Important Australian + International Fine Art by Deutscher and Hackett

Important Australian and I n te r n a t i o n a l F i n e A r t AUCTION • MELBOURNE • 3 MAY 2023

EVERY MASTERPIECE NEEDS A

S I G N AT U R E

The Signature is a masterfully crafted and truly remarkable wine. But it would not be complete without the signature of an individual who has contributed greatly to the life and soul of Yalumba. Who will be the next Signatory? Only time will tell.

Embrace the Magnificent Unknown

Impor tant Australian and International Fine Ar t Lots 1 – 91

AUCTION • MELBOURNE • 3 MAY 2023

MELBOURNE • AUCTION + VIEWING

105 commercial road, south yarra, victoria, 3141 telephone: 03 9865 6333 • facsimile: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com

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SYDNEY • VIEWING

36 gosbell street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

melbourne auction

sydney viewing

melbourne viewing

absentee/telephone bids

live online bidding

LOTS 1 – 91 WEDNESDAY 3 MAY 7:00 pm 105 commercial road south yarra, vic telephone: 03 9865 6333 TUESDAY 18 – SUNDAY 23 APRIL 36 gosbell street paddington, nsw telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00 am – 6:00 pm THURSDAY 27 APRIL – TUESDAY 2 MAY 105 commercial road south yarra, vic telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00 am – 6:00 pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 telephone bid form – p. 179 absentee bid form – p. 180 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com

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. FIONA HAYWARD senior art specialist After completing a Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, Fiona worked at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne, leaving to join the newly established Melbourne auction rooms of Christie’s in 1990, rising to become an Associate Director. In 2006, Fiona joined Sotheby’s International as a Senior Paintings Specialist and later Deputy Director. In 2009, Sotheby’s International left the Australian auction market and established a franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, where Fiona remained until the end of 2019 as a Senior Specialist in Australian Art. At the end of the franchise agreement with Sotheby’s Australia, Smith & Singer was established where Fiona worked until the end of 2020.

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 20 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

ALEX CRESWICK managing director / head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 25 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.

DIANA McPHILLIPS head of online auctions & social media Diana has a Bachelor of Arts (Art History and Theory, History) together with a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Sydney. She has also completed studies in Interior Design from the New York Institute of Art and Design. As a member of an Australian diplomatic family, Diana has lived extensively overseas and has gained a strong appreciation for the arts and culture.

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.

specialists

DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 30 years experience in public and commercial galleries and the fine art auction market. After completing a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, he 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.

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.

VERONICA ANGELATOS art specialist and senior researcher 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.

ELLA PERROTTET registrar Ella has a Bachelor of Fine Art (Visual Art) from Monash University and studied in both Melbourne and Italy. From 2014, Ella worked at Leonard Joel, Melbourne as an Art Assistant, researcher, writer and auctioneer, where she developed a particular interest in Australian women artists. She is currently studying a Masters of Business (Arts and Cultural Management) at Deakin University with a focus on collection management and research.

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.

specialists for this auction

Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Fiona Hayward 0417 957 590 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 Lucie Reeves-Smith 0401 177 007 Veronica Angelatos 0409 963 094 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 Eliza Burton 03 9865 6333 SHIPPING Ella Perrottet 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Eliza Burton 03 9865 6333

contents various vendors lots 1 – 80

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a collection of Bauhaus prints,

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catalogue subscription form

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attendee pre-registration form

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telephone bid form

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absentee bid form

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index

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Weimar, 1919 – 1923, formerly in the collection of Ludwig HirschfieldMack lots 81 – 89 various vendors lots 90 – 91 prospective buyers and sellers guide conditions of auction and sale

MARGEL HINDER

(1906 – 1995) WOMAN, 1938 also known as WOMAN CARRYING BASKET New Guinea wood 50.0 x 15.0 x 17.0 cm ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Robert Klippel, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Frank and Margel Hinder Retrospective, Newcastle City Art Gallery, New South Wales, 30 August – 30 September 1973, cat. 2 Five Decades: Frank Hinder, Paintings, Margel Hinder, Sculptures, Gallery A, Sydney, 7 – 28 June 1980, cat. 1 (as ‘Woman Carrying Basket’) Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 January – 2 May 2021 and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 30 June – 10 October 2021, cat. 5 LITERATURE Cornford, I., The Sculpture of Margel Hinder, Phillip Matthews Book Publishers, Sydney, 2013, p. 40 (as ‘Woman Carrying Basket’) Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., (ed.), Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2021, pp. 116 (illus.), 178

American-born sculptor Margel Hinder cut a unique figure in the modern art scene of Sydney when she arrived on the S. S. City of Rayville, beside her husband Frank, in July 1934. Having had a privileged middle-class upbringing particularly supportive of artistic pursuits, the young Hinder was devotee of the modernist and theosophic theories of Vitalism and Dynamic Symmetry, encountered through the teachings of Howard Giles and Emil Bisttram. Both Margel and Frank followed Bisttram to Taos, New Mexico, to participate in his experimental summer school in 1933. This sojourn proved to be formative experiences for both artists, informing their adoption of geometric abstraction and introducing them to the revolutionary social realism of the Mexican New Order (Bisttram having studied mural painting alongside Diego Riviera). Applying these concepts to wood carvings upon her return to Australia, Hinder demonstrates a strong influence of these artists, whose teachings she shared keenly with her new artist friends. Although Hinder had been disappointed by Australia’s retrograde notions of modern art and continuously fought against the ‘little understanding of, or desire for the three-dimensional’1, by the close of the 1930s, she encountered like-minded internationally engaged artists in the George Street studio of the Crowley-Fizelle School. Margo and

Gerald Lewers in particular, provided tutelage in carving and deepened Hinder’s awareness of the precept of ‘truth-to-materials’ and ‘purified forms’, as advocated Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, whom the Lewers had recently met in England. 2 Woman, 1938 (alternatively known as Woman Carrying Basket) is a simple character study of a woman at work, carved directly from a block of New Guinean hardwood. 3 This sculpture belongs to a small group of figurative works, carved in relief panels or in freestanding forms, local tableaux of work and rural lifestyle, inspired by the local Pueblo women of Taos. The Hinders’ fascination with this first nations community was founded on an admiration for their traditional way of life, considered to be an ancient and unadulterated connection to the land and its natural cycles. Hinder carved the first of these works, Taos Women, during her long boat journey back to Australia, quickly followed by a freestanding figure, Pueblo Indian. Characterized by simplified blocky forms, the governing geometry of these sculptures attempted to convey the movements and inner metaphysical life forces of her subjects. Woman is a later harmonious and resolved synthesis of these diverse artistic and philosophical theories from Taos. Carrying a basket on her head in the same pose that can be seen in both Taos Women and Pueblo Indian, the heavy rounded forms of Woman are elegantly carved, with forms blending imperceptibly in the smooth surface. Hinder’s anonymous woman is proud, her striding stance determined in its progress, the rhythmic folds of her skirt reinforcing the directing lines of her upheld arm. Romanticizing manual labour and social enterprise with an archetypal and easily legible figurative form, Woman becomes a robust and idealized example of physical vitality. In the face of institutional disdain for sculpture and systemic sexism, Margel Hinder became an extraordinarily successful artist. At a time where modelling was the preferred form of sculpture, Hinder created opportunities for herself to be on the forefront of progressive practice, becoming ‘an excellent example of a modern woman who can successfully combine a career and the running of a home.’4 1. Hinder, M., ‘A Personal view. 1930 – 1940’, Australian Women Artists. One Hundred Year 1840 – 1940, Melbourne University Union, Melbourne, 1975, p. 19 2. Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., (eds.), Margel Hinder: Modern in Motion, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2021, p. 39 3 ‘…‘‘the harder the wood the more pleasure there is in the work.’’ Most of the wood Mrs. Hinder uses is sent from a plantation in New Guinea’, see Page, M., ‘She Sculptures in Wood’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 13 November 1939, p. 2 4. Ibid. LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

MARGEL HINDER

(1906 – 1995) MAQUETTE (ADELAIDE TELECOMMUNICATIONS BUILDING), 1971 beaten copper and copper pipe on wooden base 120.0 x 65.0 x 82.0 cm ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE James Baker, Brisbane The James Baker Collection, Christie’s, Brisbane, 2 March 1996, lot 386 William (Bill) Burge, Sydney The W.R. Burge Collection, Christie’s, Sydney, 6 March 2006, lot 40 (as ‘Untitled’) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above EXHIBITED Marland House Sculpture Competition, Age Gallery, Melbourne, June – July 1971, cat. 29 Frank and Margel Hinder 1930 – 1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 13 July 1980 LITERATURE Lynn, E., ‘Big business peps up the sculptors’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 93, no. 4761, 26 June 1971, p. 50 Free, R., Frank and Margel Hinder 1930 – 1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1980, cat. M80, pp. 61, 71 (illus. as ‘Marland House Sculpture Competition’) Cornford, I., The Sculpture of Margel Hinder, Phillip Matthews Book Publishers, Sydney, 2013, pp. 104, 105 (illus.), 107 RELATED WORKS Sketch for ‘Three Form Revolve – Form 1’, 1969, copper shim, brass, solder, in the collection of the Bathurst Regional Gallery, New South Wales Untitled (Free Standing Sculpture), 1972 - 1973, Lyten steel and stainless-steel tubing, Telecommunications Building, Adelaide

By the 1970s, Margel Hinder had an established reputation as a modernist sculptor and like Barbara Hepworth, now invested her considerable talent in public sculpture. Both artists were conceptually ahead of their peers and confident of the role of the contemporary artist in the post-war reconstruction boom, with Hinder becoming one of the few women to create site-specific industrially fabricated sculpture in Australia. Hinder entered her soldered maquettes into numerous sculpture competitions for architectural, monumental and public art, winning those leading to the creation of sculptures for the Reserve Bank, Sydney; the Civic Park Fountain in Newcastle; and in Woden Town Square, Canberra. Thus Hinder’s artworks, at the height of their

innovation and impact, were experienced and enjoyed directly by everyday Australians, their dynamic and futuristic forms complementing the roaring progress of urban and technological development. Working within the framework of Dynamic Symmetry, Hinder’s conception of sculpture was deeply rooted in three-dimensionality. This copper maquette relates to a public sculpture commissioned for the forecourt of the Waymouth Street Adelaide Telecommunications exchange building.1 A complex ovoid, its open form is dynamic with implied centrifugal motion. Ringed like a planet, the crisscrossing and acentric ribs of this ‘revolve’ presented a pleasing expression of interconnected, encircling energies, an apt metaphor for global telecommunication. In 1947, Frank and Margel purchased Vision in Motion, a landmark publication on International Constructivism written by avant-garde Russian émigré artist Naum Gabo. Gabo’s radical incorporation of implied movement into modern sculpture informed Hinder’s of acentric stringed forms and a ‘space-age’ constructivist aesthetic. As Renée Free noted in 1980, Hinder followed Gabo’s preference for transparency to convey movement without actual motion. 2 The linear forms of this maquette elegantly enclose space, their transparency creating an effect of lightness and free flowing motion apparently independent of gravity. Monumental in its own right, it encourages immersive attention to its flow of internal oval forms, the looping ribbons revolving as the viewer walks around the work. This monumentality prompted Elwyn Lynn to remark the work ‘seemed too demanding of space and perhaps needed isolation like a Henry Moore on the hillside.’ 3 This Adelaide Telecommunications maquette is realised in plate and tubed copper, providing a harmonious textured grey-green patina quite distinct from the gleaming contrast of polished stainlesssteel and rusted Lyten steel in its monumental counterpart. This maquette escaped the need for additional stabilising struts at the base, balancing instead on crossed wires. Being viewed completely in the round, this maquette can be enjoyed as Hinder intended, with internal and external graduated ovals seizing light and shadow, concavities and tunnels introducing inner lightness and a hint of the transcendental. 1. Although initial entered to a sculpture competition in 1971 for Melbourne’s Marland House (won by Ken Reinhard), this Maquette formed the basis of a different commissioned public sculpture, erected in Adelaide in 1972. 2. Free, R., Frank and Margel Hinder 1930-1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1980, p. 54 3. Lynn, E., ‘Big business peps up the sculptors’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 26 June 1971, p. 50 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

ROBERT KLIPPEL

(1920 – 2001) No. 266A, CYNTHIA, 1970 brazed steel geometric sections and synthetic polymer paint on original wooden base 47.0 cm height (including base) ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Mr and Mrs Les Wild, Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Estate of the above LITERATURE Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, pl. 256, pp. 338, 339 (illus. another example as ‘Opus 266a’), 474 Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture, (CD ROM), Deborah Edwards and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002 (illus. CD–ROM Artworks) RELATED WORK No. 266b (Cynthia), 1971, welded steel and paint, 253.0 cm height, private collection, formerly in The W. R. Burge Collection, Sydney

Between 1970 and 1971, Sydney sculptor Robert Klippel created a suite of small geometric constructions, each composed of slices of extruded steel pipe, their arrangements handsome in their simplicity and monumental in appearance. With serenity and delicate precision, the filigree geometric pattern of Klippel’s No. 266a, 1970 teeters improbably on the vertical axis only to billow elegantly at its apex. With an intimate scale, this two-sided freestanding sculpture was first owned by Klippel’s collaborator, the metalsmith Les Wild. Proprietor of Electric Welders, in Rozelle, Wild was already working with the sculptor Tony Coleing to create large metal sculptures and was a pivotal presence in Klippel’s artistic journey at this time. Another small version of 266a, unpainted, was given to the artist’s wife, after whom it was named, while a large example of over two metres high, fabricated by Wild, was later installed in the garden of Sydney collector, William Burge, a frequent visitor to the artist’s studio. Completed in 1970, a few years after Klippel’s return to Australia from America, No. 266a belongs to a group of small geometric linear works far removed from the baroque and mechanical ‘junk’ sculptures that preceded them. The reduction in scale, use of a new visual vocabulary and different mode of fabrication of this group of sculptures was directly influenced by Klippel’s access to space, materials and his budding relationships with local Australian artists. In 1968, with his new wife,

Cynthia Byrne, and their young son Andrew, Klippel purchased a large old house in the harbourside suburb of Birchgrove, hopeful to turn its boathouse into a home studio. Two short years later, with his marriage under pressure, Klippel resorted to purchasing a workshop on Liverpool St, Paddington on the advice of the artist Peter Powditch.1 It was in this studio that Klippel created this entire suite, including the fourteen geometric constructions that were to be industrially fabricated on largescale by Wild between 1971 – 1974, including No.266a. Presenting a parsimonious counterpoint to the exuberance of previous constructions, Klippel’s small works employed a pared-back visual vocabulary, derived entirely from graduated geometric sections of steel piping. As his biographer James Gleeson noted, Klippel must have envisaged this aesthetic change some years before, having already amassed a large supply of materials and his first attempts in brazed steel demonstrating the confidence of resolved ideas. 2 The process of brazing joined the sections using molten metal, whose low melting point allowed it to fill gaps using capillary action. While, as an intimist, Klippel valued the authenticity of these minute traces of the artist’s hand in small works, this example 266a bears a painted grey-green finish closer in quality to Wild’s industrially perfected versions. No. 266a demonstrates the whimsical assertiveness of a master sculptor, exercising his aesthetic judgment in a new format, a culmination of the refined linear and geometric themes that underpinning his earlier constructive works. Relying on intimate human scale and dynamic tension, the open lattice of No. 266a balances on a circular segment anchored on a solid cylindrical base. Confined to a single plane, the dynamism of this sculpture is created solely through the asymmetric relationships between the geometric building blocks. Klippel valued highly the ‘springiness and vitality’ of these small sculptures, their delicate equilibrium and traces of the artist’s hand, concerned that these qualities would disappear in larger copies. 3 No 266a’s chain of unadulterated geometric shapes is improbably stacked, balancing meditatively like river stones, topped by a featherlight cloud of arced segments. Characterised by a curious combination of solemnity and lyrical whimsy, 266a is an elegant object quite unique in Klippel’s oeuvre. 1. Edwards, D., Robert Klippel, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p.244 2. Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 328 3. Artist’s notebook, 13 February 1973, cited ibid, p. 330 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

BRETT WHITELEY

(1939 - 1992) PELICAN I, 1983 cast 1987 painted bronze 89.0 x 93.0 x 29.0 cm edition: 5/9 signed and numbered at base: brett whiteley 5/9. bears Meridian Foundry stamp at base ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne (stock no. 3979) Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1989 EXHIBITED Brett Whiteley: some recent works: ‘Birds’, ‘The drought of 83’, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 30 July – 17 August 1983 (another example, painted palm frond and plaster maquette, not in catalogue) An Exhibition by Brett Whiteley – Eden and Eve, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 12 – 28 July 1984, cat. 8 (another example, as ‘Pelican’ 1983) Brett Whiteley: Van Gogh Self Portraits, Greenhill Galleries, Perth, 27 January –22 February 1987, cat. 35 (another example, as ‘Pelican’) [cast not specified] Birds, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 5 – 19 July 1988, cat. 55 [cast not specified] Brett Whiteley: art and life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 September – 19 November 1995, cat. 140 (another example); Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 13 December 1995 – 28 January 1996; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 22 February – 8 April 1996; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 9 May – 16 June 1996; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2 July – 26 August 1996; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 18 September – 19 November 1996 A Different Vision: Brett Whiteley Sculptures, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 4 April – 23 August 1998 (another example) Animals and Birds, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 15 June – 6 October 2002 (another example) On the Beach with Whiteley, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 1 March – 29 June 2003 (another example) Whiteley and the third dimension, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 26 July 2008 – 15 March 2009 (another example) Whiteley on Water, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney, November 2013 – February 2014 (another example) Brett Whiteley: Sculpture and Ceramics, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 5 June – 6 December 2015 (another example) Bohemian Harbour: The Artists of Lavender Bay, Museum of Sydney, Sydney, 1 September – 25 November 2018 (another example)

LITRATURE Gray, R., ‘A few takes on Brett Whiteley’, Art and Australia, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer, 1986, p. 223 (studio photograph, illus., another example) McGrath, Vogue Living, November 1988, p. 152 (install photograph, illus., another example) Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: art and life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, pl. 138, pp. 200 (illus., another example), 234 Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné: 1955 – 1992, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, cat. 62s, vol. 6, p. 186 (illus. another example), vol. 7, pp. 893 – 94 RELATED WORKS Pelican I [unpainted], 1983, bronze, 85.0 × 91.5 × 30.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne [edition: 1/9] Pelican II, 1988, first cast 1993, bronze, 77.3 x 96.0 x 40.0 cm

Brett Whiteley in the studio with taxidermied birds, 1974 Photographer: Lewis Morley National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

At the time that Pelican I was made in 1983, Brett Whiteley was at the height of his powers, with an enviable international career that saw him establish a friendship with Dire Straits bass player John Isley, and lead singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler, during the Australian leg of the band’s Love Over Gold tour, and later design the cover of their 1984 album Alchemy. Whiteley’s alcohol and drug-fuelled high living during the early 1980s however, in no way dampened his creative output, with the artist continuing to produce significant works across painting, drawing and sculpture. In 1983 alone, Whiteley’s work was the subject of his first exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Another Way of Looking at Vincent van Gogh (curated by the museum’s director, the late Edmund Capon AM OBE), along with concurrent exhibitions in Sydney – Some Recent Works: Birds (11) The Drought of 83 (7) Animals at Robin Gibson Gallery, and in Brisbane, at Philip Bacon Galleries. Whiteley’s van Gogh extravaganza had already been preceded by the Melbourne exhibition Life and Death: A Visual Experience in Opposites at Australian Galleries in June and was followed by an exhibition of prints in Canberra later that year.1 While not only demonstrating the artist’s incredible capacity to produce, the five exhibitions that Whiteley held in 1983 collectively showcase his expansive and voracious thinking, his ability to turn his hand with success to a variety of mediums, and the extraordinary diversity of his influences and interests.

Throughout his career, Whiteley had become renowned for exploring subjects of great difference in the one exhibition, often to the confusion of critics. This practice not only reflected his remarkable ability to jump from subject to subject, but also fuelled his drive to create. As he reflected: ‘Although completely different in style and intention, working on divergent themes at the same time has greatly helped both to exist more intensely… The experience of being able to change concentration quickly has led me to watching two television sets at the same time, enjoying and following both programmes by split-second shifting of focus and audial concentration.’ 2 Animals and the natural world featured prominently in this idiosyncratic way of working, providing a sense of release and escape from more confronting material. Birds in particular held a special place in Whiteley’s heart, and birds, eggs and nests occur as subjects – as large-scale sculptures such as Newcastle Art Gallery’s Black Totem II, 1993, for example – and as real-life collage elements, across the artist’s oeuvre. Throughout his career, Whiteley created sculptures from found objects, while also displaying mastery of more traditional techniques such as carving and casting, and he clearly relished thinking and working in three-dimensions. The singular appearance of the pelican, with its long beak and large throat pouch, obviously

Brett Whiteley Pelican, 1983 bronze 85.0 x 91.5 x 30.5 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

appealed, with it appearing in the artist’s book of sketches made at Taronga Park Zoo in 1979 3, in a number of drawings, and even as the subject for the charming bookplate that Whiteley produced for Barbara Corrigan during the 1970s (National Gallery of Australia).

realism, and expressionism: if one is neglected or overdone, if one is not considered in the light of the other, if in fact the three forces are not felt as one, in one brilliant flash of a glimpse – inspiration will be missing and eventually meaning.’ 5

Part of an edition of nine, the difference between the artist’s treatment of Pelican I and another sculpture from the edition such as Pelican, 1983 (National Gallery of Victoria), highlights Whiteley’s almost insatiable desire to push the boundaries, even across a series of editioned works. The NGV’s sculpture is cast in bronze with a traditional Verdigris patina, whereas Pelican I, as with some other examples from the edition, is finished with the artist’s painted surface and painted eyes. Explaining variations in appearance and scale Kathie Sutherland notes, ‘After casting, the separate parts of the sculpture are put together by hand. This process, which may be described as the geometry of assemblage, is largely dependent upon the whim of the artist, or foundry technician and frequently results in variations in the height and angles of individual sculptures within the same edition.’4

Pelican I ’s focus on the bird’s commanding beak epitomises Whiteley’s ability to masterfully capture function – the way in which the pelican catches caches of fish in its throat pouch, which serves as a kind of dip-net – with form, as the curve of the bird’s beak and stylised body imply both purpose and action. However, in painting over the bronze to highlight the pelican’s eye, Whiteley not only conveys his deep and personal connection to the natural world but transforms his sculpture into a conscious being that seems to knowingly observe the world around it.

The graceful lines and streamlined form of Pelican I perfectly embodies Whiteley’s capacity to hold figuration and abstraction in a beautiful tension, where the capacity and possibilities of one way of working effectively feed into and bolster the achievements of the other. As he observed: ‘Anything that is beautiful is a unique mixture of abstraction,

1. Wilson, A., Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, 2016, p. 327 2. Ibid., p. 320 3. Whiteley, B., Zoo, Pegasus, Melbourne, 1979

4. Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné: 1955 – 1992, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 894 5. Whiteley, writing about drawing in the catalogue for his exhibition at Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney in 1985 (162 drawings Brett Whiteley 1960 – 85, Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, 19 October – 6 November 1985), quoted in Wilson, op. cit., pp. 345 – 46 KELLY GELLATLY

BRETT WHITELEY

(1939 – 1992) HARBOUR IN THE RAIN, 1977 oil on canvas 61.0 x 76.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘HARBOUR IN THE RAIN’ / brett whiteley 77 / oil ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1993 (stock no. 10315) Private collection Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 125.77, vol. 7, p. 409

Bay was Brett’s return to paradise, having come from a very anxious situation – and it is paradise. He said some quite tender things at the time, like “I’m at home at last”...’ 3 From this stable domestic base, and quite literally, his living room window, Whiteley now turned to the Harbour for inspiration, with the brilliant ‘optical ecstasy’ of Lavender Bay – burnt orange in the midday sun, sparkling sapphire blue at twilight or drenched pearl-grey in the rain (as featured here).

RELATED WORKS Pissing Down All Day, 1977, oil on plywood panel, 45.0 x 85.0 cm, private collection, Melbourne, illus. in Sutherland, K., ibid., cat. 124.77, vol. 3, p. 450 Fishing Boats Nicking In, 1978, oil on canvas, 61.0 x 76.0 cm, private collection, Melbourne

Seduced by this new muse, this enchanting siren of Sydney Harbour, Whiteley would continue over the next two decades to explore further the theme of Lavender Bay, capturing her many moods through sumptuous interiors, harbour views and still-lifes. The result was indeed his most celebrated body of work for within three years of embarking upon the series, Whiteley had won three of Australia’s most coveted art awards, all with Lavender Bay paintings notably executed in or around the same year as the present painting – the Archibald Prize for Self-Portrait in the Studio, 1976; the Sulman Prize for Interior with Time Past, 1976; and the Wynne Prize for The Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour), 1977.

A meditative work exuding lyricism and tranquillity, Harbour in the Rain, 1977 encapsulates superbly the sensuous Lavender Bay scenes for which Whiteley remains so widely acclaimed and admired. Considered the crowning achievement of his career, the series signalled a marked departure from art as a reforming medium – from politics, social consciousness and a Rimbaudian vision of life as a contest between good and evil – towards tableaux strongly inspired by Matisse and his aspirations for ‘... an art of balance, purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be… a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair in which to relax from physical fatigue.’1

A stunning example from this pivotal period within the artist’s oeuvre, Harbour in the Rain poignantly evokes the poetry of the bay with its subdued palette of grey and cream, sensuality of line and intricate sketched detail, including Lavender Bay pier and glimpse of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House beyond. As such, the composition bears strong stylistic affinities with Pissing Down All Day, 1977; Grey Harbour, c.1978, and Fishing Boat Nicking In, 1978. Beyond any formal concerns, however, Whiteley’s abiding preoccupation with such panoramas lay in immortalising the beauty of his subject; as he observed in the introduction to the catalogue accompanying his ground-breaking show at Australian Galleries in 1974, these paintings ‘begin from the premise of recording the glimpse seen at the highest point of affection – points of optical ecstasy, where romanticism and optimism overshadow any form of menace or foreboding.’4

Early in 1974, a large and successful retrospective exhibition of his drawings at Bonython Gallery had enabled Brett and his wife Wendy to purchase the Lavender Bay house they had been renting, thus signifying Whiteley’s emotional bonding with Australia – ‘a centring, as it were, of his universe.’ 2 As Wendy later recalled, ‘in a sense Lavender

1. Matisse cited in McGrath, S., Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, Sydney, 1992, p. 181 2. Wendy Whiteley cited in Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, Thames and Hudson, Sydney, 1995, p. 35 3. Ibid., p. 48 4. The artist, quoted in McGrath, op. cit., p. 185 VERONICA ANGELATOS

JOHN OLSEN

(1928 – 2023)

WATTLE POLLEN TIME, 1974 oil on canvas 127.5 x 137.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John / Olsen / 74

ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 25 November 1992, lot 296 Private collection Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 22 November 1998, lot 266 (as ‘Wattle, Pollen Time’) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED John Olsen Recent Paintings, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2 – 16 August 1977, cat. 5 We are grateful to Kylie Norton, Editor, John Olsen Catalogue Raisonné, for her assistance with this catalogue entry. Now in his mid-nineties, John Olsen is hailed as Australia’s greatest living artist. He has lived a life of intense creativity fuelled by love, travel, friendship and food, and the pleasure he finds in the world around him is palpable throughout his work, which is infused with a powerful sense of joie de vivre. The landscape has been a primary subject, from the You Beaut Country series of the mid-1960s which captured the unique nature of Australia in compositions of lively line and vital colour, to depictions of Kati Thanda/Lake Eyre the following decade, more austere but still teeming with life and incident. Explaining his desire to express the experience of a total landscape in his pictures, Olsen said, ‘Not like there is the foreground, there is the middle distance and there is the horizon. I wanted that overall feeling of travelling over the landscape. There you can see the dry creek beds, the nervous system… which when you are just on the ground you don’t witness at all. Then you begin to somehow see the wholeness… It’s more than the present, it’s the past and projects itself into the future.’1

Olsen’s imaging of the landscape acknowledges the diverse habitats which are incorporated within it, and he represents plants, animals and insects as vital elements of a complex and interconnected whole. In Wattle Pollen Time, 1974, he celebrates the transformation brought by the changing of the seasons, focussing attention on the glorious yellow wattles that flower in Australia during Spring. The colour of the wattle trees strikes a bold note against the earthy backdrop of this scene, and the pollen (less appealing to those who suffer seasonal allergies) washes across the pale, lower section of the image. Painted against a luminous grey-blue sky, the scene is full of energy and swirling movement which echoes Olsen’s natural, painterly technique. His perspective contributes to this sense of bustling activity, defying pictorial logic and propelling the viewer through the landscape, across, above and around it. Enabling us to see the country he depicts from every possible vantage point, Olsen encourages comprehension of its dynamic diversity. Olsen’s fascination with the natural world in all its myriad forms has sustained a creative practice that now spans more than seven decades. His distinctive meandering line – which grew out of Paul Klee’s notion of drawing as ‘taking a line for a walk’ – has remained a key element of his pictorial language and, combined with exuberant mark-making and a mastery of colour, it has charted the countryside, the coast, deserts and even the city. Olsen’s paintings reflect a strong sense of place which has a distinct and immediately recognisable Australian sensibility. His contribution to Australian art has been widely acknowledged, from the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, awarded in 1969 and 1985, the Sulman prize in 1989, the Archibald in 2005 – for Self-portrait, Janus faced – and major exhibitions devoted to his art, most recently, the retrospective exhibition shown in Melbourne and Sydney in 2016 – 17. 1. Hurlston, D. & Edwards, D. (eds.), John Olsen – The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2016, p. 10 KIRSTY GRANT

JOHN OLSEN

(1928 – 2023)

THE BATH, 1996 oil on canvas 180.0 x 200.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John / Olsen / 96

ESTIMATE: $280,000 – 360,000

PROVENANCE Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney (stamped on stretcher bar verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1998 EXHIBITED John Olsen 1993 – 1998, Olsen Carr Art Dealers, Sydney, 7 – 25 April 1998, cat. 15 John Olsen: The You Beaut Country, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, Melbourne, 16 September 2016 – 12 February 2017; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 March – 12 June 2017 Masterpieces of Australian Painting, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 27 February 2021 John Olsen: Goya’s Dog, National Art School Gallery, Sydney, 11 – 26 June [suspended due to covid]; 29 October – 27 November 2021; Ngununggula, Southern Highlands Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 26 March – 15 May 2022

