important australian art from the collection of Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers – Grundy

(1891 – 1974) GAMELAN, 1958 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on four sheets of cardboard on hardboard 126.5 x 189.5 cm signed with artist’s monogram lower right: IF inscribed with title lower right: Gamelan

ESTIMATE: $700,000 – 900,000

PROVENANCE

John and Jan Altman, Melbourne Bonython Galleries, Sydney, c.1967 Australian Galleries, Melbourne Geoff K Gray Auctions, Sydney, 13 February 1974, lot 33 Jack and Beryl Kohane, Melbourne Niagara Galleries, Melbourne The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1996

EXHIBITED

Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 19 November – 1 December 1958, cat. 2 Festival Exhibition, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, March 1962, cat. 25 Australian Irresistibles 1930 – 1970, Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 11 August – 2 September 1970, cat. 47

LITERATURE

Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, pp. 149, 204 Bail, M., Fairweather, Art & Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, ill. 15, pp. 57 (illus.), 58, 61 Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 155, pl. 129, pp. 146 – 47, 150, 151 (illus.), 158, 255 Ian Fairweather has been described as ‘the least parochial of Australian painters, an artist of exceptional force and originality’1 and he is undoubtedly one of the most singular artists to have worked in Australia during the twentieth century. Although he is claimed as an Australian and spent many years living here, he had a restless spirit and the story of his life reads like the pages of an adventure book. Born in Scotland, Fairweather undertook his formal art education at London’s Slade School of Fine Art, studying under the formidable Henry Tonks and in 1922, being awarded second prize for figure drawing. As a prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War he had access to books about Japanese and Chinese art, and later, studied these languages at night. In 1929 he sailed to Shanghai where he lived for several years, the country’s unique art, culture and philosophy exerting a lasting influence on his art. Peripatetic by nature, or perhaps reluctant to establish roots and commit to ongoing relationships, Fairweather travelled 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

Fairweather’s first encounter with Bali was in the early 1930s. Travelling to Australia from China, where he had lived for the past few years, his boat stopped at Buleleng on the northern coast of the island and, after going ashore, he changed his plans and stayed there for almost nine months. It was a happy and productive time during which he painted almost forty known works. Some were Chinese landscapes – painted from notes and recollections of his recent experiences – but the majority depicted Balinese figure subjects, studies of solitary figures or scenes describing local people going about their daily lives.3 In 1933 he painted two mural-sized works which are ambitious both in terms of scale – being among the largest works he ever made – and the complex, multi-figure scenes they depict. Bathing Scene, Bali, c.1933 – 34 was acquired by the Tate Gallery, London in 1935 (Presented by the Contemporary Art Society) and the following year, Leicester Museums

IAN FAIRWEATHER

(1891 – 1974) GAMELAN, 1958

Ian Fairweather (from ‘Hut’ series), 1966 photographer: Robert Walker Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane © Robert Walker/Copyright Agency, 2022 Ian Fairweather (from ‘Track’ series), 1966 photographer: Robert Walker Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane © Robert Walker/Copyright Agency, 2022

and Art Gallery purchased Procession in Bali, 1933, a panoramic scene thought to depict an episode from a traditional marriage ceremony. In a letter to his friend, Jim Ede, Fairweather, who was typically selfcritical, wrote, ‘Don’t think too badly of the paintings – they are terribly crude on the surface and were done under trying conditions’, adding, ‘oh hell – Bali was somewhere near to heaven.’4 It was a place that obviously had a profound impact on Fairweather and remembering his experience of Bali decades later, he declared, ‘I was hypnotised and never recovered.’5 A second, much shorter and less pleasant visit to Bali, followed the infamous journey of 1952 when he left Darwin Harbour on a hand-built raft with the aim of sailing to Timor. By way of explanation, he subsequently told an interviewer that Timor ‘(was) the next best thing to Bali where I had done the best painting of my life’.6

Gamelan was painted in 1958, five years after Fairweather had settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, and where, for the rest of his life, he famously lived in a pair of huts built with materials salvaged from the surrounding bush. Conditions were primitive – no running water, sewerage or electricity – and Fairweather’s handmade bed and chairs were reportedly upholstered with fern fronds.7 Despite the rudimentary nature of his surrounds however – or perhaps because of it – the next two decades witnessed the production of many of Fairweather’s finest paintings and the 1960s saw his art acknowledged in significant ways, with works being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961); the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65); and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work was mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.

