various vendors lots 1 – 8

(1921 – 2013) SECOND STUDY FOR MADRAS AIRPORT, 1979 oil on canvas on board 29.0 x 39.0 cm signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART

ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE

Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

EXHIBITED

Jeffrey Smart, Redfern Gallery, London, 7 June – 4 July 1979, cat. 27 Jeffrey Smart, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 8 November – 30 December 1980, cat. 38 Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 26 October – 7 November 1981, cat. 26

LITERATURE

Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 750, p. 116 McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart Paintings of the ’70’s and ’80’s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 195, p. 159

RELATED WORKS

Madras Airport, 1979, oil on board, 34.5 x 66.5 cm, private collection, sold Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 8 December 2021, lot 1 First Study for Madras Airport, 1979, oil on canvas, 27.0 x 38.0 cm Third Study for Madras Airport, 1979, oil on canvas, 33.0 x 65.0 cm

We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

‘… Most artists today don’t paint the cars we travel in, factories people work in, roads, road-signs, and airports we all use. I like living in the 20th century – to me, the world has never been more beautiful. I am trying to paint the real world I live in, as beautifully as I can, with my own eye.’1

Although deriving his subject matter from all that would appear disturbing about the modern world – bleak highways, industrial landscapes inhabited by motorised traffic, and an impersonal contemporary architecture that seems unforgiving to human presence – Smart’s paintings are quite assuredly not commentaries upon urban alienation or the human condition. To the contrary, Smart rejoices in the beauty and oddity he perceives within the contemporary urban environment, translating momentary glimpses of the everyday into impeccably composed harmonies of colour, shape and line – all imbued with originality, irony and an inescapable feeling of expectancy. Elaborating upon his fascination with airports in particular, Smart observed: ‘Aerodromes are beautiful and exciting places, especially in a side light or on a misty day when they assume a threatening atmosphere.’2 As encapsulated by the superb example on offer, one of the most intriguing aspects of Smart’s airport paintings is the stark contrast between the almost total anonymity of the scenes depicted, and the inordinate specificity of their titles.3 Frequently observed by the artist through a window while seated on board a plane or in the waiting lounge, these works are invariably populated with generic images of workmen in overalls refuelling aircraft or involved in arcane systems of signalling (as featured here), control towers, airport car parks and observation decks. And yet, titles such as Fiumicino Car Park, 1976; Madras Airport, 1979; Night Stop, Bombay, 1981 and The Terrace, Madrid Airport, 1984 – 85 all suggest very precise points of departure.

Like his artistic mentor Cézanne, Smart’s priority has always been the pursuit of the consummate composition and certainly, nowhere is this commitment to disegno or draughtsmanship as the basis of his art more poignantly illustrated than in the evolution of Madras Airport. The crystallisation of a specific ‘moment of enchantment’, the final composition was preceded by at least three oil studies, including the present which documents the artist’s experiments with a reversed format and the substitution of different colours for the figures’ overalls. In the final interpretation, Smart would also omit the partially-obscured observation deck and terminal featured here, replacing it with a similarly half-concealed aircraft waiting on the tarmac to the left and garish pink oil tanker on the right. Significantly, a further figure study in oil of potential poses for the three airport workmen reveals, moreover, that Smart’s partner of forty years, Ermes de Zan, served as the model.

That much of Smart’s vast oeuvre fervently celebrates the mechanisms of travel is perhaps not surprising given his lifetime spent as an expatriate. Betraying a sense of place that is at once ambiguous yet strangely familiar, indeed such iconography ‘to some extent reflects his own inveterate travelling as a post-modern figure…’5 As eminent commentator on Smart’s work, Peter Quartermaine elucidates, ‘…For such figures, travel, whether voluntary or enforced, is counterbalanced by an inner sense of loss against which is shored what Salman Rushdie envisages as ‘imaginary homelands’…’6

1. Smart cited in Jeffrey Smart, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 20 2. Smart cited in Capon, E., et al., Jeffrey Smart: Drawings and Studies 1942 – 2001, Australian