LITERATURE McDonald, J., ‘Masterpiece? I’ll let you know in 500 years’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 April 1998, p. 14 Smee, S., ‘Worlds apart’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 17 April 1998, p. 58 Auty, G., ‘Grasping the subject’, Weekend Australian, Sydney, 11 – 12 April 1998 Hart, D., John Olsen, 2nd ed., Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, pl. 157, pp. 228, 230 – 231 (illus.), 234, 256 Hurlston, D., and Edwards, D., (eds.), John Olsen: The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2016, pp. 61 – 62, 165 (illus.), 208 McDonald, D., ‘Culture Buff: John Olsen’, The Spectator Australia, Victoria, 22 April 2017 Alderton, S., Norton, K., Wolifson, C. and Wright, B., Goya’s Dog, National Art School, Sydney, 2021, pp. 100, 101 (illus.) 145 McDonald, J., ‘King-of-bright John Olsen reveals his dark and melancholy side’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 June 2021 RELATED WORKS The bath – Birdsville Bunny and Pointer, 1997 – 98, oil on canvas, 137.5 x 183.0 cm, private collection, Queensland, illus. in Alderton, S., ibid, pp. 98 – 99 The Bath, 1998, oil on canvas, 120.0 x 140.0 cm, private collection The Bath: Early Morning, Bondi, 2007, oil on linen, 130.0 x 184.0 cm, private collection, New South Wales We are grateful to Kylie Norton, Editor, John Olsen Catalogue Raisonné, for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

John Olsen with painting "The bath", 1997 photographer: Greg Weight National Library of Australia, Canberra © Greg Weight, Copyright Agency, 2023

With a vast and varied oeuvre spanning more than seven decades, John Olsen has quite deservedly been hailed as 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. Embracing both figuration and abstraction, his signature technique fusing painting and drawing as one reveals the hand and eye of the artist with every stroke – the act of creation thus imbuing the painted surface with a powerful sense of the artist’s own irrepressible energy and palpable joie de vivre. As Deborah Hart, curator and author of several authoritative publications on the artist, asserts, ‘Olsen has confronted and helped redefine our basic conception of landscape… providing a psychological encounter with place, not only as seen but as experienced, resulting in a fresh, exhilarating vision.’1 Universally recognised as one of the artist’s most impressive works, significantly The Bath, 1996 was created during a particularly challenging chapter of Olsen’s life. As Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer elucidate, his mother had died the year prior in 1995, and throughout the decade more generally he had witnessed a succession of artist friends decline and pass away – an experience that inevitably prompted a reckoning with his own mortality. Around this time, Olsen’s knees also deteriorated, and accordingly, he underwent the first of several operations necessitating a less active life ‘confined to base: kitchen, bed and bath.’ 2 Serendipitously perhaps, such physical setback would become the impetus for one of the most career-defining images by Australian photographer, Greg Weight – John Olsen in Bath, Rydal, New South Wales, 1996 (National Portrait Gallery, Canberra) – created the same year as the present painting. Weight recalls, ‘I went to see him near Bathurst where he used to live and he explained that his knees weren’t working very well, and that he was spending a fair bit of time either in the bath or in bed. I’d photographed him before as we’d known each other for a long time. I saw that bathroom and it was just so photogenic – the whole atmosphere was incredible, and I suggested he hop in the bath. We began to parody a painting done by the French artist Jacques-Louis David, called The Death of Marat. We both realised what we were doing, and it accounted for the humorous expression on John’s face. Marat was a French revolutionary who was killed in the bath and because John himself is a revolutionary, he didn’t mind. He enjoyed the humour and the reference of the portrait, and we ended up putting it on the cover of my book.’ 3 That Olsen should here invoke his French Neoclassical predecessor is hardly surprising, for his oeuvre is typically rich in allusion and inference gleaned from the canon of art history. Certainly, in considering his various iterations of the bath motif during this time it is difficult not to draw comparison with the intimate domestic scenes of French postimpressionist and founding member of Le Nabis, Pierre Bonnard – an artist much admired by Olsen whose delicacy of touch and radiant colour was no doubt a salient influence upon watercolours such as the seminal The Bath, 1995 (private collection) in particular. More specifically, The Bath, originally titled The Absence of Venus, directly refers to Florentine Renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus, c.1480 (The Uffizi, Florence), in which an angelic nude Venus floats upon a

seashell surrounded by delicate flowers. As Hart continues, ‘In Olsen’s work, the ivory bath with scalloped feet is a kind of shell, although it is far removed from Botticelli’s idealised conception. Instead in search of a more robust beauty, Olsen has transmuted the old-fashioned bath at Rydal into an open landscape; the creamy white of the receptacle residing in the rich dark brown earth against a high horizon line.’4 Having moved to Rydal, near Bathurst in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales with his wife Katharine in March 1990, for Olsen the sight of abandoned tubs on country properties would not have been uncommon – as evidenced by their prevalence in the bucolic farmyard scenes of his contemporary Bill Robinson, see lot 21. Here however, the discarded vessel transcends the mundane to evoke analogy with Olsen’s experience at Lake Eyre: ‘…in the sense of fullness and emptiness; the water filling the vessel and draining away (in this instance, rushing out of the open plug hole). As the artist wrote many years previously, ‘Remember the Tao. A jug is made of clay but the use of the jug is in its emptiness’.’ 5 Elaborating further upon such resonances, Hart suggests the bath takes ‘…on the impression of a dream – as though aspects of its former existence in a domestic setting had come to revisit it. A face, a round like a moon, appears in the shaving mirror, while the showerhead and rail above are props that suggest the potential of bringing forth a shower. All is held in a poignant state of balance.’6 Imbued with myriad meaning, alongside the artist’s inimitable verve and playful wit, indeed The Bath is a masterwork that encapsulates Olsen at his finest. Incidentally, Olsen similarly regarded the work among his best at the time of its creation, writing in his journal: ‘11 June 1996: The Bath might be my best since Donde Voy. Old bath, rusted with different tonalities, taken from the bath in the Rose Room…’ 7 Such would also accord with the sentiments of Deborah Hart, co-author of the catalogue accompanying the artist’s acclaimed survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017, who describes The Bath as ‘one of Olsen’s most memorable works’ 8 , while art critic John McDonald went so far as to proclaim it ‘arguably the best painting in the show…’, eloquently adding ‘The visual echoes impart a liveliness to the scene that could be banal in other hands. As usual with Olsen’s best work, there is a restless, fidgety feel to the brushwork, as though marks were popping up spontaneously all over the painting.’ 9 1. Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 207 2. McGregor K. & Zimmer, J., John Olsen: Journeys into the ‘You Beaut Country’, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2016, p. 12 3. Greg Weight, cited in Wulff, A., ‘Photographer Greg Weight reveals the seven portraits that defined his career’, Vogue Living, 14 August 2020, at https://www.vogue.com.au/vogueliving/arts/photographer-greg-weight-reveals-the-seven-portraits-that-defined-his-career/ news-story/443d652634b10f7a74f3b098a (accessed 31 March 2023) 4. Hart, op. cit., p. 228 & 232 5. Ibid. 6. Hart in Hurlston, D. and Edwards, D., John Olsen: The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, p. 61 – 62 7. The artist’s journal, 11 June 1996 (the author is most grateful to Kylie Norton, editor of the upcoming John Olsen Raisonné, for bringing this entry to her attention). Notably, the dark brooding Donde Voy? Self Portraits in Moments of Doubt, 1989 was the subject of yet another Archibald Prize controversy when despite prevailing predictions, the work did not win. 8. Hart, 2000, op. cit., p. 228 9. McDonald, J. ‘Masterpiece? I’ll let you know in 500 years’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 April 1998, p. 14 VERONICA ANGELATOS

John Olsen in Bath, Rydal, NSW, 1996 photographer: Greg Weight National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Greg Weight, Copyright Agency, 2023

FRED WILLIAMS (1927 – 1982) PONDS, LYSTERFIELD, 1966 oil on canvas 86.0 x 71.0 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams. ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

PROVENANCE Leonard French, Victoria, acquired directly from the artist Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 30 November 2011, lot 9 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 13 June 2018, lot 5 Private collection, Jakarta RELATED WORK Ponds, Lysterfield, 1965 – 66, etching and aquatint, in Mollison, J., Fred Williams: Etchings, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 1968, cat. 225, p. 129 (illus. Fig. 252) We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry. We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David's research and writing in this catalogue entry.

Fred Williams is rightfully acclaimed as one of Australia’s finest artists of the twentieth century. As a landscape painter he has no equal – as attested by Ponds, Lysterfield, 1966, which raises invention and subtlety of vision to a level of singularity that led us to see the Australian landscape with different eyes. As James Gleeson wrote of Williams’ sell-out exhibition of 1966 at Rudy Komon’s Gallery in Sydney – ‘It has been clear for some time that Williams was a landscapist of rare distinction, but this exhibition places him in that thinly populated category of painters who have helped to shape the vision a country has of itself.’1 Part of the miracle of Williams’ art is its transformation of the subject, especially its scrubbiness and monotony, into paintings elegant, rich in colour, textural variation and imagination. A highlight of the 1966 exhibition, Lysterfield Landscape I, 1965 – 66 entered the collection of Rupert Murdoch. The following year Murdoch would acquire another Lysterfield painting from Williams’ sell-out solo exhibition at Georges Gallery, Melbourne (Hillside Landscape Lysterfield, 1966 – 67) while Lysterfield Landscape II, 1967 entered the collection of mining legend Sir Roderick and Lady Carnegie. Williams frequently visited the Lysterfield region from the winter of 1965 onwards. It was not very far from his then home at Upwey and he would continue to paint there over a number of years into the 1970s, capturing the changing light and colours of the seasons. ‘At Lysterfield’ as his close friend James Mollison points out, ‘he often had to paint from the edge of the road, and tall foreground grasses are the key to many of his Lysterfield paintings.’ 2 Significantly, the area would inspire Williams

to such heights as the magnificent Triptych Landscape, 1967 – 68 in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Yellow Landscape, 1968 – 69 in the collection of the Geelong Art Gallery – the latter of which has been described by McCaughey as ‘the crowning glory of the whole Lysterfield group...’ 3 With its predominance of cool tones, Ponds, Lysterfield evokes winter. The scrubby but empty countryside is created by a few impasto strokes of the brush across a smooth field of velvety greys. These expressionist textures also contrast against the balance achieved through the accent on verticals and horizontals, and the classical association they give to the composition. A masterpiece of minimalism, the absence of a horizon line achieves greater harmony, earth and sky are one, supported by the multi-viewpoint and its combination of motifs seen from above and in profile. His art is ‘both intimate and remote’ wrote Elwyn Lynn in The Bulletin of Williams’ 1966 exhibition’.4 Williams’ remote intimacy is almost Chinese in its mixture of immediate gesture, of spontaneous notation, with contemplation and serenity’, he continued. In Ponds, Lysterfield the landscape provided Williams with the inspiration for a singular, lyrical essay on the Australian scene in all its casual formality. It is a painting of ineffable beauty. 1. Gleeson, J., ‘Williams is at His Best’, Sun, Sydney, 12 October 1966 2. Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 100 3. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1980, pp. 190-91 4. Lynn, E., ‘Poetic Bushland’, Bulletin, Sydney, 22 October 1966, p. 54 DAVID THOMAS

Fred Williams in his Studio, Melbourne, 1969 (Ponds, Lysterfield, 1966 shown behind artist) photographer: David Moore National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew, and Joshua Moore

CHARLES BLACKMAN

(1928 – 2018) DOUBLE IMAGE, 1961 oil on composition board 137.0 x 152.5 cm signed lower left: BLACKMAN ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Perth Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 22 November 1998, lot 283 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Probably: Paintings and Drawings: Charles Blackman, The Matthiesen Gallery, London, 3 – 25 November 1961

‘…Part of their essential character springs from the interpretation, marvellously developed and sustained, between the tenderness and grace of the personages contained in the paintings and the fiercely implacably controlled means taken to give these personages life and eloquence within the terms of painting itself…’1 At the time of unveiling his seminal solo show at Mathiesen Gallery in London in November 1961 (in which Double Image, 1961 was most likely included), Charles Blackman’s star was in the ascendent. In 1958, one of his Alice paintings had been acquired by the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris (a remarkable feat for any Australian artist), and in June 1960, his solo exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery had completely sold out, realising approximately £4,500 pounds and enabling the Blackmans to buy a house in St Lucia, Queensland. Two months later he was awarded the prestigious Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship for his celebrated Suites I – IV (now housed in the collections of the state galleries of New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia), and by the following February, he and his family had relocated to London where they would remain for the next five years. Significantly in June 1961, three of his paintings were featured in the groundbreaking Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, alongside major works by Boyd, Nolan, Tucker and Whiteley, and later that year, he was selected, together with Whiteley and Lawrence Daws, to represent Australia at the progressive Biennale des Jeunes organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris. An impressive achievement both in scale and conceptual breadth, Double Image comprises one of a select few works created during this pivotal period in Blackman’s oeuvre when, stimulated by the dynamic European art scene, he was at the height of his artistic powers and critical success. As one London newspaper critic observed of his representation at the Whitechapel show, ‘The most moving – and

the discovery of the exhibition – are the three remarkable paintings by Charles Blackman… It is fanciful to see in this painting not only a new and original talent but a sign that Australian painting is at last moving away from its obsession with the outback?’ 2 Meanwhile, esteemed English art critic Bryan Robertson, an early champion of the young Antipodean’s work, was so impressed that he offered to arrange the subsequent solo exhibition for Blackman at the Mathiesen Gallery, writing in the Preface to that catalogue: ‘These are some of the strongest, most urgent and forceful paintings by a young artist that I have seen in the past ten years.’ 3 Possibly with the present work in mind, Robertson continued: ‘… Perhaps the dense blacks refer to the discrepancy between innocence and experience, making a further parallel with the tension between the idea and its projection, its shape and surface. We are given a curious impression, often of a double image, positive and negative, as well as of the space between people…’4 As reiterated by art historian David Hansen, a dominant feature and recurrent motif of Blackman’s art, is precisely that of the ‘double image’ encapsulated so powerfully here – from the double-headed protagonist of Janus-face Alice with Teapot Crown, 1956 to the matching arm gestures of The Exchange, 1952 or the various female couples of the iconic Dreaming in the Street, 1960, where one figure is depicted in bright light and full colour, and her companion reduced to a dark, anonymous silhouette. 5 Separated into two voyeuristic vignettes akin to a split-screen ‘suite’, it is difficult to know whether Double Image accordingly represents two separate people or one and her shadow (psychological or emotional, rather than physical). Imbued with an aching sense of isolation and betraying an almost existential quality, indeed it is perhaps not a coincidence that Blackman was reading Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Either/ Or (1843) at the time – a theory of human existence characterised by the enduring opposition between the essentially hedonistic-aesthetic heart and the critical-ethical mind.6 Such would also seem to accord with Robertson’s contemporary interpretation of the duality inherent in these poignant ‘double Image’ works, ‘…the paintings show their own synthesis, supercharged between romantic vision and classical compression of form.’ 7 1. Robertson, B., ‘Preface’, Charles Blackman: Paintings and Drawings, The Mathiesen Gallery, London, 1961, n.p. 2. Pringle, J.D., ‘The Australian Painters’ in Observer, London, 4 June 1961, n.p. 3. Robertson, op. cit. 4. Ibid. 5. Hansen, D., in Important Australian Art, Sotheby’s, Sydney, 26 November 2007, p. 136 6. Ibid. 7. Robertson, op. cit. VERONICA ANGELATOS

JOHN BRACK

(1920 – 1999) ONE BALANCING GIRL, 1977 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 66.0 x 48.0 cm 73.0 x 55.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: John Brack ‘77 inscribed with title on artist’s label verso: ONE BALANCING GIRL / MRS / BROOKS ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Pauline Brooks, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1978 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED John Brack, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 27 May – 21 June 1978, cat. 14 LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. P238, p. 67 Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 132 The First Gallery in Paddington: The Artists and their Work tell the Story of the Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Edwards & Shaw, Surry Hills, New South Wales, 1981, p. 14 (illus. installation)

The following excerpts are from Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pp. 121 – 22: ‘The series of gymnasts… thematically presents a logical progression from the ballroom dancing series – the concern with senseless ritual as recreational activities are converted into difficult and testing labour. In its formal language, however, there are signs of a fundamental change. A constant preoccupation in Brack’s art is identity. This can be traced back to a youthful interest in books on physiognomy as well as a later study of Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity with its questions of ‘re-identification’ and ‘personal distinctiveness’ ... Up to this point, Brack’s images of still-life objects – scissors, knives and forks – were kept separate from figure compositions, although he did imbue these still life objects with a symbolic existence. In the gymnast series, the stick-like figures start to lose a little of their human identity and increasingly become formal elements that symbolically convey humanity as observed from a distance. The whole setting is reduced to a minimum – the featureless floors and walls of the gymnasium, with a few lines on the bare floorboards marking off the extent of the playing arena. They are very sparse compositions where the figures remain the dominant elements but no longer occupy most of the picture space. ‘The origins of the gymnast motif probably can be traced back to Brack’s observation of his own children when they were young, although when he commenced the series his youngest daughter was almost twenty and all the gymnasts in the first series are boys. Implied in this association is the artist’s concern that angst is being pushed down onto our children: “... a series of pictures dealing with children doing gymnastic exercises, the idea here is related to balancing and falling, but not absolutely collapsing – you know, the world is going on in a series of stumbling lurches, but not absolutely collapsing... it is not the abyss, it is stumbling, but it is not the abyss.”1

Rudy Komon during John Brack’s solo show, 1978 ‘One Balancing Girl’ shown second from the right photographer unknown

‘The series of gymnasts is largely preoccupied with exploring a number of premeditated ambiguities intended as a visual metaphor commenting on the complexity of life... there is statement about balance and imbalance, movement and stability, unity and discord, implying in the antinomical sense that at the moment of greatest balance there exists the greatest potential for imbalance, that ascent implies descent, and so forth. These slight, almost sexless figures cast against the naked floorboards are involved in part of a ritual as complex as life itself. Having attained for a brief moment a state of triumph, they hover as if frozen on the pinnacle of their success, precariously balancing, tottering on the brink of collapse without actually collapsing.’ 1. John Brack on John Brack, Lecture, Australian National University, Canberra, 1977, p. 7

JEFFREY SMART

(1921 – 2013) SECOND STUDY FOR HOUSE AT INTERSECTION, 1977 oil on canvas on composition board 27.5 x 37.5 cm signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) John Sleigh, Victoria Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Jeffrey Smart, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 29 March – 11 April 1978, cat. 19 On loan to Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria, 1984 – 1990 (exhibited December 1989 – January 1990) LITERATURE Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Gryphon Books, Melbourne, 1983, cat. 708, p. 115 McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart / Paintings of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990, cat. 149, p. 158 RELATED WORK House at Intersection, 1977, oil on canvas, 53.0 x 60.0 cm, private collection, illus. McCulloch, A., ‘The Fantin of the Autostrada’, Melbourne Herald, Melbourne, 6 April 1978 We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Few paintings better exemplify Jeffrey Smart’s pictorial intelligence and wit than this image of a pristine traffic intersection before a doublestorey modern townhouse. There is no mistaking we are in Italy, on the outskirts of a town or city, and it is late afternoon on an idyllic summer’s day. The artist even alludes to a theme used by painters who evoked the melancholy Italian verse of the poet Shelley: this is a moonrise picture.1 Smart had been settled near Arezzo for seven years when he produced this painting. Familiarity with the area saw him directing attention upon otherwise unremarkable motifs passed daily in his car: traffic signs, bus stops, overpasses, apartment blocks. For him they represented

a sort of mute theatrical cast, objects he might deploy in different combinations across pictures. The creative challenge in working this way was to develop a striking design, hitting upon a visual drama that might serve as a source of endless fascination. The solitary townhouse in this study is an invention. There was no small building precariously sited on a traffic island. Instead the artist devised it from architectural drawings in his sketch books, then finished his paint with an orange hue and shadows to convey illumination from a setting summer sun. The accompanying road markings—which feature in several 1970s paintings—are adapted from the Arezzo turnoff on the A1 motorway from Rome to Florence. The artist used variants of this configuration to display his mastery of geometry, always having one edge curve gracefully upward. Optically he also used turnoff markings to lead the viewer’s eye through the centre of his compositions, while also stabilising an overall design. The remaining elements in this study are five signs and a very distant building. Smart positions them evenly along his horizon line, using colour and size to highlight the ‘No Entry’ traffic sign on the left of centre. With it Smart uses the white bar against red to echo the horizon behind, while he has the sign’s circular shape also rhyme visually with the adjacent ascending moon, an identically sized blue disc in the serene sky. The artist graded this particular work as a ‘second’ study. Smart’s initial studies—some of them pencil drawings, others small oil sketches— will employ one or more motifs he intended to use in a picture. But they can show him grasping for a definitive composition. Props are still being moved around his stage, the backdrop is undecided, lighting is yet to be confirmed. Then comes Smart’s so-called ‘second’ study. Technically it might be more than the second variant on a theme, but this tasty piece sees him cement the picture’s design. It amounts to the dress rehearsal. Objects are placed and posed like actors with, apart from a few details, the visual elements seen in their final settings. So, as visual summations of a major composition, his ‘second’ studies are hardly to be classed as lesser pictures. Indeed, as this Second Study for House at Intersection, 1977 shows, certain studies by Jeffrey Smart amount to minor masterpieces. 1. Smart would quote snatches of Shelley’s verse in conversation, sometimes explaining how Italy had inspired particular lines. DR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

RUSSELL DRYSDALE

(1912 – 1981) CHILDREN DANCING, 1950 oil on canvas 66.0 x 102.0 cm signed lower right: Russell Drysdale inscribed with title verso: ‘CHILDREN DANCING’ / RUSSELL DRYSDALE / c/o MACQUARIE GALLERIES, / 19 BLIGH ST / SYDNEY ESTIMATE: $1,300,000 – 1,600,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (partial label attached verso) Mervyn Horton, Sydney The Estate of Mervyn Horton, Sydney Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in November 1983 EXHIBITED Russell Drysdale, The Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 9 – 21 August 1950, cat. 10 Russell Drysdale, The Leicester Galleries, London, 30 November – 23 December 1950, cat. 16 First Loan Exhibition: Contemporary Australian paintings selected from private collections in Sydney, Art Gallery Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 September – 19 October 1955, cat. 21 (as ‘Dancing Children’) Contemporary Australian Paintings: Pacific Loan Exhibition, on board Orient Line S.S. Orcades, Sydney, 2 October 1956; Auckland, 8 October 1956; Honolulu, 16 October 1956; Vancouver, 22 October 1956; San Francisco, 25 October 1956; National Art Gallery, Sydney, November 1956, cat. 22 (label attached verso, as ‘Dancing Children’) Famous Paintings from Australian Homes, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 14 – 24 May 1957, cat. 36 (as ‘The Children’) Contemporary Australian Art, Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, May 1960, cat. 18 (label attached verso) Russell Drysdale Retrospective 1937 – 1960, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 October – 6 November 1960, cat. 66 (label attached verso, as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’) On long term loan to the Bendigo Art Gallery, 2005 – 2023

LITERATURE Gleeson, J., ‘Drysdale reveals the ‘gold of art’’, The Sun, Sydney, 9 August 1950, p. 30 McKie, R., ‘Drysdale takes Australia to London’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 12 October 1950, p. 8 (as ‘Dancing Children’) ‘Sundry Shows: Russell Drysdale’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 71, no. 3679, 16 August 1950, p. 23 ‘Drysdale Paintings’, The Bulletin, Sydney, vol. 72, no. 3729, 1 August 1951, p. 2 (as ‘The Dancing Children’) Hamilton, G., Summer Glare, Angus and Robertson, London, 1960, illus. front cover Haefliger, P., Russell Drysdale Retrospective 1937 – 1960, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1960, cat. 66, p. 58 (as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’) ‘Sundry Shows: Russell Drysdale’, The Bulletin, Sydney, 12 October 1960, vol. 81, no. 4209, p. 23 (as ‘Children Dancing in the Desert’) Dutton, G., Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, pl. 66 (illus., as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’), p. 188 Dutton, G., Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969, pl. 65, pp. 88, 91 (illus., as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’), 204 Pringle, J., Russell Drysdale’s Australia, Sydney Ure Smith, Sydney, 1974, p. 1 (illus., as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’) Thomas, D., ‘The Mervyn Horton collection’, Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, Spring 1983, pp. 78 (illus., as ‘Children Dancing, No. 2’), 79

Russell Drysdale Broken Mountain, 1950 oil on canvas 66.2 × 102.0 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Russell Drysdale’s paintings of Australia and its inhabitants helped define our national identity, capturing the essence of the country and the character of its people. When his now iconic depictions of rural Australia first appeared in the early 1940s however, there was no artistic precedent for the imagery of a harsh and unyielding landscape populated by stoic, resilient people. Representing a decisive break from the romantic pastoral imagery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Drysdale’s vision focussed on the experience of outback and country life, infusing elements of Surrealism and Expressionism into his realistic approach, and making a profound contribution to the visual representation of Australian life. One of the best-known artists of his generation, Drysdale’s art is on permanent display in major galleries throughout the country and he remains a household name. His path to a career as an artist was more coincidence than the result of focussed planning. Recovering from eye surgery in 1932, he passed the time by drawing. Impressed by what he saw, Drysdale’s doctor, Julian Smith – ‘that strange and brilliant mixture of surgeon, artist and photographer’1 – showed his work to Daryl Lindsay. A successful painter, member of the famed artistic family, and later director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Lindsay recalled that Drysdale’s work ‘showed a curious sensitivity and a sharp observation.’ 2 Born into a

family with extensive farming interests – including Boxwood Park in the Riverina district – the young Drysdale ‘liked Lindsay because he had had the same sort of life that I had led… He had been a jackeroo [sic.] and a station manager and we could talk about horses and sheep.’ 3 Although Drysdale had always imagined a life on the land, this attention from respected artworld figures prompted him to consider a creative career and a subsequent introduction to George Bell, the influential modern artist and teacher, sealed his fate. Drysdale enrolled at the Shore–Bell School in Melbourne in 1935 after extended travel in England and Europe. Having seen the work of the Impressionists and modern artists there for the first time, he was fuelled with the desire to paint, later saying, ‘I… got to like these things tremendously and I wanted to do it… quite suddenly they had a meaning which they never had in books.’4 He absorbed Bell’s teaching, which emphasised the importance of imagination and encouraged individual expression, as well as developing a sound technical knowledge of the materials and processes of his craft. Bell also instilled in his students the importance of drawing, believing that its practice ‘is as essential to an artist as practising scales to a pianist.’5 Drysdale’s first solo exhibition at Riddell Galleries, Melbourne in 1938 included The Rabbiter and his Family, 1938 (National Gallery of Australia) and Monday Morning, 1938

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape, 1950 oil on canvas 101.6 x 127.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

– purchased by his friend Maie Casey, who sold it a few years later to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – and the critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Writing in the Melbourne Herald, Basil Burdett proclaimed, ‘I have seldom seen a more promising exhibition by a young painter anywhere.’6 During a trip to Australia in 1949, renowned British art historian Kenneth Clark visited Drysdale’s studio and bought The Councillor’s House, 1948 – 49 – a painting based on the artist’s recent trip to Hill End – for his personal collection. Early the following year Clark wrote to Drysdale advising that Leicester Galleries in London wanted to present a major solo exhibition of recent paintings. While a June 1950 date was suggested, he did not have enough work ready to show, and the exhibition was scheduled for December that year. Inspired by the prospect of an exhibition at such a respected London gallery – where artists including Matisse and Picasso had also had their first London solo shows – Drysdale worked at a solid pace, but he was also excited by recent travels through Queensland which had presented him with a wide range of new subject-matter. Fourteen of the paintings exhibited in London were finished by August – including Emus in a landscape, 1950 (National Gallery of Australia) and Broken Mountain, 1950 (National Gallery of Victoria) – when they were shown

at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney prior to being packed and shipped.7 Children Dancing, 1950 was among this group of paintings and it was the subject of considerable positive commentary from the local critics. The Daily Telegraph writer described it eloquently as ‘a rare, beautiful, and tragic canvas, in which two children dance against an empty landscape, not to music, but to the silence of their red and rainless outback world.’ 8 James Gleeson regarded the greatest works among the ‘rich and exciting’ presentation as those which depicted figures in the landscape, and highlighted Children Dancing among this group. Summing up the exhibition, he wrote: ‘These pictures have the impact of a profound emotional experience, yet every element in them is controlled by a clear and watchful intelligence that rigorously suppresses any hint of emotionalism. No other artist, with the possible exception of Sidney Nolan, has succeeded in capturing so much of the essence of inland Australia, yet these landscapes have been constructed with quite as much respect for the verities of classical art as one would find in a Poussin.’ 9 Children Dancing follows a closely related, smaller work which was painted the previous year.10 The earlier image depicts two young girls dancing barefoot, with arms raised, in a flat and featureless desert

landscape. Space is condensed in this picture, the figures are close to the picture plane, and the viewer feels part of an intimate scene. In contrast, the pictorial space in the current work is vast, with low-lying hills just visible on the distant horizon. Tall, spindly trees on the left, painted with the utmost delicacy, are balanced by a windmill on the far right, and the strong verticality of these elements – such ubiquitous features of the Australian outback – in turn echoes the figures of the dancing children. Drysdale describes the dry, dusty earth with a palette of ochre, dark red and brown. The sky is immense and luminous, palest blue and green above the horizon and along the top of the painting, is a band of orange and pink which speaks to the heat of the day, as well as signalling that there is more to come. While the landscape of this painting is tough and spare, it is the joyous free-spirited dancing of the figures that prevails. Although London audiences were unfamiliar with the physical reality of Drysdale’s subject-matter and sometimes challenged by the ruggedness of the landscape he described, his paintings struck a chord. Reviewing the exhibition in a broadcast on the BBC Pacific Service, Eric Newton said, ‘There’s nothing lush or exuberant about Mr Drysdale’s Australia. I don’t feel an irresistible urge to emigrate to Australia – his Australia – as a result of visiting the show. But that has nothing to do with Mr Drysdale’s excellence as an artist. There are plenty of good pictures that take me to places I don’t particularly want to visit in real life’.11 He continued, ‘ he is a first-rate painter. His pictures are authentic accounts of a distant and unfamiliar continent. They are creations in their own right, and as such they have an authority, a unity, a presence of their own.’12

