this auction
Chris Deutscher
Damian Hackett 0411 350 150 0422 811 034
Henry Mulholland Fiona Hayward 0424 487 738 0417 957 590
Crispin Gutteridge Veronica Angelatos 0411 883 052 0409 963 094
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auctioneers
ROGER McILROY head auctioneer
Roger was the Chairman, Managing Director and auctioneer for Christie’s Australia and Asia from 1989 to 2006, having joined the firm in London in 1977. He presided over many significant auctions, including Alan Bond’s Dallhold Collection (1992) and The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art (2000). Since 2006, Roger has built a highly distinguished art consultancy in Australian and International works of art. Roger will continue to independently operate his privately-owned art dealing and consultancy business alongside his role at Deutscher and Hackett.
SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer
Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.
Lot 25
Del Kathryn Barton Hard Wet, 2017 (detail)
various vendors page 12
prospective buyers and sellers guide page 134
conditions of auction and sale page 136
telephone bid form page 138
absentee bid form page 139
attendee pre-registration form page 140
index page 155
Lot 5
Fred Williams Landscape with Swamp, 1972 (detail)
IAN FAIRWEATHER
(1891 – 1974)
PEKING MARKET PLACE, c .1940
gouache and pencil on paper
36.0 x 43.0 cm
signed lower right: I Fairweather
ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 90,000
PROVENANCE
Lina Bryans, Melbourne
Christie’s, Melbourne, 6 March 1970, lot 64 (as ‘Market Place’)
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne
Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne, acquired from the above 6 December 1982
EXHIBITED
Fairweather: A Retrospective Exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 3 June – 4 July 1965, then touring to: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 July – 22 August 1965; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 September – 10 October 1965; National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 26 October – 21 November 1965; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 9 December 1965 –16 January 1966; and Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 13 March 1966, cat. 79 (as ‘Market Place’)
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 10 – 24 September 1981, cat. 139 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 120, as ‘Market Place, 1940 – 41’)
and fellow artist Lina Bryans – ‘the mysterious lady benefactress’ 2 as Fairweather would call her. Always able to make a simple situation more complicated and fraught, Fairweather – although grateful for Frater’s support – felt humiliated by the process, and it would be some years before he would meet up with Bryans in person.
The works in this group were memories of Peking which he had visited for the first time in 1933 after living in Shanghai for two years. Although only a brief visit, his first impressions were positive, and he was keen to return. For the next year however he circled Southeast Asia, restlessly travelling to Bali, Australia, Colombo and Davao in the Philippines, and finally arriving back in Peking in March 1935. He found the city much changed, he wrote in a letter to Jim Ede, and ‘full of refugee Russians’ who competed for the sort of unskilled work he depended upon while waiting for money from the sale of his paintings in London. 3 All that was left to do was to walk the city, drawing and sketching the temples and bridges, the walls and canals, the crowded markets and busy street stalls. Peking was messy and noisy and, though preferable to the monotony of Melbourne and the irritations of Davao, drove him to distraction. As he found in most instances, places and people were much better after the fact.
In 1938, Fairweather was living in an abandoned theatre in Sandgate, a seaside suburb of Brisbane. Spooked by inexplicable noises and lights throughout the night, he began both sleeping and working in the old projection room where he could at least close the door to feel more secure. In spite of this he was productive and, as he recounted to his friend Jock Frater, in a few months had completed at least ten works which he intended to send to London for sale.1 Before Fairweather could execute his plan however, Frater managed to sell a large lot to his friend
Such depictions of China are now considered amongst Fairweather’s finest works, and indeed the present, Peking Market Place , c.1940, has all the immediacy and vividness of a photograph snapped in the street. The dark brown and cream figures form a long serpentine line set against a vivid background of indigo blue, a colour used frequently in Chinese ink paintings, with other details picked out in a deep russet. It offers a fleeting impression quickly and perfectly sketched.
1. Roberts, C. and Thompson, J., Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 123
2. ibid.
3. ibid.
DR CANDICE BRUCE
RALPH BALSON (1890 – 1964)
CONSTRUCTIVE PAINTING, c .1942 oil on card
48.0 x 60.0 cm
ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney
Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 4 May 2004, lot 146
Private collection, Sydney
There was never a time when Ralph Balson’s belief that abstraction was the highest form of expression ever diminished. He occasionally wrote about it, his art shifted from non-objective geometric paintings to become gestural and experimental. But critical to everything he produced was his disinterest in colloquial figuration – the landscape and nationalist heroism held no interest. He wanted Australian art to become international without any parochial facade.
Balson’s art is not an intellectual pursuit in itself, echoing those he admired, especially Mondrian. His association with Sydney’s burgeoning modernism shortly after he arrived from England in 1923 was critical. His enduring friendship with Grace Crowley became an arrangement of reciprocal understanding in each other’s pursuits, each exerting a profound effect upon the other. Their art became a marker of abstract art’s secure place in Australian art history.1
Crowley went to France and studied under Albert Gleizes and André Lhôte, where she responded to their reworking of Cubism. Back in Sydney in 1932 Crowley and Rah Fizelle established a School where Balson was a student. In 1939 he was included in Exhibition 1 at David Jones Gallery, the first exhibition in Australia of artists working with abstraction.
In Constructive Painting , c.1942, one finds a work which embraces a serious understanding of European geometric avant garde painting. The painting shares a close conceptual and pictorial system with the artist’s Construction in Green, 1942 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), also executed in oil on card. The overlapping and interlocking translucent forms in halftones surround more strongly defined shapes in red, blue and green – a black rectangle becomes a pictorial anchor. The irregularity becomes a resolved composition of sublime and elegant equilibrium.
The surfaces of Balson’s art are always important and the measured painterly personality in his geometric work is distinctive. Areas of subtle, lushly nuanced variations meet edges that hold the final distinct gesture of the brush. Soft irregular borders remind us that nothing is a conceptual template, that the presence of the artist’s hand is essential.
Balson can appear to us a precursor to many artists from the generation that followed him. Those who found purpose and certainty in geometric abstraction then moved to painterliness in various appearances, where each career signals a particular respect – David Aspden, Peter Booth and Michael Johnson are obvious examples. What they share in common is the depth of their introspection, rather than observation of an external world.
Balson’s autodidactic philosophical curiosities, especially scientific theory, increasingly shaped his thinking. He was born in Dorset in 1890, attended the local village school, left at age 13 and was apprenticed to a house painter and his formative instincts remained. Respect for Balson’s work has never ebbed, from his earliest work to his final Matter paintings he holds a critical presence in each decade of Australian art.
1. as witnessed by the recent exhibition, GRACE Crowley & Ralph Balson, held at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square, Melbourne, 23 May – 22 September 2024.
DOUG HALL AM
ERIC THAKE
(1904 – 1982)
BRASILIA AT CORIO, 1976
oil on canvas board
60.0 x 50.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: ERIC THAKE 1976 inscribed with title lower left: BRASILIA AT CORIO inscribed with title verso: “BRASILIA AT CORIO”
ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Victoria
Thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
Eric Thake , Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, 15 October – 28 November 1976, cat. 29
Eric Thake , Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 2 – 14 February 1977, cat. 17
A keen observer of the world around him, Eric Thake always carried a sketchbook so that he could record what he saw. As a child he was enthralled by Cole’s Funny Picture Books, especially their visual puzzles, and credited them with his habit of seeing the unexpected and the unfamiliar in the everyday. This unique perspective was combined with a distinctive sense of humour and an eye for design, born in part from the experience of working in the art department of Patterson Shugg process engravers from 1918, and later, as a commercial artist. A draftsman, painter and printmaker of refined skill, Thake produced some of the most memorable images of mid-twentieth century Australian art.
From the early 1970s Thake lived at Geelong where the Corio docks and surrounding industrial landscape captured his attention. The largest painting in his oeuvre, Brasilia at Corio, 1976 depicts a singular gas silo which fills the pictorial space with its huge spherical form. While the artist has paid attention to the details of his subject, he has also played with reality, subtly modifying elements in the service of composition, story-telling and design. Photographic images of similar silos show, for example, that the elegant curve of the external stairs sweeping around
the left-hand-side of Thake’s silo is pure artistic invention, while the flash of red which represents a fire extinguisher dwarfed by the looming bulk of the silo is a classic example of his ironic humour.
The most striking element of this image is the depiction of light and shadow, and in particular, the concentric circles reflected on the silo’s front. Thake’s daughter recalls him explaining that this was simply the result of the way that the sun hit the vertical supporting poles – no doubt with a little artistic licence thrown in.1 The graphic quality of these reflected patterns, the geometric form of the silo and its bright white colour presumably inspired the title which, in characteristic Thake style locates the exotic in the everyday, aligning the industrial waterfront of Geelong with the federal capital of Brazil, a planned city and marvel of modern design and construction (involving, among others, architect Oscar Niemeyer and landscape architect, Roberto Burle Marx) which was inaugurated in 1960.
Thake was the first Australian surrealist and this aspect of his art was identified as early as 1933 when he showed Bluebells, Blue River, 1932 (National Gallery of Victoria) in the annual Contemporary Art Group exhibition. Reviewing the show, Blamire Young observed insightfully that ‘His juxtapositions are sometimes surprising’ 2 and this is one of the defining characteristics of Thake’s oeuvre. While he was aware of the work of English and European surrealists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Edward Wadsworth and Paul Nash (possibly having seen their work in local exhibitions, but known primarily in reproduction from books, magazines and postcards), what distinguishes Thake’s art from that of his peers is the unique ability to construct ‘a bricolage of everyday images to unfix and change, this way and that, the world around us.’3 Indeed, by incorporating the lessons of surrealism into his vision of the world, no matter how apparently banal his subject matter, Thake’s images are at once familiar and yet full of mystery, the uncanny and the unexpected.
1. Conversation with Jenifer Beaty, 4 October 2024
2. Young, B., The Herald, Melbourne, 1 August 1933, cited in Eagle, M. and Minchin, J., The George Bell School: Students, Friends, Influences, Deutscher Art Publications, Melbourne, 1981, p. 26
3. Eagle, M., ‘The 1920s and Eric Thake’ in Eagle & Minchin, ibid.
KIRSTY GRANT
GUY GREY–SMITH
(1916 – 1981)
PT D’ENTRECASTEAUX, 1976 oil and beeswax on composition board 121.0 x 91.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: G Grey Smith / 76 bears inscription on frame verso: GUY GREY-SMITH ‘ANN LEWIS’ 1978 inscribed verso: 31
ESTIMATE: $55,000 – 75,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist Gallery 52, Perth Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 1982
EXHIBITED
A Festival of Perth Exhibition: Paintings by Guy Grey-Smith, Old Fire Station Gallery, Perth, 24 February – 16 March 1977, cat. 31
LITERATURE
Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: Life Force , University of Western Australia, Perth, 2012, p. 266
Guy Grey-Smith is renowned for his powerful visions of the Western Australian landscape, in particular the rocky coasts of the southwest. This love of the sea was instilled in him as a child, travelling over two hundred kilometres with his family for holidays at places like Bunkers Bay and Canal Rocks. These journeys, occasionally by horse and cart, also took in the variety of the natural world as they passed through woodland, fields of wildflowers and soaring karri forests. In Pt D’Entrecasteaux , 1976, Grey-Smith stands 240 kilometres further south at Black Point (now known as Tookulup), a small promontory that looks towards the spectacular Point D’Entrecasteaux, named after the French Admiral who was the first European to sight the area in 1792.
