 96
111 31
243
244