Alongside the positive reviews came good sales. Nine paintings were sold on the opening day, including one to Sir Laurence Olivier, who had previously met Drysdale and his wife in Sydney. War Memorial, 1950 was selected for the Tate Gallery, and while the artist was reportedly disappointed by this choice, representation in such an important international collection added significantly to his developing reputation. Drysdale was one of a small handful of twentieth century Australian artists to achieve this level of recognition during his lifetime. In addition to being represented in the Tate and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, his work was also included in major private collections including that of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Acknowledgement of his great talent also came in 1954, when he was selected alongside Sidney Nolan and William Dobell to represent Australia at the XXVII Venice Biennale – the first time Australia had participated in this pre-eminent international exhibition of contemporary art – and in 1969, when his contribution to Australian art was recognised with a knighthood. Having been owned by Mervyn Horton, Children Dancing has a distinguished provenance. Employed as an editor by Sam Ure Smith in 1951, he was also secretary to the Society of Artists, as well as being gallery manager for their annual exhibition, and in this way was very familiar with the Sydney art world. In addition to editing several books on contemporary Australian art during the 1960s-early 80s, Horton is probably best known as editor of Art and Australia, which was launched in May 1963.13 1. Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2009, p. 15 2. Ibid. 3. Drysdale interviewed by Geoffrey Dutton, quoted in Eagle, M. and Minchin, J., The George Bell School: Students, Friends, Influences, Deutscher Art Publications, Melbourne and Resolution Press, Sydney, 1981, p. 91 4. Klepac, op. cit., p. 21 5. Drysdale quoted in J.F. Nagle, ‘Preface’, Russell Drysdale, Richmond Hill Press, Melbourne, 1979 6. Burdett, B., ‘Young painter shows brilliant promise’, Herald, Melbourne, 26 April 1938, p. 10, quoted in Smith, G., Russell Drysdale 1912 – 81, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p. 19 7. The Leicester Galleries exhibition also included a number of earlier works loaned from collectors including Kenneth Clark: see Klepac, op. cit, p. 217 8. McKie, R., ‘Drysdale takes Australia to London’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 12 October 1950, p. 8 9. Gleeson, J., ‘Drysdale reveals the ‘gold of art’’, The Sun, Sydney, 9 August 1950, p. 30 10. Dancing Children No. 1, 1949, oil on canvas, 30.5 x 40.6 cm, illustrated in Klepac, op. cit., p. 206 11. Q uoted in Klepac, ibid., pp. 220 – 221 12. Ibid. 13. Daniel Thomas, ‘Horton, Mervyn Emrys Rosser (1917 – 1983)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu. au/biography/horton-mervyn-emrys-rosser-12657/text22809, published first in hardcopy 2007, accessed online 6 March 2023 KIRSTY GRANT

Mervyn Horton’s Upstairs Sitting Room, 34 Victoria Street, Potts Point, Sydney, 1983 photographer: John Delacour illus. in Thomas, D., 'The Mervyn Horton collection', Art and Australia, Fine Arts Press, Sydney, Spring 1983, p. 78

Russell Drysdale, c.1945 photographer: Max Dupain National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with funds provided by Timothy Fairfax AC 2003

JOHN PERCEVAL

(1923 – 2000) BOY BESIDE A FRUIT BARROW, 1943 oil on cheesecloth on cardboard on composition board 69.0 x 42.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Perceval / Jan 43 bears inscription with title on handwritten label verso: Boy by the Fruit Barrow / 1943 ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 150,000

PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in April 1979 EXHIBITED Rebels and Precursors, Aspects of Australian Painting in Melbourne 1937 – 1947, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, August – September 1962; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September – October 1962, cat. 90 (as ‘Boy on the Fruit Barrow’) John Perceval Canberra Exhibition, ANU and Department of Interior, Albert Hall, Canberra, 13 – 24 July 1966, cat. 12 (label attached verso, as ‘Boy by the Fruit Barrow’) Autumn Exhibition 1979, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 5 – 20 April 1979, cat. 105 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) John Perceval: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 April - 12 July 1992 and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 August - 20 September 1992 (label attached verso) On long term loan to the Bendigo Art Gallery, 2005 – 2023 LITERATURE Plant, M., John Perceval, Lansdowne Press, Victoria, 1978, pl. 3, pp. 16, 17 (illus.) Haese, R., Rebels and precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, Penguin, Victoria, 1981, p. 204 Allen, T., John Perceval, Melbourne University Press, Victoria, 1992, pp. 140, 141 (illus.), 146

John Perceval was the youngest member of the group of artists forever known as the Angry Penguins. They gained this collective title during World War II through their association with Max Harris’ magazine of the same name, and further benefited from the patronage of John and Sunday Reed at Heide. The Angry Penguins each created momentous series of artworks in the years 1942 – 1944: Albert Tucker with the harrowing Images of Modern Evil; Sidney Nolan and his acclaimed paintings of the Wimmera; Arthur Boyd’s twisted scenes of Melbourne populated by gargoyles and cripples; and Joy Hester with her emotive and lyrical ink-wash drawings. In many ways, the most intimate and psychologically complex were John Perceval’s images of a small, blonde child with a bowl haircut navigating landscapes of personal memory. This child was the artist himself, trawling through events from his troubled childhood located within a setting of pre-war Melbourne. Boy beside a fruit barrow, 1943, is a significant work from the series and one of the few remaining in private hands. To say that Perceval had a difficult childhood is a major understatement. Born Linwood Robert Stevens South, he and his older sister Betty were initially raised on large wheat property ‘Illamurta’ 220 kilometres east of Perth, near Bruce Rock. Perceval’s parents’ marriage failed soon after his birth and his mother moved to Perth. As an act of early defiance and self-invention, the young boy rejected his given name and began using ‘John’ instead. At the age of five, he and his sister re-joined their mother in Perth and it was here that he first gained encouragement for his art. Three years later, the children again returned to ‘Illamurta’ and the harsh realities of life on a working farm became part of the boy’s daily routine. In the interim, his mother married William de Burgh Perceval. Betty and John, now aged 11, moved again to join them and he adopted Perceval as his surname. In late 1937, however, he contracted the crippling disease of polio, leading to a year bedridden in hospital, followed by a long rehabilitation. His latent talent was recognised by visiting journalist who wrote a large article for The Sun, headlined ‘Paralysed boy of 15 paints like a master’, and illustrated with a powerful self-portrait.1 This painting is now one of the treasures in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.

John Perceval Boy with Broken Pot, 1943 oil on muslin on composition board 63.5 × 38.0 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

John Perceval Boy with Cat 2, 1943 oil on composition board 59.0 x 43.8 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Having experienced such a fractured family life, the outbreak of war soon after his recovery was of unexpected benefit to Perceval, for he was assigned to the army’s cartographic unit, and it was here that he met Arthur Boyd in 1942. Such was their immediate rapport that Perceval soon moved into the rambling Boyd compound at Murrumbeena. He had found a new and embracing surrogate family, which became permanent when he married Arthur’s younger sister Mary in 1944. Following encouragement from Albert Tucker, Boyd and Perceval studied Max Doerner’s The materials of the artist and their use in painting (1934), which described in detail traditional techniques, and began using these to imbue their paintings with the gravitas of the old masters.

The first connected series that Perceval completed included the extraordinary Boy with cat I and II, 1943, where, as Bernard Smith described, ‘the child becomes…a figure of pity and terror’ 2 as the cat’s claws tear into his flesh. The series progressed and other characters started to appear as Perceval recalled specific childhood episodes of himself in a wheelchair being guided through the streets, encountering vaudeville side shows of performing dogs and circus entertainers on stilts. Seen together, these images portray a haphazard, dystopian carnival, whose participants leer over the boy as he navigates his way through the world. Boy beside a fruit barrow connects directly to these, and Perceval’s biographer Margaret Plant vividly describes its tension

Arthur Boyd and John Perceval, 1943 photographer: Albert Tucker gelatin silver photograph Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne © The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation

with ‘the fair-haired child, small in front of a huge mother figure with hair in a chignon and her arm taut with the weight of her purchases; and the fruit man, hunched up and fingering the money. Behind the three hollow-eyed figures is a Caligari set of tall houses with windows black and vacant like the people’s eyes.’ 3 It is a powerful and compelling scene, one which underscores Perceval’s belief that ‘children are the real world.’4

Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Together with Boy beside a fruit barrow, they are now regarded as a pivotal and critically important sequence in Australian art of the 1940s. 1. Pimlott, F.L., ‘Paralysed boy of 15 paints like a master’, The Sun News Pictorial, Melbourne, 25 June 1938, p. 43 2. Bernard Smith, cited in Reid, B., Of Light and Dark: the art of John Perceval, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992, p. 14 3. Plant, M., John Perceval, Lansdowne Press, Victoria, 1978, p. 16 4. The artist, cited in Reid, B., ibid., p. 3

Perceval’s ‘childhood’ paintings from 1943 may be found in major Australian collections including the National Gallery of Australia; National Gallery of Victoria; Heide Museum of Modern Art; and the

ANDREW GAYNOR

ALBERT TUCKER

(1914 – 1999) SELF PORTRAIT, 1948 oil pastel, synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard 50.5 x 37.0 cm (sight) signed and dated lower right: Tucker / 1948 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Albert Tucker, Melbourne (label attached verso, no. 30107) Thence by descent Barbara Tucker, Melbourne Sotheby’s, Sydney, 27 August 2013, lot 6 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Albert Tucker: Works on Paper 1928–1978, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 25 October – 12 November 1978, cat. 94 Albert Tucker: The Endurance: of the Human Spirit, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 1 March – 1 April 2000, cat. 10 Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948–1952, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 18 July – 5 November 2006 LITERATURE Harding, L., Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948–1952, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, p. 53 (illus.)

In an interview with fellow artist James Gleeson in 1979, Albert Tucker reflected on the challenges of describing his own appearance in visual form, saying ‘Yes, it is very hard dealing with one’s own image… One gets trapped in a curious delusional state’.1 Despite these fears, Tucker’s self portraits speak honestly and directly of their subject at particular times in his life. The delicately painted Self-Portrait, 1937 (National Gallery of Australia), for example, depicts a young novice, serious and wide-eyed. In Self, 1983 (National Gallery of Victoria), a painting made almost fifty years later – by which time Tucker was a highly respected senior figure with a firm place in the history of twentieth century Australian art – we witness a dramatic transformation of attitude, appearance and painterly confidence. Creating self portraits throughout his career, Tucker was motivated in part by the opportunity that this subject presented for self-analysis and expression, and as well as documenting his physical appearance through the years, together, they chart the development of his artistic identity.

This 1948 self portrait was painted in Paris, a city which enchanted Tucker with its ‘wide boulevards, open skies, easy relaxed people and… the impossible gardens of Versailles’. 2 Rather than presenting a recognisable image of the artist, it discards the traditions of naturalistic representation and adopts instead, a bold Cubist approach, fragmenting the human form into a series of interconnected abstract shapes. Outlined by strong painted lines, these shapes allow various perspectives of the subject to be combined into one image, facilitating the rendering of a three-dimensional subject in two dimensions. Texturally rich, the image is enlivened by a combination of painting and drawing media – oil pastel, gouache and synthetic polymer paint – and their lively, expressive application across the surface of the work. The use of simplified shapes to represent aspects of the human form was not entirely new to Tucker’s work. His renowned Images of Modern Evil series, produced during the mid-1940s, had also utilised this approach and the elegant red lips of this self portrait (echoed by the band of blocky, white teeth below), hark back to the crescent mouth – also typically coloured red – which is such a distinctive element of those now iconic images. Like all Australian artists of his generation, Tucker had seen very little modern art and his knowledge of contemporary European painting was drawn primarily from books and magazines. But in Paris he encountered exhibition after exhibition, and this experience, he said, threw him ‘into a tailspin of awe [and] filled this screaming hunger… I’d had all my life.’ 3 The influence of Picasso is strong in this painting and indeed, in much of Tucker’s work from this time. Describing the Spanish master as ‘everything and more than we could have hoped … there is no one else anywhere near him’4, Tucker later observed that, ‘When one deals with a distortion, it’s impossible to avoid Picasso because of the way he… disintegrated the image, pulled it completely to pieces and kept putting it back together in different ways.’ 5 1. Tucker, A., interviewed by Gleeson, J., 2 May 1979, National Gallery of Australia Research Library, https://nga.gov.au/Research/Gleeson/pdf/Tucker.pdf, accessed 20 February 2023, p. 6 2. Tucker to John and Sunday Reed, Sidney Nolan and Sweeney Tucker, 14 February 1948, Barrett Reid papers, State Library of Victoria, quoted in Harding, L., Meeting a Dream: Albert Tucker in Paris 1948-1952, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2006, p. 26 3. Tucker, A., interviewed by Blackman, B., 14 July 1988, quoted in Burke, J., Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker, Random House, North Sydney, 2003, p. 302 4. Tucker, 1948, op. cit., p. 31 5. Harding, L., ‘Re-picturing the Modern World 1940 – 1949’ in Harding, L. & Cramer, S., Cubism and Australian Art, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2009, p. 119 KIRSTY GRANT

CHARLES BLACKMAN

(1928 – 2018) GLADIOLI, c.1964 oil on canvas 122.0 x 102.0 cm signed upper left: BLACKMAN bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: “WOMAN WITH GLADIOLI” / 1964 bears inscription on partial label verso: […] dioli 48 x 40 ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE Skinner Galleries, Perth Private collection, Perth Lister Gallery, Perth David Davies, London, acquired from the above in April 1982 The Collection of Sir David Davies, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 May 2003, lot 13 (as 'Woman with Gladioli') Private collection, Sydney

LITERATURE Amadio, N., Charles Blackman The Lost Domains, second edition, Alpine Fine Arts Collection Ltd, New York, 1982, cat. 3.14, pp. 39, 40 (illus.), 142 EXHIBITED Charles Blackman, Skinner Galleries, Perth, 28 May 1974, cat. 4 ‘Bathed in a light that has its source in the luminous colours, these inward gazing faces full of a gentle sadness, these flowers, which often seem like souls of flowers, have a stringent poetry that lingers in the minds...’1 Fusing the beautiful with the enigmatic, Charles Blackman’s exquisitely lyrical images of women and flowers are arguably among his most widely admired achievements. First appearing in such celebrated examples such as The Presentation, 1959 (National Gallery of Victoria) and The Bouquet, 1961 (Queensland Art Gallery I Museum of Art), the trope is central to Blackman’s art, punctuating every decade of his vast oeuvre; as the artist’s biographer, Thomas Shapcott, elaborates, ‘the motif… must be seen as a long series of inventions on a theme capable of infinite variety within the form.’ 2 Painted sonnets capturing moments of great sensitivity and poignant beauty, indeed for Blackman, such images of girls and flowers were ‘…an eloquent form for his personal poetry’, and invariably, as Nadine Amadio adds, ‘…reflections of his wife’. 3 For while no doubt betraying affinities with his haunting investigations of loneliness in his Schoolgirl series previously, as well as his iconic Alice paintings with their abundant floral blooms, Blackman’s depictions of women with flowers were most profoundly inspired by the encroaching blindness of his first wife and muse, Barbara Patterson – a writer and poet who was already legally blind when the couple married in 1951, with her condition deteriorating dramatically over the decade subsequently.

Emerging from Blackman’s fruitful London sojourn in the first half of the sixties during which he was at the height of his creative powers and critical success (see lot 9), Gladioli, c.1964 is a superb example of the artist’s remarkable ability to illuminate an inner ‘world of things sensed rather than seen.’4 Featuring his signature use of the ‘double image’ in the female profile set against an atmospheric dark ground devoid of any subject beyond its brushwork and enlivened by the brilliant colour-burst of gladioli, notably the composition engages all the senses, invoking a deeper, more intimate scrutiny. As Blackman himself reflected upon his women and flower images created during these years, ‘…what emerged was that in relation to [flowers] human beings start to do certain kinds of things… that is, the flowers evoked the people, in a certain kind of gentility, or substance, or reverence, or sensitivity.’ 5 In the present work, such wider sensitivity is heightened by the figure’s closed eyes – the absence of sight emphasising a greater reliance on smell (her head inclined towards the flowers recalls their perfume) and touch (the prominence of her hand speaks of their delicate textures). Meanwhile, the sombre notes of the backdrop perhaps allude to music, the fleeting transience of a nocturne with ‘…the lyrical balance of light and shade… suggest[ing] an inner listening.’6 A poetic work imbued with melancholy and tenderness, Gladioli not only encapsulates the artist’s unique intuitive response to his subjects, but offers powerful insight more specifically into the female psyche – a complex inner realm of dreams and emotions to which few others have given such eloquent expression. As Amadio elucidates, Blackman ‘…admits that what he attempts to paint is ‘virtually unpaintable’… The form of a girl’s face lit with flowers like a radiant echo of herself, is one of his best-known images, as well as one of his many powerful devices for painting the ‘unpaintable’. The floral flower shape is part of the woman; the singing colours of the flowers are the music of her psyche. They are so often held like a gift of herself. The flowers are in no sense a decoration even when they are not closely knit into the girl form; in fact the space between them and her make a bridge of emotions.’ 7 1. Langer, G., Courier Mail, Brisbane, 18 November 1958 2. Shapcott, T., The Art of Charles Blackman, André Deutsch, London, 1989, p. 28 3. Amadio, N., Charles Blackman: The Lost Domains, Alpine Fine Arts Collection, New York, p. 44 4. The Antipodeans’, Modern Art News, Contemporary Art Society, Melbourne, vol. 1, no. 1, August 1959, p. 9 5. The artist cited in Shapcott, T., Focus on Blackman, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1967, p. 36 6. Amadio, op. cit., p. 39 7. Smith, B., ‘The Antipodeans’, Australia To-day, Melbourne, 14 October 1959, p. 104 VERONICA ANGELATOS

ARTHUR BOYD

(1920 – 1999) WIMMERA LANDSCAPE WITH DAM AND WHITE COCKATOO, c.1958 oil on composition board 39.5 x 49.5 cm signed lower left: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE Andrew Ivanyi Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, by 1978 Estate of the above, Melbourne

An untiring and extremely skilful painter of landscapes, Arthur Boyd is undoubtedly among Australia’s most revered artists with his highly personalised images of his homeland now iconic within the national consciousness. Among the more revelatory and widely acclaimed of his achievements, the extended sequence of luminous, sun-parched landscapes inspired by his travels to the Wimmera region in north-west Victoria are particularly celebrated. As Janet McKenzie elaborates, ‘… [in these paintings] Boyd created an archetypal Australian landscape. Possessing both a poetic lyricism and a down to earth quality and capturing the glorious light, these works… [offer] a sense of acceptance that many country-dwelling Australians could identify with.’1 Boyd first encountered the Wimmera region during the summer of 1948 – 49 when he accompanied the poet Jack Stevenson on a number of expeditions to Horsham in north-west Victoria. With its flat, semi-arid paddocks and endless horizons, the wheat-farming district presented Boyd with such a stark contrast to the verdant, undulating hills of Berwick and Harkaway (where he had recently undertaken an expansive mural series of Brughelesque idylls at his uncle’s property, The Grange) that he found himself required to develop a new visual vocabulary in order to capture this desolate landscape. Although the Wimmera could not be described as ‘uninhabitable’, it was for Boyd, his first glimpse of the vastness of Australia’s interior. As Barry Pearce notes, ‘…He discovered there a hint of something that had drawn other painters of his generation, a subject tentatively recorded by a few artists of the nineteenth century and touched on by even fewer of the twentieth: the empty spaces of the great interior. Of course, the Wimmera was wheat country and not by any means forbidding, nor forsaken. But in hot dry weather it could have, over sparse, unbroken horizons, a searing expanse of sky that elicited an acute sense of the infinite…’ 2 When initially unveiled at the David Jones Gallery in 1950, the Wimmera landscapes were greeted with universal acclaim – no doubt, as more than one author has observed, ‘because their sun-parched colours were

so reminiscent of the Heidelberg school.’ 3 Significantly the paintings resonated not only amongst the public, but also with institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria who purchased arguably the most famous work from the series, Irrigation Lake, Wimmera, 1950, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales who acquired Midday, The Wimmera, 1948 – 49 – thereby representing the first works by Boyd to enter a major public collection. Imbued with the spirit of the land, these works represented for many their first encounter with these ‘more intimate aspects of the Australian landscape’4 and thus, not only established Boyd’s reputation as ‘an interpreter of the rural Australian environment’ 5, but moreover, launched his career on the international stage, with Boyd subsequently awarded the honour of representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1958. So profound was the impact of the stark simplicity and shimmering light of the Wimmera upon Boyd’s psyche that he would subsequently revisit the subject on several occasions over the following decades – whether painting at his property ‘Riversdale’ on the Shoalhaven river in southern New South Wales, or abroad while residing in London and Italy. A later iteration most likely completed towards the end of the fifties, Wimmera Landscape with Dam and White Cockatoo, c.1958 is one such ‘re-imagining’ of the Wimmera region, illustrating well the complexity of Boyd’s vision which is invariably an amalgam of visual observation, artistic experience and emotional response. Offering a sophisticated reappraisal of the theme in its absolute sparseness, economy of detail and restrained palette, the image is one of intimacy and warmth, enhanced by the slightly rose-tinged sky which infuses the entire composition with a sense of joyous optimism. Here there is no angst, no challenge, no dramatic dialogue between man and nature as may be found elsewhere in Boyd’s oeuvre; to the contrary, the work exudes a mood of stillness and calm acceptance, as Franz Philipp astutely observes of such Wimmera paintings ‘…the phrase ‘landscapes of love’ comes to mind.’6 1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd: art and life, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 62 2. Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, The Art Gallery of New South Wales and The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1993, p. 20 3. Campbell, R., ‘Arthur Boyd (1920 – )’, Australia: Paintings by Arthur Streeton and Arthur Boyd, XXIX Biennale, Venice, 1958, n. p. 4. Pearce, op. cit., p. 20 5. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 67 6. Ibid., p. 64 VERONICA ANGELATOS

BRETT WHITELEY

(1939 – 1992) CHIMP, TARONGA ZOO STUDY, 1978 VERSO: UNTITLED (FIG TREE) brush and ink on paper 57.0 x 53.0 cm (sight) signed lower left: brett whiteley inscribed with date and title lower right: ‘chimp’ Taronga Zoo study / 14 / Nov / 78 bears artist’s stamp lower right ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000 PROVENANCE Private collection Lawsons, Sydney, 19 June 1984, lot 180 (as ‘Chimp’) Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 76.78 (addendum) We are grateful to Kathie Sutherland for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

Brett Whiteley first exhibited images of zoo animals in his 1965 exhibition at the Marlborough New London Gallery alongside his famed Christie series, a violent and disturbing body of work that investigated the murder of at least eight women in London by serial killer John Christie. Within the exhibition, the animals depicted in Whiteley’s Regent’s Park Zoo works provided welcome relief from the darkness of the Christie story, but also enabled the artist to find both release and enjoyment in the comparatively simple act of capturing animals in motion. The animals’ appearance at times behind the wires of a cage however, also made apparent the day-to-day reality of their situation, with Whiteley establishing a clear connection between their confinement and the human condition. On the title page for the screenprint portfolio, My Relationship between Screenprinting and Regents Park Zoo between June and August 1965, 1965 for example, Whiteley juxtaposed an image of a chimpanzee with a photograph of himself, each looking sideways to the other to create a sense of mirroring and equivalence. This look between the two (and the printed arrows on the forehead of each pointing to the other) powerfully conveys a sense of psychological connection and understanding.

As Sasha Grishin has commented, exploration of what Whiteley described as his ‘inner paddock’, and his ‘attempt to marry the seen with the unseen of his life’1 was a major part of the artist’s oeuvre, and depictions of the bird and animal kingdom afforded Whiteley an important way in which to achieve this. Whiteley was at the height of his powers in the year he created Chimp Taronga Zoo Study, 1978, having won the trifecta of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, but his life was complex, and mired by addiction. Drawing was a constant companion throughout the artist’s life and the buildings, landscape and jewel-like harbour of Sydney, his hometown, an endless source of inspiration. Taronga Zoo was within walking distance of Whiteley’s home in Lavender Bay, and it is perhaps not surprising that the artist sought refuge there, in a place where he could observe countless potential subjects and work unimpeded. In this majestic study, which powerfully captures Whiteley’s extraordinary facility of line and command of the medium, the large dark eyes of the chimp convey a sense of deep connection; seeming to truly study the artist, and by extension, the viewer. In Whiteley’s skilful hands, the image is moved beyond the simple graphic depiction of an animal to a powerful and empathic portrait of an individual sentient being, with its own unique personality and character traits. As Edmund Capon, former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales has surmised: ‘There is a sense of liberation in his art which is captured in that unequivocal delight in the experience of the moment, the indulgent sensuality and the satisfaction and fulfilment of the moment. Whiteley’s investigations have no profounder aspirations than to immortalise the experience, and this he achieved with unrelenting imagination, individuality and ultimately an immense and humane beauty.’ 2 1. Grishin, S. ‘Self Portraits & Other Intimacies’ in Grishin, S. et al., Baldessin / Whiteley: Parallel Visions, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018, p. 164 2. Capon, E., ‘Foreword’ in Pearce, B. et al., W., Brett Whiteley: Art and Life, Thames & Hudson, Australia and The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2014, p. 7 KELLY GELLATLY

JOHN OLSEN

(1928 – 2023)

TIDAL ESTUARY, 1993 watercolour and pastel on paper 97.0 x 152.0 cm (sight) signed and inscribed with title lower left: John / Olsen / ‘Tidal Estuary’ ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 100,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 23 August 1995, lot 38 Private collection, Melbourne We are grateful to Kylie Norton, Editor, John Olsen Catalogue Raisonné, for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

‘…I brushed a line around the core theme, the seed-burst, the life-burst, the sea-harbour, the source of life… I wanted to show the Harbour as a movement, a sea suck, and the sound of the water as though I am part of the sea... I am in the sea-harbour and the sea-harbour is in me.’1 With his distinctive meandering line, exuberant mark-marking and mastery of colour, John Olsen is universally acclaimed among both critics and collectors alike as Australia’s most important contemporary artist. Throughout his vast career now spanning more than seven decades, he has revealed an unerring fascination with the natural world in all its myriad forms, creating evocative depictions of the landscape that arguably capture the spirit and character of this country more eloquently than any other non-indigenous artist before him. Significantly, despite his extensive travels throughout the Australian interior and further abroad in England, Spain and Portugal, it the beauty of the Sydney Harbour and its surrounds that has been his most enduring muse – inviting endless physical and intellectual wonderment both at the colour and play of light on the water, and the various life forms inhabiting the sea and its edges. No doubt borne from an idyllic childhood spent living on the shores near Bondi, Olsen’s love of the harbour was reignited in the early 1960s when, having recently returned from abroad, he moved with his young family into a small fisherman’s cottage in the picturesque Watsons Bay at the tip of the South Head. Drawing inspiration anew from the colour, dynamism and vitality of the harbour, Sydney’s crown jewel, thus Olsen embarked upon his ‘littoral’ series of works which, featuring the chaotic flux of tides, city and people, are resplendent in their vivacious palette and energy. Witness for example, Entrance to the seaport of desire, 1964 or the celebrated Five Bells, 1963 (both in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales) – the latter inspired by the tragic 1939

poem of the same name by Kenneth Slessor that would also provide the impetus for the artist’s monumental mural commission for the northern foyer of the Sydney Opera House, Salute to Five Bells, 1972 – 73. An effervescent watercolour dating from his later years, Tidal Estuary, 1993 attests to Olsen’s ‘lifelong love affair with Sydney Harbour’ 2, bringing a freshness and immediacy to a subject that has sustained him for decades. Exuding lyricism and informed by a belief in the organic interconnectedness of all things, the 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. In a manner akin to the artist’s earlier interpretations of the subject, dominating the composition here is a cell-like form in which tendrils of calligraphic line and brilliant colour coalesce, with the extraordinary range of mark-making of varying degrees of intensity and pace layered over a delicate background wash. Employing Olsen’s signature ‘all-at-once’, multi-perspective approach – ‘I’m down on the canvas one moment and up flying the next, or looking sideways or underneath’ 3 – thus the work possesses a remarkable expansiveness, stretching out towards the high horizon and pushing against the edges and corners of the frame. Map-like, the aerial view details the sensuous lines of the estuary and peregrinations of its various marine creatures, yet 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 golden sky beyond. A superb example of Olsen’s talent as a ‘master watercolourist’, indeed Tidal Estuary not only tangibly embodies the sight as well as the feel of this iconic watery microcosm, affectionately described by Olsen as the ‘umbilical chord [sic.]’4 of the city. More broadly perhaps, it illuminates the artist’s enduring interest in the artistic parallels between the structures of such biomes and the relationships that connect them; as he reflects, ‘When one begins to see nature as a series of processes, the appearance of the object change – form follows function… I would like to make the viewer see the microcosm and the next moment the expansiveness of the universe’. 5 1. The artist, referring to his celebrated Five Bells, 1963 in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, see: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/olsen-john/ 2. Bungey, D., John Olsen: An Artist’s Life, Harper Collins, Sydney, 2014, p. 110 3. The artist, cited in Hawley, J., ‘John Olsen’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1993, p. 129 4. Olsen’s deliberate misspelling reinforcing the qualities of harmony and unity – see Murphy, J., ‘The Journals of John Olsen’ in Hurlston, D., and Edwards, D. (eds.), John Olsen The You Beaut Country, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2016, p. 98 5. The artist, cited in John Olsen, My Complete Graphics 1957 – 1979, Gryphon Books, Sydney, 1980, p. 132 VERONICA ANGELATOS

TONY TUCKSON

(1921 – 1973) TP 174A UNTITLED, c.1963 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 122.0 x 91.5 cm ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney (labels attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2006 EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson, Paintings, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 18 October – 4 November 1989, cat. 10 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, dated as c.1962 – 1965) Tony Tuckson. Important Paintings, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 23 August – 16 September 2006, cat. 10 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, dated as c.1963)