Coastal paintings appear at most stages of Grey-Smith’s trajectory and following them consecutively, they provide signposts as his technique altered to become the celebrated slab paintings of the 1960s and 1970s. Early works such as Albany Landscape (Torbay), 1951 (private collection), and Longreach Bay, Rottnest, 1954 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) are descriptive of the rhythms and natural patterns of the ocean but are still, even placid, when compared to the spiky rock
outcrops in Bunker Bay (Winter ), 1956 (private collection) and Bunker Bay, 1960 (private collection). Conversely, in Kalbarri Landscape , 1959 (Artbank), the crash of the waves and the surge of the rolling surf resonate throughout the scene. Abandoning the theme for much of the 1960s, Grey-Smith returned in the mid-1970s with a passionate sequence of paintings done in his (by-now) trademark process of pigment thickened with a home-made wax emulsion applied using paint scrapers. The work on offer here, Pt D’Entrecasteaux , 1976, belongs to this series and it appears that Grey-Smith has climbed down just below the summit of Black Point, as the lower half of the painting is highly suggestive of the heavily eroded rock forms within the one-hundredmetre-high limestone cliff. This upthrust is then counterbalanced by the horizontality of Point D’Entrecasteaux itself, rendered as a ghostly blue apparition cutting left to right above. Suggestive of a primaeval life force, Grey-Smith succeeds here in ‘divorcing abstraction from romantic self-expression… (his) concern is with the thing, and its value to other observers, and not primarily with the autobiography of (his) own feelings. This kind of classical abstractionism is perhaps more valuable than romantic abstract expressionism, and harder to come by.’1
Pt D’Entrecasteaux was exhibited at Grey-Smith’s remarkable exhibition of 1977 held at Rie Heyman’s Old Fire Station Gallery in Subiaco, Perth, full of ‘glorious colour which seemed to pour out of the gallery as we walked up the street.’ 2 To coincide with the show, Art and Australia published an extended article by noted curator Barry Pearce who celebrated that the artist was deliberately pushing his own boundaries, which was ‘typical of the energetic character of Guy Grey-Smith in seeking to improve and extend the possibilities of his subject without plagiarising himself, and there is no sign of relaxation of his prolific output.’3 Grey-Smith died in 1981 after two equally powerful exhibitions mounted by Ann Lewis at Gallery A in Sydney; and the current owners purchased Pt D’Entrecasteaux from respected Perth gallerist Wendy Rogers in 1982. It has not been seen publicly since.
1. Hutchings, P., ‘The Grey-Smiths’, The Critic, Perth, vol. 2, no. 10, 25 May 1962, p. 82
2. Thomas, C. V., cited in Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: life force, University of Western Australia Publishing, Perth, 2012, p. 104
3. Pearce, B., ‘Guy Grey-Smith: painter in isolation’, Art and Australia, vol. 15, no. 1, 1977, p. 69
ANDREW
GAYNOR
FRED WILLIAMS
(1927 – 1982)
LANDSCAPE WITH SWAMP, 1972 oil on canvas
71.0 x 97.0 cm
signed lower right: Fred Williams bears artist’s name, title, date, medium and dimensions on artist’s label verso inscribed on artist’s label verso: WILLESMERE [sic] / PARK / (KEW) / PAINTED ON 6 AUGUST 1972
ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000
PROVENANCE
Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (RK 3461), (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney
Gould Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 16 April 2008, lot 18
Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
From Streeton to Whiteley: A Selection of Australian Art, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 18 October – 10 November 1996, cat. 29 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
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 writing in this catalogue entry.
The 1970s introduced some of Fred Williams’ pictorially richest and most interesting works, as seen in Landscape with Swamp , 1972. From the aerial viewpoint and minimalism of the You Yang paintings and the tripartite divisions of his later Lysterfield paintings, his work gave way to the freer compositions and richer colours of the Yan Yean oils of 1972, painted out of doors at the Yan Yean Swamp in company with John Perceval. Unlike earlier works, they are clearly identified with the place and its particularities, being described by Patrick McCaughey as ‘among the finest and most interesting of all the oil sketches of the early 1970s.’1 Although inspired by a different place, Landscape with Swamp belongs to this group in terms of motif and achievement. Now
more traditional in pictorial presentation, the brilliance of palette and vitality of form gains in emphasis through the use of black, outlining tree trunks and water’s edge. It provides an element of control, as it were, for the rich tangle of colour and paint, seen again in such works as Yan Yean II (Dog Chasing Possum) and Yan Yean in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, both painted in 1972.
Landscape with Swamp is identified by the artist’s note on the back of the painting as Willsmere Park in Melbourne’s East Kew, close to the Kew Billabong and River Yarra. Williams even added the date on which it was painted, indicating that both location and time had significance in terms of the painting itself during this highly fertile period of his art. While the locale is different from Yan Yean, the motif is similar and marks the genesis of the great Kew Billabong series of three years later. Previously it had been thought that Williams commenced this series in April of 1975. 2 Williams considered the Billabong ‘splendid’ and found ‘it a great place to work.’ 3 It was within easy distance from his home and provided Williams with what McCaughey described as ‘a retreat, a new starting point with some point of departure from previous work.’4 Quiet paintings of the transitory illusion of light reflecting on water and thoughts of Monet’s Waterlilies led many to see these paintings as being ‘as close to the spirit of French Impressionism as any of Williams’ works.’5 Such developments to come are hinted at in Landscape with Swamp , where the splendidly vigorous handling of the monumental in nature is destined to give way to the intimate. The ephemeral detritus of man and nature were to replace the grandeur of trees beside the bank and their solid reflections in the water.
1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1980, p. 240
2. Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 199
3. ibid.
4. McCaughey, op. cit., p. 285
5. Mollison, op. cit., p. 201
DAVID THOMAS
JOHN BRACK (1920 – 1999)
SEATED NUDE WITH SCREEN, 1982 – 83 oil on canvas
130.0 x 97.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: John Brack 1982/3 inscribed with title on artist’s label attached verso: ‘SEATED NUDE WITH SCREEN’
ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 500,000
PROVENANCE
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1983
EXHIBITED
John Brack , Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 21 May – 11 June 1983, cat. 9
John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 10 December 1987 – 31 January 1988, cat. 105
The Nude in the Art of John Brack, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, Victoria, 17 December 2006 – 25 March 2007, cat. 15
John Brack Retrospective , The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 24 April – 9 August 2009, then touring to The Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2 October 2009 – 31 January 2010 (label attached verso)
LITERATURE
Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, pp. 73 (illus.), 134, 141
Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. 1, p. 160, vol. 2, cat. o275, pp. 36, 171 (illus.)
Klepac, L., Australian Painters of the Twentieth Century, Beagle Press, Sydney, 2000, p. 168 (illus.)
Lindsay, R., The Nude in the Art of John Brack, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, 2006 (illus., n.p.)
Grant, K., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 187 (illus.), 225
Like all artists of his generation, John Brack was well-versed in the history of Western art and it remained an essential touchstone throughout his career. A survey of his painting reveals references to significant historical works by artists as diverse as Boucher, Seurat and Buffet, which provided inspiration as he borrowed from earlier masters and challenge as he pitted himself against them. His iconic painting, The bar, 1954 (National Gallery of Victoria), for example, appropriates both the subject and composition of É douard Manet’s famous depiction of A bar at the Folies-Berg è re, 1882 (Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London). In Brack’s characteristic way however, the PostImpressionist’s clever visual trick of depicting the scene in front of the barmaid reflected in a mirror is used to describe the subject as he witnessed it in 1950s Melbourne – a drab image of dour-faced workers who are urgently drinking their fill before the imminent early closing of the pub rather than the gay opulence of 1880s Paris.
Working within the traditional genres of painting, Brack explored the still-life, portraiture and the nude in his art. Landscape as a theme however, is largely absent from his oeuvre, and indeed, when his friend and fellow artist, Fred Williams, announced that he intended to make the Australian landscape the focus of his art, Brack was sceptical, doubting its relevance as a subject for contemporary painting. Always underlying Brack’s approach – and explaining his avoidance of landscape as a subject – was an enduring interest in the human condition. As he said,
‘What I paint most is what interests me most, that is, people; the Human Condition, in particular the effect on appearance of environment and behaviour… A large part of the motive… is the desire to understand, and if possible, to illuminate… My material is what lies nearest to hand, the people and the things I know best.’1
In the context of the nude, Brack described this focus on human nature in the following way: ‘When I paint a woman… I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes, and dreams. The way the light falls and casts its shadows is merely… a hindrance unless it helps me to show these things.’ 2 Embarking on his first sustained series of paintings of the nude during the mid-1950s, Brack sought to test the development of his work through a return to the rigour and discipline of life drawing and placed an advertisement for a model in the newspaper. Questions about how he might make a new and meaningful contribution to the genre were answered by the single response he received, from a thin middle-aged woman whose appearance demanded a radically different approach that was far removed from the sensual nudes of earlier artists such as Rubens and Gauguin. Brack quickly realised that ‘there is absolutely nothing whatsoever erotic in an artist’s model unclothed in a suburban empty room’ 3 , and produced a series of striking paintings including Nude in an armchair, 1957 (National Gallery of Victoria) and
Opposite: John Brack in his studio with easel and paint completing ‘Nude on shag rug 1976 – 77’, February 1977 photographer unknown
The bathroom, 1957 (National Gallery of Australia), that boldly challenged expectations of the subject. While some lamented the skinny, sexless appearance of the model, art critic Alan McCulloch wrote that in pitting himself against tradition Brack had successfully demonstrated that ‘he [was] on all occasions master of the medium.’4
The nude returned as a major subject within Brack’s oeuvre during the 1970s and 80s and in these works a restrained sensuality and pleasure in depicting the female form is apparent. The contrast between the uncomfortable tension of the 1950s nudes and paintings like Seated nude with screen, 1982 – 83, where the subject looks out at the viewer completely at ease with her nakedness, seems to reflect the changes in social mores that had taken place in the intervening years and the increased informality of the late twentieth century. These differences might also point to the development of Brack’s own confidence and
artistic maturity. In the mid-1950s he was at the beginning of his career with a handful of solo exhibitions to his name, still defining his visual language and establishing his artistic persona. In 1968, with the help of a monthly stipend from his Sydney dealer Rudy Komon, Brack had resigned from his position as Head of the National Gallery School in Melbourne and for the first time in his life was able to paint fulltime. The ensuing decades witnessed regular solo exhibitions, private commissions, as well as other public affirmations of his art.