While the title of the painting refers to the traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra which Fairweather presumably witnessed in Bali, Gamelan is not a representational depiction. Murray Bail sees it as a ‘remembrance of… happy times on Bali, which in turn traces more memories, or moods of memories’,8 while composer Martin Armiger identifies a connection between the sound of the gamelan and the construction of the picture. ‘As rhythm builds on rhythm… simple melodies take on subtle variations, the various strands interweave delicately. The relationships between these melodic strands shift… gradually, hypnotically’.9 He continues ‘…patterns emerge from gamelan, as form emerges from… this painting’10, subtly evoking the experience of its subject through gestural line, shape and layering which emphasise the process of art-making, more than the end result.

Ian Fairweather Gethsemane, 1958 gouache on four sheets of cardboard on hardboard 145.5 x 198.0 cm Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Alongside Last Supper, 1958 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); Gethsemane, 1958; and Kite Flying, 1958 (both Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art), Gamelan is one of four important large-scale paintings which Fairweather completed in 1958. Variously composed of three or four cardboard sheets joined together, the increased scale of these works signalled a newfound confidence and authority in Fairweather’s approach, the expanded pictorial scope opening up his compositions so that they retain their distinctive linear complexity, but simultaneously assume a new sense of strength and monumentality. The significance of these works was recognised early on by distinguished collectors renowned for their sophisticated and discerning eyes – author Patrick White purchased Gethsemane from its second exhibition in 1961, and curator and art historian, Daniel Thomas AM, was the first owner of Last Supper, buying it in 1962. Sending the works to Treania Smith at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney in 1958, with detailed instructions for their preparation and mounting, Fairweather wrote, ‘I guess they are really murals – in feeling as well as size – and not at home in living rooms’. He added, ‘They have given me hell – They are an attempt to climb up to something out of something else.’11 The ‘something’ he was seeking was abstraction, and these works are especially significant in that they mark the beginning of a move towards pure abstract imagery which he likened to ‘the Buddhist idea of suspended judgement – The mind is cleared of thought but not of awareness – Always the purpose of art is to find its way through the forest of things to a larger unity containing all things’.12

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. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2009, p. 23 4. Ian Fairweather to Jim Ede, late 1933, quoted in quoted in Roberts, C. & Thompson, J. (eds.),

Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 15 5. Ian Fairweather to Treania Bennett, 12 April 1956 in Roberts & Thompson, ibid., p. 387 6. Bail, 2000, op. cit., p. 103 7. Ibid., p. 119 8. Ibid., p. 146 9. Armiger, M., ‘Fairweather and Music’ in Bail, M., et. al., Fairweather, Art & Australia Books in association with Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p. 58 10. Ibid. 11 Ian Fairweather to Treania Smith, early 1958, Roberts & Thompson, op. cit., p. 218 12. Ian Fairweather to Annette Waters, 23 – 25 October 1958 in Roberts & Thompson, op. cit., p. 226

KIRSTY GRANT

(1920 – 1999) ELASTIC STOCKINGS, 1965 oil on canvas 130.0 x 96.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 65

ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 400,000

PROVENANCE

The collection of the artist Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1996

EXHIBITED

John Brack, Gallery A, Melbourne, 29 March – April 1965, cat. 6 John Brack, Gallery A, Sydney, 14 May 1965, cat. 4 John Brack and Fred Williams, Albert Hall, Canberra, 1 – 13 August 1967, cat. 7 John Brack: Selected Paintings 1947 – 1977, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, 15 March – 1 April 1977, cat. 21 John Brack: Retrospective: paintings and drawings, Australian National University, Canberra, 21 September – 16 November 1977, cat. 26 John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 11 December 1987 – 31 January 1988, cat. 67 John Brack, Selected Paintings 1950s – 1990s, Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, 15 June 1996, cat. 8 John Brack Retrospective, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 24 April – 9 August 2009; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 October 2009 – 31 January 2010 (label attached verso)

LITERATURE

Brook, D., ‘Goths and venetians’, The Canberra Times, Canberra, 3 August 1967, p. 25 Millar, R., John Brack, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, pl. 6, pp. 25, 35 (illus.), 52, 108 Grishin, S., John Brack Retrospective: Paintings and Drawings, 1945 – 1977, Australian National University, Canberra, 1977, pl. 26 Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, pl. 67, pp. 55 (illus.), 122, 123, 130, 131, 140 Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. 1, pl. 26, pp. 97 (illus.), 99, vol. 2, cat. o145, pp. 20, 129 (illus.) Grant, K., John Brack, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 138 (illus.)