When Tony Tuckson held his first commercial exhibition at Watters Gallery, Sydney, in 1970 at the age of 49, it was to reveal an astonishing original painter, one who stamped an immediate and lasting mark on modern Australian art. At the time Untitled, 1963 was painted, very few knew of Tuckson’s work. His was a career happening in the shadow of strident division between abstraction and figuration. The Sydney 9 group formed in 1960 and all were abstractionists and included Robert Klippel and Clement Meadmore amongst others. It was an immediate response to Melbourne’s Antipodeans and their exhibition – all seven artists were figurative. Robert Hughes championed the former; Bernard Smith the latter.1 By 1960, John Passmore’s paintings had evolved into abstraction, and Peter Upward painted his wildly energetic June celebration in 1960. Ian Fairweather had painted abstract works in the late 50s and Monastery was finally completed in 1961 – the same year John Olsen painted You Beaut Country No. 2. Contemporaneous accounts reveal Tuckson is missing amongst all the action. Tuckson’s place in art history’s canon of great abstractionists is one written in hindsight, where respected critical reaction frequently places him as Australia’s finest abstract expressionist. Prolific weekend and evening studio activity were kept at arm’s length from his position as deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. However, his selfimposed studio isolation didn’t restrict his worldliness and the reach of

his curiosity. Tuckson had studied art in his native England (he was born in Egypt), flew Spitfires in WWII and was sent to Darwin in 1942; at the end of the war he enrolled at East Sydney Technical College. As Deputy Director, he developed a keen and conversant interest in Aboriginal and Melanesian art, something not shared by uninterested gallery trustees, but it informed his own art. Tuckson’s distinctive figurative work was shaped by European modernism, especially the School of Paris, and Picasso and Matisse in particular. He also reveals an indebtedness to Ian Fairweather, both in terms of the arrangement of elements within compositions and an easy-going disregard for the quality of materials themselves. By the end of the 50s, figuration had been abandoned and the expressive potential of abstraction became a tour de force. While American Abstract Expressionism can be regarded as a pivotal underpinning of his approach to painting and drawing, Aboriginal and Melanesian art also shaped his essential aesthetic and stylistic repertoire. 2 Tuckson looked at, thought about and absorbed art that interested him. Viewers won’t find revelatory moments of identifying a source and then the application of an assumed influence. His discursive interests become rather a sophisticated part of his intellectual character, discrete elements within his unrestrained intuition and expressive exuberance. Between 1961 and 1965 Tuckson worked on red, black and white paintings. Untitled suggests nothing beyond the gestures themselves in their orchestrated, well-practiced and seemingly haphazard characteristic. But the various marks, incidents and painterly sweeps all converge into an experiential whole, where no part of the painting might exist without its interconnected counterpoint. 3 If Tuckson produced no further work after these formative abstractions, his reputation would be undiminished. But he continued to paint ambitiously, often larger in scale, until his premature death in 1973. 1. Antipodeans, Victorian Artists’ Society Galleries, East Melbourne; 4 – 15 August 1959 (The Antipodean Manifesto written by Bernard Smith) 2 Mendelssohn, J., Passion and Beauty: the paintings of Tony Tuckson; The Conversation, 28 November 2018 at https://theconversation.com/passion-and-beauty-the-paintings-oftony-tuckson-107591 The author suggests the exhibition 8 American Artists, organised by the Seattle Art Museum and shown in Sydney in 1958, had a profound effect on Tuckson, especially the work of Markey Tobey. 3. Mimmocchi, D., et al., Tony Tuckson, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, 2018. DOUG HALL AM

ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

(1917 – 1999) SHEEP WEATHER ALERT 5, 1992 – 93 torn and cut bitumen-based printed linoleum, paint and weathered plywood (diptych) 78.0 x 240.0 cm (overall) left panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: SHEEP WEATHER ALERT / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992–1993 5A right panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title upper right (inverted): SHEEP WEATHER ALERT / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992–1993 5B ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000 (2) PROVENANCE Pinacotheca, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1993 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 5 May 2009, lot 212 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 5 – 22 May 1993, cat. 32 Blue Chip: The Collector’s Exhibition, Niagara Galleries at Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, June – July 2010 The Daylight Moon: Rosalie Gascoigne and Lake George, Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 26 June – 22 August 2015, cat. 4 (pp. 17, 30, illus. and inside back cover) Spring 2016, Justin Miller Art, Sydney, October – November 2016 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Blue Chip 2020, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney, 24 September - 10 October 2020 LITERATURE Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, pl. 22, pp. 60 – 61 (illus.) Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 488, pp. 95, 265 (illus.), 339, 356

‘…Somebody gave me a lot of that lino. I couldn’t stand the inferior red and green on it, which in theory were the colours, but the black and grey were good, so I tore it by hand. It turned out in a way like sheep shapes, especially if you saw a mass of them.’1 With her training in the formal discipline of Ikebana complementing her intuitive understanding of the nature of materials, her deep attachment to her environment and later interest in modern art, Rosalie Gascoigne remains one of Australia’s most revered assemblage artists. Bespeaking a staunchness and scrupulous eye, her works are artful and refined, yet always maintain a close connection with the outside world, powerfully evoking remembered feelings or memories in relationship to the landscape; they are ‘instances of emotion recollected in tranquillity’ to quote a phrase of Wordsworth’s which was so dear to her. Occupying that space between ‘the world and the world of art’ 2, Sheep Weather Alert 5, 1992 – 93 offers an impressive example of the assemblages inspired by Gascoigne’s everyday experience of her

immediate surroundings on the outskirts of Canberra – and specifically, the region’s biting cold temperatures that posed a tangible threat to newborn lambs and recently shorn sheep. As the artist herself elaborates, ‘‘Sheep weather alert’ is what they say on the weather report. It’s a good name. it means you jolly well get your sheep or you’re going to lose a lot to the cold – it’s a bitter climate here.’ Referring to the present work, she continues ‘This is a misted-over one; they’re washed over, and it reads like shapes looming in the mist. When you have shearing time around Canberra, the yards are full of sheep, the trucks are full of sheep, the hills are full of shorn sheep – sheep, sheep, sheep – you’re just surrounded by it. That was what I was after.’ 3 Originally part of an eight-piece installation which was later dismantled by the artist, the present diptych features a cool palette of neutral whites, greys and touches of blue to suggest ice, while the scattered forms evoke a myriad of notions from sheep and lambs grazing across fields, to tufts of shorn wool, frozen icicles or even falling snowflakes. Thus, although inextricably linked in their inspiration and materials to her physical surroundings, Gascoigne’s achievements almost always encapsulate a larger, more intangible sense of place that is, paradoxically, ‘both nowhere and everywhere at once’.4 Having eschewed the use of iconography, she favours rather allusion and suggestion to capture the timeless ‘spirit’ of the landscape so that her art ‘may speak for itself’, awakening ‘… associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us’. 5 Yet if Sheep Weather Alert 5 functions ‘allusively’ as a rich repository of memories and associations, it also exists ‘illusively’ as a purely abstract form of art, transcending both the materials of its construction and the landscape itself with its formal interest in qualities of colour, texture and repetition. For indeed, as Gascoigne reiterates, ultimately such works are about ‘the pleasures of the eye’, with her manipulations of natural and semi-industrial debris to be appreciated simply as objects of aesthetic delight. Like the materials themselves, beauty is a quality that is easily and thoughtlessly discarded; as John McDonald muses, ‘When we value things for their perceived usefulness, we overlook a more fundamental necessity. Life is impoverished by the inability to recognise beauty in even the most humble guise.’6 1. The artist, quoted in MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 60 2. Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne: Materials as Landscape, Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 11 3. The artist, quoted in MacDonald, 1998, op. cit., p. 60 4. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, 1989, p. 18 5. McDonald, J., ‘Introduction’ in MacDonald, 1998, op. cit., p. 7 6. McDonald, ibid. VERONICA ANGELATOS

WILLIAM ROBINSON

born 1936 CHOOK YARD WITH BATH-TANK, c.1984 oil on linen 72.0 x 87.0 cm signed lower right: William Robinson bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: “CHOOK YARD WITH BATH-TANK” ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 140,000

PROVENANCE Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland (label attached verso) Private collection Phillips Auctioneers, Sydney, 23 May 2000, lot 25 Private collection Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 1 May 2002, lot 23 Private collection, Victoria

It would be foolish to dismiss Robinson’s early Farmyard paintings as quirky humorous vignettes. These portrayals of the animals and farm detritus that occupied Robinson’s hobby farm are complex compositional arrangements, which ultimately pointed to way towards Robinson’s celebrated mature landscapes. When these works were initially exhibited at the Ray Hughes Gallery in Brisbane, Robinson was exhibiting alongside the Australian artist Ken Whisson (1927 – 2022). Whisson, by now had been resident in Italy for several years, while Robinson was still teaching at the Kelvin Grove campus of the CAE; a position he would keep until he retired in 1989 to begin painting full time. At around this time, Robinson’s compositional experiments had him poised on the precipice of convention and his exposure to the rigour of Whisson’s approach may well have metaphorically eased him over.

The whimsical farmyard paintings are in fact variable compositional arrangements, each one a further version of the other. The cows become regular features of his work and are recognisable by the names as we have come to know them through other examples. In the Chook Yard with Bath – Tank, c.1984, Josephine peers suspiciously from behind the water tank and Rosie trots at pace towards the viewer – farmer – artist. As the years passed, Robinson’s view finder would zoom out and away from the features of the farm and begin to take in the surrounding landscape. And it was from this base that the majestic works he is best known for developed. In the years that followed he would exhibit annually at the Ray Hughes Gallery. The group of artists that exhibited with Ray Hughes in those years would pursue major art prizes such as the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman as a pack. Robinson would go on to win the Archibald and Wynne prizes twice; Davida Allen and Keith Looby from the same stable would also win the Archibald Prize. Robinson’s place in the canon of Australian art has long been secured. His landscape paintings in the years since these farmyard works began are considered among the most accomplished in the land. Whereas many landscape painters were drawn to the romantic heroics of the outback however, Robinson stuck to the lush hinterland of the east coast. In the mid-nineties following trips to Europe, his paintings gained a profound spiritual resonance as the artist looked closer to the heavens as the source of his inspiration – a long way from these humble farmyard paintings that were the springboard for the towering, spiritual crescendos that followed. HENRY MULHOLLAND

WILLIAM ROBINSON

born 1936 SUN AND LIGHT RAIN NUMINBAH, 2004 oil on linen 51.0 x 66.0 cm signed and dated lower left: William Robinson 2004 bears inscription on backing board verso: SUN AND LIGHT RAIN NUMINBAH ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 2005 EXHIBITED William Robinson, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 21 – 29 May 2005; Sydney, 14 June – 2 July 2005, cat. 19 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 51)

In relation to a sense of place, William Robinson has made a unique contribution to the Australian landscape tradition, moving beyond conventional notions to encompass a fluctuating environment; of rainforest and ocean, ground and sky, day and night, elemental forces of wind, lightning, rain and fire. His multidimensional grasp of time and space also suggests metaphors for states of mind and being, life and death, continuity and transcendence. The profound spiritual resonances in Robinson’s art remind us of the need to preserve an ancient natural world in the present; ‘to keep the faith’, as Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory, ‘with a future on this tough, lovely old planet’.1 Robinson’s treatment of the horizon and distorted perspective set him apart from his contemporaries. While many Australian landscape painters traditionally looked towards the arid interior for inspiration, he embraces the lush south-eastern Queensland mountain ranges. The dramatic features of the granite belt, with its soaring cliffs, meandering rivers, creeks and waterfalls, offer the perfect subject for Robinson to flaunt his painterly innovations.

The steep ravines, high annual rainfall and proximity to the coast combine to provide dramatic weather shifts, which Robinson exploits wilfully. As the title of Sun and Light Rain, Numinbah, 2004 suggests, it is the ephemeral beauty of this landscape which captivates the artist. He gives equal weight to the physical grandeur of the ancient forms, as he does to the intangible elements of light, mist, mood and atmosphere. In the act of painting there is a tipping point where the image takes over and a seamless synergy occurs between the artist, their materials and subject. The artist becomes the vehicle for the work and almost takes a backseat as the painting evolves in inspired revelation. Artists sometimes refer to a work as ‘painting itself’ when describing this shaman-like relationship between the artist and subject. Robinson arrives at this point early and you can feel the urgency his works attain as they reach toward a higher state of observation and translation. Each new painting builds on the achievements of the previous one as he pushes the boundaries of his artistic abilities and the conventions of landscape painting. This state of oneness with his work is achieved by continuous immersion in the act of creation and Robinson typically works every day, all day – except Sundays. God rested on the sabbath and so does Robbo, reserving this day for reflection and music in humble observance of the Maker’s achievements. The artist is a deeply spiritual man and his paintings are to be viewed as a personal homage to his creator. The current example conveys this more than others, the central image of painting is the sunrise to the east, which may be considered as the first of its kind. Like the renaissance masters Robinson so much admires, he looks to the heavens for the essence of his inspiration. 1. Hart, D., ‘William Robinson’s artistic development: An intimate and expansive journey’ in William Robinson, A Transfigured Landscape, Queensland University of Technology and Piper Press, Brisbane, 2011, p. 38 HENRY MULHOLLAND

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL

born 1960 BRONTE INTERIOR, 2003 unique colour woodblock print 95.0 x 60.0 cm signed lower left: Cressida Campbell signed below image lower left: Cressida Campbell ESTIMATE: $140,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Queensland Menzies, Sydney, 23 June 2016, lot 14 Private collection, Queensland EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell Still Life and Interiors, Nevill Keating Tollemache Ltd, London (in association with Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane), 3 – 18 July 2003, cat. 26 LITERATURE Crayford, P., (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010 (3rd ed.), cat. P0306, p. 347 RELATED WORK Bronte Interior, 2003, watercolour on incised woodblock, 95.0 x 60.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Crayford, P. (ed.), ibid., pp. 224 – 225

An accomplished artist working at the intersection of painting and printmaking, Cressida Campbell conjures beautiful unique images whose prosaic subject matter conceals their meticulous conception. In this masterful woodblock print in soft warm tones, Bronte Interior, 2003 Campbell combines several subjects into the deep field of this view of her weatherboard house in Bronte: a still life of ripe pomegranates and delicate pink lisianthus in the foreground, blending into a serene and unoccupied interior, with a tiny sliver of dense bamboo landscape visible through a window frame. It is this oblique, obstructed and multilayered composition that provides Campbell’s interiors with such enduring appeal. With Japanese understanding of pictorial composition, Campbell’s interiors present a believable window into the artist’s rich private world. During her studies at East Sydney Technical College with Les Matkevich, Campbell discovered and developed a strong affinity with the medium of woodblock printing. But it was in 1980, at the Yoshida Hanga Academy in Tokyo, that she developed her adaptation a technique of monoprinting from hand-painted woodblocks, called Yiban Duose (meaning ‘one block, many colour printing’), making it her dominant pictorial mode. Similar to cloisonné, the chalky watercolour impression on paper features delicate contours each coloured section,

a white negative trace of the block’s incised furrows. Despite her profound respect for observable reality, Campbell’s images are more than faithfully recorded snapshots. These images are constructed and rigorously edited into cropped panels, the intricacies of their design stiches together disparate viewpoints and includes titillating allusions to what lies beyond the frame. The influence of Japanese art in the aesthetic and technique of Campbell’s artworks is so profound that an entire chapter was devoted to the subject in the monograph accompanying the artist’s recent retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. Asian works of art, prints, furniture, ceramics and textiles appear often in Campbell’s artworks, composing a large proportion of the artist’s personal collection and filling the shelves and walls. These objects were acquired from local dealers, during her travels with her first husband Peter Crayford, and through her sister Sally Campbell who collects and deals in Asian textiles. The artist also considers her collection of chairs to be a collection of sculptures, and places them in her compositions ‘because they make for great design.’1 The green chair recently vacated in the visual centre of Bronte Interior, although inanimate, stands in for a human presence, while the bursting vigour of life radiates from natural elements placed strategically in the corners of this composition. Long before Campbell overtly described this process in the title of a work (Journey Around My Room, 2019), she created images which gently coax viewers to travel through time and space, living vicariously through the artist and her personal recollections, both known and imagined. To collect is to travel, and the artist displays clearly her love for the objects in her collection through her careful attention. She explained this impetus in 1997 ‘things that I love, if I have not made them into a picture, I feel I have not fully experienced them.’ 2 The long and illustrious history of the genre of still life has often been entangled with powerful moral lessons about the emptiness of worldly possessions and the transience of earthly life. However, in Campbell’s work, this is unintentional. Campbell makes no comment on distinctions between fine art and decoration, simply addressing the things in which she derives an aesthetic pleasure and hoping that others will respond in turn to their seductive impact. 1. The artist in conversation with Rebecca Edwards, in Noordhuis-Fairfax, S., Cressida Campbell, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2022, p. 48 2. The artist, cited in Wright, M., ‘Arts’, Australian Financial Review Magazine, Sydney, 26 September 1997, p. 112 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

BANKSY British, born 1974 GIRL WITH BALLOON, 2004 screenprint in three colours 65.5 x 50.0 cm (sheet) edition: 71/150 published by Pictures on Walls, London signed dated and numbered lower right: BANKSY 04 / 71 / 150 ESTIMATE: $450,000 – 650,000

PROVENANCE Santa’s Ghetto, Pictures on Walls, London Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in December 2004 EXHIBITED Santa’s Ghetto, Soho Books, London, 1 – 24 December 2004 This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Pest Control, London, issued in 2019, complete with one half of the corresponding, numbered, Di–Faced Tenner note.

Girl with Balloon on Waterloo Bridge, London, 2004 photographer: Dominic Robinson

In 2010, Time magazine compiled a list of the 100 most influential people in the world, including the English street artist Banksy, who having always taken great care to protect his anonymity, appeared masked with a paper bag. Banksy’s messages, in contrast, are stenciled plainly on city walls, editioned in print and virally shared the world over, revealing boldly the unjust truths of contemporary society. Working from guerilla underground art scene of Bristol, Bansky’s humanist and provocative motifs were first painted directly, ‘bombed’, on the streets. Fulfilling a democratic and anti-elitist ethos, Banksy’s murals reached ordinary people on their commutes around the city, his distinctive style of visual metaphor quickly gaining broad popular support. As the cultural maverick Andy Warhol once astutely noted, ‘repetition adds up to reputation’1, and so the ubiquity of Banksy’s images has had an undeniable influence on contemporary culture, and none less than the bittersweet image of Girl with Balloon, his most iconic work. Banksy’s figures are archetypes, simplified and easily readable. Broadly relatable in their melodramatic humanity, they become emblems around which to rally. With characteristic symbolic ambiguity, Banksy’s Girl with Balloon is an allegory for hope everlasting. Recalling the 1956 French short film Le Ballon Rouge, the blazing red of Banksy’s heart-shaped balloon provides a radiant beacon of brightness within the grisaille of the city. This motif of a young girl reaching out to its disappearing string carried on the wind first appeared in the London suburb Shoreditch in 2002, and shortly after it also appeared underneath Waterloo Bridge at South Bank. While the Waterloo example of this aerosol stencil mural was accompanied by a chalk epithet proclaiming,

‘there is always hope’, later printed editions of this image would rely solely on the visual power of the silhouette of the young girl, her dress billowing in the wind. Banksy, like a latter-day Robin Hood, uses visual metaphors to anonymously highlight the corruption of innocence at the hands of capitalist and oppressive government regimes. Thwarting Banksy’s noble artistic intent of democratic access to art, many of Banksy’s original public artworks have been removed by overzealous council cleaners. His images instead survive printed on mobile supports, first stenciled directly on carboard protest placards and assorted reused surfaces, before being immortalized to the iterative medium of screen-print at the artist-run publishing cooperative Pictures on Walls. This example of Girl with Balloon is an early example from Pictures on Walls, printed in three colours (white, black and red), hand-signed and numbered from an edition of 150. Banksy, in applying his stencil motifs to printed editions on wove paper, hand-signed, numbered and blind-stamped, accompanied with certificates from his own authentication committee, derides and dismantles the power structures of the fine art market from within. Harnessing an industrial means of mass reproduction, Banksy could circumvent commercial gallery structures by directly publishing his own printed oeuvre. Furthermore, Banksy directly marketed these works to the public using tongue-in-cheek commercial initiatives, such as pop-up art happenings and an internet mail-order subscription service. This example of Girl with Balloon was acquired from one such ephemeral art happening, an annual festive group exhibition from Pictures on

Walls selling limited edition prints cheaply from squatted premises in London’s SoHo. Called Santa’s Ghetto, this event was described in the press the year before as a ‘festive extravaganza of cheap art and related novelty goods from low-brow artists and trained vandals.’ 2 Silkscreen print reproduction has a long history with grassroots ‘do-it-yourself’ activism. Popularised during the student revolutions of the 1960s, printed posters were initially created for ephemeral purposes, reacting quickly to local events and carrying messages with time-sensitive and location-specific relevance. With images and text able to be uniformly copied cheaply and quickly, this means of print reproduction enabled young activists to ‘expose history’s blind spots and forgotten causes and sowed the seeds for today’s street artists. They remind us that social and political change often starts at street level’. 3 High-contrast, clearly delineated, icons create powerful and persuasive visual arguments easily read from a distance. Able to be reappropriated in the service of diverse social and political incentives, they are omnipresent in contemporary mass media and thus persist in the global public imagination. Girl with Balloon is a key example of Banksy’s innate understanding of the power of this mode of cultural communication.

Banksy Love is in the Bin, 2018 Spray paint and acrylic on canvas mounted on board, framed by the artist Decommissioned, remote controlled shredding mechanism remains in the frame 142.0 x 78.0 x 18.0 cm Private collection

Banksy stands on the shoulders of giants, notably Andy Warhol, who was amongst the first to recognise the potential of the silkscreen to preserve the defining images of a generation. When widely distributed amongst a group of disparate individuals, these prints had the power to unite them in a common mind. While Warhol’s own experimentations with this medium blurred the boundaries separating painting, drawing and prints, he provided a framework to reinterpret this industrial medium into an aesthetic investment to be protected and exchanged, with value beyond the historical archive. Since 2002, Girl with Balloon has become a beloved image with enduring appeal. Banksy has reused this motif in support of various social campaigns, by changing the design of the balloon, or dressing the girl in different costumes, such as in a mural on the West Bank in 2005, projected onto Paris and London landmarks in 2014 in support of the Syrian Refugee Crisis, and in 2017 on posters decrying Brexit. In 2018, Banksy memorably created a new artwork, titled Love is in the Bin, when a unique stenciled version of Girl with Balloon appeared to self-destruct seconds after being sold for a record price at auction in London. Love in the Bin, the new creation, partially shredded, subsequently sold for a new record of over £18 million in 2021. 1. Steiner, W., ‘Postmodern Portraits’, Art Journal, New York, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 1987, p. 1974 2. Cripps, C., ‘Graffiti with bells on’, The Independent, London, 1 December 2003 3. Rose, S., ‘Poster Workshop: The Art of Revolution’, The Guardian, London, 25 March 2011 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

PETER BOOTH

born 1940 PAINTING (SNOW SCENE – GREY TREE), 2006 oil on canvas 45.5 x 81.5 cm signed and dated verso: BOOTH 2006 inscribed verso: 62 ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2007 EXHIBITED Peter Booth, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 19 June – 14 July 2007, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

From his auspicious debut in the ground-breaking exhibition The Field held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, Peter Booth has proceeded to achieve international recognition as one of the most important and influential artists of his generation. If it was his large, monochromatic abstract works which initially attracted widespread acclaim however, today it is his immensely vivid and painterly figuration for which Booth is best renowned. Drawing upon epic legends of the past and prophecies for an imagined future, these dramatic, poetic images of the human spirit poignantly explore fundamental human emotions and anxieties, issues of spiritual turmoil, social alienation and the devolution of civilisation. Thus framed within a world both imagined and observed, Booth’s vision transcends the immediate or particular to acquire a universality comparable to the musings of his greatest artistic predecessors, including Goya, Blake and Shakespeare.

Painting (Snow Scene – Grey Tree), 2006 relates to the celebrated group of ‘snow paintings’ which Booth commenced during the winter of 1989. Preceded by a series of wet and windy landscapes, the quiet chill of the snow paintings represented a transition in Booth’s oeuvre which he parallels to the journey in Milton’s epic sequence of poems, Paradise Lost (1667) to Paradise Regained (1671). More specifically however, the series was inspired by the artist’s rereading of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606) with its chilling themes of ambition and evil bearing resonance for Booth in contemporary Western greed and disregard for the planet. Accordingly, in many of these works, snow throws a white curtain of silence over the charred and blackened landscape, heralding the end of man’s aggression towards his fellow man and the environment like the omen of destruction foretold by the decimation of Birnam Wood in Macbeth. Yet to focus solely upon the immediate, pessimistic impact of such works is to ignore the lyricism – even optimism – frequently underlying Booth’s imagery. Indeed, discussing the snow motif which has its origins in the artist’s childhood memories of Sheffield, Jason Smith elucidates ‘...for Booth, the winter landscape is one of serenity and the promise of renewal. It reminds us of the resilience of nature and is a metaphor for human endurance against the physical and psychological trials of life...’1 1. Smith, J., ‘Peter Booth: Human / Nature’ in Peter Booth: Human / Nature, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, pp. 14 – 15 VERONICA ANGELATOS

BEN QUILTY

born 1973 WANT WANT WANT, 2006 oil and aerosol on linen 140.0 x 200.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Want Want Want / oil and aerosol on linen 2006 / Ben Quilty bears inscription on label on stretcher bar verso: BQ 22 / Want Want Want 2006 ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney Private collection, Brisbane Blockprojects Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above LITERATURE Slade, L., Ben Quilty, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, p. 57 (illus.)

Ben Quilty’s images of cars are not simply painterly depictions of objects of desire but a kind of empathic portraiture that joyfully captures the psyche of the large group of Australian men who love their cars, along with access and participation in the world of hotted up cars and hooning that a certain type of car ownership allows. As a boy from the outer suburbs, Quilty’s interest in this realm comes from a place of understanding. Indeed, he effectively launched his career in 2003 with an exhibition of ‘portraits’ of his 1972 Torana.1 As he has said: ‘For us initiation was performed inside a car. Beer in hand we became valued members of a society and, as the motor screamed, the dizziness of expectation awakened the adult in us.’2 Quilty’s youth was one of testosterone-fuelled binge drinking and risk taking, and the muscle cars that fill his oeuvre in the early 2000s – the nuggety Torana, Ford Falcons and the ubiquitous Aussie ute – are cars that he knows intimately and has most likely behaved badly in. These cars are both an extension of self and a way of presenting oneself to the world, but in Quilty’s hands, they also speak powerfully of our collective desire for a sense of community and our need to

belong. Never afraid to unveil the darker side of society’s actions and compulsions, Quilty also paints these cars as terrifying wrecks, their smashed-up distorted bodies highlighting the dire consequences that can arise from the recklessness of youth. The luscious, thick brushwork of want want want, 2006 conveys this luxury car (a Mercedes) as an object of lust and longing, well beyond the financial capacity of the artist and his mates at the time it was created. Quilty’s thick slabs of paint and use of vibrant colour deftly capture the car’s sleek low-lying body, the way in which its tyres hug the road, and its seemingly innate capacity for speed. While still, it seems to be poised to move – the artist’s confident use of aerosol (the tool of the graffitist) across the grille, bonnet and windscreen capturing a sense of immediacy and haste. Bathed in a glowing yellow halo, this is a car of dreams that seems to point to another stage of life for the artist – one beyond the machismo and potential dangers of his youth. This car offers a different kind of social status, as well stability and success, while also promising the thrill of incredible speed whenever you put your foot down. In depicting these pervasive symbols, Quilty draws on his own past and experiences to highlight the need for men to have other possibilities of ‘becoming’. As he has commented: ‘There’s no initiation process for young men. When you turn 18 you skol a yard glass and you spew on yourself and then you’re supposedly a male that’s got something to give to society. It’s just so far from how it should work. It’s definitely informed my work; it’s what I’m interested in because it’s where I’ve been. It’s what I’ve done.’3 1. Torana, Maunsell Wickes Gallery, Sydney, 2003 2. The artist, quoted in Ben Quilty Live! An Interpretative Guide, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, p. 5, at https://issuu.com/uqartmuseum/docs/ benquiltyinterpretiveguide, accessed 24 March 2023 3. Low, L. A., “The hot seat: Ben Quilty”, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 March 2007, at https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/the-hot-seat-ben-quilty-20070318-gdpowl. html, accessed 24 March 2023 KELLY GELLATLY

BEN QUILTY born 1973 WINDSOR NO. 1, 2004 oil on canvas 35.0 x 40.0 cm signed with initials lower right: BQ signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ‘Windsor no. 1’ / oil on canvas / 35 x 40 cm / Ben Quilty / 04 ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Scott Livesey Art Dealer, Melbourne (stamped verso) Private collection, Victoria, acquired from the above in 2005

BEN QUILTY born 1973 THE OTTER, 2019 oil on canvas 40.5 x 30.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: The Otter / 19’ / Ben Quilty

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, acquired in 2019

ESTIMATE: $28,000 – 36,000

ALBERT HENRY FULLWOOD

(1863 – 1930) THE OLD WHALING STATION, MOSMAN’S BAY, SYDNEY, 1899 watercolour and gouache on paper on cardboard 57.5 x 94.0 cm (sight) signed, dated and inscribed lower left: A. H. Fullwood.\ 99 / Old Bridge MOSMAN / Sydney framer’s label attached verso: S. A. Parker, Sydney bears inscription on framer’s label verso: A. H. Fullwood ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE The artist, Sydney Thence by descent Mrs V. Fullwood, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1930 Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2021 EXHIBITED Spring Exhibition, Twentieth Annual Exhibition of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, Royal Art Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 19 August – 20 September 1899, cat. 249 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station, Mosmans [sic.] Bay, Sydney’) Second Federal Art Exhibition, South Australian Institute Building, Adelaide, 10 November – 9 December 1889 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station’) (Studio exhibition), Paling’s Buildings, Sydney, 17 – 24 February 1900 Sydney Harbour: an exhibition to mark the 175th anniversary of the founding of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 October – 19 November 1963, cat. 28 (label attached verso, as ‘Mossman’s [sic.] Bay’, loaned by Mrs. V. Fullwood)

LITERATURE ‘The Art Societies. Preparations for August Shows’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 31 July 1899, p. 3 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station at Mosman’s Bay’) ‘The Spring Art Exhibitions’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 9 August 1899, p. 5 (as ‘Old Whaling Station’) ‘This Year’s Pictures. The Annual Exhibitions’, The Australian Star, Sydney, 19 August 1899, p. 6 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station, Mosmans [sic.] Bay’) ‘The Art Exhibitions’, Sunday Times, Sydney, 20 August 1899, p. 10 ‘Art Society’s Show. Fine Landscape Display’, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 21 August 1899, p. 7 (illus., as ‘An Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay’) ‘The Art Exhibitions. The Art Society’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 August 1899, p. 3 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay’) ‘Art Notes’, Sunday Times, Sydney, 3 September 1899, pp. 2, 9 (illus., as ‘Old Whaling Station and Rustic Bridge, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney) ‘Art in Adelaide. Second Federal Exhibition’, Quiz and the Lantern, Adelaide, 16 November 1899, p. 7 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station’) The Studio (London), vol. XVII, no. 82, January 1900, p. 291 (illus.) ‘Mr. Fullwood’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 17 February 1900, p. 5 (as ‘The rickety old footbridge at Mosman’s Bay’) ‘Mr. Fullwood’s Exhibition’, Evening News, Sydney, 20 February 1900, p. 6 (as ‘The Old Bridge at Mosman’s’) ‘Reviews’, The Mercury, Hobart, 28 February 1900, p. 5 (as ‘The Old Whaling Station’) Souter, D. H., ‘A. Henry Fullwood, landscapist: being a review of his Australian work’, Art and Architecture: the Journal of the Institute of Architects of New South Wales, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 1 (January – February), 1905, pp. 5 (illus. as ‘Mosman’s Bay’), 6 RELATED WORK Not Titled [Old Mosman whaling station], 1899, watercolour, gouache and ink on cardboard, 50.6 x 76.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Old footbridge at Mosman Bay, 1880 – 1899 Mosman Library, Sydney

The Old Whaling Station, Mosman's Bay, Sydney, 1899 illus. in 'Art Notes', Sunday Times, Sydney, 3 September 1899, p. 9