Like all of the nudes from this time, Seated nude with screen was painted in Brack’s studio and features its distinctive timber floorboards and unadorned walls, as well as a Persian carpet, which is rendered in characteristically intricate detail. Helen Brack interprets these carpets as symbolising the world of men and in the context of images where the subject is always female, this has a particular relevance. 5 In addition to
Installation photograph from the retrospective John Brack , held at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne, 2009
highlighting what the artist perceived as the differences between the sexes, this pictorial device also illustrates the counterbalance they provide each other.6 In this painting, the centrally-placed figure is prominent within the composition, and the all-over pale tone of her bare skin contrasts with the dark colours and decorative detail of the carpet. Brack has also paid particular attention to the model’s hair, carefully describing its elaborate braiding and the bun that is neatly coiled on top of her head. The model’s clothing often features in these paintings, discarded and casually draped nearby. Here, the figure’s overcoat – presumably hanging on a hook which is attached to the folded screen in the background – assumes a strangely anthropomorphic character and suggests the presence of another figure in the room. What ultimately prevails in this painting however, is what Patrick McCaughey astutely described as Brack’s ‘paramount… sense of observed reality.’ 7
Joan and Peter Clemenger purchased this painting from Brack’s 1983 exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne and, apart from being displayed in several subsequent museum exhibitions –including both the 1987 and 2009 retrospectives at the National Gallery of Victoria – it has graced the walls of their home ever since. 8
1. Brack cited in Reed, J., New Painting 1952 – 62, Longman, Melbourne, 1963, p. 19
2. Brack, H., ‘This Oeuvre – The Work Itself’, in Grant, K., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 16
3. Brack, J., Interview, Australian Contemporary Art Archive, no. 1, Deakin University Media Production, 1980, transcript, p. 6
4. McCulloch, A., ‘Classical themes’, Herald, 13 November 1957, p. 29
5. See Lindsay, R., The Nude in the Art of John Brack, McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, 2007, unpaginated
6. See Helen Brack cited in Gott, T., A Question of Balance: John Brack 1974 – 1994, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2000, p. 23
7. McCaughey, P., ‘The Complexity of John Brack’ in Lindsay, R., John Brack , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 9
8. See exhibition history noted above in the caption for this lot.
KIRSTY GRANT
John Brack
The bathroom, 1957 oil on canvas
129.4 x 81.2 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Brack
BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992)
BIRD IN THE RAIN, 1984 painted and glazed earthenware with cobalt blue decoration and white glaze
53.0 cm (height) signed and dated on base: brett whiteley 84 monogrammed on base by potter John K Dellow: 84 JKD
ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney Whiteley Estate, Sydney
Sotheby’s, Melbourne (private sale)
Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2011
EXHIBITED
An Exhibition by Brett Whiteley – Eden and Eve, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 12 – 28 July 1984, cat. 52 [additional to catalogue] probably Animals and Birds , Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 15 June – 16 October 2002
LITERATURE
Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné , Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 95c, vol. 6, p. 79 (illus.), vol. 7, p. 866
Traditional blue-and-white painted ceramics constitute a little-known facet of Brett Whiteley’s artistic practice, despite consistently appearing within many of his most famous paintings of his Lavender Bay home alongside his personal collection of Asian and European blue-and-white ware. A technique only approached at the height of his career (from c.1974), collaboration with local potters provided Whiteley with unique and consistent three-dimensional supports for his sensuous ink-andwash still lives, landscapes and figure studies. The resulting elegant and life-affirming works were intimately linked to the rest of his oeuvre, both thematically and aesthetically.
This voluptuous balustre vase, Bird in the Rain, 1984 is amongst a handful of very large ceramic vessels, thrown by John K. Dellow and painted by Brett Whiteley in 1984. Combining many of Whiteley’s most iconic and optimistic motifs, it features, in rich and precious ultramarine pigment, an atmospheric scene of a speckled nesting bird in a tree, unfurling like a frieze around the wide shoulder of this vessel. The meandering painted lines of the tree and its wide leaves were then streaked with dark raindrops, the liquid pigment arrested mid-drip. Bird in the Rain, like all of Whiteley’s ceramics, is entirely
painted with ravishingly deep blue, applied in a range of saturations. This hue, described as his favourite colour, produced for Whiteley an ‘obsessive, ecstasy-like effect.’1
Between 1976 – 1982, Whiteley created a large body of ceramics with Derek Smith, a former teacher at East Sydney Technical College who had established Blackfriars Pottery in Chippendale. Following Smith’s move to Tasmania in 1982, Whiteley was referred to one of his students, Harriet Collard, who had a pottery studio in Leura. Inevitably, when Whiteley was confident enough to attempt larger works and required a potter with greater physical strength and a larger kiln, Collard handed him over to John Dellow who was also, at that time, living in the Blue Mountains. 2 It was within Dellow’s spacious pottery studio in the mountains in Katoomba, that the imposing Bird in the Rain was thrown, painted and glazed, a tandem between the artist and the potter. Although Whiteley collaborated with a succession of highly skilled commercial potters, the forms of the vessels they produced for him were unusual, with exaggerated silhouettes that suited the artist’s expressive and loose brushwork, in designs often mapped out in his notebooks, in pencil, ink or even collage.
The lyrical and serene composition of a small and alert bird, sitting steadfastly on her nest, balancing on a thick snaking branch has appeared throughout Whiteley’s oeuvre in many forms. From a rough and spare Sketch for Blue Vase , 1975, featuring a songbird sitting on a leafy branch adorning a wide baluster vase, to a plump pigeon sitting on a group of eggs, painted on the back of a large earthenware vase , Figure by the River, 1976, and of course painted and mixed media masterpieces such as The Wren, 1978; T’an, 1979; The Dove and The Moon, 1983, and Pink Dove , 1983. The poet Robert Gray perceptively reflected around the time of this vase’s execution, ‘…[Whiteley’s bird paintings] are to me his best work. I like in the bird-shapes that clarity; that classical, haptic shapeliness; that calm – those clear perfect lines of a Chinese vase. The breasts of his birds swell with the most attractive emotion in his work: it is bold, vulnerable and tender.’3
1. Brett Whiteley, cited in Krausmann, R., ‘Painting the infliction of life’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Sydney, 1975 – 76, p. 6
2. Correspondence between Kathie Sutherland and Harriet Collard, 29 February 2016, reproduced in Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, vol. 6. p. 851
3. Gray, R., ‘A few takes on Brett Whiteley’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 24, no. 2, 1986, p. 222
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992) WREN, 1988
(cast later by Meridian Foundry, Melbourne)
cast bronze, wire, glass eyes on a wooden stand
31.0 x 23.0 x 23.0 cm (bronze)
60.0 x 23.0 x 31.0 cm (overall, including base) edition: 9 + 2 AP
bears foundry stamp at base of bronze: BW AP 2–1 / E Ed
ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Sydney Company collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Brett Whiteley: ‘Birds’, recent paintings, drawings, sculpture and one screenprint, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 5 – 19 July 1988, cat. 54 (another example)
Brett Whiteley: Art & Life , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 16 September – 19 November 1995, cat. 144 (another example), then touring to: 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 (another example)
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)
Brett Whiteley: Sculpture and Ceramics , Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney, 5 June – 6 December 2015 (another example)
LITERATURE
McGrath, S., Vogue Living, November 1988, p. 152 (illus., install photograph, another example)
Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: Art & Life , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, pl. 138, pp. 200 (illus., another example), 234 Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné: 1955 – 1992, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, cat. 72S, vol. 6, p. 197 (illus., another example), vol. 7, p. 896
‘People ask me – “Why paint birds?”, and I look at them dumbfounded. I’ve got no answer to it except that they’re the most beautiful creatures and I can’t think of a nicer theme – celebrative, heraldic theme – than birds.’1
Sculpture was an integral part of Brett Whiteley’s sprawling, diverse practice and he first introduced sculpture into his exhibitions in 1964 and 1965 with the intention of making a direct correlation between his work in two and three dimensions. 2 Across the course of his
career, sculptural elements burst from the picture plane, and threedimensional form was explored through the addition of real-life objects to his paintings (including branches, nests, eggs and taxidermised animals), in his collaborations in ceramics, and through stand-alone sculptural works. So important was the role of sculpture to Whiteley in his exhibitions that he would often borrow back privately owned works for inclusion, adamant that the exhibition would be less without them.
As Kathie Sutherland has revealed, Whiteley was not averse to writing ‘begging’ letters to a work’s owner pronouncing that the exhibition in question would be a ‘flop’ without the inclusion of the artist’s chosen sculptural centrepiece. 3
A version of Whiteley’s Wren, 1988, was first shown in the solo exhibition Brett Whiteley: ‘Birds’, recent paintings, drawings, sculpture and one screenprint , held at the artist’s Surry Hills studio in July 1988. True to Whiteley’s prodigious talent and ability to turn his hand to any material, this landmark show featured major works in all media, including the artist’s highly acclaimed bronze ‘Bird Sculptures’ of 1983 – 88, of which Wren is part. Presented during the year of his separation from his wife and muse Wendy Whiteley, the focus on birds in this exhibition also represented ‘a yearning at once for domestic stability and personal freedom.’4 Indeed, just as landscape provided Whiteley with ‘a means of escape, an unencumbered absorption into a painless, floating world’5 , so too these ornithological creatures embodied a declaration of love and limitless joy – with the symbolism of birds and eggs having fascinated the artist from childhood, as his sister Fran Hopkirk has observed.
Despite the weight of the bronze in which it is cast, Wren immediately captures the quirky hoppity movements of this beautiful small bird. Driven by the desire to convey personality rather than precisely replicate the animal’s physiology, Whiteley has abstracted the wren’s characteristic round form, streamlining its body, head and beak into a continuous line, as if the bird is caught mid-action, possibly capturing some food. This is a creature that the artist both knows well and has observed closely, its jaunty erect tail making it immediately identifiable as a wren, while its spindly legs convey a sense of both the bird’s fragility and its need of our protection and care.
1. Brett Whiteley, cited in Featherstone, D., Difficult Pleasure: A Film about Brett Whiteley, Film Finance Corporation Australia Limited, 1989
2. Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, vol. 7, p. 5
3. ibid.