RELATED WORK

Study for ‘Elastic Stockings’, 1964, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, 54.5 x 40.5 cm, private collection

Medical supply shop window, c.1965 photographer: Laurence Course © The Estate of Laurence Course

John Brack The Rosette, 1965 oil on canvas 81.5 x 53.5 cm private collection © Helen Brack

John Brack was appointed head of the National Gallery School in Melbourne in 1962 and over the following six years, he transformed it into a serious training ground for professional artists. The demands of the job meant reduced painting time, but he maintained a studio behind his office, undertaking a number of private commissions, as well as being represented in important exhibitions including Australian Painting at London’s Tate Gallery (1963) and Australian Painters 1964 – 66: The Harold Mertz Collection at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1967). These years also saw the creation of the shop-window paintings, a series in which his stated aim to produce pictures which ‘operate on numerous levels of meaning [and]… have some reference to the complexity of life’1 was successfully achieved.

A number of Brack’s images relate to shops and shop window displays, and the first, made in 1955, depicts a display of commercial kitchen equipment he had seen at the top of Bourke Street in Melbourne. Simply titled, The Slicing Machine Shop, 1955 (private collection), it depicts gleaming meat slicers, measuring scales and giant mixers which assume threatening, anthropomorphic qualities belying their obviously inanimate status. Brack’s most concentrated series of shop window subjects emerged during the early 1960s, and this time, the windows featured in paintings such as Still Life with Self Portrait, 1963 (Art Gallery of South Australia) and The Happy Boy, 1964 (National Gallery of Australia) – the latter based on Roper’s medical supply shop in Swanston Street, Melbourne – displayed surgical instruments, prosthetic limbs and other medical aids. Bearing obvious associations with the human body, these objects enabled Brack to comment about life without depicting the figure, instead using subject matter that seemed to him, more appropriate for a contemporary artist.

Brack often found subjects walking the city streets and recorded the details of what he saw in quick sketches which were later used as aides memoire in the studio. Additional detail was sometimes provided by photographs taken by his friend Laurence Course, an art historian and keen photographer. Brack often incorporated his own reflection looking through the window, and the recognition that there were people inside the shop looking out, to add visual ambiguity and narrative complexity to these paintings. Summing this up, he said, ‘The exterior and the interior

John Brack Still Life with self portrait, 1963 oil on canvas 149.2 x 78.6 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide © Helen Brack

of the window become mixed up, they become a paradox… illustrative not simply of shop windows but of the whole aspect of life itself, so that people who pass by are entangled with the beautiful display, gleaming instruments… [which] have something to do with the props that hold people together.’2

The primary focus of Elastic Stockings, 1965 is an elaborate sign advertising said garments which dominates the top half of the image. The decorative, graphic qualities of the sign must have appealed to Brack, and luminous shades of yellow hint at the gold lettering of the original. Instead of depicting the window as he had encountered it, full of a myriad of practical items,3 his very singular vision and unique perspective of the world transformed what he saw, presenting a dramatic contrast between the showy signage and the lacklustre display of surgical instruments below. The result is humorous, but also somewhat melancholy. As he said, ‘What struck me is they had window displays [of surgical instruments] as you would display ladies’ dresses… to make them attractive… to attract… the passer by… to say ‘I will buy one’.4 This painting is classic Brack, exemplifying not only his great technical skill, but the distinctive intellectual ingenuity he brought to his art, and through which he created such a unique and significant place in the history of twentieth century Australian art. As Patrick McCaughey wrote, ‘His appeal is to the intelligence: to read what has been so clearly described. Yet behind the impersonal, unbroken surface lies a world which seethes with irony, ambiguity, where the normal is displaced or held in a different balance. The lucidity of Brack’s art, his subjects and his mode alike, do not disguise the complexity of his imagination.’5