Mosman has long been one of Sydney’s favourite painting grounds. The artists who stayed at Bulletin cartoonist Livingstone Hopkins (‘Hop’)’s shack behind Edwards Beach in the 1880s (Julian Ashton, A.J. Daplyn, Frank Mahony and John Mather); the more celebrated residents of Reuben Brasch’s ‘Curlew Camp’ at Little Sirius Cove in the 1890s (Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton); pioneer modernists (Elioth Gruner, Roland Wakelin and Margaret Preston); even Kevin Connor in the 1970s and Michael Johnson in the 1990s – all responded with delight to the sunshine, bright colour and varying distances of the North Shore littoral of Gorma Bullagong.1

and magazines, and as a sensitive and productive landscape painter

For several decades from the 1820s Sirius Cove was a harbour for whaling vessels (it takes its present name from whaling station entrepreneur Alexander Mosman). But as early as the 1850s the area had become ‘a favourite place for picnickers … a beauty spot of the harbour,’ with ‘cheerful views and bracing breezes, secluded nooks with whispering seas and placid reflections.’ 2 Mosman provided all the seductions of bush and beach, and just a short ferry-ride from the city. Mosman was also something of a heartland for A.H. Fullwood. While (like so many of his generation) Fullwood has been cast into the art-historical shadows by the quadrumvirate of Roberts, Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Charles Conder, he was a prominent artist in Sydney during the 1880s and 1890s: as a black and white illustrator for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia and for various newspapers

in oils. Fullwood’s later work as an official artist during the Great War was celebrated in an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial in 1983, but only recently has Gary Werskey’s monograph given him the close attention he so warmly merits. 3 Having migrated from Birmingham with his widowed mother and younger sisters in 1883, the talented Fullwood easily found work as a black and white artist in Sydney, but his fortunes faltered in the 1890s: he lost his savings in a run on the New South Wales Savings Bank in February 1892, around the same time that the illustrated papers – his bread-and-butter clients – were shifting from wood engravings to half-tone photographic reproduction. He appears to have joined his Australian naturalist colleagues Roberts and Streeton at Curlew Camp, where the rent was only six or seven shillings a week, before rejoining his family at ‘Yebrand’, a Mosman boarding house, in 1895. Married the following year, Fullwood nevertheless maintained the Mosman connection until his departure for London (via the USA) in 1899. The present work is a superb example of the artist’s skill in that characteristic 19th century form, the highly-finished exhibition watercolour.4 A larger and more detailed version of a work formerly in the Oscar Paul Collection and now in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney depicts the

Tom Roberts Mosman’s Bay, 1894 oil on canvas 63.5 x 106.2 cm New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, New South Wales

view eastward across the head of Mosman’s Bay, from the shadowed mudflats of the foreground over opalescent water to the fashionable ‘refreshment rooms’, behind which rise pink sandstone cliffs and goldgreen eucalyptus foliage. It combines dramatic landscape chiaroscuro, picturesque structures in the rickety old footbridge (soon to be replaced) and ‘The Barn’, as well as a host of narrative incidents: beachcombing boys; a man in white flannels and boater sitting on the wharf steps; a white tent on the sward centre left (pitched by artists, perhaps?) The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney also participates in the artistic conversation of its time: the horizonless plane of the bush background reprises Roberts’s Bailed Up, 1895 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney); the picnickers on the old footbridge are equivalent to the pier promenaders in Conder’s A Holiday at Mentone, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide); while the figure with the hitched-up skirt in the foreground irresistibly recalls the little girl in Julian Ashton’s The corner of the paddock, 1888 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne). First shown at the 1899 Society of Artists’ Annual (Spring) Exhibition, The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney was widely applauded in contemporary press reviews. The Star called it ‘one of the most striking items in the water colour list’, while for the Sunday Times it was, of the 17 works Fullwood entered, his ‘best picture… The golden evening tints [morning, in fact] creep down the hills and across the old bridge till lost

in the cold shadow of the foreground. A lad gathering oysters under the bridge, clever and complete. The best water-color [sic.] in the exhibition.’ The Telegraph declared it was ‘by far the best of its class in the whole show. There is vital human interest in this picture, as well as solid sterling craftsmanship.’ 5 The self-evident quality of the picture saw it included in the Second Federal Art Exhibition, Adelaide, and it was also reproduced not only in local papers and journals, but also in London’s Studio magazine. The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney may not be by one of the ‘Australian Impressionist’ gods, nor be in the popularly valorised medium of oil paint, but this work is a remarkable achievement, a rich, complex piece of picture-making and a particularly fine example of finde-siècle watercolour. 1. A comprehensive listing of Mosman Bay pictures is beyond the scope of this entry, but amongst the finest and best-known 19 th century pictures are: Conrad Martens, Mosman’s Bay, 1848, watercolour, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney; Julian Ashton, Mosman’s Bay, 1888, watercolour, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; John Mather, Mosman’s Bay, 1889, watercolour, 1889, AGNSW; Arthur Streeton, The Point Wharf, Mosman’s Bay, 1893, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and Tom Roberts, Mosman’s Bay, 1894, New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale. 2. M.H., ‘Historic Memories. Mosman’s Bay. Forty Years Ago. Opening of Tram’, Evening News, 6 March 1897, p. 4; ‘Old Mosman’, Mosman Mail, 1 September 1899, p. 2 3. Anne Gray, A. Henry Fullwood: war artist, Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1983; Gary Werskey, Picturing a nation: the art and life of A.H. Fullwood, NewSouth Books, Sydney, 2021 4. In the Society of Artists exhibition in which The Old Whaling Station, Mosman’s Bay, Sydney was first shown, there were 120 oil paintings and 135 watercolours, within a total of 294 works. 5. ‘This Year’s Pictures. The Annual Exhibitions’, Australian Star, Sydney, 19 August 1899, p. 6 DR DAVID HANSEN

JOHN PETER RUSSELL

(1858 – 1930) DADONE, c.1900 oil on canvas 32.0 x 25.5 cm signed with initials and inscribed with title upper right: DADONe / J.R / FeciT ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE The artist Thence by descent Jeanne Jouve, the artist’s eldest child and only daughter Private collection, a gift from the above in 1948 Private collection, Paris, purchased in 2000 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 September 2005, lot 10 The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy ChambersGrundy Collection (label attached verso) Important Australian Art from the Collection of Red Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy, Bonhams, Sydney, 26 June 2013, lot 72 Private collection, Melbourne

John Peter Russell holds a unique place in Australian art history for his close association with avant-garde circles in 1880s Paris and his firsthand acquaintance with masters of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. As a student at Fernand Cormon’s atelier in Paris in the mid-1880s, Russell worked alongside Émile Bernard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and later, Vincent van Gogh, with whom he established an enduring friendship.1 On a summer break from Paris in 1886, Russell spent several months on Belle-Île, one of a group of small islands off the coast of Brittany. It was here that he met and befriended Claude Monet who he saw working en plein air, famously introducing himself by asking if Monet was indeed ‘the Prince of the Impressionists’. Inevitably flattered, Monet, who was eighteen years Russell’s senior, took a liking to the young Australian and dined with him and his beautiful wife-to-be, enjoying their hospitality and company during his stay on the island. Uncharacteristically, Monet also allowed Russell to watch him work and on occasion, to paint alongside him, experiences that provided an extraordinary insight into the techniques and working method of one of the founders of the Impressionist movement. The influence on Russell was significant and the paintings he made in Italy and Sicily only a few months later show him working in a new style, creating compositions that are made up of strokes of pure high-keyed colour. 2

Captivated by the rugged beauty of Belle-Île and attuned to the possibilities the environment presented for the development of his art, Russell – whose inherited wealth meant he didn’t have to find paid employment – bought land overlooking the inlet of Goulphar in 1887. Writing to Tom Roberts, he said, ‘I am about to build a house in France. Settle down for some five years. Get some work done. It will be in some out of the way corner as much as a desert as possible.’ 3 Living there permanently until 1909, Russell developed an intimate knowledge of the island’s geography, both from the land and the sea, and this informed many of his best known paintings such as Port-Goulphar, Belle-Île, 1887 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Rough Sea, BelleÎle 1900 (National Gallery of Victoria), which capture the distinctive light, changing colours and atmospheric conditions of his island home. Russell was also a talented painter of portraits and just as his images of the Belle-Île landscape describe areas he knew intimately, so too, the subjects of his portraits are typically people with whom he had a close relationship. His great friend, van Gogh, is the subject of a fine 1886 portrait which is in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Russell’s wife, Marianna – an Italian beauty who had modelled for the sculptor, Rodin – was the subject of numerous works. Her mother also sat for Russell and this intimately-scaled profile portrait depicts her father, Pasquale Mattioco – the colloquial Italian term ‘Dadone’ acknowledging his status as a senior male relative. The artist’s respect for his subject is clear and, as well as rendering the subject’s physical appearance, the portrait speaks to the wisdom and experience of a long life. With an emphasis on shades of blue, with white and grey highlights, the painting recalls Russell’s seascapes, and the image is built up in a series of energetic and assured brush strokes which reflect what Russell scholar, Ann Galbally, described as the artist’s distinctive ‘intensity of vision.’4 1. Although Russell did not see van Gogh again after he departed for Arles in the south of France in early 1888, their friendship continued via an extensive correspondence. See Galbally, A., A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent van Gogh and John Peter Russell, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2008 2. Taylor, E., ‘John Russell and friends: Roberts, Monet, van Gogh, Matisse, Rodin’, Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013, p. 60 3. Russell to Tom Roberts, 5 October 1887 quoted in Tunnicliffe, W., (ed.), John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 193 4. Galbally, op. cit., p. 15 KIRSTY GRANT

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON

(1815 – 1879, British) JULIA JACKSON, 1867 Albumen silver print from glass negative 25.0 x 18.5 cm (image) signed lower right below image: Julia Margaret Cameron dated and inscribed below image lower left: From Life April 1867. bears Colnaghi blindstamp below image ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Joyce Evans, Melbourne EXHIBITED [SELECTED] Distant Relations, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 8 May – 18 July 1993 (another example) Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 19 September 1998 – 10 January 10 1999; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 27 January – 4 May 1999; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 27 August – 30 November 1999 (another example) Alfred Stieglitz and the 19th Century, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 31 October 2015 – 27 March 27, 2016 (another example) Julia Margaret Cameron: A Bicentenary Exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 28 November 2015 – 21 February 2016; Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, 18 November 2014 – 1 February 2015; Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, 14 March – 14 June 2015; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 14 August – 25 October 2015; Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid, 8 March – 8 May 2016 Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Tokyo, 29 June – 25 September 2016 (another example) LITERATURE [SELECTED] Wolf, S., Julia Margaret Cameron’s Women, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1998, pl. 59, p. 73 (illus. front cover, another example) Cox, J. & Ford, C., Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs, Thames & Hudson, London, 2003, cat. 307 (another example) Weiss, M., Julia Margaret Cameron, MACK in association with V&A Publishing, London, 2015 (illus. front cover) RELATED WORKS Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute Chicago, Chicago; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Getty Centre, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles and Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

Julia Margaret Cameron received her first camera as a gift at the age 48. Her children had all left home and the camera was offered as an amusement with which she might pass the time. Thrilled by the artistic potential of the medium however, she took to photography with energy and enthusiasm, converting a chicken coop into her studio and a coal bin into her darkroom, and in her hands, it became something much more significant. As she recalled, ‘from the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing, with voice and memory and creative vigour.’1 Renowned for the creation of imaginative tableaux and penetrating portraits, Cameron was a pioneering figure in the history of photography, all the more unusual in Victorian Britain because of her gender. While Cameron photographed many famous faces, including Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Dickens – all of whom lived nearby on the Isle of Wight – family members also featured in her work. Her niece, Julia Jackson, known as a great beauty, was the subject of more than twenty photographic portraits. This image, arguably Cameron’s most iconic portrait of Jackson, was taken shortly before her first marriage and signed by the artist, it is inscribed ‘From Life April 1867’. Its composition is simple and direct, focussing on Jackson’s face framed by long flowing hair, and the lighting, which casts half of her face in shadow, emphasises her distinctive and elegant features. Jackson may be familiar to many because of the striking resemblance between her and her daughter, the writer Virginia Woolf. 2 A poetic study of youthful grace and beauty, this photograph also reveals something of the subject’s character as she confidently returns the camera’s gaze. Prints of this portrait are held in numerous public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The contemporary photographic fraternity was critical of Cameron’s work, claiming her technique was poor and ridiculing her preference for softly focused images. It is precisely this aspect of her approach however, which gives her portraits a sense of timelessness, imbuing them with a visual poetry and symbolic meaning that transcends the documentary and descriptive. 1. Cameron, J. M., Annals of My Glass House, 1874, manuscript, p. 3, V&A · ‘Annals Of My Glass House’ By Julia Margaret Cameron (vam.ac.uk), accessed 3 April 2023. 2. Following the death of her first husband, Jackson remarried in 1878 and Virginia was born four years later. Virginia Woolf wrote the first book on Cameron’s photography which was published in 1926. KIRSTY GRANT

DOROTHEA SHARP

(1874 – 1955, British) THREE CHILDREN FEEDING BIRDS oil on canvas 61.0 x 61.5 cm signed lower right: DOROTHEA SHARP ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, United Kingdom Private collection, United Kingdom Private collection, Adelaide

Dorothea Sharp was a highly successful British artist whose impressionistic paintings of children attracted national acclaim in the first half of the twentieth century. Sharp’s paintings follow the path set by Mary Cassat and Berthe Morisot whose own studies of children are some of the most sensitive and sought-after works in the Impressionist oeuvre. In Australian art, there is a strong correlation between Sharp’s Three Children Feeding Birds and paintings such as Jane Sutherland’s much-loved Field naturalists, c. 1896, in the National Gallery of Victoria. Both works depict three children caught in an unguarded moment, fascinated by what they observe; and Sharp’s painting demonstrates the artist’s own fascination in such youthful innocence. Born to a comfortably wealthy family, Sharp was determined to be an artist from a young age following a visit to the Royal Academy. However, her family were not supportive and she only began her studies at the age of twenty-one after receiving a small legacy from an uncle. She first enrolled at the Richmond School of Landscape Painting in Surrey, then transferred to night classes at the Regent Street Polytechnic. Whilst there, she received encouragement during school visits by Sir David Murray and Sir George Clausen, two significant British painters of the time. However, the transformative event in her development

happened in 1900 at the age of twenty-six, when she went to Paris and saw the work of Monet, Matisse and van Gogh. Monet’s influence can be seen in her subsequent handling of broken colour and light, whilst the inspiration of the other two can be detected in Sharp’s preference for bright outline. On her return to London, she declined a wedding proposal to instead immerse herself in the London art scene, joining the Royal Society of British artists and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Initially working from a small back bedroom in her home at Carlton Mansions in Hampstead, London, Sharp had her first works exhibited at Royal Academy in 1901 and continued to do so until 1948. She visited the artists’ community in St Ives, Cornwall, in 1920, and was so delighted by what she found that she took one of the Porthmeor Studios which Sharp retained over many years. Whilst there, she was often to be found painting on the nearby beaches surrounded by children, mostly the daughters of fishermen, who were her chief sitters. She eventually moved to St. Ives permanently during World War II. Sharp’s first solo exhibition in London was held in 1933 and sold out in a couple of days, despite being mounted at the height of the Depression. An elected member, then Vice-President, of the Society of Women Artists, her work was hung in the Paris Salon, and she exhibited alongside other famous contemporaries such as Dame Laura Knight and Sir Alfred Munnings. Three Children Feeding Birds demonstrates Sharp’s prodigious talent with its autumnal setting in a park, a charming and beautifully painted work which matches the description of her paintings given by the editor of The Artist magazine, that ‘her subjects live because they are based on the joy of life.’1 1. Sawkins, H., ‘Artists of note, no. 2: Dorothea Sharp, ROI RBA’, The Artist, London, vol. 9, no. 2, April 1935, pp. 55 – 58 ANDREW GAYNOR

ELIOTH GRUNER

(1882 – 1939) THE MILL, MOUNT GILEAD, 1926 also known as THE OLD MILL, MENANGLE oil on wood panel 24.0 x 28.0 cm signed and dated lower right: GRUNER 1926 ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Judge Edward, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1926 Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, by 1940 (label attached verso) John Young, Sydney Thence by descent Mrs John Young, Sydney James R. Lawson Auctioneers, Sydney, 19 November 1940, lot 161 Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, a gift from the above in 1958 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Elioth Gruner, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 10 – 21 August 1926, cat. 15 (as ‘Mount Gilead’) Elioth Gruner Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 April – 31 May 1940, cat. 12 (label attached verso, as ‘The Old Mill, Menangle’) LITERATURE ‘The Studio: Mr. Gruner’s Oil Paintings’, The Australasian, Melbourne, 21 August 1926, p. 45 (as ‘Mount Gilead’) We are grateful to Steven Miller, Head of the Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library and Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Elioth Gruner was a restless artist, uncomfortable with city life and undertook many journeys throughout Australia as a result, often for months at a time. In the first half of 1926, when The Mill, Mount Gilead, 1926 was painted, Gruner travelled from Sydney to Bellingen, inland from Coffs Harbour, down to Kelso, near Bathurst, and thence to Menangle, south of Campbelltown. In December, he would continue, heading from Bowral in the southern highlands of New South Wales to Cooma in the foothills of Mount Kosciusko. Gruner ‘worked from nature direct, living in camp or caravan for months on end, and would put up with flies, mosquitos and all the varying tortures imposed on the painter by the Australian climate, rather than succumb to what he regarded as the artificiality of the “easel painting” back in his studio.’1 The Mill, Mount Gilead is a classic example of the jewel-like scenes the artist sought to capture amidst, and in spite of, his physical privations.

Gruner was an exceptionally successful artist in his lifetime, winning the Wynne Prize for landscape painting a staggering seven times. 2 His fascination with the effect of light on the landscape resulted in a number of masterworks, including Spring Frost, 1919, consistently rated as one of the most popular paintings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In August 1926, he held his first (and only) solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, which was so admired that 26 of the 29 paintings were sold by its second day of viewing. Newspaper critics marvelled at his ‘progressive opening up new aspects of technique… brilliantly coping with some new problem.’ 3 However, Gruner’s star waned over subsequent decades and renewed appreciation has only ensued since curator Deborah Clark’s incisive exhibition Elioth Gruner: Texture of light held at the Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2014. His work is again seeing popularity with astute collectors as a result. The Mill, Mount Gilead regards from afar the convict-built windmill which was erected in the 1830s on the highest ridge of Thomas Rose’s Mt Gilead farm, sited on the traditional lands of the Dharawal people. It originally had a domed roof and four large sails but fell into disrepair after wheat rust affected local crops in the 1860s. Gruner’s view is from an opposing hill and the warmth of the mid-morning sun captures the surviving stones of the tower.4 He aligns its peak with a passing row of low clouds, and perfectly counterbalances the rich greens of agriculture with the hazy blue of the background mountains, all surmounted by a cloud-whipped sky. The critic for The Australasian, who wrote of the Macquarie Galleries show, described the present work as ‘a cool and collected little study … which might be (set) in Holland, so neat and well-groomed and immaculate it is.’ 5 It was purchased from the exhibition by Judge Edward, who, it seems, sold it back to the Macquarie’s Director, John Young, who then gifted it to his wife Eva, herself a specialist in Australian artists, particularly Conrad Martens. The verso of this painting illustrates this connection with the distinctive Macquarie Galleries logo still affixed, designed by John D. Moore and featuring a woman standing in a doorway. The Mill, Mount Gilead has only been exhibited twice in its history and has not been seen publicly since Gruner’s memorial exhibition in 1940. 1. Lindsay, D., ‘Elioth Gruner: 1882 – 1939’, Elioth Gruner Memorial Loan Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1940, n.p. 2. Gruner was awarded the Wynne Prize in 1916, 1919, 1921, 1929, 1934, 1936, and 1937. 3. ‘Oil Paintings. Mr. Gruner’s Exhibition’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 11 August 1926, p. 10 4. Rose’s mill tower still stands today. 5. ‘The Studio: Mr. Gruner’s Oil Paintings’, Australasian, Melbourne, 21 August 1926, p.45. The critic referred to the painting by its catalogue name of ‘Mount Gilead.’ ANDREW GAYNOR

ARTHUR BOYD

(1920 – 1999) LANDSCAPE (BACCHUS MARSH), 1943 – 45 oil on canvas on composition board 62.5 x 74.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Arthur Boyd 45 signed and dated lower left: A Boyd 45 bears inscription on backing verso: ARTHUR BOYD / BACCHUS MARSH LANDSCAPE ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE possibly: Mr and Mrs Gerd Buchdahl, Cambridge, England Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED possibly: Contemporary Art Society 7th annual exhibition, Myer Gallery, Melbourne, 21 – 31 August 1945, cat. 105 (as ‘Landscape’) Winter Exhibition, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, June 1971, cat. 29 (as ‘Landscape with creek’) Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 December 1993 – 6 March 1994, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 20 March – 23 May 1994, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 9 June – 21 August 1994, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 22 September – 20 November 1994, cat. 42 (label attached verso) LITERATURE possibly: Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, cat 5.1, p. 245 (as ‘Landscape, 1945’) Haese, R., Rebels and precursors: the revolutionary years of Australian art, Penguin, Melbourne, 2nd ed., 1988, fig. 25 pp. 91 (illus.), 195, 280 Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, pl. 50 (illus., dated as ‘1943’), pp. 40, 242 Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, cat. 42, p. 60 (illus., dated as ‘1943’)

In the mid-1930s, a young Arthur Boyd had his first encounter with the town of Bacchus Marsh, located in a fertile valley on the border of the traditional lands of the Woiwurrung and Wathaurong peoples in Victoria. Despite the bucolic setting, the encounter was not pleasant. Scouting locations for scenes to paint, Boyd was caught in a downpour and took shelter under the awning of a local shop. Spying the bedraggled, long-haired teenager, the local policeman decided he looked like a criminally inclined delinquent, and ‘before any harm could come to Bacchus Marsh, Arthur was run out of town.’1 It would be easy therefore to consider this subsequent painting, Landscape (Bacchus Marsh), 1943, depicting a twisted and foreboding snarl of trees, as a riposte to the town but it is far more complex and important than that. It is instead recognised as a pivotal work, one of the artist’s key paintings done in response to the anguish of World War II. The early years of the War saw radical changes occur within Boyd’s art. A humanist and pacifist, he was nonetheless conscripted into the army where he worked in the cartographic section. It was here that he met John Perceval who would become his artistic soulmate for the next decade and who in turn, would marry Boyd’s younger sister, Mary, in 1944. Boyd’s paintings from 1942 and early 1943 are turbulent, full of gargoyles, cripples (based on Perceval) and totems occupying locations around South Melbourne. As the series progressed, Boyd’s mood and palette darkened, and he sought to create a more appropriate contemporary landscape than the hitherto reigning glory of Arthur Streeton’s blue and gold. Boyd found inspiration in a watercolour by Louis Buvelot (Yarra Flats, 1871) which he studied on repeat visits to the National Gallery of Victoria. It echoed the earlier studies he had done of Bacchus Marsh, but it was Buvelot’s handling of the trees, clumped darkly in the foreground, that caught Boyd’s attention. His response was the present work, Landscape (Bacchus Marsh), yet whereas Buvelot’s image is calm and reflective, Boyd’s is deliberately challenging, with trees straining towards the sky as their dead companions lie littered at their feet. This definitive work led directly to the acclaimed ‘Hunter and Shepherd’ series where figures and hybrid animals engage in eternal struggle within similar primordial forests. 1. Bungey, D, Arthur Boyd: a life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, p.37 ANDREW GAYNOR

Arthur Boyd in front of ‘Landscape (Bacchus Marsh)’, c.1943 – 45 photographer: Albert Tucker

ARTHUR BOYD

(1920 – 1999) NEBUCHADNEZZAR, RAINBOW AND WATERFALL, 1967 oil on canvas 107.5 x 112.5 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription verso: 12 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (stock no. 1974) Private collection, Sydney Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Sotheby’s, Sydney, 12 May 2014, lot 77 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Arthur Boyd, Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney, 8 – 24 April 1968, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 25 June – 5 July 1968, cat. 22 Four Australian Modern Masters: Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley, Fred Williams, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 11 November – 6 December 1988, cat. 7 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, as ‘Nebuchadnezzar and Rainbow 1968’)

‘I’d like to feel that through my work there is a possibility of making a contribution to a social progression or enlightenment. It would be nice if the creative effort or impulse was connected with a conscious contribution to society, a sort of duty of service.’1 According to the Old Testament, Nebuchadnezzar, king of ancient Babylon (602 – 562 BCE), was a successful ruler who fell from grace for placing his own self-aggrandisement before God. As punishment for his pride and arrogance, he thus lost his sanity and was banished into the wilderness for seven years where he underwent various trials and tribulations: ‘...his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses: they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven; til he knew that the most high God ruled in the kingdom of men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will.’ 2 Although the Book of Daniel has provided inspiration to the visual arts for centuries from the medieval façade reliefs of Notre Dame La Grande, Poitiers to the Romantic prints of visionary William Blake, no painter has arguably ever devoted him or herself more fully to imagining the degenerative experiences of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness than Australian modernist, Arthur Boyd. Imbuing his king with Lear-like characteristics, Boyd embarked upon this impressive Nebuchadnezzar series in 1966 to illustrate a text on the theme by the scholar Thomas S.R. Boase (who subsequently published 34 of the works in his dedicated tome in 1974). 3 Characterised by its frenzied energy, vivid colour and profound symbolic permutations, the series still remains one of the artist’s most sustained, encompassing

more than a hundred works and featuring some of the most sumptuously executed paintings of his career. Elaborating upon the appeal of the theme for the artist, Boase suggests: ‘Here is a subject that leads immediately into Boyd’s preoccupation in many other works with the fusion between man and natural forces, the involvement of man and beast... Other echoes link with Boyd’s own symbolism, the sinister dark birds, the gentle mourning dog. Behind the figures there are traces of the Australian landscape of his early inspiration. But if these works are enriched with such references, the myth is newly and freshly created, a second Daniel come to judgment [sic.] our own contemporary obscure and secret impulses.’4 Given the artist’s renowned social conscience, indeed it is perhaps not coincidental that his Nebuchadnezzar series was produced at the height of the Vietnam War when audiences internationally were assailed with images in the mass media of cruel dictatorial regimes: villages incinerated, men and women tortured, children screaming from the pain of napalm. As one author notes, ‘self-immolations in protest actually took place on Hampstead Heath near Boyd’s house... and once more, a biblical subject by him was seen to be an allegory of the descent of humanity in a conflicted world.’ 5 In Nebuchadnezzar, Rainbow and Waterfall, 1967, the king ablaze in golden flames has become barely distinguishable from the dry Australian bushland and musk pink waterfall – thus inextricably fused with the natural world in a manner that unmistakably foreshadows the artist’s interpretations of the Narcissus myth a decade later. As with other iterations, including Nebuchadnezzar Running in the Rain and Lion’s Head in a Cave and Rainbow 6, here Boyd notably includes the motif of a rainbow, perhaps as a symbol of hope or sign of God’s covenant – or conversely, to denote the fruitless pursuit of an illusory aim (the ultimate downfall of his biblical protagonist). Either way, like the finest of Boyd’s Nebuchadnezzar achievements, the present offers an empathetic and emotive response to a harsh tale of moral instruction, giving compelling form to ‘…good and evil; things elemental and mysterious, things intensely human and vulnerable.’ 7 1. Arthur Boyd, cited at https://www.bundanon.com.au/collection/exhibitions-page /active-witness/ 2. Boase, T.S., Nebuchadnezzar, Thames and Hudson, London, 1972, p. 20 3. Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 26 4. Boase, op. cit., p. 42 5. Pearce, op. cit. 6. See Boase, op. cit., plates 22 and 40 7. Oliver, C., ‘A Welcome to Arthur Boyd’ in Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works by Arthur Boyd, ex.cat., Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1969, n.p. VERONICA ANGELATOS

ARTHUR BOYD

(1920 – 1999) PULPIT ROCK, SANDBAR AND FIGURE, SHOALHAVEN RIVER, c.1987 oil on composition board 91.0 x 122.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription verso: 4 ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Wagner Art Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in November 1989 Estate of the above

‘...The river itself, of course, is the most compelling image in many of these paintings of this period. Boyd has captured it in all its moods; quiet as floods begin to recede; ugly brown as it swells with water; dark, calm and green in summer when the land is parched; glowing pink at sunset.’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 1973, 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 immortalising the myriad moods of the Shoalhaven in images that are today imprinted upon the national psyche as some of our most beloved and iconic.