4. Grishin, S., Baldessin/Whiteley: Parallel Visions, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018, p. 196
5. Brett Whiteley: Feathers and Flight, Brett Whiteley Studio, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 4 June 2020 – 28 March 2021, see https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/listen/ whiteley-feathers-flight/ (accessed 16 October 2024)
KELLY GELLATLY
BELLE–ÎLE. VILLAGE D’ENVAG
JOHN PETER RUSSELL (1858 – 1930)
[SUNSHINE SHIMMER], 1900 oil on canvas
65.0 x 81.0 cm
signed with initials lower centre: J.R. dated and inscribed with title verso: Sunshine Shimmer / August / B Isle 1900
ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Brittany, France
Harald Alain Russell, the artist’s son, Brittany, France, inherited from the above c.1930
Thence by descent
Private collection, United Kingdom
EXHIBITED
John Peter Russell, Galerie G. Denis, Paris, 1941 / 1943 (?), cat. 11 (label attached verso, as ‘Belle-Isle. Village d’En-vag’)
On long term loan to Glasgow Museums & Art Galleries, Kelvingrove, Scotland, 1974 – 1991
LITERATURE
Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, cat. 158, p. 107 (as ‘Belle-Île. Village d’En-vag’)
Although he was born in Sydney, John Russell lived much of his adult life in Europe and holds a unique place within the history of Australian art for his close association with avant-garde circles in 1880s Paris and firsthand acquaintance with some of the masters of European Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Following studies at the Slade School, London in 1881, Russell attended Fernand Cormon’s atelier in Paris in the mid-1880s, working 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, he spent several months on Belle- Î le, one of a group of small islands off the coast of Brittany which, buffeted by almost constant westerly winds blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean, is part of the accurately named La C ô te Sauvage. Captivated by the rugged landscape and the possibilities of this environment for his painting, Russell bought land there the following year. Writing to his friend, 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.’ 2
It was here that he met and befriended Claude Monet who he saw working en plein air and, recognising his painting style, famously introduced himself by asking if he was indeed ‘the Prince of the Impressionists’. 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, Marianna, enjoying their hospitality and company during his stay on the island. Uncharacteristically, Monet allowed Russell to watch him work and on occasion, to paint alongside him, experiences that provided the younger artist with 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
Gustave Loiseau
Le village d’Envag, 1900 oil on canvas
50.0 x 73.0 cm
Private collection
Belle-Île-en-Mer, Brittany, France
in Italy and Sicily only a few months later show him working in a new style, using a high-keyed palette (from which black had been banished entirely) and his compositions made up of strokes of pure colour. 3 In addition to showing him how to use colour as a means of expressing a personal response to the subject, Monet’s example also highlighted for Russell the importance of working directly from nature.4
Belle- Î le offered little in the way of obvious picturesque views but ‘instead … the challenge of a raw confrontation with nature for which there was no tradition of painterly representation.’5 Russell and Monet were not the only artists attracted by its creative possibilities. The roll call of artists who visited Russell and his wife – Fernand Cormon (1888); John Longstaff (1889); Dodge MacKnight (1889, 90, 91 and 92); Eugène Boch (1890); Bertram Mackennal (1891) and Auguste Rodin (1902) –is mirrored by those who came to paint on the island independently.
Henri Matisse first visited Belle- Î le in 1895 as a young art student, returning in 1896 and again the following summer. Of the island he said simply, ‘Here it is wildness in all its beauty and emptiness.’6 During an extended stay in 1896 he lived at the village of Kervilahouen on the south-western side of the island, near Russell’s house, and the two artists met. Russell introduced the young artist to Monet’s techniques and the work of van Gogh, contributing to a dramatic transformation in his approach to colour. Matisse’s biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes this as ‘a way of seeing: the first inklings of the pursuit of colour for its own sake that would draw in the end on his deepest emotional and imaginative resources.’7
In Belle- Î le, Village d’Envag, 1900, it is the distinctive stone cottages of the island, specifically the nearby village of Envag, that have captured Russell’s attention. With a series of chimneys lined up in silhouette
65.5 x 93.0 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
against a pale blue sky, the cottages are described in delicate shades of purple, blue and occasional pink and white highlights. Characteristically, the colour is built up in individual brushstrokes which shimmer with movement and light, communicating as much about the appearance of the scene as the feeling of being there. Russell varies the application of paint according to the subject, with regular, mostly horizontal strokes defining the geometric form of the buildings, and freer, more painterly daubs delineating the verdant foreground and atmospheric sky. This is an intimate scene, a local view, and located just north of Russell’s home – known to the locals as Château de l’Anglais – which overlooked the inlet of Goulphar, it was an area with which he was very familiar.
Russell scholar Ann Galbally explains the appeal of a rural lifestyle for many French artists during the late nineteenth century as ‘something that seemed to… be purer, simpler, and more fundamental’ than the
intensity of the artworld centre of Paris. 8 Citing, among others, van Gogh at Arles, Gauguin at Pont-Aven and Russell at Belle- Î le, she explains that ‘they were drawn … towards a primitive life style, a closer communication with nature, a chance, so they felt, to find the source of art.’ 9 In this context, paintings like Belle- Île, Village d’Envag sit alongside Russell’s images of local fishermen and other island inhabitants, celebrating the simplicity and authenticity of rural life. Monet had painted examples of vernacular architecture in Varengeville, a coastal town in Normandy, and the cottages of Belle- Île appealed to other artists who visited the island. Matisse, for example, focussed on buildings at nearby Kervilahouen which, in the work illustrated here, gleam a brilliant white against his bold colour palette. Probably having seen Monet’s paintings of Belle- Île, the Post-Impressionist, Gustave Loiseau, travelled there with friends and fellow artists Maxime Maufra and Henry Moret in 1900. It is not known whether Loiseau and Russell met at the time,
Claude Monet
Customs House at Varengeville , 1897
oil on canvas
Henri Matisse
Maisons à Kervilahouen, Belle-Île , 1896 oil on board
31.0 x 37.0 cm
Private collection
but the similarities between their paintings, both depicting the same area in Envag, make this a tantalising possibility. Russell paints from a position close to the cottages while Loiseau adopts a broader view – the varied perspectives, perhaps, of a local, more interested in capturing an impression of a familiar subject, versus a visitor, who paints the entirety of the scene as a way of recording it. Loiseau’s painting also includes figures walking on the path and close inspection of Belle- Î le, Village d’Envag reveals a solitary figure sketched in pencil on the path as it forks to the right. A label attached to the back of the painting shows that it was exhibited in an exhibition at Galerie G. Denis, Paris in the 1940s, and Russell obviously regarded it as finished, so just when and why the sketch was added remains a mystery.
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 correspondence. See Galbally, A., A Remarkable Friendship: Vincent van Gogh and John Peter Russell, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2008
2. Russell to Tom Roberts, 5 October 1887, cited in Tunnicliffe, W., (ed.), John Russell: Australia’s French Impressionist, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 193
3. Taylor, E., ‘John Russell and friends: Roberts, Monet, van Gogh, Matisse, Rodin’, Australian Impressionists in France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2013, p. 60
4. Prunster, U., ‘Painting Belle- Île’ in Prunster, U., et al., Belle- Île: Monet, Russell and Matisse, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2001, p. 31
5. Galbally, A., ‘Mer Sauvage’ in Prunster, ibid., p. 14
6. Prunster, op. cit., p. 37
7. Spurling, H., The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, Volume One: 1869 – 1908 , Hamish Hamilton, London, 1998, p. 144, cited in Taylor, op. cit., p. 65
8. Galbally, A., The Art of John Peter Russell, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1977, p. 45
9. ibid.
KIRSTY GRANT
EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX (1865 – 1915)
FIGURE STUDY FOR THE ARBOUR, c .1909 – 10 oil on canvas
74.0 x 40.5 cm
signed lower left: E Pillips Fox [sic]
ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Brisbane
Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 25 August 1997, lot 260 (as ‘The Waiter’)
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 25 April 1999, lot 67A
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 20 August 2001, lot 47
Private collection, Tasmania
Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, (private sale)
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2016
EXHIBITED
E. Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick Fox, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 13 November – 6 December 1997, cat. 16 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 21)
LITERATURE
Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 322, pp. 27, 225 (as ‘The Waiter’)
RELATED WORK
The Arbour, 1910, oil on canvas, 190.5 x 230.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Emanuel Phillips Fox
The Arbour, 1910 oil on canvas
190.5 x 230.5 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Colour and the varied effects of light were central to the art of Emanuel Phillips Fox. Indeed, as Lionel Lindsay recalled, ‘He once told me that he no longer saw anything except as a colour-sensation… His gamut of greens is extraordinary fine and varied, and the purity of his colour still holds the sunlight imprisoned in the pigment.’1 While he had been trained in an academic style, Fox always enjoyed the freedom of working outdoors, and the influence of French Impressionism – particularly as articulated by Monet and Renoir, whose work was easily accessible during Fox’s years in Paris – encouraged this, feeding in to what has been described as his natural ‘inclination towards colour, light and optical experience.’ 2
The influence of Monet and Renoir is also apparent in the so-called déjeuner paintings that Fox made in the early twentieth century – Al Fresco , c.1905 (Art Gallery of South Australia); The Arbour, 1910
(National Gallery of Victoria); and Déjeuner, c.1910 – 11 (University of Queensland Art Museum) – each of which depict family groups gathered around a meal in intimate outdoor settings. As Fox scholar, Ruth Zubans, observed, ‘In style there are considerable differences… [but] in attitude… the mood of optimism, easy sociability and warm humanity are qualities shared by the artists.’3
Fox’s working method typically involved the production of numerous studies and the largest of these three paintings, The Arbour, was no exception to this practice. In addition to quick compositional sketches in pencil and charcoal which show him experimenting with the placement of figures and refining the depiction of particular subjects, Fox produced a series of more detailed studies in oil. An earlier small head study of the artist’s nephew, Leonard (Len), for example, which was made in 1908 during the artist’s extended stay in Melbourne, served as the basis for
Emanuel Phillips Fox Al fresco, c.1904 oil on canvas
153.5 x 195.5 cm
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
the boy in red and the young girl is thought to be modelled on his sister, Louise.4 While the identity of the adult sitters is not clear, given this focus on family it is possible that they are based on the artist’s wife, Ethel Carrick Fox – also a noted artist – and the children’s parents, Fox’s brother David and his wife Irene.
Depicting a standing man, stylishly attired and cigar in hand, this painting is the largest study known to have been made for The Arbour and although it was previously referred to as The Waiter, it is clear that the figure is a member of this intimate party rather than staff. Fox describes the details of his clothing, pose and attitude, most of which are transcribed with little variation to the final painting, and his focus on the representation of colour and light – and unrivalled ability to describe in paint the effect of dappled light shining through foliage – is also on full display. While much of this painting is ‘finished’, aspects
of it have a work-in-progress quality that imbues it with a freshness and palpable sense of energy. Here, brushstrokes communicate not only the physical making of the painting but something of the thinking involved in its creation.