Galleries, Melbourne, 2001, p. 102 3. Grishin, S., ‘Jeffrey Smart’s Eternal Order of Light and Balance’, in Jeffrey Smart: Paintings and Studies 2002 – 2003, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2003, p. 12 4. Quartermaine, P., ‘Imaginary Homeland: Jeffrey Smart’s Italy’, in Jeffrey Smart, 1999, ibid., p. 38 5. ibid. 6. ibid.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1920 – 1999) ROCKY HILLSIDE, SHOALHAVEN, c.1980 oil on composition board 91.0 x 61.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd inscribed with title verso: Rocky Hillside – Shoalhaven

ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE

Private collection Gould Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1994

‘The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly. His paintings are a celebration of 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 there are infinite possibilities, as long as we train ourselves to see.’1

Eager to rediscover his roots, his ‘Australianism’, after more than a decade abroad, in 1971 Arthur Boyd returned to the country of his birth to take up a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Over the blazing summer of 1971 – 72, Boyd and his wife Yvonne were invited by the Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald to visit Bundanon for the weekend, staying at a home he shared on the south coast of New South Wales with art historian Sandra McGrath and her husband Tony. Here the artist’s joyful rediscovery of the Australian bush with its stark contrasts and clarity of light was nothing short of an epiphany, and thus in 1974, Boyd purchased the nearby property Riversdale on the banks of the Shoalhaven River. Once again the magic of the dour, untamed Australian landscape became the impetus for his art, and over the subsequent twenty-five years until his death in 1999, Boyd would dedicate himself almost exclusively to capturing the myriad moods of the Shoalhaven in images that are today imprinted upon the national psyche as some of our most beloved and iconic. Soul-piercing in its beauty, the Shoalhaven region offered both refreshing solace for the artist’s world-weary eyes, and endless potential as a subject – ‘the variation in the area with its great deep tones and high keys’ bearing strong affinities with music. As Boyd elaborated, ‘in the desert there is only one note, just one low singing note. In this landscape the tonal range – not tonal in the obvious sense of colour, but the actual fact of the horizon which can vary from very high to low, to infinite, depending on your line of vision – makes it a greater challenge. It has a knife-edged clarity. Impressionism could never have been born here, but Wagner could easily have composed here. He could not have composed at Port Phillip Bay. In fact,’ he added with characteristic playfulness, ‘I actually think Wagner lived in the Shoalhaven.’2 Wild and primordial, the region differed completely from the ordered English countryside to which he had grown accustomed and thus, a new vision was required to unlock its tangled mysteries. If previously Breughel and Rembrandt had offered inspiration, now Von Guérard, Piguenit and Buvelot became Boyd’s spiritual mentors.

Suffused with warmth and lyricism, Rocky Hillside - Shoalhaven, c.1980 is a superb example of the ‘pure’ Shoalhaven landscapes which – devoid of the mythological creatures and symbolic narrative punctuating versions elsewhere – simply pays homage to the sheer beauty, grandeur and wonder of Nature. Indeed, the work is a poignant reminder of how Boyd, comfortable once more with the eternal diversity of the Australian landscape, ultimately did tame his wilderness: ‘...what was unfamiliar became familiar, what was menacing became friendly, what was awesome became intimate.’3

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 42 2. Boyd quoted in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of

New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, pp. 26 – 27 3. McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 79

VERONICA ANGELATOS

(1928 – 2018) ASCENDING CHILDREN, 1960 oil on composition board 122.0 x 91.0 cm signed upper left: BLACKMAN

ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE

Brian and Marjorie Johnstone, Brisbane, by 1967 Marjorie Johnstone, Brisbane, 1992 Private collection, Brisbane, a bequest from the above in 1994

LITERATURE

Shapcott, T., Focus on Charles Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, pp. 52, 53 (illus.) Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, Andre Deutsch, London, 1989, pl. 88, pp. 149 (illus.), 255 and illus. back cover St John Moore, F., Charles Blackman. Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 20