Featuring the magnificent Pulpit Rock towering above a lone figure nestled on the sandbar below, Pulpit Rock, Sandbar and Figure, Shoalhaven River offers a powerful meditation upon the immense physical presence of Nature. A central feature of the Shoalhaven paintings executed during the eighties, this monolith, with its distinctive forward-tilting Phrygian cap profile, has been variously described by scholars as Boyd’s ‘…Rigi, his Mount Fuji, his Mont Sainte-Victoire’ 2 (alluding to the great mountain sequences of J.M.W. Turner, Hokusai and Cézanne), and perhaps more abstractly, compared to the haystacks and Rouen Cathedral scenes that occupy Monet’s oeuvre. Indeed, elaborating upon the religious significance imbued in his repeated use of this motif, Hoff suggests ‘in these paintings of Pulpit Rock set between sky and water in an ambience of luminous space, Boyd restates the theme of the cyclic element in nature that had occupied him in the forties.’ 3 Acknowledging that he is religious ‘in the sense that I am overawed by the marvellous things in the world and overawed by the awful things’,4 thus Boyd here pays homage to the grandeur and sheer beauty of Nature – all the while implying that unless steps are taken to preserve this wilderness for future generations, it will be destroyed. As Janet McKenzie elaborates in her monograph dedicated to the artist’s Bundanon period, ‘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.’ 5 1. McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 78 2. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Deutsch, London, p. 78 3. ibid. 4. Boyd, cited in McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 43 5. ibid., p. 42 VERONICA ANGELATOS

JOHN OLSEN

(1928 – 2023) LANDSCAPE WITH BLACKBOYS, BROOME, 1999 watercolour on paper 79.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John / Olsen / 99 inscribed with title lower right: Landscape / with Black / Boys / Broome ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED John Olsen: Recent Paintings and Works on Paper, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 7 – 22 December 1999, cat. 7 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) We are grateful to Kylie Norton, Editor, John Olsen Catalogue Raisonné, for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

Like his meandering lines, John Olsen’s thoughts and musings on the things he sees and feels about the Australian landscape unravel across the surface, with the spontaneity and energy of a conversation in a pub. Not only does he paint the picture, but he spins the yarn of the entire adventure. Whether it is looking down from a light aircraft as he often does, or on his hands and knees observing mud maps of small creatures, Olsen lives and breathes his subject matter. It is as though he needs to witness and actually experience being in the landscape in order to truly see it. He is at the height of his abilities when he is at one with the landscape. The subject of Landscape with Black Boys, 1999 features the eponymous plants, famous for their distinctive black trunks and magnificent crowns of grassy leaf strands, depicted as brooding vertical forms around the work. Their leafy flourishes will burn off in a bush fire

with no harm to the plant, they simply regrow albeit very slowly. Their appearance earned them the now much dated nickname of Blackboy or Black Boy Plants. Destruction as a creative impulse is an important aspect of Olsen’s work, it’s a basic tenet of painting that the artist needs a subject to be undone in order to be understood – and in turn, presented anew through the eyes of the artist. The overall feel of the current work is of a landscape brought to life by bush fire rather than destroyed, and in this sense echoes the idea ruin equals renewal. The bush needs fire as an essential element of nourishment, such as water and light. The heat from fire activity triggers the urge to grow in certain plants and seeds that may have been dormant for many seasons. The fire signals that it is their time to germinate and flourish. At the same time, it is the story of a journey through the landscape, like so many expeditions the artist undertook throughout his career. One such trip to the pearling town of Broome occurred in 1983, when he was accompanied by Dame Mary Durack, Geoffrey Dutton, Vin Serventy and Alex Bortignon. The artist and writers explored the northwest of Australia resulting in numerous exhibitions and the publication of The Land Beyond Time, a major book which documented their trip. Olsen’s images of the surrounding landscape and the characters of the Western Australian town compliment the writers’ words throughout the publication. The current example was created on a later trip to the town in 1999 and therefore reinforces the artist’s connection with Western Australia. The artist’s eye wanders over the land and describes the horizon, waterhole and the tracks that appear to come and go. John Olsen’s Landscape with Black Boys sits in harmony with the artist’s fascination with the Australian Landscape, its rugged contradictions and the timeless cycle of ruin and renewal that has occurred through millennia. HENRY MULHOLLAND

FRED WILLIAMS

(1927 – 1982) ROCKS AND SAPLINGS, 1957 – 58 gouache on paper 53.5 x 37.0 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams. ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 20 November 1995, lot 203 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Blue Chip XII: The Collectors’ Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 2 March - 2 April 2010, cat. 37 (label attached verso and illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 47) RELATED WORK Landscape with Rocks I, 1957 - 58, oil on composition board, 116.0 x 91.0 cm, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, illus. in McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, pl. 38, p. 110

Returning to Australia in late 1956 following five years in London, Fred Williams saw the landscape of his own country through new eyes. The vast featureless spaces, undistinguished scrubby bush and harsh light of his homeland offered a distinct contrast to the picturesque English countryside with which he had become familiar. While his friend, John Brack, expressed reservations about the landscape – and particularly the ubiquitous gum tree – as a valid subject for contemporary painting, Williams recognised it as part of a longstanding and respected artistic tradition which was ripe for new interpretation.

Williams visited friends in Mittagong, New South Wales in late 1957 and the subject matter of this work, painted in moody blue and brown tones, connects it to a series of paintings including Landscape with Rocks I, 1957 – 58 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which was made in response to the surrounding landscape. Gouache, a quick-drying medium composed of watercolour mixed with white pigment (which renders it opaque), was for many years his preferred medium for painting outdoors and as this example shows, in Williams’ hands, it also offered something of the richness of oil paint in terms of the pictorial possibilities and textural manipulation it allowed. The compressed space of the image reveals the influence of the postImpressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, and hints at the radical distortions of perspective that would follow in Williams’ later work. Similarly, the vertical saplings – with leaning and fallen boughs beyond – point to the increasingly abstract and pared back images of the bush for which he subsequently became renowned. The decision to concentrate on painting the landscape was momentous for Williams and for the history of Australian art. Capturing its essence, he created archetypal images that have since become part of our collective visual memory, shaping the way we view our country. This singular vision was recognised by the Sydney Morning Herald art critic who, soon after Rocks and Saplings was made, proclaimed, ‘There is every chance he will go down in history as Australia’s greatest landscape artist… Williams clarifies our vision, develops our understanding, defines our land.’1 1. Thornton, W., quoted in Grant, K. & Phipps, J., Fred Williams: The Pilbara Series, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2002, p. 17 KIRSTY GRANT

GUY GREY–SMITH

(1916 – 1981) KARRI FOREST II, c.1976 oil on canvas on board 122.0 x 183.0 cm signed lower right: G Grey Smith bears inscription verso: KARRI FOREST / GUY GREY SMITH / No. 15 bears inscription on frame verso: KARRI FOREST GGS ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE Gallery 52, Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in October 1979 EXHIBITED A Festival of Perth exhibition: Paintings by Guy Grey–Smith, The Old Fire Station Gallery, Perth, 24 February – 16 March 1977, cat. 34 An exhibition of paintings, drawings and woodcuts by Guy Grey–Smith, Gallery 52, Perth, 13 September 1979 – 3 October 1979, cat. 15 LITERATURE Mason, M., ‘Honest, vital art show’, The West Australian, Perth, 18 September 1979

The Karri tree (Eucalyptus diversicolor) is the tallest tree in Western Australia and one of the tallest in the world. Growing exclusively in the south-west of the state, it was a tree that became emblematic for Guy Grey-Smith throughout his career. Indeed, his first painting to enter the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia was Karri forest, 1951, described by curator Melissa Harpley as ‘one of his first Australian landscapes where (Grey-Smith) has enough confidence in his composition to focus on the trees and eliminate external reference points.1 More than twenty-five years later, Karri forest II, c.1976 continues this scrutiny in a densely orchestrated paean to colour applied in slabs of thickened paint demarcating the trunks as they soar above the arcs and arabesques of bracken ferns below. Grey-Smith is one of Australia’s key post-war artists, the first West Australian modernist to have a truly national profile exhibiting with the likes of Kym Bonython, Macquarie Galleries, Rudy Komon, and Ann Lewis of Gallery A. By the early seventies, the famous hospitality that he and his artist-wife Helen provided at their home in the Darling Ranges outside Perth was starting to wane as a constant stream of visitors disrupted much of their studio time. In late 1972, they took a break and drove to Pemberton in the south-west. Hearing that a house nearby was up for sale, ‘Guy went to look and decided to buy. It was one of the

original timber-cutter’s cottages on a large sloping block surrounded by stands of majestic Karri trees. The sparse and simple wooden house was quite primitive but suited the two self-described “country personalities” perfectly.’ 2 They had found their refuge. The forests around Pemberton contain some of the largest Karri trees ever recorded, and unlike Guy’s childhood home of Boyup Brook, these giants grow close together and right to the edge of the roads. He discovered renewed inspiration living with the forests towering all around the town, bisected by clearwater streams, and animated by shafts of light between the leaves. It was a painter’s paradise and work after work emerged from his tiny, cluttered studio. Unlike the previous karri paintings, Guy steps now stepped deep within the forest, where the densely-packed trunks cause dramatic shifts from shadow where the sun penetrates the canopy high above. One suite from 1974 was described by the noted curator Daniel Thomas as being ‘better than nature’s colours; they are like medieval stained glass, songs of praise by means of colour.’ 3 Melissa Harpley, who curated the major Survey Guy Grey-Smith: art as life at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2014 4 wrote in the catalogue essay of Guy’s fluency with colour, texture and the occasional brushed gesture. His use of colour and the impasto in the paint ‘is evocative of the visual experience of moving between light and dark, so common in a thickly wooded place, and firmly makes the viewer a part of the scene.’ 5 Karri forest II was included in what was to become Grey-Smith’s last solo show in Perth. Newspaper art critic Murray Mason pointed to Karri forest II ’s ‘interior intimacy’ advising that close inspection revealed ‘the artist’s vision and method impressively.’6 Many works from this Gallery 52 exhibition are now in noted state, university and corporate collections, and this lot’s companion Karri forest I has been part of the Janet Holmes à Court collection for decades. Similarly, Karri forest II was purchased directly from Gallery 52 by a famed Perth collection and has stayed within the family ever since. 1. Harpley, M., Guy Grey-Smith: art as life, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2014, p. 12 2. Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: life force, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2012, p. 92 3. Thomas, D., ‘Delicacy in change’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 September 1974, p. 7 4. Guy Grey-Smith: art as life, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 21 March – 14 July 2014 5. Harpley, Guy Grey-Smith: art as life, ibid., p. 13 6. Mason, M., ‘Honest, vital art show’, The West Australian, Perth, 18 September 1979, p. 19 ANDREW GAYNOR

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GUY GREY–SMITH

(1916 – 1981) NIGHT SISTER, 1963 oil on composition board 75.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: G Grey Smith / 63 original artist's frame ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Christian Brothers College, Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1963 Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland EXHIBITED Guy and Helen Grey–Smith, Christian Brothers College, Perth, 28 October – 9 November 1963, cat. 9 LITERATURE Gaynor, A., Guy Grey–Smith: Life Force, University of Western Australia Publishing, Perth, 2012, p. 258

In December 1962, Guy Grey-Smith and his artist-wife Helen travelled to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) for eight weeks. Guy carried a list of Sri Lankan artists and potters he wished to meet, or at least seek out their work; and subsequently delivered a lecture one night near the end of their stay. Unfortunately, his health was not robust having suffered a relapse some years earlier due to the tuberculosis he contracted during World War Two and was forced to seek advice from a chest clinic in Colombo shortly after the new year. This resulted in a prolonged stay in hospital and this image of a nursing sister doing her late night rounds in the wards no doubt stirred strong emotional memories for the artist, recalling his own time as a patient over the years, first as a desperately wounded POW following his near fatal leap from a burning plane during World War II (his left leg remained two-centimetres short as a result); and his subsequent infection by tuberculosis (family lore says he did

this whilst assisting in the digging of an escape tunnel). This was then followed by the removal of half a lung due to the disease, an operation undertaken in 1944 whilst still a prisoner. The Grey-Smith’s return from Sri Lanka, however, was sweetened by the announcement that Guy had just been awarded ‘Best WA Entry’ in the Perth Prize for Contemporary Art for the tough and edgy Roebourne Pass. It was on his release following a POW exchange in 1944 that GreySmith began art studies at the famed Chelsea School of Arts in London. He developed his own methods of paint application using paint bulked up with a home-made beeswax emulsion, applied using scrapers onto a Masonite board prepared with an adhered layer of muslin. The years 1962 to 1966 may be considered as ‘classic’ years for Guy Grey-Smith as he gained greater confidence and fluency with his chosen technique; and Night sister, 1963, effectively demonstrates these aspects utilising a colour palette seen in contemporaneous paintings, such as View to the beach (Quinns), 1964, now in the Wesfarmers Collection, Perth; and Whyalla, c.1963, owned by Adelaide University. Night sister was exhibited as part of an incredible two-person exhibition that the couple held in October 1963 at the then-vacant Christian Brothers School in Perth. Their buildings were temporarily operating as a branch of the Adult Education Board and, spectacularly, the GreySmiths selected the enormous gymnasium as venue. Guy’s paintings, watercolours and drawings were perfectly augmented by Helen’s silkscreened fabrics making the vast space resonate with colour and design. Night sister has remained in the same family collection since its purchase there in 1963, and retains its original frame, made by the artist himself. ANDREW GAYNOR

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK

(1893 – 1965, German/Australian) COMPOSITION WITH CYLINDERS, c.1922 tempera on cardboard 37.5 x 44.5 cm signed lower right: L. H. MACK ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

however, incorporated a diverse range of activities which mirrored the

EXHIBITED Bauhaus e visioni, Museum of Modern Art, Bolzano, Vienna, 17 March – 28 May 2000; Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Austria, 14 June – 22 October 2000 and Jewish Museum Frankfurt, Germany, 13 December 2000 – 22 April 2001, cat. 62 (as ‘Untitled (Composition of planes with Cylinders)’)

he presented projected light compositions alongside a musical score.

LITERATURE Stasny, P., Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack: Bauhaus e visioni, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2000, cat. 62, pp. 69 (illus., as ‘Untitled (Composition of planes with Cylinders)’), 70, 173

Museum of Modern Art, New York. 3

breadth of Bauhaus teaching. Of particular note during this period, and indeed throughout his life, is Hirschfeld-Mack’s focus on colour and its theory, especially the farbenlichtspiele, or colour-light plays, in which Despite his status as a journeyman (which followed the successful completion of an apprenticeship) rather than a master (as teachers were known), he also taught a colour seminar at the Bauhaus in the winter of 1922 – 23, and colour charts he made for these lessons are now held in the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, as well as the collection of the

Painted during these years, Composition with Cylinders, c.1922 is characteristic of Hirschfeld-Mack’s Bauhaus abstraction, with an irregular patchwork of geometric shapes in red, blue and white providing

RELATED WORK Composition, 1922, watercolour over graphite on off–white wove paper, 21.1 x 25.7 cm, in the collection of Harvard Art Museums, USA

the backdrop for a series of vertical cylindrical forms, which are open at each end. Line, form and colour combine to create a dynamic composition, as well as a sense of three-dimensional space in which the cylinders recede and advance in a jostling, rhythmic movement.

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack’s arrival in Australia aboard the infamous HMT Dunera in 1940 established a direct link between avant-garde European modernism and the development of twentieth century Australian art. An artist and a teacher, he had studied at the Weimar Bauhaus from 1919 until 1925. Founded by architect, Walter Gropius, in 1919, the Bauhaus was a highly influential school whose manifesto proposed a radical challenge: ‘Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which can embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity’.1 The idealism and democratic approach that the school represented struck a chord with many following the experience of the First World War, and Hirschfeld-Mack’s first wife, Elenor, recalled, ‘We were all totally fulfilled by the new ideas that surrounded the Bauhaus.’ 2 Hirschfeld-Mack began his apprenticeship in the graphic printing workshop, learning various printmaking techniques and mastering the use of the printing press. His interests and creative output at the time

Texture is often a distinctive feature of Hirschfeld-Mack’s paintings and here, brush strokes remain visible in the smooth surface of the tempera medium and the material qualities of the work are emphasised by a section of the cardboard support being left exposed. A closely related watercolour, which is dated 1922 and assumed to precede the painting, in the collection of Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, tells us something about Hirschfeld-Mack’s working method. Although the colour palette is slightly varied – more purple and pink, than blue and red – the arrangement of background forms is very similar and the placement of cylinders is almost identical. While elements of the composition have been refined between the watercolour and the painting, it is evident that the artist’s clarity of intent, as well as a strong visual design were both present and well-formed from the outset. 1. Schwarzbauer, R. with Bell, C., Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More Than a Bauhaus Artist, HistorySmiths, Melbourne, 2021, pp. 36 – 37 2. Ibid., p. 36 3. Colour charts are also held in the collection of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, and the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, see ibid., p. 49 KIRSTY GRANT

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YVONNE AUDETTE

born 1930 LANDSCAPE AT MIDNIGHT, 1966 – 67 oil on plywood 152.5 x 114.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Y. Audette 66 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Y. Audette 1966 – 67 / landscape at midnight / YVONNE AUDETTE ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne

‘The calligraphy – that’s why I like the transparency because you could see underneath it every form, structure, mark that had been put down before – nothing was ever lost. It is like the inside of a human being, everything is there, what you say and do is always there in human experience. I want to do this in my painting; to build up layer, upon layer – put on top. Everything underneath is important.’1 Unlike many Australian artists at the time, Yvonne Audette took the unusual step, when choosing to venture abroad to further her career, of travelling to New York rather than London – a decision which not only reveals the young artist’s independence of mind and willingness to chart her own path, but more profoundly, impacted the entire course of her artistic development. Arriving in New York in late 1952, she accordingly enjoyed first-hand exposure to the burgeoning school of Abstract Expressionism through the work of celebrated exponents including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey, before subsequently travelling to Europe, where she established a studio in Florence in 1955, before finally settling in Milan in 1963. 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. When she eventually returned to her hometown of Sydney in 1966, not surprisingly Audette cut an unusual figure among her largely male local peers. Well-travelled and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant Garde, she had matured as a painter and was now working in a subtle and nuanced abstract style derived from the ambiguous mark-making of European Art Informel. A superb example of her work from the sixties, Landscape at Midnight, 1966 – 67 exudes the confidence of an artist who had reached creative maturity. Although completed upon her return to Sydney, the composition was nevertheless commenced in Italy and thus maintains her European frame of reference through allusion and style, reflecting the multi-layered histories Audette had encountered in Europe: ‘When I went to Europe in the mid-50s… my work responded to the layering of society itself – the remnants of murals on walls, the frescoes, the whole antiquity of the civilisation.’ 2 Complex, multifaceted abstractions, indeed Audette’s works evolve over time; as Christopher Heathcote

notes, ‘each painting… the product of months, sometimes years, spent deliberating over how the next stage should be approached and resolved.’ 3 In this regard, they betray striking affinities with the work of fellow expatriate, Rome-based American artist Cy Twombly, who shared her fascination with the ‘direct visual poetry’ of random, accumulated graffiti found on walls in ancient Italian streets and encouraged her to loosen up and experiment in the quest to discover her own unique voice. As Audette reflects, ‘It was for me a learning experience – I was excited how images were painted out and worked over, reworked over and over – the courage to destroy in order to get something better, closer to what one wants to express. The ability to manipulate paint and seeing the energy this way of working produces in the painting. The importance given to gestural, spontaneous brushwork, acting as the very meaning of the work in itself. All this is very important to me and always will be, it is my way of working, the very act of painting being the content.’4 Temporarily departing from her previous Cantata series which had emerged from Audette’s heartfelt love of J.S. Bach’s music, Landscape at Midnight represents an important transition work, inspired rather by Asian art and calligraphy. Significantly, such influence was absorbed both directly through classes with a Zen painting master while living in New York, but also more obliquely, through exposure to the work of artists such as Franz Kline, Pierre Alechinsky and Bradley Walker Tomlin, who were incorporating calligraphic brushwork into their abstractions. In a manner akin to a palimpsest, thus the image here is built up through accretions of colour and form, intuitive lines, shapes and scribbles painted with the brush, alongside shimmering transparent layers applied with a palette knife before being repeatedly scraped back and then applied again over an extended period. Carefully constructed yet seemingly ‘automatic’ in its creation, indeed the work offers a compelling study in space and depth which, enlivened by calligraphic gesture and lyrical colour, elegantly encapsulates Audette’s remarkable legacy as one of the first painters to bring abstract expressionism to Australia. 1. The artist, quoted in Durie Saines, D., The Will to Paint: Three Sydney Women Artists of the 1950s, Joy Ewart, Nancy Borlase, Yvonne Audette, Masters thesis, Power Institute of Fine Art, University of Sydney, 1992, p. 100 2. The artist, quoted in McCulloch-Uehlin, S., ‘Abstraction’s Forgotten Generation’, The Australian, 23 April 1999, p. 9 3. Heathcote, C., ‘Yvonne Audette: The Early Years’ in Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 33 4. The artist, quoted in Grant, K. ‘Interview’, Yvonne Audette: Different Directions 1954 – 1966, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, n.p. VERONICA ANGELATOS

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JOHN COBURN

(1925 – 2006) SONG OF INDIA, 1974 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 120.0 x 91.0 cm signed lower right: Coburn signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: “SONG OF INDIA” / JOHN COBURN / SYDNEY 1974 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Kandiah Kamalesvaran AM (Kamahl), Sydney, acquired directly from the artist Private collection, New South Wales Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 10 May 2017, lot 55 Private collection, Queensland LITERATURE Rozen, A., The Art of John Coburn, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979, pl. 51, p. 85 (illus., dated as 1975) Amadio, N., John Coburn Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 199 (dated as 1975)

John Coburn’s style is unique in Australian art and his contribution is one of inestimable worth. How does one value or rate in terms of dollars the art of a man whose vision elevates us to spiritual consciousness?’1 Unlike his contemporaries for whom abstraction represented the glorification of geometry and colour, John Coburn’s works are seldom purely cerebral or devoid of emotion. To the contrary, suffused with an overwhelming sense of celebration and allegory, his deeply personal iconography is predicated upon the promise of renewal – whether it be the regeneration of nature or the resurrection of the human spirit. Betraying strong affinities with the work of Matisse, Rothko, Picasso and Miró, his remarkable oeuvre encompassing paintings, prints and tapestries is thus which he reveals and exalts through the most direct of images. Indeed, highlighting the profound spiritual significance of his art, Nadine Amadio suggests Coburn as a pilgrim, ‘…his signs and symbols speak[ing] eloquently of a man who has been prepared to make a journey and return with the gifts of his insight.’ 2

When Coburn embarked upon the exquisite Song of India, 1974 offered here, he was universally regarded by public and private collectors alike as being at the height of his artistic career. Two years earlier, he had been appointed Head of Sydney’s National Art School; his spectacular colourful abstract curtains of the ‘Moon and Sun’ had just been unveiled at the newly-opened Sydney Opera House; and the Australian Government had presented his ‘Creation Series’ of tapestries to the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, Washington. In 1973, his considerable international standing as a religious artist was augmented by the commissioning of the painting Tree of Life III, 1973, by the Vatican Museum’s Gallery of Contemporary Religious Art, while closer to home, other works from this richly fertile period found their way into major state and corporate art collections, including Valencia, 1973 (Queensland Art Gallery / Museum of Modern Art, Brisbane); Aubusson Green, 1973 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) and Garden in Vevey, 1973 which was acquired by the BHP Collection. Saturated with emotion and joyfulness, Song of India offers a dynamic, harmonious composition in which the artist’s signature biomorphic forms float and colours pulsate with a vitalistic energy against a seductive red ground. Hot hues of celebration and the earth radiate passion, alongside resonant blues and purples, while cool neutrals (white, black and grey) provide visual anchors within this feast of colour, all evoking the rich, exotic splendour of India. Without doubt, the composition embodies Coburn at his finest, arresting in its simplicity and compelling in its ability to explore the profound and intuitive. As Coburn observed of his commitment to the allegorical and sensory potential of his art, ‘Appearances are distracting. What you feel about a thing is important, not what it looks like. I don’t want to teach people to see. I want to get them to feel.’ 3 1. Strzynecki, P., ‘Beyond Psalm 46’ in John Coburn, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 2000, p.8 2. Amadio, N., John Coburn: The Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 10 3. The artist, cited in Klepac, L., John Coburn: The Spirit of Colour, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2003, p. 33 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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ROGER KEMP

(1908 – 1987) UNTITLED, c.1980 synthetic polymer paint on linen 136.5 x 235.5 cm bears inscription verso: E083 ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne

The mid-1970s saw Roger Kemp standing tall within the Australian art scene. It began with the pioneering abstractionist being awarded an OBE for services to Australian painting. This was followed by the National Gallery of Victoria commissioning from him a splendid suite of tapestries to hang in its Great Hall; while, not to be outdone, the still to be opened National Gallery in Canberra purchased a strong selection of his works for its embryonic collection. Then a nationally touring survey exhibition, curated by Monash University’s Professor Patrick McCaughey, was being arranged—which firmly cemented recognition of his lifelong contribution to modern Australian art. These were to be Kemp’s most productive years. The artist might have entered his sixties, but he now seemed to bristle with creative energy. Weekdays were spent in his city studio, an old warehouse near Spencer Street station which Kemp leased with the young sculptor George Baldessin. Kemp used the entire upper floor in the narrow brick building as an immense painting studio, working until late making his critically acclaimed Sequence series. As this untitled early piece from that series demonstrates, the Sequence paintings were generously wide horizontal abstractions fashioned from structured geometric forms. It’s a bold, gutsy composition painted on linen canvas he had unrolled then fixed directly to the studio wall. An initial sense of visual pattern is deceptive. Kemp may have improvised, developing an increasingly intricate design as he went. But circles,

squares and bars in a narrow palette were adroitly balanced, so that a blue diamond to the left of a central white oblong answers a dark turquoise rectangle over on the right. Kemp also did not work in-theflat across his paint surface, instead deliberately suggesting that his forms levitate in space. This sees him adding a thick black outline to shapes, darkening some pale areas so they drop away, and emphasising tonal values—means for optically conveying distance while setting a contemplative mood. Kemp always had a weighty point he wished to press. Through geometry he wished to convey the perceptions of physicists and scientists, how they discern rational systems behind our seemingly haphazard world, with his overall Sequence paintings conveying the restless turmoil of the cosmos. But this untitled piece has a more direct goal, evoking the built environment around Kemp’s warehouse-studio. The artist teases his audience visually by using geometric forms to hint of what was a city zone under active redevelopment: squares, oblongs and discs strikingly echo an urban grid of inner-city streets, alleyways and buildings viewed from above, each floating white square denoting a skyscraper to be constructed. Painted during this intense creative period, Untitled (Sequence), c.1980 shows Roger Kemp in top form. One can appreciate why The Australian’s critic Christopher Allen was transfixed by a room of these later works in the NGV’s 2020 Kemp retrospective. ‘These paintings look more beautiful and impressive,’ Allen declared in his review, insisting how in visual terms this peak in Kemp’s production ‘can be said, without exaggeration, to be breathtaking.’1 1. Weekend Australian, 11 – 12 January 2020 DR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

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MARGARET PRESTON

(1875 – 1963) CIRCULAR QUAY, SYDNEY, 1925 hand–coloured woodcut 24.5 x 24.5 cm (image) 27.0 x 26.0 cm (sight) edition: 6/50 signed with initials in image lower left: M.P. signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image: 6th Proof – Circular Quay – 25 / Margaret Preston ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000 PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales Private collection, Western Australia, acquired from the above in 2022 EXHIBITED Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston Exhibition, The New Gallery, Melbourne, 24 November – 5 December 1925, cat. 9 (another example) Exhibition of Woodcuts by Margaret Preston, Dunster Galleries, Adelaide, September 1926, cat. 57 (another example) Australian Painter– Etcher’s Society Annual Exhibition, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 8 – 23 June 1928, cat. 233 (another example) Sydney Harbour Bridge Celebrations, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 21 March – 3 April 1932, cat. 143 (another example) Work by Four Artists, 52a Collins St, Melbourne, November 1932, cat. 12 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, Woodcuts etc. by Margaret Preston [and others], The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, 12 September 1933, cat. 17 (another example) Exhibition of Etchings, pencil drawings and woodcuts, The Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, May 1934, cat. 256 (another example) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980 and touring, cat. 10 (another example) The Prints of Margaret Preston, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 August – 18 October 1987, cat. 19 (another example) 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) Destination Sydney, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 11 December 2015 – 21 February 2016 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, another example) O’Keefe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 12 October 2016 – 11 February 2017, and touring, cat. 35 (another example)

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LITERATURE Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 17, September 1926, p. 48 (illus., as ‘Circular Quay, Sydney’, another example) Australia Beautiful, (The Home Easter Pictorial), Sydney, 1928 (illus. cover, another example) Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 50 (dated as c.1925) North, I. (ed.), The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, cat. P.10, pp. 19 (illus., another example), 53 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 84, p. 105 (illus., another example) Butel, E., Margaret Preston, Editions Tom Thompson, Sydney, 1995, pl. 11, p. 31 (illus., another example), 87 Edwards, D., Peel, R. and Mimmocchi, D., Margaret Preston Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, pp. 80, 92 (illus. another example), 285 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, revised edition 2005, cat. 84, p. 117 (illus. another example) Harding, L., and Mimmocchi, D., (eds), O’Keeffe, Preston, Cossington Smith: Making Modernism, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2016, cat. 35, pp. 126 (illus., another example), 194 RELATED WORKS Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

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MARGARET PRESTON (1875 – 1963) BRACHYCHITON DISCOLOR, c.1931 hand–coloured woodcut 46.5 x 45.0 cm edition: 2nd proof of unknown edition size signed with initials lower right: MP signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: Brachychiton 2nd proof Margaret Preston ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above c.1970 EXHIBITED Society of Artists, Special Exhibition, David Jones’ Restaurant Annexe, Sydney, 14 – 28 May 1931, cat. 1 (as ‘Bracychilon [sic.] discolour [sic.]’) LITERATURE Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, cat. 154, p. 158 (as ‘Brachychiton discolor, c.1931) Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2005, cat. 154, p. 167 (as ‘Brachychiton discolor, c.1931’)

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HERBERT BADHAM

(1899 – 1961) NUDE MODEL, 1934 oil on canvas on board 39.5 x 34.0 cm signed and dated lower left: H BADHAM ‘34 ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 8 November 1989, lot 44 (as ‘The Model’) Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 31 July 1990, lot 246 (as ‘The Striped Cloth’) Private collection, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED probably: Herbert Badham, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, May 1939, cat. 12 (as ‘Nude Study’) LITERATURE Ashton, H., ‘Herbert Badham. Interesting Painter’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 May 1939, p. 4 (as ‘Nude Study’)

It seems more than likely that this painting is the work first exhibited as Nude Study, 1934 in Herbert Badham’s solo exhibition held in 1939 at Sydney’s Grosvenor Gallery. The exhibition was opened by Sir Marcus Clark and reviewed by the critic Howard Ashton who, after commenting on some of Badham’s compositions being deliberately overcrowded with detail, turns to Nude Model ‘as a work which shows what the artist can do when he is content to express things more simply and broadly.’1 Indeed, compared to works such as Travellers, 1933 or Hyde Park, 1933 which contain a wealth of detail as Badham strives to capture the complexity of everyday life, Nude Model exhibits a quiet classicism indicative of the training he had received at the Julian Ashton Art School. Under the tutelage George Lambert, Henry Gibbons and Julian Ashton, Badham, along with fellow students William Dobell, Douglas Dundas, Charles Meere and Rah Fizelle, had been encouraged to place a great emphasis on drawing which was seen as the foundation of all art while figure studies and landscape were the dominant subject matter.