1. Lindsay, L., ‘E. Phillips Fox’, Art in Australia, series 1, number 5, 1918, cited in Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1994, p. 1
2. Zubans, ibid., p. 3
3. Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1995, p. 126
4. Fox, L., E. Phillips Fox and his family, self-published, Potts Point, 1985, p. 68
KIRSTY GRANT
ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943)
CEDAR TREE, COOMBE BANK, 1913 oil on canvas
76.5 x 63.5 cm
signed with initials lower left: AS. bears inscription verso: A. STREETON
ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE
Sir Robert Mond, Coombe Bank, United Kingdom
Nevill Keating Pictures, London
Private collection, Melbourne
Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 22 April 1996, lot 14
Henry Krongold, Melbourne
Thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne
RELATED WORK
The lake, Coombe Banks, 1913, oil on canvas, 64.0 x 102.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Arthur Streeton first lived in London between 1897 and 1906 but struggled to make an impression. For some years, he wooed the ‘brilliant, educated, successful, socially experienced and wellconnected Canadian-born violinist Esther Leonora (Nora) Clench’1, but his comparative status as an impoverished artist weighed heavily on his mind. Knowing that he still had a larger profile in Australia –indeed, a number of his early works were already attracting large sums at re-sale – Streeton decided to return briefly in late 1906, holding financially successful exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney. Sufficiently emboldened, he returned to his now-fiancé in London, and they were married in 1908. Part of the honeymoon was spent in Venice, and Streeton returned there for a painting expedition in September, where he ‘threw off his devotion to conscious art, and became absorbed again in truth of presentation.’ 2 Through his wife’s connections, he met Dr Ludwig Mond, whose chemical manufacturing business was famed in Europe. Mond was a major collector of art works, predominantly by historic European artists, but his ‘tastes were wide enough to encompass contemporary art, and Streeton was to find Ludwig Mond, and his sons Robert and Alfred, a valuable source of patronage over the years to come.’ 3 Indeed, the Monds’ purchased one of Streeton’s paintings of Venice’s Grand Canal in 1909, and the artist’s son was christened Charles Ludwig Oliver Streeton in honour of their patron and friend. In 1912, Streeton ‘joined a party led by the painter Sigismund
Goetze, to travel down the Loire. Nora had been instrumental in Streeton’s involvement with Goetze, who was married to Ludwig Mond’s sister, Violet.’4
Over Easter the following year, Streeton, Nora, Oliver and his nanny stayed at the Monds’ home Coombe Bank in Sevenoaks, Kent. Built in 1725 for the Duke of Argyle, Coombe Bank is a Palladian-style villa sited near the River Darent with extensive acreages of forest including ‘a dozen or so old cedars and miles of park.’ 5 Ludwig Mond purchased the property in 1906 but on his death in 1909, it passed to son Robert who carried out extensive alterations to the gardens, building a rockery and a formal rose garden. Streeton wrote vividly of the days and evenings there filled with ‘billiards, golf, fishing, shooting, ‘music’, peaches and grapes – nothing wanting.’6 It also included a major commission from Mond to paint ‘a dozen landscapes of the place and surroundings to be hung in the house.’7 Cedar Tree, Coombe Bank , 1913, in particular, clearly expresses Streeton’s delight as he painted aspects that caught his eye. Rapidly executed, likely en plein air, the vigorous horizontal brush marks of the work convey the sweeping movement of branches caught by breezes on a gusty day. Likewise, the agitation inherent in the blustering clouds accentuates this sensation.
Other subjects featured in the sequence include a small play cottage known as the ‘Children’s house’, a stand of other cedars, and a substantial vista of the noble frontage of Coombe Bank with attendant mature trees. A further work, The lake, Coombe Banks , 1913, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, features people boating on the southern side of the property – again surrounded by trees and foliage. All these paintings display the ‘truth of presentation’ Streeton had been striving for following Venice, particularly evident in the evocative spontaneity he captured in this painting.
1. Wehner, V., Arthur Streeton of Longacres: A Life in the Landscape, Mono Unlimited, Melbourne, 2008, p. 6
2. Lindsay, L., ‘Arthur Streeton’, in The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Arthur Streeton, Melbourne, 1935, p. 16
3. See Wray, C., Arthur Streeton: Painter of Light, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1993, pp. 116, 120
4. ibid., p. 122
5. Arthur Streeton, Letter to Walter Pring, 30 March 1913, cited in Galbally, A. and Gray, A. (eds.), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890 – 1943, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 125
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
ANDREW GAYNOR
MARGARET PRESTON (1875 – 1963)
PINEAPPLE PALM, 1925 also known as STILL LIFE WITH PALM oil on canvas
56.5 x 45.5 cm
ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000
PROVENANCE
Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney
Elioth Gruner, Sydney, acquired from the above in August 1929 with Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, May 1940
Howard Hinton, Sydney, acquired from the above Lawson’s, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above, c.1970
EXHIBITED
Margaret Preston, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 7 – 31 August 1929, cat. 6
Elioth Gruner Exhibition by Request of the Perpetual Trustee Co (Limited), Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 8 – 31 May 1940, no. 17 (as ‘Still life with Palm’)
Margaret Preston in Mosman, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, 7 September – 13 October 2002
LITERATURE
Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, p. 311
Margaret Preston Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, monotypes and ceramics , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, CD-ROM compiled by Mimmocchi, D., with Edwards, D., and Peel, R., cat. 1925.14 (illus.)
Margaret Preston Strelitzia, 1925 oil on canvas
45.7 x 53.9 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
© Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2024
By 1925, when Pineapple Palm was painted, Margaret Preston’s long years of training and thought began to coalesce in her pursuit of a truly national Australian art. Ever the straight-talking pragmatist, she was wise enough to realise that this would be no overnight undertaking and instead set herself gradual exercises to reach her goal. Each was a finished work unto itself, but each was also an experiment analysing an aspect of her pursuit. In the words of her great supporter Sydney Ure Smith, publisher of Art in Australia, Preston was ‘the natural enemy of the dull,’1 an artist whose ‘refusal to repeat herself was because she had acquired a single aim which she knew had to be approached in stages – namely the discovery of forms which would eventually become the basis for an Australian natural art.’2 Taking her cues from Aboriginal design, modernist flattened abstraction, and Japanese art, she used still life as her ‘laboratory table’, a controlled space ‘on which aesthetic problems can be solved.’3
Preston had a rigorous traditional art training undertaken variously at the National Gallery School, Melbourne; the Munich Government School for Women; and at private academies in Paris and London. She slowly became attuned to the theoretical ideas underpinning the paintings of Paul Cézanne and took further inspiration from the Fernand Léger’s mechanised evocations of the modern world. Moreover, from her concurrent study of Japanese printmaking, Preston intuited these modern masters’ emphasis on shallow space and abrupt angles of view. However, her overarching inspiration was the art of Australia’s Indigenous population, whose pared-back symbols and aerial perspectives – so Preston believed – were the essential anchor for any art that attempted to express an authentically Australian identity. This understanding was outlined in her article ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’ published in Art in Australia in March 1925.4 Unfortunately, like most of Australia in those years, Preston neglected to inform herself of the deep spiritual attachment that the Indigenous have for their art, and her appropriations and experiments may jar with contemporary thought.
Margaret Preston
The Potted Plant , 1925 oil on canvas
42.1 x 42.4 cm
Benalla Art Gallery, Victoria, Ledger Gift in 1975
© Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2024
Pineapple Palm is, at first glance, an austere arrangement of draped fabric, flowerpots, the palm itself and a semi-obscured window – a partial view in the Japanese manner – but closer examination reveals the painting’s deliberate complexities. Preston takes obvious delight in the juxtaposition of the pineapple’s angular form and textural skin (surely a fruit designed solely for modernist art) set against an exotic floral fabric, likely one designed by Paul Poiret or Raoul Dufy, and imported by the David Jones’ store in 1924, with Preston enlisted to arrange their display. Apart from these blooms, the rest of the image incorporates muted, earthy colours akin to those utilised by Indigenous artists, and by tilting the table’s surface, she effectively reduces the space to a shallow plane. Notably, Pineapple Palm was first owned by Preston’s esteemed artist colleague Elioth Gruner 5 , and of the modest total of paintings known from 1925, a number are now part of respected institutional and corporate collections including Still life and Study in white (both National Gallery of Australia); Strelitzia (National Gallery
of Victoria); Pink Hibiscus (Wesfarmers); The Potted Plant (Ledger Collection, Benalla Gallery); and White and Red Hibiscus (Art Gallery of South Australia).
1. Ure Smith, S., ‘Editorial’, Art in Australia, Margaret Preston Number, 3rd series, no. 22, Art in Australia Ltd., Sydney, December 1927
2. McQueen, H., ‘Margaret Rose Preston – an enemy of the dull’, National U, Canberra, 13 June 1977, p. 23
3. Preston, M., ‘Aphorism 46’, in Gellert, L. and Ure Smith, S. (eds), Margaret Preston: Recent Paintings 1929, Art in Australia Ltd., Sydney, 1929
4. Preston, M., ‘The Indigenous art of Australia’, Art in Australia, 3rd series, no. 11, Art in Australia Ltd., Sydney, March 1925, n.p.
5. Other art colleagues who collected Preston’s paintings included Leon Gellert, Sydney Ure Smith, Lionel Lindsay, George Lambert, Thea Proctor and Adrian Feint.
ANDREW GAYNOR
CLARICE BECKETT
(1887 – 1935)
MARIGOLDS, c .1925
oil on board
40.5 x 30.5 cm
signed lower right: C. Beckett bears inscription verso: Clarice Becket [sic] / 10 Guineas
ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000
PROVENANCE
Grace Seymour, Melbourne c.1930s, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 21 August 2001, lot 25 Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above
RELATED WORK
Still Life (Marigolds), 1925, oil on board, 30.5 x 40.8 cm, in the collection of the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Victoria, Maud Rowe Bequest 1937
We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s writing in this catalogue entry.
Still life subjects are well-suited to the art of Clarice Beckett as stillness was such a fundamental aspect of her painterly aesthetic. In her lifetime, paintings of flowers were notably favoured more than landscapes, and their bright colours always caught the eye of the viewer. Asters, carnations, roses, and petunias were the single and group subjects of numerous still life paintings exhibited in the spring and autumn exhibitions of the Victorian Artists’ Society in East Melbourne during the twenties. Her first solo exhibition in 1923 featured so many flower paintings that the review in the Sun News-Pictorial was headed ‘Vases and Flowers: Miss Beckett’s Art.’