1. John Brack interview, Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media

Production, 1980, transcript, p. 3 2. John Brack quoted in The Lively Arts: John Brack, ABC-TV documentary 3. See photograph by Laurence Course in Grant, K., John Brack, National Gallery of Victoria,

Melbourne, 2009, p. 139 4. John Brack, Deakin University interview, op. cit., p. 6 5. McCaughey, P., ‘The Complexity of John Brack’ in Lindsay, R., John Brack, National Gallery of

Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 8

KIRSTY GRANT

(1917 – 1999) AUTUMN, 1989 painted and stencilled sawn wood from discarded soft drink crates on plywood backing 92.0 x 83.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: AUTUMN 1989 / Rosalie Gascoigne

ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000

PROVENANCE

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired from the above in 1989

EXHIBITED

Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 31 October - 18 November 1989, cat. 15

LITERATURE

McDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 346, pp. 236 (illus.), 332

Rosalie Gascoigne first used the planks of found soft-drink crates in her work in the late 1970s, employing the wooden boards of brands such as Tarax, Crystal, Swing, and most notably, the distinctive daisyyellow of Schweppes, in elegant compositions that lyrically evoked the Australian bush. Gascoigne was initially dependent upon finding this ‘new’ material in the various dumps that she haunted on the outskirts of Canberra, but soft-drink crates were to become something of a signature material after she discovered them in abundance in a depot at Queanbeyan, where discarded crates could be bought by the truckload. As a result of the artist’s maxim, ‘See a lot, take a lot’1, her frequently replenished stockpile allowed an ongoing dialogue with this material that was to extend over many years. Gascoigne soon progressed from working with larger boards to splitting or sawing the planks into strips or small squares, before moving, as she has in Autumn, 1989 to assembling panels of these strips before gluing them to backing boards. The sense of movement that these component parts enabled, and the ability to try things out three-dimensionally, was an essential part of her act of making, as she never sketched or pre-planned anything on paper. As Gascoigne’s studio assistant, artist Peter Vandermark has commented: ‘Her hands were always moving things around, her eyes always assessing the arrangements her hands made. She’d say her art was seeing, watching and trying out...’2

Despite Gascoigne’s self-proclaimed role as a ‘regional artist’, few of her works respond directly to a particular place or experience and instead conjure the sensations or essence of being in the landscape. Gascoigne’s ‘place’ – the Canberra/Monaro region, is instead the starting point for works whose associative and experiential possibilities reverberate beyond her immediate environment and come to evoke the Australian landscape more broadly. The title of her works also play an important role, as Gascoigne never named a piece until it was finished; giving herself time to sit with her art and encouraging a piece to ‘work on’ her, before endowing it with a name. As a result, the intrinsic connection between the work and its name – which often reflects her love and knowledge of Romantic poetry – creates an active and participatory role for the viewer who is given a starting point, but then left to infer, imagine and experience an individual and necessarily personal response. In many ways, it is within this space of discovery and re-discovery, of shifting moods and associations, that the power of Gascoigne’s work lies.

The jostling squares of Autumn – with its bleached and weathered slithers of burnished yellow and red, capture the season at its most majestic, as the leaves change colour and fall from the trees, creating a carpet of amber upon the ground. We can almost feel and hear the rustling of our feet moving through piles of leaves. Yet to experience Gascoigne’s Autumn is to also come to understand the transience of nature, and of life, as captured in a poem she likely knew – Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923): ‘Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay.’3

1. Gascoigne mentioned the importance of this approach to her practice in various interviews throughout her career, first stating in 1972: ‘…If it looks good to me, I keep it. I never bother at the time what I am going to do with it. I take it home and store it on exposed shelves in the garden. It may or may not come good for me. I like to have a lot of stuff to look at.’ Artist statement in Bottrell, F., The Artist Craftsman in Australia, Jack Pollard, Crows Nest, New

South Wales, 1972, p. 39 2 ‘Peter Vandermark and Marie Hagerty in Conversation with Mary Eagle’ in Eagle, M.,

From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, The Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery,

Canberra, 2000, p. 20 3. Frost, R., Nothing Gold Can Stay, ‘Poetry Foundation’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/148652/nothing-gold-can-stay-5c095cc5ab679, accessed 15 August 2022\

KELLY GELLATLY