Badham was born in Watsons Bay, Sydney in 1899 and upon completing his schooling, worked briefly as a clerk before signing up to the Royal Australian Navy in 1917. As a result, it was not until 1921 that he was able pursue his studies at the Julian Ashton Art School In 1932 where notably, just two years before he painted Nude Model, he was runner up to fellow student William Dobell for the prestigious New South Wales Travelling Scholarship. Although Nude Model is a quietly classical composition, in typical Badham style, it is rich in information about the period in which it was painted. He has positioned his classically-posed model on a window seat beneath a narrow band of stained-glass casement windows which were typical of the 1920s bungalow. This referenced the Arts and Crafts movement and was the most common form of housing in the Sydney suburb of Vaucluse in the 1930s. 2 Badham also records their exteriors in works such as The Travellers and South Head, 1935. It would seem highly possible that this is the artist’s own home, as he was living in the area at this time. His interest in geometry and perspective which was to become a major feature of his work during the fifties is also beginning to surface here, as the angle of the model’s legs echoes the angle of the abstract shapes in the stained-glass window. The model’s identity has yet to be established but it appears to be the same person as portrayed in the work The New Scarf, also from 1934. Another unifying factor for works of this period is Badham’s inclusion of fabric. Here he uses the striped cloth and coloured cushion against the abstracted window pattern, while in Breakfast Piece, 1936 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), the play of blue and white cloth, crockery and clothing creates a highly active surface, as does the art deco pattern of the women’s hats and men’s blazers in The Travellers. Apart from their competence, these early works by Badham are important in that they signify a break away from post-Heidelberg pastoral landscapes and record an interest in the immediate world of everyday Sydney. 1. Ashton, H., ‘Herbert Badham. Interesting Painter’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 25 May 1939, p. 4 2. See Raworth, B., Our Inter-war Houses: How to Recognise, Restore and Extend Houses of the 1920s and 1930s, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), Melbourne, 1991 CHRISTINE FRANCE

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GODFREY MILLER (1893 – 1964) THE GREEN GINGER JAR oil on canvas 40.0 x 40.5 cm signed on label verso: Lewis Miller, John Henshaw, John Kaplan, JH 171 ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

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PROVENANCE Darlinghurst Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private Collection, Sydney Shapiro, Sydney, 17 May 2016, lot 26 Private collection, Jakarta

JOHN PASSMORE (1904 – 1984) (HARBOUR LANDSCAPE), c.1956 oil on composition board 35.5 x 43.5 cm signed with initials lower right: JP

PROVENANCE Private collection, Victoria

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

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MARGARET OLLEY

(1923 – 2011) PROTEA AND FRUIT, 1976 oil on composition board 75.0 x 120.0 cm signed lower right: Olley ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, United Kingdom EXHIBITED An exhibition of recent works by Margaret Olley, Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, 28 September – 16 October 1976, cat. 15 LITERATURE The Olley Project https://ehive.com/collections/5439/ objects/465668/protea-and-fruit (accessed 30/03/23)

‘…I can think of no other painter of the present time who orchestrates his or her themes with such richness as Margaret Olley. She is a symphonist among flower painters; a painter who calls upon the full resources of the modern palette to express her joy in the beauty of things.’1 A much-loved, vibrant personality of the Australian art world for over 60 years, Margaret Olley exerted an enduring influence not only as a remarkably talented artist, but as a nurturing mentor, inspirational muse and generous philanthropist. Awarded an Order of Australia in 1991 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2006, Olley featured as the subject of two Archibald-Prize winning portraits (the first by William Dobell in 1948, and the second by contemporary artist Ben Quilty in 2011, just prior to her death) and was honoured with over 90 solo exhibitions during her lifetime, including a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1997. Today her work is held in all major state and regional galleries in Australia, and the myriad contents of her Paddington studio have been immortalised in a permanent installation at the Tweed Regional Gallery in northern New South Wales, not far from where Olley was born. Bequeathing a legacy as bountiful as the subject matter of her paintings, indeed her achievements are difficult to overstate – and reach far beyond the irrepressible sense of joy her art still brings.

A striking example of the still-life scenes for which Olley remains widely celebrated, Protea and Fruit, 1976 encapsulates well the way in which she repeatedly turned to the quotidian for inspiration, excavating her domestic setting to uncover the beauty inherent in everyday life. Such impression of familiarity is aided by Olley’s selection of items here that are eminently unpretentious - native wildflowers in an stoneware jug, a compote of spiny cucumbers and basket of apples, pair of rustic brass candlesticks and a folded saffron-coloured cloth resting casually on the wooden table as if the artist had placed it there only moments before. Significantly, the whole arrangement is enlivened by its juxtaposition against a vivid teal background - a vibrancy typical of Olley’s work during the seventies when she increasingly experimented with the chromatic possibilities of her art. For indeed, notwithstanding the apparent randomness of her arrangements, always underlying such compositions was the artist’s careful ‘orchestration’ of elements to create a harmonious, perfectly balanced image – an aesthetic originally inspired by her firsthand experience of the theatre in 1948 when she assisted with painting the sets for Sam Hughes’ productions of Shakespeare’s Pericles and Cocteau’s Orphée (designed by Jean Bellette and Sidney Nolan respectively). Paying homage to the great European masters of her métier such as Vermeer, Bonnard, Matisse and Cézanne, thus Olley meticulously choreographs the various components of her exquisite still lifes as if actors on a stage – objects both commonplace and beautiful, shuffled this way and that, plunged into deep shadow or transformed by lighting. Leading the viewer’s eye and mind through an intimate, deeply personal drama that resonates with the artist’s delight in her domestic surrounds, each composition reveals the very essence of her identity; as Barry Pearce elucidates, ‘…to live with a Margaret Olley painting is to experience the transfiguration of a passionate, highly focused personality into art. In her paintings, the space surrounding each bowl of fruit, each vase of flowers, and through which the eye traverses a cacophony of surfaces such as patterned carpets, modulated walls, and cluttered tabletops, resounds with her presence. These are reflections of the things she loves, and which embellished the centre of how she prefers her existence to be.’ 2 1. Gleeson, J., ‘Introduction’, Margaret Olley, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 1964, n.p. 2. Pearce, B., ‘Margaret Olley Retrospective’, State of the Arts, Sydney, August – November 1996, p. 5 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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ROBERT KLIPPEL

(1920 – 2001) NO. 274B, 1974 welded steel 258.0 cm (height) ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Richard and Joan Crebbin, Sydney Christie’s, Sydney, 17 August 1998, lot 1084 (as ‘Construction’) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Robert Klippel, Sculpture since 1970, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 21 November – 8 December 1979, cat. 1 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books,Sydney, 1983, pp. 331, 334, 474 (as ‘Opus 274b’) Edwards, D., Robert Klippel: Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture, (CD–ROM), Deborah Edwards and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002 (illus. CD–ROM Artworks) RELATED WORK No 274a Metal Construction, brazed steel, 29.3 cm height, in the Crebbin Collection, Sydney, illus. in Gleeson, op cit, p. 330

Exerting his creativity with a new formal vocabulary, no longer reliant on the found forms of industrial and mechanical detritus, Robert Klippel’s constructions of early 1970s were meticulously drawn in space with a strict rational syntax of right angles, perfect circles and squares in graduated sizes, arranged and assembled in brazed steel. The high formalism of these works demonstrates the continuity of these aesthetic concerns throughout Klippel’s oeuvre. While several examples of this suite were monumental in feel despite their modest size, such as No. 266a (lot 3), these became the first, and only, sculptures for which Klippel created industrially produced enlargements. No. 274b, 1974, striking in its refined rectilinear severity and gleaming clean edges, is the most successful of these enlarged geometric sculptures, with both versions acquired for the collection of Richard and Joan Crebbin, Klippel’s consistent patrons.

Klippel, swept along in the popular penchant for large paintings and sculptures, set aside his concerns of over-refinement and authenticity to contact Les Wild, who operated a small welding firm in Rozelle. Having already attracted sculptors like Tony Coleing to his workshop, Wild’s reputation for skill with difficult constructions preceded him in Sydney’s artistic circles. While Klippel’s smaller, ‘a’ versions of these sculptures were made with pre-cut sections of steel piping brazed together by hand in the studio, the process of enlargement with required third party industrial welding. Fabricating a copy ten times the size of the maquette required small adjustments to proportions in order to rebalance the structure, quality control and aesthetic judgment provided by the constant presence of the artist in the welding workshop. The first sculpture Klippel chose to fabricate on a large scale with Wild was to fulfil a site-specific commission in a new landscaped garden of a Melbourne collector. By same token, 274b, produced years later was installed with great care in a garden, that of the Crebbins, whose Walter Burley-Griffin Castlecrag residence Klippel knew well. In this context, set against the view of Sydney harbour, the design of 274b acquired a relevance and gravitas that was absent from its smaller form. The gleaming exactitude derived from the industrial process combined with the arrangement of Klippel’s geometric section endowed 274b with the appearance of a scientific sighting instrument. Its rods intersecting at cross-hairs in the eye of the work, the construction interacts directly and closely with its expanded environment. Although the loss of human touch was a concern for Klippel in the initial stages of fabrication, in No. 274b, the technical perfection of an industrial finish and spartan discipline of its geometric construction dovetailed to create a masterful sculpture. While governed by static straight lines and right angles, save for wide arced segment for the foot, the arrangement of Klippel’s guiding lines invokes careful movement. Perhaps providing the impression of a gradual alignment of each part working in tandem to provide focus and clarity? Gleeson provides a clear assessment of the merits of this sculpture in his 1983 monograph ‘cool as an equation and loaded with the authority of logic, it stands in complete mastery of its space. It is undeniable as a theodolite or an astrolabe.’1 1.

Gleeson, J., Robert Klippel, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 331

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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JAMES GLEESON (1915 – 2008) WOMAN IN A CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE, c.1953 oil on board 30.0 x 19.5 cm signed lower left: Gleeson signed and inscribed with title verso: WOMAN IN A CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE / James Gleeson ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Estate of Sheila Wood, Melbourne Mossgreen, Melbourne, 29 August 2016, lot 66 Private collection, Jakarta EXHIBITED probably: Sydney Painting 1955, Macquarie Galleries at Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, 31 May – 11 June 1955

WILLIAM DOBELL (1899 - 1970) SELF PORTRAIT, c.1966 – 68 oil on composition board 19.5 x 40.5 cm ESTIMATE: $28,000 – 35,000

RELATED WORKS Self Portrait, 1968, oil on composition board, 75.5 x 121.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, illus. in Pearce, B., William Dobell, The Painters Progress, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1997, p. 127 Study for Self Portrait, 1966, oil and pencil on board, 20.3 x 30.8 cm, formally in The Harold E. Mertz Collection

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist Sotheby’s, Sydney, 19 November 1973, lot 100 John Fairfax and Sons, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, since 2002 Thence by descent Amanda Adams Auctions, Melbourne, 12 February 2023, lot 554 Private collection, New South Wales

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TONY TUCKSON (1921 – 1973) MAN’S HEAD NO.2 (TP330), c.1952 – 56 oil on canvas 41.0 x 37.0 cm (irregular) ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

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PROVENANCE Estate of the artist, Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1995 EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson…heads, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 23 September 1995, cat. 18 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)

RICHARD LARTER (1929 – 2014) THAT SPECIAL DISPOSITION, 1973 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 180.5 x 114.5 cm signed and dated lower left: R./ LARTER. / JUNE. 1973.

PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Bonython, K., Modern Australian Painting 1950 – 1975, Rigby Publishers Ltd, Sydney, 1980, p. 149 (illus.)

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 24,000

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LLOYD REES (1895 – 1988) THE WATTLE TREE, 1934 pencil on paper 18.0 x 26.0 cm signed and dated lower left: L. REES / 1934 copy of S.A. Parker framer’s label attached to backing verso ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000 PROVENANCE Miss V. de Putron, Sydney, by 1942 J. Davies, by 1969 Masterpiece Fine Art Gallery, Hobart Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 2002 EXHIBITED Society of Artists Annual Exhibition, Education Department Gallery, Sydney, 7 September 1934 – 5 October 1934, cat. 7 Lloyd Rees Loan Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 – 30 August 1942,

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cat. 61 (copy of label attached to backing verso) Paintings, Drawings and Graphics by Lloyd Rees, Masterpiece Fine Art Gallery, Hobart, opened 7 September 1984, cat. 34 Masterpiece Fine Art Gallery, Hobart, 2 – 24 November 2001 (as ‘The Wattle Tree (West Pennant Hills)') Lloyd Rees, Painting with Pencil 1930 – 36, 12 December 2015 – 17 April 2016, Museum of Sydney, Sydney, cat. 137 (as ‘The Wattle Tree, (West Pennant Hills)’) Uncovered Northwood, Lloyd Rees and Beyond, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney, 12 September – 21 October 2022 (as ‘The Wattle Tree (West Pennant Hills)') LITERATURE Free, R., Klepac, L., Rees, A., et al, Lloyd Rees: Painting With Pencil, 1930 – 36, Richard Nagy Ltd, London & Sydney Living Museums, Sydney, 2015, pp. 137 (illus.), 184 (as ‘The Wattle Tree, (West Pennant Hills)') Davis, R., Uncovered Northwood, Lloyd Rees and Beyond, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2022, pp. 61 (illus.), 109 (as ‘The Wattle Tree (West Pennant Hills)')

LLOYD REES (1895 – 1988) EVENING NO. 1, 1982/83 oil on canvas on board 50.0 x 60.0 cm signed and dated lower left: L. REES / 83 inscribed with title verso: 4 EVENING NO 1

PROVENANCE Von Bertouch Galleries, Newcastle (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Blue Days on the Derwent. Tasmanian Exhibition by Lloyd Rees, Von Bertouch Galleries, Newcastle, 1 – 24 July 1983, cat. 4

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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MURRAY GRIFFIN (1903 – 1992) THE WOODCUTTER, c.1948 oil on composition board 81.0 x 66.0 cm signed lower right: MURRAY / GRIFFIN ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE The artist Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne

EVELINE SYME (1888 – 1961) BAYSIDE STILL LIFE WITH PINEAPPLE oil on canvas 41.5 x 21.0 cm signed lower left: E W SYME

PROVENANCE Private collection E. J. Ainger Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, 6 December 2015, lot 628 (as ‘Still Life Table Setting’) Private collection, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

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JAMES GLEESON

(1915 – 2008) IMAGES FOR A DARKENING TIME, 2003 oil on canvas 178.0 x 132.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Gleeson ‘03 signed and inscribed with title on stretcher bar verso: “IMAGES FOR A DARKENING TIME” / James Gleeson ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above in 2004 Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Estate of the above EXHIBITED James Gleeson: Disguised Signals. New Paintings and Drawings, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 27 April – 22 May 2004, cat. 6 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 29 October 2004 – 27 February 2005; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 March – 13 June 2005, cat. 91 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Klepac, L., James Gleeson. Beyond the Screen of Sight, The Beagle Press in association with the National Gallery of Victoria, Sydney, 2004, cat. 91, pp. 188 (illus.), 189, 201 ‘In his old age, Jung voiced very well our need for the unutterable: ‘It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown… [Man] must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. Only then is life whole’…’1 Without doubt Australia’s leading Surrealist painter and poet, for more than six decades James Gleeson has divulged the depths of his own imagination onto the canvas, offering up damning – yet simultaneously captivating – depictions of a visceral universe that defies intellectual grasp. With their typically ominous skies, huge grotesque forms and dominant motifs of metamorphosis, his landscapes are the manifestation of our inner psyche – powerfully capturing the repulsive, the erotic, the abject, and the tumultuous uncertainty of our dreams and subconscious thoughts. As Lou Klepac, author of several authoritative texts on Gleeson’s work, elucidates: ‘Gleeson’s paintings are the mirror which reveals the dark and dangerous regions which are too terrifying for our ordinary consciousness, because they represent a view of existence measured in light years where man’s life is but a flicker of a small flame.’ 2 Monumental in scale and conception, Images for a Darkening Time, 2003 exemplifies well the second period of Gleeson’s career during which, from 1983 until his death in 2008, ‘he embarked upon the

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large imaginative landscapes which constitute his greatest and most original achievement.’ 3 In stark contrast to his earlier explorations of ‘man as the measure of all things’, Gleeson now jettisons all interest in the representation of the human figure, transfixed instead by the mutability of forms and possibility of ‘a biomorphic cosmos’ – as might have existed pre-civilisation, or might yet occur after the obliteration of humanity. As Gleeson asserts, ‘I got to the point where the extreme (of the figure) almost came to be recognisable – then I felt no need to use the form at all as an entirety. It could be represented by an arm, a hand, an eye. I broadened it to be not only landscape but cosmic experience.’4 Featured in the major retrospective James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004, the present is a dynamic and potent work that contains all the visceral urgency and emotional gravity which distinguishes the artist’s late work. As Klepac elaborates, ‘…James Gleeson’s late paintings will no doubt be interpreted as the world reduced to an illogical and disturbing state as a punishment for something that mankind has done. The paintings do have an air of prophecy, and many will interpret them as reflecting our fear of global extinction since this has become a universal anxiety… Rather than being images of possibility influenced by time, Gleeson’s paintings are the final development of the universal and always present question about the nature of reality… Not even Gleeson can be the final interpreter of this amazing series of late works. The artist has acted as a ‘medium’ to these images which have come to him in an avalanche after fifty years of serious work which now seems as though it may have been the preparation for a newfound language and most eloquent voice. Perhaps most remarkable of all is that these paintings have had to be developed on a large scale in order to affirm the inevitability of these images and the essential, positive presence of the world which they represent. The scale is an essential part of the vision. That they are so also affirms that they could not have been painted or conceived other than by a master. Gleeson’s world is not an upheaval of the self-conscious, nor an expression of a tormented soul… One might suggest however, that it is a reaction to, and a redressing of the positivism of a materialist age. His late work enriches us by supplying us with a world of wonder and infinite possibilities, rare in a rather arid world…’ 5 1. Klepac, L., James Gleeson, Landscape Out of Nature, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 1997, p. 10 2. Klepac, L., James Gleeson: Beyond the Screen of Sight, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2004, p. 9 3. Ibid. 4. The artist, quoted in Free, R., James Gleeson: Images from the Shadows, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 43 5. Klepac, op. cit., 1997, pp. 9 – 10 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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ALBERT TUCKER (1914 – 1999) PARROTS IN FLIGHT oil on cardboard 61.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower right: Tucker ESTMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in the late 1980s Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1999 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth

SIDNEY NOLAN (1917 – 1992) BURKE AND CAMEL, 1966 Ripolin enamel on paper on board 51.5 x 75.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Nolan / 1966

PROVENANCE Blue Boy Gallery, Melbourne Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 17 June 2014, lot 112 Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Shapiro, Sydney, 9 May 2017, lot 16 Private collection, Jakarta

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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JOHN COBURN (1925 – 2006) SPRING GARDEN, 1976 synthetic polymer paint on paper 51.5 x 71.5 cm (sight) signed lower right: Coburn signed, dated and inscribed with title on handwritten label verso: Spring Garden / John Coburn / Sydney 1976 ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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PROVENANCE C. Dorothy Lewis Irrevocable Trust, New York Doyles, New York, 21 November 2017, lot 17 Private collection, Melbourne

TIM STORRIER born 1949 FIRE LINE, 1995 synthetic polymer paint and rope on paper 103.0 x 152.0 cm signed and inscribed with title lower right: Fire Line / Storrier

PROVENANCE Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Queensland

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

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JOHN GLOVER

(1767 – 1849) EVENING ON THE THAMES, 1808 watercolour on paper 73.0 x 110.0 cm signed and dated lower left: J. Glover 1808 ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 20 April 1999, lot 141 (as ‘On the Thames’) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 28 November 2003 – 1 February 2004; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 10 February – 12 April 2004; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 24 April – 18 July 2004; National Gallery of Victoria, 13 August – 3 October 2004, cat. 28 (as ‘The Thames near St. Pauls’ Cathedral’) LITERATURE Hansen, D., John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 2003, cat. 28, pp. 156, 157 (illus., as ‘The Thames near St. Pauls’ Cathedral’)

John Glover is widely recognised and much admired as one of the most significant landscape artists painting in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century. His immigration to Van Diemen’s Land at the age of sixty-three is often recounted, yet comparatively little attention is paid to his long and successful career in England as an artist, exhibitor, teacher and contemporary of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. In both England and Australia, Glover focused principally on picturesque landscapes and verdant rural surroundings, but he painted the occasional cityscape, as with this large and luminous watercolour of the Thames in 1808. Glover associated with artistic and literary circles and is known to be a close reader of poetry; early sketchbook pages include many quotes and verses. William Wordsworth was one poet whom he read, and this tranquil scene corresponds closely with his sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802, which was first published in 1807. Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear

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The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! While Wordsworth is describing the calm of early morning, Glover has positioned himself on London Bridge, looking towards Blackfriars Bridge, and is thus facing west, into a setting, rather than rising sun. The crowded port of London lies downstream, east of this view. Here we see only a small number of water craft, mostly moored at the wharves, the river workers ending their day’s toil. This view harks to a pictorial device used extensively by the French artist Claude Lorrain (1600 – 1682), looking across a seaport towards a low sun, and to the reflections and shadows cast upon the waters.1 Claude had many British imitators; Glover was not the only one to be known, but may be the best remembered, widely dubbed as the ‘the English Claude’. In this expansive scene Glover’s view is not framed, as so often, by trees or geological features but rather is punctuated by the imposing and distinctive dome of St Pauls Cathedral on the right, and Watt’s shot tower, for bullet manufacturing, on the left, built less than twenty years earlier and the cutting edge of military technology. 2 Here then, we see both the power of religion and of industrial and military might, at the heart of a metropolis immersed in the long Napoleonic war, yet simultaneously expanding its imperial control around the globe. Both London and Blackfriars bridges have since been rebuilt; railway, road and walking bridges now interrupt this view, including the Millennium Bridge which leads to Bankside, the (reconstructed) Globe Theatre and Tate Modern. 3 1. See for example, Glover’s Conway Castle, 1796, in Hansen, D., John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 2004, cat. no. 8, p. 140. 2. Glover appears to position the shot tower before Blackfriars Bridge; other prints firmly locate it west of the bridge. For example, see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/ object/P_1880-1113-5853 3. The National Gallery of Victoria holds Glover’s Sketchbook 72, which includes c. 1808 – 09 sketches of the Thames (NGV 1932-4) ALISA BUNBURY

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CONRAD MARTENS

(1801 – 1878) GOVETTS LEAP, 1876 watercolour and gouache on paper 44.5 x 64.5 cm signed and dated lower left: C. Martens. / 1876 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE William Busby Esq., New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist, 28 July 1876 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales LITERATURE Conrad Martens Account Book, 1856 – 1878, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney (as ‘Govets [sic.] Leap Wm. Busby £21.0.0’) de Vries–Evans, S., Conrad Martens on the Beagle and in Australia, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1993, pp. 196, 202, and in supplement p. 31 (as ‘Govett’s Leap’) Ellis, E., Conrad Martens, Life & Art, State Library of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 1994, p. 187 (as ‘Govet[t]s Leap’) RELATED WORKS In Conrad Martens Sketchbook, Volume 02: Conrad Martens sketches from the Blue Mountains, Lithgow and Capertee, 1873–76, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney: Govett’s Leap, showing Mount King George, 1874, pencil on paper, 28.5 x 46.0 cm; Govett’s Leap, looking south east, 1874, pencil on paper, 28.5 x 46.0 cm The most significant landscape artist working in Sydney in the mid nineteenth century, Conrad Martens first witnessed the breathtaking geological formations of the Blue Mountains a few short weeks after his arrival in Sydney on 18 June 1835. He had intended only to visit Australia but soon recognised the rich opportunities for artistic inspiration and a potential market in the burgeoning colony of New South Wales. It was reported on 31 July 1835 that ‘a gentleman of the name of Martin’ was travelling ‘in search of the picturesque’, which he soon found amid the towering sandstone escarpments and the seemingly endless forested valleys of the ranges.1 Martens sold his first view of Govett’s Leap, near Blackheath, as early as 6 August, with similarly impressive natural landscapes forming an important part of his oeuvre from that time. 2 In December 1874, Martens, then in his seventies and having travelled widely throughout eastern NSW and southern Queensland, undertook another trip to the Blue Mountains. This decision may have been

prompted by recent public recognition he had received. In 1873 the Trustees of the new National Gallery of Victoria commissioned a watercolour, One of the falls on the Apsley, for their developing collection. The following year a variant view of the spectacular gorges of the Apsley River, in the northern tablelands of NSW, was commissioned for the New South Wales Academy of Art (later Art Gallery of New South Wales). 3 The interest provoked by these important acquisitions may have encouraged Martens’ return to the increasingly accessible Blue Mountains for further inspiration and opportunities. A number of paintings resulted, including depictions of the recently opened trainline, which paved the way for the establishment of new townships and ever-expanding tourism.4 Fortuitously many of Martens’ sketchbooks survive, including that from his 1874 journey which shows his route and demonstrates his superlative draughtsmanship. Two pencil studies of Govetts Leap, drawn on 16 December, are included – one of which was most certainly the source for the watercolour being offered here. 5 In the study we see his meticulous attention to the topography of the terrain and strata of the columns, positioning himself so that a damaged gum tree counterbalances the nearest cliff-face, framing the scene and leading the viewer’s eye along the meandering valley. The painting is similar but has been enhanced for picturesque effect. We can no longer see the top of the left cliff and are thus immersed within the dramatic scene. Martens’ use of blues and purples for the shadowed valley enhances the sensation of vast depth, which is further highlighted by the tiny figure in white who provides scale and, by holding carefully to a branch as he peers tentatively over the precipice, encourages an understandable sense of awe in the ‘wild magnificence’ and ‘wonderful natural sublimity’ of the New South Wales escarpments.6 Marten’s Account book, kept throughout his career, provides invaluable information about his output and his clientele. This watercolour was acquired by William Busby, a pastoralist and parliamentarian, in July 1876 for £21 – it has remained with the family ever since. 1. ‘Domestic and Miscellaneous Intelligence’, The Australian, 31 July 1835, p. 2 2. Sold to J. Macarthur. Martens painted oils and watercolours of the same scene in 1837, 1839 and 1847. 3. One of the falls on the Apsley, 1873, watercolour, collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and Apsley Falls, 1874, watercolour, collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. These were based upon pencil sketches made when Martens visited in 1852. 4. The trainline first ran as far as Weatherboard in July 1867; see Conrad Martens, Crossing the Blue Mountains, Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 12 Sept. 2007, lot. 65 5. See Related works above. 6. John Oxley, upon sighting the Apsley Falls; see Oxley, J., Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales, John Murray, London, 1820, pp. 296, 299 ALISA BUNBURY

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TOM ROBERTS

(1856 – 1931) RIVER OMEGA, NEW SOUTH WALES, 1901 oil on wood panel 19.5 x 35.5 cm signed lower left: Tom Roberts signed and dated lower centre: Roberts [illeg.] 1901 bears inscription on label verso: RUBIN COLLECTION / Roberts Tom / River Omega ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000

PROVENANCE Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, Sydney Christie’s, Sydney, 4 October 1972, lot 416 Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Alan Greenway, Australia and USA, acquired from the above in 1972 Thence by descent Private collection, California, USA EXHIBITED Spring Exhibition 1972: Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 24 November 1972, cat. 19 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Topliss, H., Tom Roberts, 1856 – 1931: A Catalogue Raisonné, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985, vol. I, p. 168, cat. 365, vol. II (illus.)

Tom Roberts is renowned in Australian art for his grand vistas of national life, full of the blazing light akin to his fellow Heidelberg artists. However, on closer examination, his palette is more muted than the glare so beloved by Arthur Streeton and in Robert’s smaller works, this becomes even more apparent. Paintings such as Trafalgar Square, c.1884 (Art Gallery of South Australia); Cloud study, c.1889/1901 (National Gallery of Victoria); and Saplings, 1889 (Art Gallery of South Australia) are extremely low key, even foggy, and clearly indicate why he later became so enthusiastic about Clarice Beckett’s paintings which he encountered in in the late 1920s.1 In River Omega, 1901, this delicate sensibility is pronounced in a composition dominated by soft blues and creamy ochre. It is also one of the very few landscapes painted by Roberts during these years. The Omega Headland is a small promontory 130 kilometres south of Sydney and is near the junction of the Werri Creek where it spills into the Pacific Ocean on the traditional lands of the Dharawal people. Stretching back inland is low-lying alluvial land enriched by ancient

eruptions from Saddleback Mountain which rises in the distance. The native cedar trees were rapidly logged by early European settlers who cleared much of the forest to establish dairy farms. Later residents further altered the land by blasting rocks near the headland to build a concrete channel to admit tidal waters into the creek. 2 Another artist attracted to the area was Lloyd Rees who painted there from 1939 and some of his many views of the region bear a striking resemblance to Robert’s River Omega, including Omega pastoral, 1950 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), and Sea at Omega, 1957 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery). Like Rees, Roberts stood on the sands between the creek and ocean, looking inland, a view encompassing the sinuous twists of the creek, sand banks, sparse trees and the hills beyond. The modest scale of the wooden panel concentrates the detail and indicates that River Omega was probably started en plein air before being finished in the studio. One reason for the small number of landscapes painted by Roberts at the time was the continuing effects of the 1890s depression and his major key to survival were portrait commissions. ‘“Portraits pay, George my boy,” the dear chap would say, as he would soften the red tint on the nose of a politician.’ 3 River Omega is the only landscape from 1901 recorded in Helen Topliss’ catalogue raisonné, but another of a slightly smaller size – Near Ballina, 1901, oil on wood panel, 19 x 35.5 cm, owned by Norman Schurek – was also recorded in the catalogue for the artist’s retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1947. In spite of its scale, Roberts took great pride in these paintings and carried a number with him to London in 1903, where he wrote in 1909 that they ‘(hold) up with all my late stuff and they with it. A kind of touchstone and I didn’t know it.’4 For many years, River Omega was owned by the eccentric grazier, The Honourable Major Harold de Vahl, whose sprawling collection included other works by Roberts as well as examples by Picasso, Degas, Renoir, Dobell and Streeton amongst many others. 1. Robert’s Sunrise, Tasmania, c.1928 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) is claimed to be his direct response to seeing Beckett’s paintings. 2. See Rees, L., & Free, R., Lloyd Rees: an artist remembers, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1987, p. 57 3. Taylor, G., Those were the days, Tyrell’s, Sydney, 1918, p. 100 4. Tom Roberts, letter to S.W. Pring, 11 February 1909, Mitchell Library, Sydney, MLMSS 1367/2 ANDREW GAYNOR

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BESSIE DAVIDSON (1879 - 1965) GUÉTHARY (BASSES-PYRÉNÉES), 1948 oil on panel 19.0 x 24.0 cm signed lower left: Bessie Davidson signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Guéthary (Basses-Pyrénées) / Bessie Davidson / April 1948 ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection, France

CHARLES CONDER (1868 – 1909) BEACH AT NEWQUAY, c.1906 oil on canvas 41.0 x 51.0 cm bears inscription on stretcher bar verso: PROMENADE / NEW QUAY bears inscription on frame verso: No. 36 bears canvas makers’ stamp verso: Windsor & Newton, London James Bourlet and Sons label attached verso ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE J. Leger & Son, London (label attached verso) Ralph E. Smith, Sydney, by 1960 Private collection, Sydney, a gift from the above in 1966 EXHIBITED J. Leger & Son, London, August 1942 Charles Conder: 1868 – 1909, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 August – 4 September 1966; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 9 November – 4 December 1966, cat. 36 RELATED WORKS Beach Scene, Newquay, 1907, oil on canvas, 40.0 x 60.3 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (illus., in Hoff, U., 1972 ed., p. 88) Newquay, 1906, oil on canvas, 64.2 x 77.2 cm, in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England (illus., in Hoff, U., 2003 ed., p. 137)

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HILDA RIX NICHOLAS (1884 – 1961) PORTRAIT, 1911 pastel and charcoal on paper 37.5 x 27.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower left: E. H. Rix. / 9. 9. 11. ESTIMATE: $6,000 – 8,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection, France

HILDA RIX NICHOLAS (1884 – 1961) PORTRAIT WITH PINK HAT, 1911 pastel and charcoal on paper 37.5 x 27.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: E. H. Rix. / 9. 9. 11.