‘Nearly 80 paintings by Miss Clarice Beckett were exhibited yesterday at the Athenaeum. There is one portrait; the rest are land or seascapes, and some effective still life studies. Daisies; and Mr Sherlock’s Asters, and a Japanese Vase show the artist at her best… Her work denotes a fine appreciation for natural beauty.’1
In her Memorial Exhibition held in May 1936 at the Athenaeum, Melbourne, flowers also played a significant role, The Wattle being a lone native among the camellias and chrysanthemums. Beckett’s champion, Rosalind Hollinrake, noted that, ‘Unlike her contemporaries Ellis Rowan and Margaret Preston, Beckett did not paint native flowers.’2 She acknowledged one exception, the painting titled Gladioli exhibited at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1922, to which gum leaves had been added. ‘Her attitude to native flora’, Hollinrake continued, ‘was that the Australian bush was fragile despite its seeming hardiness and that bush flowers should be left where they belong.’3 Significantly, among the works unveiled in her Memorial show was a painting titled Marigolds, (cat. 25). Just one year later, the related painting, Still Life ( Marigolds), 1925, was bequeathed to the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum, Victoria – thus becoming one of the first works by Beckett to enter a public collection. Today the painting remains widely acclaimed among the artist’s finest flower pieces, and is complemented by the slightly larger, Marigolds , c.1925 on offer here. If the Castlemaine version has a lighter setting, with a strikingly simple ground of subtle fawns and greys, the flowers contained in a green glazed Chinese ginger jar, the present work places more focus upon the colour burst of orange flowers – while still maintaining all the subtle interplay of the former. Both provide a tangible sense of the flowers’ presence through an aura of tone and ravishing colour, thus eloquently illustrating that Beckett’s understanding of beauty was not purely confined to landscapes.
1. Sun News-Pictorial, Melbourne, 5 June 1923, p. 9
2. Hollinrake, R., Clarice Beckett: Politically Incorrect, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 1999, p. 16 3. ibid.
DAVID THOMAS
RITA ANGUS
(New Zealand, 1908 – 1970)
PORTRAIT OF O’DONNELL MOFFETT, c .1939 oil on canvas on cardboard
37.5 x 34.5 cm (image)
41.0 x 38.0 cm (frame)
ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000
PROVENANCE
Valmai Moffett, Christchurch, New Zealand, commissioned from the artist
O’Donnell Moffett, New Zealand, a gift from the above
Thence by descent
Private collection, New Zealand
EXHIBITED
Gembox, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, 29 August – 15 November 2009
Bad Hair Day, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, 4 June 2016 – 28 May 2017
Faces from the Collection, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, May 2013 – September 2015
Ship Nails and Tail Feathers, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, 10 June – 23 October 2023 on long term loan to the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, 1998 – 2024
LITERATURE
Hall, K., ‘QUIET INVASION Faces from the Collection’, Bulletin, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, B.175, Autumn, March – May 2014, p. 31 (illus.)
Angus
Self-portrait , c.1937
oil on canvas on board
49.0 x 40.0 cm
Public Art Gallery, New Zealand
© The Estate of Rita Angus
Rita Angus painted this portrait of a young boy on the eve of the Second World War. Then in her early thirties, she had recently completed paintings such as Cass , 1936; Self-portrait, 1936 – 37; and Leo Bensemann, 1938, which are now celebrated in the art history of Aotearoa New Zealand. Living in Christchurch, then the country’s leading art centre, she was at the height of her powers and much admired by her artist contemporaries.
On a personal level, however, this was a challenging time for Angus. In March 1939, she quit her flat, unable to pay the rent, and for most of the year she stayed with friends, helping with childcare and household duties in return for board. As a committed pacifist she was deeply troubled by the escalating threat of war, but she was also beset by misfortune, including the death of a sister and the end of a long-term relationship. It was during this unsettled period that she painted Portrait of O’Donnell Moffett, c.1939.
95.5 x 67.0 cm
The portrait was commissioned by the subject’s mother – Angus’ friend, the cellist Valmai Moffett (née Livingstone). The two women, born a year apart, had known each other since the early 1930s and had much in common; both had married young and soon separated, and both were gifted artists, independent, unconventional and dedicated to their work. They were part of the same social circle in Christchurch, a group of innovative artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals who were linked through friendship, love affairs and marriage. Valmai attended parties at Rita’s studio in Cambridge Terrace, a hub for the local artworld, and she was painted and drawn by mutual artist friends. Today, Evelyn Page’s Portrait of Valmai Moffett , 1933 is one of the treasures of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection.
According to family history, Valmai commissioned Rita to make a pencil portrait of her son and was surprised to be presented with a more substantial work – an oil painting. Angus evidently wanted to do
Rita
Dunedin
Evelyn Page
Portrait of Valmai Moffett , 1933 oil on canvas
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand
Rita Angus
Head of a Māori Boy, c.1938 oil on canvas on plywood
42.0 x 31.0 cm
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand
© The Estate of Rita Angus
her best for her friend. She knew how much Valmai missed her tenyear-old son, who was based in Dunedin with his father at the time. Angus later referred to the portrait in a letter to a mutual friend, the composer Douglas Lilburn. ‘When I painted O’Donnell years ago as a commission, I asked the lowest amount I could, though in economic straits myself…’1 Angus, childless herself, was greatly drawn to children and took pleasure in depicting them all her life. Here, she presents us with an alert, wide-eyed boy, scrubbed and groomed for his portrait, his hair freshly combed and his jersey neatly buttoned. His irrepressible cowlick and unruly white collar contribute to the impression of barely contained vitality.
The portrait has affinities with another arresting image of a child – Head of a Māori Boy, c.1938, in the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Both works show the crisp drawing, sharply delineated form
Rita Angus
Leo Bensemann, 1938 oil on canvas
30.0 x 35.5 cm
Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington
© The Estate of Rita Angus
and brilliant light that are typical of Angus’ art, but the Moffett oil, an intimate and affectionate portrait, is more naturalistic. Its freshness and luminosity remind us that Angus had spent much of the past two years painting pristine watercolours of the Central Otago landscape.
Portrait of O’Donnell Moffett is a fine example of Angus’ work, and a testament to the friendship between two remarkable women, key figures in the lively Christchurch art world of the 1930s. Like most of Angus’ paintings it was never exhibited in her lifetime and has only come to public notice in recent years through exhibitions at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Angus herself thought highly of it, telling Douglas Lilburn in 1946, ‘I’m glad I’ve painted this portrait for it’s good.’ 2
1. ‘Letter from Rita Angus to Douglas Lilburn’, 16 August 1946, Douglas Lilburn papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, MS-P-7623-61.
2. ibid.
JILL TREVELYAN
MARGARET OLLEY
(1923 – 2011)
HARBOUR VIEW, BOTTLEBRUSH AND KELIM, c .1999 oil on composition board
76.0 x 106.5 cm
signed lower right: Olley
ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE
Nevill Keating Pictures, London
Private collection
Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 10 March 2004, lot 29
Private collection, UK, acquired from the above
EXHIBITED
Margaret Olley: Recent Paintings , Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 10 – 25 June 1999, cat. 1 (illus. on catalogue cover)
LITERATURE
Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2012, pp. 169 (illus.), 262
‘…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 and interior scenes for which Olley remains widely celebrated, Still Harbour View, Bottlebrush and Kelim, c.1999 wonderfully encapsulates the way in which she repeatedly turned to the quotidian for inspiration, excavating her domestic setting to uncover the beauty inherent in everyday life. While the majority of
her paintings were executed in her home in Paddington where she lived from 1964 until her death in 2011, several were painted at the homes of nearby friends which offered different vantages such as the spectacular harbour view captured here. Deliberately positioning the natural border of the window frame just slightly off-centre to engender a sense of sincerity and unaffectedness, Olley further emphasises this impression of familiarity in the seemingly nonchalant arrangement of unpretentious still life items on the table – loosely scattered apples with a ceramic compote dish and saucer (motifs unmistakably redolent of Cézanne); native bottlebrush divided between a blue and white striped jug and glass vase; and a vibrantly patterned kelim rug evoking the exotic, textured interiors of Matisse. Notwithstanding the apparent randomness of her arrangement however, fundamental to such compositions was inevitably the artist’s careful ‘orchestration’ to create a harmonious image – a practice inspired directly by her 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). As Olley fondly recalled, ‘space is the secret of life… it is everything’ 2, and over the ensuing decades, she consequently came to arrange the objects in her art as characters on a stage – objects both commonplace and beautiful, shuffled this way and that, plunged into deep shadow or transformed by lighting.
Thus, in Harbour View, Bottlebrush and Kelim, the various elements are poignantly orchestrated to lead the viewer’s eye and mind through an intimate, deeply personal drama to a tantalising glimpse of the harbour beyond. Paying direct homage to the great European masters of her métier such as Vermeer, Bonnard, Matisse and Cézanne, as well as her domestic surroundings which continue to provide inspiration, indeed the work reveals the very essence of the artist’s identity; as Barry Pearce aptly notes, ‘…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.’ 3
1. Gleeson, J., ‘Introduction’, Margaret Olley, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 1964, n.p.
2. Margaret Olley cited in Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 14
3. Pearce, B., ‘Margaret Olley Retrospective’, State of the Arts, Sydney, August – November 1996, p. 5
VERONICA ANGELATOS
WILLIAM DELAFIELD COOK (1936 – 2015)
HILLSIDE I, 2004 – 11
PROVENANCE
WILLIAM DELAFIELD COOK
(1936 – 2015) HILLSIDE I, 2004 – 11 synthetic polymer paint on linen 162.0 x 380.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: W Delafield Cook 04 – 11
ESTIMATE: $450,000 – 650,000
Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney (labels attached verso) Company collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2016
EXHIBITED
William Delafield Cook, A Survey, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale, Victoria, 16 July – 11 September 2011, then touring to TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria, 15 October 2011 – 12 February 2012, cat. 17 Summer Group Show, Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney, 29 January – 13 February 2014
LITERATURE
Gregg, S., William Delafield Cook, A Survey, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale, Victoria, 2011, cat. 17, pp. 46 (illus.), 49 – 50 Field, F., ‘William Delafield Cook’, obituary, Independent (UK), 13 May 2015
‘By giving what is commonplace an exalted meaning, what is ordinary a mysterious aspect, what is familiar the impressiveness of the unfamiliar, to t he finite the appearance of infinity...’1
With their glacial proportions and immutable subject, Delafield Cook’s Australian landscapes such as the magnificent Hillside I, 2004 –2011 eloquently encapsulate the concept of time immemorial. For despite their visual immediacy and apparent fidelity, such landscapes nevertheless appear suspended in time – suffused with a sense of calm and tranquillity that, though reassuring in its contemplation of an eternal space, simultaneously evokes a disquieting undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty through the landscape’s ability to expose our limits and the finitude of our existence. 2 The span of a human life pales into insignificance in the face of such an ancient, monumental landscape; and indeed, as the artist admits, part of his motivation for fastidiously recording a place springs from ‘acknowledging your mortality’ and ‘attempting to leave something behind after you are gone.’ 3 Heightening the depiction of reality to such unimaginable degree to reveal the ‘essence’ of his subjects, thus Delafield Cook highlights the surreal within the real, inviting us to contemplate that which lies beyond our perception – the basic human quest for an underlying universal truth that transcends time or locality.
Both Delafield Cook’s affinity for the Australian landscape and his consummate skill in capturing its essential character with an intensity unparalleled in Australian art is all the more remarkable when one considers that such paintings – which he created almost exclusively from the late 1970s onwards – were produced entirely from his studio in London. Relocating to London in 1958 after what had been intended as a short trip became a second home, significantly Delafield Cook would spend part of every year for the last three decades of his life travelling back to his country of origin to recon nect and undertake
long journeys into the landscape ‘…where his ancestors had settled, where his grandfather had painted, where he had grown up…’4 , before then returning to his studio ab road to recreate his vision. Paradoxically perhaps, such distance only enhanced the power of his iconic landscapes, allowing the artist to pursue ‘…the pure idea of land filtered through memory, in which all voices and activities are silenced, and the spirit of the earth can peacefully emerge.’5
Noteworthy in its execution over an extended period of seven years, Hillside I clearly represented an epic undertaking for Delafield Cook and unsurprisingly perhaps, was selected for inclusion in his highly acclaimed survey exhibition organised by the Gippsland Art Gallery in 2011 (the artist’s last solo show before his untimely death in 2015). So utterly still and elemental that it almost seems beyond time, the composition offers an intriguing, mysterious interpretation of the parched hillside motif that has today become a universally recognised hallmark of his art. Reprising the artist’s earlier iterations of the theme which first emerged during the late 70s and early 80s – many of which have now entered the country’s major state gallery and corporate collections, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales; Bendigo Art Gallery; Heide Museum of Modern Art; The University of Melbourne Art
Collection; ANZ Collection; and the Commonwealt h Bank of Australia Collection – Hillside I also betrays unmistakable allusions to Tom Roberts’ celebrated bushranging masterpiece, Bailed Up!, 1895, 1927 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) with its high horizon line, tilted picture plane and sunburnt palette (though Delafield Cook deliberately eschews any hint of the sentimental human drama favoured by his predecessor).
Notwithstanding its ostensible neutrality or stark emptiness however, the landscape here is nevertheless informed by exquisitely rendered incidents ‘…if one is prepared to look long and hard enough’ 6 as Delafield Cook asserts, while the vast amplitude of the hillside is conveyed through the painting’s panoramic scale: ‘…it brings in this element of having to turn your head to take in the picture which fills the field of vision, like being there.’7 Simultaneously infinite in its detail and infinite in its expanse, the work thus fathoms an Australian ‘sublime’ that is boundless and majestic in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich and the eighteenth-century Romantics Delafield Cook so admired. Inspiring awe and reverence, the classical harmony and stillness imply that the forces of the cosmos have here aligned – that there is a divine order amidst the chaos of nature. 8 Bereft of any apparent narrative, it is the landscape itself, distilled in its unknowable ‘essence’, that occupies
Hillside I, 2004 – 11, in situ at Tower One, International Towers, One Sydney Harbour, Barangaroo, Sydney
the focus, imbued with a sense of drama that leaves the viewer poised indefinitely in a moment of suspense. As Delafield Cook observes of this quality in his art, ‘It’s the stage that we’re living out our lives in… The picture is the set, pregnant with possibilities.’ 9
1. Quote from Novalis, Poeticism (1798) inscribed in one of Cook’s notebooks; see Hart, D., William Delafield Cook, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 220
2. Fitzpatrick, A., ‘Intimations of Mortality in the Work of William Delafield Cook’ in William Delafield Cook. A Survey, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale, 2011, pp. 32 – 44
3. Delafield Cook, cited in Hart, op. cit., p. 184
4. ibid., p. 168
5. Gregg, S., ‘William Delafield Cook: A Survey’, in William Delafield Cook. A Survey, op. cit., pp. 2 – 23
6. Delafield Cook, cited in Hart, op. cit., p. 197
7. Delafield Cook, cited ibid., p. 199
8. Gregg, op. cit., p. 9
9. Delafield Cook, cited ibid., p. 16
VERONICA ANGELATOS
William Delafield Cook in his studio with Hillside I, 2004 – 11 photographer unknown
WILLIAM ROBINSON born 1936
TO BEECHMONT WITH STORM CLOUDS BUILDING, 2002 oil on linen
122.0 x 183.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: William Robinson / 2002 dated and inscribed with title on frame verso: 2002 TO BEECHMONT WITH STORM CLOUDS BUILDING
ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000
PROVENANCE
Australian Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 9 May 2007, lot 25 Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
William Robinson: Recent Paintings , Australian Galleries, Sydney, 13 August – 7 September 2002; Melbourne, 24 September – 25 October 2002, cat. 8 (illus. in exhibition catalogue as ‘To Beechmont with storm clouds’)
William Robinson
Rainforest and mist in afternoon light , 2002 oil on linen
167.5 x 243.5 cm
Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation, Brisbane
‘...To see one of Robinson’s landscapes is to be in it as well, to walk, and maybe to forage, with the painter through gum-thicketed gullies where any difference between the sky and its reflection is hard to tell- and probably unnecessary to know. The viewer is required to take a leap of faith, and execute something akin to a cartwheel, before penetrating Robinson’s dizzy realms. The resulting experience is partly aesthetic, partly athletic...’1
With its multiple viewpoints and sweeping panorama of darkness and light, earth and air, To Beechmont with Storm Clouds Building , 2002 encapsulates well the highly original landscapes for which William Robinson has become so widely acclaimed and admired. Departing from predecessors such as Streeton, Drysdale and Williams who focused their attention inland or inward to urban landscapes, Robinson is unique in his devotion to an environment hitherto neglected by artists – the ancient, labyrinthine rainforests of his immediate surroundings in the coastal hinterland of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. Similarly, where the Australian landscape tradition had been characterised by a strong horizontality, Robinson here deliberately eschews established figure-ground relationships and conventional one-
point perspective to transform landscape into a multi-view experience – allowing every fold and fissure to be explored, yet still preserving a sense of panoramic continuity.
Immortalising those elements of nature which seem eternal – from the stormy clouds, mysterious in their gauzy substance to the endless forest, teeming with life – the present work thus offers a powerful manifestation of the artist’s enduring interest in the relationship between man and the cosmos. In stark contrast to his earlier bucolic farmyard scenes and landscapes which feature the genial folk figures of Bill and Shirley, here the viewer is confronted with a dark, sombre wilderness which, within the context of the artist’s oeuvre, may well be construed metaphorically as a sign of mankind’s spiritual abandonment. Notwithstanding, Robinson vehemently asserts to the contrary – that God is in fact closest to his subject in desolation and moreover, that the artist reveals himself through his pictorial absence. Thus, for Robinson, ‘finding himself’ as a painter, appreciating the landscape and becoming closer to God are all inextricably linked. Indeed, describing the experience of walking through the forest of 2000 year old beech trees near his property at Springbrook (which he famously captured in the highly acclaimed five-
panel masterpiece Creation Landscape – Darkness and Light I – V, 1988, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth), the artist poignantly evokes his visit to one of the world’s greatest pilgrimage destinations: ‘I wanted to show the presence of God somehow, not only through the mystery of walking through Chartres Cathedral and walking through this forest, but also something about the nature of providence.’ 2
Like the best of Robinson’s achievements, To Beechmont with Storm Clouds Building celebrates the sheer genius of creation itself with a landscape that is as grotesque as it is beautiful, terrifying as it is marvellous. Imbued with a sense of joy and wonderment, the composition pays poignant homage to the universe and its benevolent creator, rejoicing in the infinite cycles of nature and the forest as a repository for hope.
1. James, B., 'A Landscape We Thought We Knew', Sydney Morning Herald, 29 January 2003, p. 15
2. Robinson, cited in Fink, H., ‘Light Years: William Robinson and the Creation Story’, Artlink , 2001, vol. 21, no. 4
ANGELATOS
VERONICA
William Robinson in his studio at Manly in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. photographer: Ian Lloyd © R.Ian Lloyd
LIN
ONUS (1948 – 1996)
LIGHTNING WEED AND RIPPLE, 1996
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
91.5 x 122.0 cm
signed lower right: Lin Onus
ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Melbourne
Savill Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso)
Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
Lin Onus, Savill Galleries, Melbourne, 30 October – 23 November 2003, cat. 4 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 4)
Extraordinarily beautiful and technically flawless, the paintings of Lin Onus exhibit a complex mixture of ideas set around place, ownership and history wherein they occupy a distinctive position in the broader setting of Australian art. Paintings such as Lightning Weed and Ripple , 1996 have the capacity to transfix the viewer and are full of meaning , what Michael O’Farrell observed as ‘the sheer tactility of Lin Onus… imagery that establishes a carefully balanced dialogue of sensory and mental elements.’1 Renowned for incorporating satire and humour in his early political installations and paintings that challenged cultural hegemonies, it is in these later paintings that Onus demonstrated his Indigenous connection to country. Poetic landscapes of the natural world combined with subtle traditional iconography confirmed Onus’ relationship to both his adopted homeland in Arnhem Land and to his own ancestral sites at the Barmah Forest on the Murray River.
Growing up in a culturally productive and politically engaged household in Melbourne, Onus could not help but be influenced by the activism of his family. His mother Mary Kelly was of Scottish origin and an active member of the Australian communist party and his father, Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man from the Aboriginal mission of Cummeragunja near Echuca, was an important figure in the Aboriginal civil rights movement, whose Aboriginal Enterprises (1952 – 1968) provided an outlet for Aboriginal art and craft in defiance of the then-national goal of assimilation. In 1957, Bill Onus together with Doug Nicholls established the Aboriginal Advancement League in Victoria with a goal to ‘promote cultural renewal and reawaken aboriginal pride.’ 2 Onus’ cultural education on his Aboriginal side was provided by visits to Cummeragunja with his father. There they would sit with his uncle Aaron Briggs (who gave Onus his Koori name, Burrinja, meaning ‘star’3), on
Lin Onus
Malwan Pond – Dawn, 1994 synthetic polymer paint on canvas
91.5 x 122.0 cm
Previously the collection of S&P Global, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, 1 December 2022, lot 9 © Lin Onus/Copyright Agency 2024
the banks of the Murray River within view of the Barmah Forest (Onus’ spiritual home and the subject of many of his paintings), listening to stories of family and history. Leaving school at 14, Lin Onus began, his largely self-taught, artistic career assisting his father in decorating artefacts. After embarking on a panel-beating apprenticeship, he developed skills working on metal and painting with an airbrush. By 1974, he was painting watercolours and photorealist landscapes and in 1975, he held his first exhibition and began a set of paintings based on Musqito, the first Aboriginal guerrilla fighter, which still hang on the walls of the Advancement League in Melbourne.