PROVENANCE Private collection, France

ESTIMATE: $6,000 – 8,000

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ANTOINE – CHARLES VAUTHIER (1790 – 1879, French) ECHIDNA, c.1827 watercolour, pen and ink on paper 11.0 x 15.5 cm bears inscription on mount lower right: Vauthier ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000 PROVENANCE Marcel Jeanson, Paris The Jeanson Collection, Christie’s, London, 19 June 2000, lot 209 Arader Galleries, New York, 23 April 2022, lot 57 Private collection, Adelaide RELATED WORK L’Echidné Australien, Echidna Australis Lefs, engraving by J. F. Cazenave after A.C Vauthier, 10.0 x 16.0 cm, published in Oeuvres complètes de Buffon, Paris, Île-

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de-France, France, 1837-39, pl. 52, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The National Gallery of Australia also holds another Antoine–Charles Vauthier watercolour of Australian interest, of the thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger. Antoine-Charles Vauthier’s ‘parent’ echidna watercolour appears in print form in at least three important publications: Hyacinthe-Yves-Phillippe-Potentien, Baron de Bougainville, Journal de la Navigation autour du globe de la Frégate la Thétis et de la Corvette l’Espérance pendant les années 1824, 1825, et 1826, Paris: Arthus Bertrand, Paris, 1827 Achille Richard, Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mammifères et des Oiseaux Découverts Depuis 1788 Jusqu’à Nos Jours, Badouin Frères, Paris, 1822-44 René Lesson, Voyage Autour du Monde Entrepris par Ordre du Gouvernement sur la Corvette La Coquille, P. Pourrat Frères, Paris, 1839

HANS HEYSEN (1877 – 1968) GUMS, 1906 oil on canvas on board 33.0 x 26.0 cm signed and dated lower left: HANS HEYSEN. 06 signed, dated and inscribed verso: Gums 1905 (oil) / Hans Heysen

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Australian Art Auctions, Sydney, 30 June 1980, lot 54 Private collection, Brisbane, acquired from the above EXHIBITED possibly: Pictures for Collectors, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, February 1946, cat. 10 (as 'Gums (oil, 1905)')

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000 RELATED WORK A lord of the bush, 1908, oil on canvas, 135.4 x 105.3 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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MAX MELDRUM (1875 – 1955) GOMETZ LE CHÂTEL, 1927 oil on canvas on board 37.0 x 34.0 cm signed lower right: MELDRUM signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Max Meldrum. / GOMETZ LE CHATEL 1927 ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000 PROVENANCE The Estate of Max Meldrum probably: Sotheby’s, Melbourne The Adam Galleries, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1997 E. J. Ainger Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, 1 August 2010, lot 211 Private collection, Sydney

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EXHIBITED Paintings by Max Meldrum, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 18 — 29 August 1931, cat. 2 possibly: Exhibition of Pictures by Max Meldrum, David Jones George St Store, Sydney, November 1937, cat. 44 A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings of Max Meldrum, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, July — August 1954, and touring, cat. 11 An exhibition of paintings by Max Meldrum & Associates, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 — 26 March 1997, cat. 32

CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935) WATTLE AT SHERBROOKE, c.1923 oil on pulpboard 36.0 x 30.5 cm signed lower left: C. Beckett bears inscription with title on gallery label verso: CLARICE BECKETT / “WATTLE AT SHERBROOK [sic.]” ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000 PROVENANCE The Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne (partial label attached verso) Private collection, acquired from the above in 1975 Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 26 July 1989, lot 42 (as ‘Wattle at Sherbrook’ [sic.])

Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 8 November 1989, lot 285A (as ‘Wattle at Sherbrook’ [sic.]) Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 7 May 1990, lot 65 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Possibly: Paintings by Miss Clarice Beckett, Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, 5 – 20 June 1923, cat. 17 (as ‘Dead Tree, Sherbrooke’) Clarice Beckett, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 5 – 17 February 1975, cat. 26 (as ‘Wattle at Sherbrook’ [sic.])

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NORMAN LINDSAY

(1879 – 1969) LANGOUR, 1934 also known as THE PINK DRAPE oil on canvas on composition board 61.0 x 51.5 cm signed lower right: NORMAN / LINDSAY ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Bloomfield Galleries, New South Wales Private collection, Canberra, acquired from the above in 2009 Estate of the above LITERATURE Lindsay, N., & Stewart, D., Paintings In Oil, The Shepherd Press, Sydney 1945, pl. 21 (illus.) Bloomfield, L., Norman Lindsay: Oil Paintings 1889–1969, Odana Editions, Sydney, 2006, p. 78

Famed for his watercolours and black-and-white art, Norman Lindsay was a relative latecomer to oil paint and only began using it seriously in the mid-1930s. It coincided with a separation from his wife and longtime muse Rose, with Lindsay moving into a new studio in Bridge Street, Sydney, whilst his estranged wife stayed at Springwood, the family home at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains. The next years became an incredibly productive period for Lindsay who began attracting a number of new models including those he spotted when attending shows in Sydney’s thriving music halls. As he commented later in 1964, ‘I paid well, I treated my models well, and they liked posing for me. They liked me too.’1 This must have been true for his biographer Lin Bloomfield estimates that between 1930 and 1940, Lindsay used the astounding number of 140 different models, paying them up to ten shillings for a single long sitting. Langour, 1934, is one of the first paintings painted at Bridge Street and although this model has not been firmly identified, she bears a strong resemblance to Gloria Scalis who posed for a clutch of works around the time, such as Repose, c.1933; Lin Bloomfield,

Since the turn of the century, Lindsay was renowned for his vivid drawings of knockabout types and arresting recruitment posters for World War One, his authorship of beloved books such as The Magic Pudding (first published in 1918, it has never been out of print), and – possibly most important to the artist – his spirited attacks on puritanical wowsers in essays, broadcasts and artworks. An avid enthusiast for the hedonistic Dionysian cults of Greek tradition, Lindsay was never a sentimentalist in his depictions of women, commenting that ‘I have utterly repudiated the academic nude image of femininity as an innocuous stuffed dummy designed to decorate the walls of second-class suburban homes… And it appears pretty clear that I must have successfully infused sexual desirability into my women, else they never would have aroused such infuriated howls from the massed ranks of suburbia.’ 2 Regardless of identity (or politics), Langour is a superb painting by an artist at the height of his game. Lindsay (who was 55 at the time) believed that ‘the best years of a man’s life are the middle years, from his forties (through) his fifties… The reason is obvious. They have gone through the preliminary exercises in a craft and have acquired power of expression. They have fire and passion.’ 3 Part of the intensity of Langour is due to Lindsay’s use of thin glazes of translucent colour applied to a neutral, though often dark, underpainting. Although he did not enjoy painting hands or feet, the model’s poised left hand is exquisitely observed and rendered. The pink drape, used as a prop in a number of his oils, still survives today, a treasured textile artefact within the Norman Lindsay Gallery, as the family home in Faulconbridge is now known. 1. Norman Lindsay, letter to John Hetherington, 1964, cited in Lin Bloomfield, L., Norman Lindsay: oil paintings 1889-1969, Odana Editions, New South Wales, 2006 p. 3

however, sees an equal likeness to a model named Cécile who posed

2. Norman Lindsay, letter to John Hetherington, February 1968, cited in Bloomfield, L., ibid., p. 10

for an eponymously titled painting, also from c.1933.

3. Norman Lindsay, letter to John Hetherington, July 1959, cited in Bloomfield, L., ibid., p .64 ANDREW GAYNOR

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NORMAN LINDSAY (1879 – 1969) SATYR AND TWO NYMPHS watercolour on paper 42.0 x 41.5 cm (sheet) signed lower left: NORMAN LINDSAY ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 April 1999, lot 33 (as ‘Satyr and the Nymphs’) Private collection, Sydney Christie’s Australia, Melbourne, 6 May 2003, lot 20 Ronald Coles Investment Gallery, New South Wales (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne

NORMAN LINDSAY (1879 – 1969) THE PICNIC, 1944 watercolour on paper 53.0 x 58.0 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower left: NORMAN LINDSAY / 1944 bears inscription verso: "The Picnic"

PROVENANCE Private collection Pickles Auctions, Sydney, November 1979 Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 July 1987, lot 539 Private collection, Adelaide Christie’s Australia, Melbourne, 24 November 1999, lot 5 Private collection, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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JANET CUMBRAE STEWART (1883 – 1960) THE PLAITS, 1925 pastel on paper 26.5 x 22.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Cumbrae Stewart / 25 bears inscription with title verso: 56 / The Plaits / 8 Guineas ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

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PROVENANCE Penelope Corrie, Brisbane, the sitter, a gift from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, Brisbane Thence by descent Private collection, Brisbane

CLARA SOUTHERN (1860 – 1940) AUTUMN ON THE YARRA oil on canvas on board 34.0 x 45.5 cm signed lower right: C Southern signed and inscribed with title verso: Autumn on the Yarra / Clara Southern signed and inscribed on label verso: Autumn on the Yarra / C Southern

PROVENANCE Private collection Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 28 May 1980, lot 322 Private collection, Melbourne

ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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A Collection of Bauhaus Prints, Weimar, 1919 – 1923, Formerly In The Collection Of Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack Lots 81 – 89

This group of prints, which has come directly from Ludwig HirschfeldMack’s family, is a fascinating document of his years at the Weimar Bauhaus, highlighting the diversity and creative range of graphic arts within the school, as well as the nature of the relationships and professional camaraderie that existed between students and teachers. In addition to a number of Hirschfeld-Mack’s own prints made during the early 1920s, this selection includes work by three renowned artists and Bauhaus Masters – as the teachers were known – Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Paul Klee. Hirschfeld-Mack was one of the first students to enrol at the Bauhaus in October 1919 and he began his apprenticeship in the graphic printing workshop, learning various printmaking techniques and mastering the use of the printing press. Undertaking commissions for external clients, as well as limited edition fine art printing, he was involved in the production (and perhaps also the design) of some of the portfolio covers of the Neue Europäische Graphik series.1 The two stylised figure compositions by Oskar Schlemmer – Master at the Bauhaus from 1921 – 29 and a close friend of Hirschfeld-Mack – in this group were included in the first of these portfolios, published in 1922, alongside woodcuts, lithographs and etchings by other Bauhaus Masters (Feininger, Klee, Johannes Itten, Gerhard Marcks, Georg Muche and Lothar Schreyer). A significant example of Hirschfeld-Mack’s graphic oeuvre, the lithograph Reaching the Stars, 1922, is an exemplar of his creative skill – ambitious in scale and composition, it may have been submitted as part of the work required for promotion from apprentice to journeyman. 2 As he explained, it ‘[represents] the man who was capable of applying technical advances with electricity… in everyday life’ 3 and the National Gallery of Victoria impression of this print, which is embellished with gold leaf, appears to depict this quite literally.

the school, sometimes hand-printing the blocks which, as a result of being carved into cigar box lids, were too fragile to be run through the press. Evidently pleased with the result, the master gifted some of these prints to his student and the example included here, Tahiti, 1920, is characteristic of his woodcuts which skilfully exploit the expressive and textural potential of the medium.4 It was not all study and work at the Bauhaus however, and the year was marked by four annual celebrations which brought together members of both the school and broader communities: the lantern festival, the summer solstice party, the kite festival and Christmas.5 Hirschfeld-Mack remembered, ‘There was a kite festival, when we marched in procession through Weimar to the top of the hill, with hundreds of school children. There were lantern festivals when lanterns made in the workshops were carried through the streets at night.’6 The 1922 Drachenfest, or kite festival, is represented here by two small lithographs by Hirschfeld-Mack. Joyously coloured in vivid red and yellow watercolour, they illustrate figures in the landscape flying striking box-shaped kites. This group of prints also includes a famous lithographic postcard for the 1922 lantern party by Paul Klee – Master at the Bauhaus between 1921 – 31 – which has been delicately handcoloured and depicts four figures holding their lanterns aloft. A second postcard by Oskar Schlemmer for the same event adopts a different approach, focussing on the paper lanterns and describing their varied forms and bright colours against a black background (the night sky), which is illuminated by a full moon and two sparkling stars. 1. Schwarzbauer, R. with Bell, C., Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More Than a Bauhaus Artist, HistorySmiths, Melbourne, 2021, p. 39 2. Ibid., p. 43 3. Ibid.

Part of the Bauhaus staff from its inception, Lyonel Feininger designed the woodcut which illustrated the cover of the 1919 manifesto, and ran the graphic printing workshop from late 1920. Hirschfeld-Mack is known to have printed some of Feininger’s prints during his time at

4. Ibid., p. 40 5. Droste, M., Bauhaus 1919 – 1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, 1990, pp. 37 – 38 6. The artist, quoted in Stephen, A., ‘Bauhaus Now!’, Bauhaus Now!, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019, p. 12, https://buxtoncontemporary.com/exhibitions/bauhaus-nowexhibition-catalogue, accessed online 20 March 2023 KIRSTY GRANT

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (1893 – 1965, German/Australian) UNTITLED (BAUHAUS AUSSTELLUNG), 1923 lithograph on paper 9.0 x 14.0 cm (sheet)

LITERATURE Stasny, P., Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack: Bauhaus e visioni, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2000, cat. 51, pp. 1 (illus., as ‘Untitled (Bauhaus Cartoon)’), 60, 61 (illus.) Koepnick, G., and Stamm, R., The Bauhaus Postcards, Insel Verlag, Berlin, 2019, pp. 52 (illus.), 80

ESTIMATE: $2,000 – 4,000 PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

EXHIBITED Bauhaus e visioni, Museum of Modern Art, Bolzano, Vienna, 17 March – 28 May 2000; Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Austria, 14 June – 22 October 2000 and Jewish Museum Frankfurt, Germany, 13 December 2000 – 22 April 2001, cat. 51 (as ‘Untitled (Bauhaus Cartoon)’) Bauhaus 1919 – 1933: Workshops for Modernity, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 8 November 2009 – 25 January 2010 (another example)

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PAUL KLEE (1879 – 1940, Swiss/German) LATERNENFEST BAUHAUS, 1922 colour lithograph and watercolour on paper 9.0 x 13.5 cm (image) signed within image lower left: Klee ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000 PROVENANCE Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Melbourne Private collection, Italy EXHIBITED Paul Klee at Play, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 5 November 2019 – 14 May 2017 (another example) LITERATURE Bayer, W., Gropius, W., & Gropius I., Bauhaus 1919 – 1928, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938, p. 86 (illus., another example) Thrall Soby, J., The Prints of Paul Klee, Museum of Modern

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Art, New York, 1947, pl. 30 (illus., another example) Franciscono, M., ‘Paul Klees kubistische Graphik’ in Paul Klee; Das graphische and plastische Werk, Bern: Stämpli + Cie A.G., Duisburg, 1974, p. 54 (illus., another example) Klee, F., Paul Klee, Rosenwind: Farbbilder, Zeichnungen und autobiographische Notizen, Herder, Germany, 1984, p. 41 Droste, M., Bauhaus 1919 – 1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, 1990, p. 38 (illus.) The Paul Klee Foundation (ed.), Paul Klee: Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, 1919 – 1922, Thames and Hudson, Bern, 1999, no. 3087, p. 474 (another example) Kornfeld, E., W., Paul Klee: Verzeichnis des graphischen Werkes von Paul Klee, Bern, 2005, no. 87, pp. 228, 229 (Illus., another example) Koepnick, G., and Stamm, R., The Bauhaus Postcards, Insel Verlag, Berlin, 2019, pp. 17 (illus.), 77 RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

OSKAR SCHLEMMER (1888 – 1943, German) LATERNENFEST BAUHAUS SONNWEND WEIMAR, 1922 colour lithograph and ink on card 10.5 x 15.5 cm ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Melbourne Private collection, Italy LITERATURE Droste, M., Bauhaus 1919 – 1933, Bauhaus-Archiv Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin, 1990, p. 38 (illus.) Koepnick, G., and Stamm, R., The Bauhaus Postcards, Insel Verlag, Berlin, 2019, pp. 19 (illus.), 77

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OSKAR SCHLEMMER (1888 – 1943, German) KONZENTRISCHE GRUPPE (FIGURENPLAN K 1), 1921 from the portfolio NEW EUROPEAN GRAPHICS, 1ST PORTFOLIO: MASTERS OF THE STATE BAUHAUS, WEIMAR lithograph on paper 49.0 x 33.5 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: O Schlemmer / 1921 bears inscription upper right: 8 ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000

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PROVENANCE Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Melbourne Private collection, Italy LITERATURE Bayer, W., Gropius, W., & Gropius I., Bauhaus 1919 – 1928, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938, p. 188 (illus., another example) RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

OSKAR SCHLEMMER (1888 – 1943, German) FIGUR VON DER SEITE: FIGUR H2 SITZENDE, 1921 from the portfolio NEW EUROPEAN GRAPHICS, 1ST PORTFOLIO: MASTERS OF THE STATE BAUHAUS, WEIMAR lithograph on paper 47.5 x 35.0 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower right: Oskar Schlemmer / 1921 ESTIMATE: $3,000 – 5,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Melbourne Private collection, Italy LITERATURE Grohmann, W., Oskar Schlemmer: Drawings and Graphics, Catalogue Raisonné, Verlag Gerd Hatje, Germany, 1965, cat. GL7 RELATED WORK Another example of this print is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (1893 – 1965, German/Australian) DRACHENFEST WEIMAR, 1922 colour lithograph and watercolour on paper 12.5 x 8.5 cm (image) signed lower right below image: L. Mack dated lower left below image: 1922 ESTIMATE: $2,000 – 4,000

PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy EXHIBITED Bauhaus e visioni, Museum of Modern Art, Bolzano, Vienna, 17 March – 28 May 2000; Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Austria, 14 June – 22 October 2000 and Jewish Museum Frankfurt, Germany, 13 December 2000 – 22 April 2001, cat. 49 (as ‘Untitled (Kite Festival in Weimar)’) LITERATURE Stasny, P., Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack: Bauhaus e visioni, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2000, cat. 49, pp. 60 (illus., as ‘Untitled (Kite Festival in Weimar)’), 61, 173 Koepnick, G., and Stamm, R., The Bauhaus Postcards, Insel Verlag, Berlin, 2019, pp. 24 (illus.), 78

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (1893 – 1965, German/Australian) DRACHENFEST WEIMAR, 1922 colour lithograph and ink on paper 9.0 x 12.5 cm (image) 10.5 x 15.5 cm (sheet) inscribed with title within image lower left: DRACHENFEST WEIMAR ESTIMATE: $2,000 – 4,000

PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy EXHIBITED Bauhaus e visioni, Museum of Modern Art, Bolzano, Vienna, 17 March – 28 May 2000; Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Austria, 14 June – 22 October 2000 and Jewish Museum Frankfurt, Germany, 13 December 2000 – 22 April 2001, cat. 50 (as ‘Untitled (Kite Festival in Weimar)’) LITERATURE Stasny, P., Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack: Bauhaus e visioni, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2000, cat. 50, pp. 60, 61 (illus., as ‘Untitled (Kite Festival in Weimar)’), 173 Koepnick, G., and Stamm, R., The Bauhaus Postcards, Insel Verlag, Berlin, 2019, pp. 25 (illus.), 78

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (1893 – 1965, German/Australian) REACHING THE STARS, 1922 colour lithograph on paper 42.0 x 31.5 cm (image) 68.5 x 50.0 cm (sheet)

Museum Frankfurt, Germany, 13 December 2000 – 22 April 2001, cat. 53 (as ‘Sterntänzer (Reaching the Stars)’) The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910 – 1937, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 August – 6 November 2011 and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 25 November 2011 – 4 March 2012 (another example)

ESTIMATE: $4,000 – 6,000 PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy EXHIBITED Two masters of the Weimar Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 4 July – 19 August 1974, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 August – 6 October 1974, cat. 55 (another example) Bauhaus e visioni, Museum of Modern Art, Bolzano, Vienna, 17 March – 28 May 2000; Jewish Museum of the City of Vienna, Austria, 14 June – 22 October 2000 and Jewish

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LITERATURE Stasny, P., Ludwig Hirschfeld–Mack: Bauhaus e visioni, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Germany, 2000, cat. 53, pp. 62, 63 (illus., as ‘Sterntänzer (Reaching the Stars)’) Schwarzbauer, R., and Bell, C., Ludwig Hirschfeld– Mack: More than a Bauhaus Artist, HistorySmiths, 2021, pl. 3, p. 182 (illus. another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

LYONEL FEININGER (1871 – 1956, German/American) TAHITI, 1920 from the portfolio 12 WOODCUTS BY LYONEL FEININGER woodcut on paper 16.0 x 19.0 cm (image) 22.5 x 33.0 cm (sheet) signed lower left: Lyonel Feininger

PROVENANCE Estate of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Melbourne Private collection, Italy RELATED WORK Woodblock for Tahiti, 1920, woodblock, 16.0 x 18.8 cm, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

ESTIMATE: $2,000 – 3,000

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VARIOUS ARTISTS

TEN AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHS (FOLIO 1), 1935 – 1997, 2001 ten silver gelatin photographs various sizes each housed in an archival mount and contained in a Solander Box edition: 1/10 ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000 (10)

F) ROBERT MCFARLANE

PROVENANCE Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Company collection, Sydney

A) GREG BARRETT born 1943 VICKI ATTARD, FLASHDANCE, 1995/2001 34.0 x 28.0 cm signed below image: Greg Barrett signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Greg Barrett/ VICKI ATTARD / FLASHDANCE / 1995 / 2001 / SET 1/10

B) OLIVE COTTON (1911 – 2003) TEACUP BALLET, 1935/2000 25.5 x 19.5 cm authenticated and signed verso by the artist’s daughter, Sally McInerney / SET 1/10

C) BRETT HILDER born 1946 INDIAN RUG, NEW MEXICO, 1997/2001 20.5 x 15.5 cm signed below image: Brett Hilder dated and inscribed verso: 1997 / Printed 2/2001 / 9.2.4 / SET 1/10

D) JON LEWIS (1950 – 2020) ADAGIO DANCERS, BONDI, 1984/2000 24.5 x 31.0 cm signed and dated verso: Jon Lewis ’84 / “Adagio Dancers – Bondi” / Printed 2000 SET 1/10

E) GRAHAM MCCARTER born 1940 OPAL MINER’S WIFE, 1967/2001 22.0 x 22.0 cm signed below image: Graham McCarter. dated and inscribed verso: ‘OPAL MINERS WIFE’ / MAR 1967 / Printed Jan. 01 / SET 1/10

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born 1942 BEA NUDE, 1978/2000 21.5 x 14.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: ‘B Nude, Darlinghurst 1978’ Robert McFarlane / Printed 2000 SET 1/10 bears artist’s studio stamp verso

G) DAVID MOORE (1927 – 2003) SISTERS OF CHARITY, WASHINGTON DC, 1956/2000 35.5 x 23.0 cm signed below image: David Moore signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Sisters of Charity, Washington DC, USA – 1956 / 2000 / David Moore SET 1/10

H) DAVID POTTS (1926 – 2012) THE RABBIT TRAPPER, DORIGO, 1947/2000 30.5 x 20.0 cm signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: THE RABBIT TRAPPER / DORRIGO – N.S.W. – 1947 – 2000 / David Potts / SET 1/10 bears artist’s studio stamp verso

I) ROGER SCOTT born 1944 QUEENSCLIFF, SYDNEY, 1975/2000 20.0 x 30.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: QUEENSCLIFF SYDNEY 1975 PRINTED 1 –6 – 2000 / R. Scott / SELENIUM TONED / SET 1/10

J) WOLFGANG SIEVERS (1913 – 2007) GEARS FOR MINING INDUSTRY, 1967/2000 27.0 x 21.0 cm signed and dated verso: Wolfgang Sievers / 1967 / 2000 / SET 1/10

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MERVYN BISHOP born 1945 PRIME MINISTER GOUGH WHITLAM POURS SOIL INTO THE HAND OF TRADITIONAL LANDOWNER VINCENT LINGIARI, NORTHERN TERRITORY, 1975/2021 digital inkjet print edition: A/P aside from an edition of 25 60.0 x 60.0 cm (image) signed below image lower right: Mervyn Bishop dated and inscribed with title below image lower right: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hand of / Traditional Gurindji Land Owner, Vincent Lingiari / Wattie Creek – Northern Territory 1975 / 2021 ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Australian Postwar Photodocumentary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 8 August 2004 (another example) Half Light Portraits from Black Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 November 2008 – 22 February 2009 (another example) The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 March – 8 June 2015; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 4 July – 11 October 2015 (another example) LITERATURE Annear, J., The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, pp. 6 (illus. another example), 50, 292 RELATED WORKS Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, the National Library of Australia, Canberra and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney

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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 25% (inclusive of 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. included in the buyer’s premium. Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. 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.

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.

conditions of auction and sale

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 25% (inclusive of 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.

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS 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; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in 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 Hackett, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of 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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SALE CODE: PELICAN SALE NO.: 074 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 3 MAY, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 91 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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SALE CODE: PELICAN SALE NO.: 074 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 3 MAY, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 91 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: PELICAN SALE NO.: 074 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 3 MAY, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 91 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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179

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SALE CODE: PELICAN SALE NO.: 074 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 3 MAY, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 91 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars. 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. Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale 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. Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of 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.

180

INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

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NOW CONSIGNING forthcoming auctions of important australian + international fine art sydney • 02 9287 0600 melbourne • 03 9865 6333 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

Catherine Opie Binding Ties 1 April—9 July heide.com.au Supported by

image: Catherine Opie, Bo, 1994 © Catherine Opie. Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul

MEET THE 200+ ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS THAT ARE MAKING MELBOURNE NOW THE IAN POTTER CENTRE: NGV AUSTRALIA, FED SQUARE

The Perry Collection comprises over 300 works of the Meldrum school of Australian Tonalism. This new publication illustrates and describes the work of Max Meldrum and his principal early associates including Bale, Beckett, Colahan, Colquhoun, Farmer, Hurry, Jorgensen, Frater, Leason and Shore. Extensively researched with five Appendices, Bibliography, and Catalogue of Works, the publication provides new information on Meldrum. There are 145 colour reproductions and 40 black and white images. Foreword by Dr Gerard Vaughan AM. 184

Printed in an edition of 500 numbered copies. $50 plus $15 for postage and handling. Email order direct to: peterwperry13@gmail.com

A Geelong Gallery exhibition

Geelong presenting partner

Major partner

Exhibition partners

Saturday 1 April— Sunday 9 July

Publication partner Ruth Fagg Foundation Trust

Dimmick Charitable Trust

This ambitious exhibition is proudly supported by a collective of Geelong Gallery donors from our 2022 Annual Giving

Rainy day 1930 oil on canvas on board Geelong Gallery Purchased 1973 Photographer: Andrew Curtis

185

186

3 MAR – 14 MAY 2023 BOOK NOW

Presenting Partner

image Oliviero Toscani, born Milan, Italy 1942, Andy Warhol, 1975, New York, United States of America, pigment print on paper, 32.0 x 46.0 cm (image), 40.0 x 50.0 cm (sheet), Public Engagement Fund 2021, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, © Oliviero Toscani, Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol TM 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS / Copyright Agency

In Association with

Supported by Significant Lender National Gallery of Australia

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188

Reach Out to The Moon, Even If We Can’t

Australian Exclusive 26 Feb – 25 Jun 2023

artgallery.wa.gov.au Yoshitomo Nara No war love & peace 2020. Fibre-reinforced polymer, 46 x 48 x 32 cm. On loan from the Artist, courtesy Pace Gallery. © YOSHITOMO NARA, 2020.

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Lot 4

Lot 5

Lot 6

Lot 7

Lot 8

Lot 9

Lot 10

Lot 11

Lot 12

Lot 13

Lot 14

Lot 15

Lot 16

Lot 17

Lot 18

Lot 19

Lot 20

Lot 23

Lot 25

Lot 26

Lot 27

Lot 28

Lot 34

Lot 35

Lot 36

Lot 37

Lot 38

Lot 41

Lot 42

Lot 43

Lot 44

Lot 45

Lot 46

Lot 49

Lot 50

Lot 51

Lot 52

Lot 53

Lot 54

Lot 55

Lot 56

Lot 57

Lot 58

Lot 59

Lot 60

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES

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:

Lot 90 Various Artists

Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au Phone: 1800 819 461

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. © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2023 978-0-6452421-9-5

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Lot 91 Mervyn Bishop

Lot 61

Lot 62

Lot 63

Lot 64

Lot 73

Lot 76

Lot 77

Lot 78

Lot 81

Lot 82

Lot 86

Lot 87

Lot 88

Lot 89

Lot 90

Lot 91

index AUDETTE, Y.

A 42

HEYSEN, H.

HINDER, M.

1, 2

HILDER, B.

HIRSCHFELD-MACK, L. 41, 81, 86, 87, 88

BADHAM, H.

BANKSY

BARRETT, G.

BECKETT, C.

KEMP, R.

BLACKMAN, C.

9, 15

KLEE, P.

BISHOP, M.

BOOTH, P.

BOYD, A.

16, 34, 35, 36

BRACK, J.

KLIPPEL, R.

CAMERON, J. M.

CAMPBELL, C.

26, 27, 28

R REES, L.

56, 57

ROBINSON, W.

21, 22

ROBERTS, T.

RUSSELL, J.P.

S SCHLEMMER, O.

83, 84, 85

SCOTT, R.

LARTER, R.

SHARP, D.

LEWIS, J.

SIEVERS, W.

LINDSAY, N.

3, 51

QUILTY, B.

76, 77, 78

SMART, J.

SOUTHERN, C.

STORRIER, T.

SYME, E.

43, 63

MARTENS, C.

CONDER, C.

McCARTER, G.

COTTON, O.

McFARLANE, R.

CUMBRAE STEWART, J.

MELDRUM, M.

TUCKER, A.

14, 61

MILLER, G.

TUCKSON, T.

19, 54

MOORE, D.

COBURN, J.

DAVIDSON, B.

DOBELL, W.

DRYSDALE, R.

NICHOLAS, H, R. NOLAN, S.

VAUTHIER, A-C.

70, 71 62

F FEININGER, L.

FULLWOOD, A. H.

OLLEY, M.

OLSEN, J.

6, 7, 18, 37

W WHITELEY, B.

4, 5, 17

WILLIAMS, F.

8, 38,

G GASCOIGNE, R. GLEESON, J. GLOVER, J. GREY-SMITH, G.

52, 60

PASSMORE, J.

PERCEVAL, J.

POTTS, D.

39, 40

GRIFFIN, M.

GRUNER, E.

PRESTON, M.

45, 46

191

192

193

specialist fine art auction house and private gallery

194

Important Australian + International Fine Art

Articles inside

ABSENTEE BID FORM

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conditions of auction and sale

prospective buyers and sellers guide

A Collection of Bauhaus Prints, Wiemar, 1919 – 1923,

s pecialists for this auction

s pecialists

s pecialists