While the bullying and racism experienced by Onus in suburban Melbourne during the 1960s influenced much of his art, the cultural revelations that came from his friendship with respected Arnhem Land artist Jack Wunuwun (1930 – 1991) enabled Onus to embrace both his Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage. From his first encounter with Wunuwun at Maningrida in 1986 while travelling in his role as the Victorian representative for the Aboriginal Arts Board, Onus’ life was deeply influenced by the late Yolŋu Elder, who had adopted Onus as his son. Over the next decade, Onus made sixteen ‘spiritual pilgrimages’ to the outstation of Garmedi, the home of Jack Wunuwun in Central Arnhem land. 4 Wunuwun was able to offer Onus a kind of cultural sanctuary by welcoming him into the Yolŋu kinship system – a relationship that provided Onus with the opportunity to learn Aboriginal traditional knowledge which enhanced his own Yorta Yorta experience of the world. Through Wunuwun, Onus was given creation stories that he was permitted to paint and an Aboriginal language he could also access. As Onus noted, ‘…going to Arnhem Land gave him back all the stuff that colonialism had taken away – Language and Ceremony.’5
Onus acquired his knowledge of symbols, patterns and designs from the comm unity elders, and it seemed to him that this experience of tradition was ‘like a missing piece’ of a puzzle which ‘clicked into position’ for him culturally.6 His resulting personal idiom thus juxtaposed the rarrk clan patterns of Maningrida, learnt from the older artist, with a photorealist style of landscape , integrating Indigenous spirituality and narrative with Western representation.
Lightning Weed and Ripple, 1996 presents a mesmerising, immaculately executed image of central Arnhem Land wetlands where the surrounding tall trees are reflected in the cool dark water of the billabong and fish glide just below the surface of the water, creating ripples and affording glimpses of the traditional markings that cover their bodies. Onus’ watery landscapes embrace what Wunuwun described as ‘seeing below the surface’7 and function on several levels. Rich in reflections and ambiguities, these enigmatic views clearly dispensed with the conventional idea of a European panoramic view. Here a landscape apparently hangs upside down from the sky. Reflected in the still water, flashes of lightning expose the serpentine tree branches and illuminate the leaf detritus below, while the school of rarrk -covered fish swim not only under the water, but seemingly through the sky and the branches of the trees as well. As Margot Neale elaborates, these paintings are ‘deceptively picturesque, for things are not always what they seem. Laden with cross-cultural references, visual deceits, totemic relationships and a sense of displacement, they, amongst other things, challenge one’s viewing position: Are you looking up through water towards the sky, down into a waterhole from above, across the surface only or all three positions simultaneously?’ 8
Lin Onus
Dawn at Numerili, 1993
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
91.0 x 121.5 cm
Deutscher and Hackett, 11 November 2020, lot 3
© Lin Onus/Copyright Agency 2024
Reflections are essential to the art of Lin Onus, literally and metaphorically, and both his painting and his social activism address issues of identity, racism and the power imbalance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Indeed, throughout his lifetime Onus held a mirror to unresolved social inequality within this country and explored what it means to be Australian, with his luminous paintings reflecting his desire to create an art that could be appreciated on numerous levels by everyone. Onus hoped that ‘history would see him as some sort of bridge between cultures’ 9 and as articulated by Ian Mclean, ‘[he] successfully used postmodern strategies to infiltrate issues of Aboriginality into everyday Australian life .’10 This convergence of different cultures, languages and visual perspectives thus powerfully embodies both Onus’ personal and artistic journey, and it is appropriate that through his prodigious talent and legacy of widely celebrated work he ultimately did succeed in bringing together Indigenous and nonIndigenous perspectives in a spirit of reconciliation that celebrates the intersection of differing values and points of view.
1. O’Ferrall, M., ‘Lin Onus’ in Australian Perspecta 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991 p. 80
2. Kleinert, S., ‘Aboriginal Enterprises: negotiating an urban Aboriginality’, Aboriginal History, vol. 34, 2010, see: http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p170581/html/ch07. xhtml?re... (accessed 20 October 2024)
3. Neale, M., Urban Dingo: The Art of Lin Onus 1948 – 1996 , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p. 14
4. ibid., p. 15
5. ibid.
6. Leslie, D., ‘Coming home to the land’, Eureka Street, March – April 2006, see: https://www. eurekastreet.com.au/article/coming-home-to-the-land# (accessed 20 October 2024)
7. Neale, M. et al., Lin Onus: A Cultural Mechanic, Savill Galleries, Melbourne, 2003, p. 1
8. ibid.
9. Neale, 2000, op. cit., p. 21
10. ibid., p. 41
CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE
(1917 – 1999)
ALL THAT JAZZ, 1989 sawn and split soft drink crates on plywood 131.0 x 100.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ALL THAT JAZZ / 1989 / Rosalie Gascoigne
ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000
PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne
Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 15 March 2006, lot 21
Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
What Is Contemporary Art?, Rooseum, Malmö, Sweden, 3 June –30 July 1989 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 48)
Rosalie Gascoigne , Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 1 – 18 November 1989, cat. 6 (label attached verso)
20th Century Australian and New Zealand Paintings, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 22 August – 28 September 1991, cat. 77 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand, 22 February – 16 May 2004, cat. 14
Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 47
LITERATURE
Allen, C., ‘Bill Robinson: Rosalie Gascoigne,’ Art Monthly Australia, no. 27, December 1989, p. 19
Delaruelle, J., ‘Free of gobbledegook,’ Sydney Review, Sydney, December 1989, p. 16
Johnson, A., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne,’ Art & Text, no. 36, May 1990, p. 151 (illus.)
McDonald, E., ‘”There are only lovers and others ...” An interview with Rosalie Gascoigne’, Antic, Auckland, no. 8, December 1990, p. 13 (illus.)
Drury, N., Images in Contemporary Australian Painting, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1992, pl. 162, pp. 176 (illus.), 177, 257
Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, pl. 7, pp. 45 (illus.), 112
Gascoigne, M., ‘No ordinary woman’, Alumni News , University of Auckland, vol. 12, no. 1, 2002, cover (illus.), p. 2
Rosalie Gascoigne: Plain Air, City Gallery Wellington and Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2004, pl. 18, p. 68 (illus.)
McAloon, W., ‘Roadrunner,’ New Zealand Listener, vol. 193, no. 3336, 17 – 23 April 2004
Armstrong, C., ‘Collector profile: Pat Corrigan AM’, Art and Australia, vol. 43, no. 3, Autumn 2006, p. 450 (illus., installation view)
Dedman, R., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne’, Australian Art Market Report, issue 24, Winter 2007, p. 24 (illus.)
Grant, J., ‘Set the letters free’, Eye: The International Review of Graphic Design, no. 64, 2007, p. 29 (illus.)
Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 21, 100 (illus.), 135
Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue
Raisonné , Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 345, pp. 236 (illus.), 332, 350 – 351, 353, 370
Rosalie Gascoigne Monaro, 1989
sawn and split soft-drink crates on plywood
131.0 x 457.0 cm (overall)
The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth © Rosalie Gascoigne Estate / Copyright Agency 2024
‘Gascoigne’s art communicates a fervent commitment to life. She flourished from middle into old age, while her peers underwent the more usual passage to resignation and calm wisdom. Most people accept the weakening. Rosalie, growing older, sharpened herself. Her art affirmed the sap of life within weathered forms.’1
Rosalie Gascoigne first discovered wooden soft drink crates in 1978 at the Schweppes depot in Queanbeyan, NSW, near Canberra, gathering them up and taking them home with no predetermined sense as to how they would be used in her art. They first appeared in their full, unadorned form in the twenty-piece work, March Past, 1978 – 79 (National Gallery of Australia); its rows of alternating horizontal boards of red, green and faded natural wood inspired by the Anzac Day March she had recently witnessed on a trip to Melbourne. 2 Gascoigne was hooked. From that serendipitous moment she was to use the material across her oeuvre in around 130 works, even returning to her precious stockpile in 1999, the last year of her life, after transition of the manufacture of the crates to plastic had seen them become an increasingly rare resource. 3 As the artist’s husband, astronomer Ben Gascoigne recalled, Gascoigne’s capacity for collecting this material en masse was considerable, and it served her well:
'It could be disconcerting, returning home after a day at the office, to find the drive blocked by a couple of hundred soft drink crates. They had to be sorted, stacked, cleaned and dismantled, the latter process involving pulling out up to forty nails from each box, with no short cuts. The family helped, but she did most of the work herself.'4
Initially, Gascoigne combined the beautiful, weathered woods and colours of the planks of drink crates in elegant compositions that lyrically evoked the Australian bush. The typography of various printed
brands on these crates – Dales, Tarax, Crystal, Swing – is used to great effect, dancing across the surfaces of works as if mirroring the experience of dappled light and of the changing seasons on the landscape. However, once this preoccupation had run its course, she began to split the boards – first with a tomahawk, and then, a bandsaw –often manipulating the graphic black lettering of her much-loved yellow Schweppes crates into tightly compacted groupings which made the fragmented letters seem to jostle, bounce or rustle across the picture plane.
Notably, All That Jazz , 1989 was shown in the artist’s groundbreaking exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in November 1989. Gascoigne’s first solo exhibition in Sydney since her Gallery A début in 1976, this landmark exhibition brought together major soft drink crate works such as Monaro, 1988 – 89 (Art Gallery of Western Australia); Wheat Belt , 1989 (National Gallery of Australia); and Outback , 1988, with a significant group of retro-reflective road sign works in her signature yellow and orange.
As we see in the majestic All That Jazz , 1989, this way of working with the slithers of boards also coalesced with Gascoigne’s use of the grid as an important organising principle within her work. Closely aligned to Modernist art practice, the tessellation, compression and repetition that occurs across the work’s structure, no longer evokes feelings or sensations related to the natural world, but instead suggests, in the self-conscious regulation of its surface, a sense of continuum and endlessness that is in and of the work itself. Calling to mind an elaborate and highly coloured patchwork quilt (particularly the geometric creations of the Gee’s Bend quilters of America’s Deep
Rosalie Gascoigne, with her collection of Schweppes boxes , 1994 photographer: Richard Briggs
South), the knowing combination of the work’s title and form brings a sense of musicality and lively movement to the piece. As Mary Eagle has observed:
‘…[A] work by Gascoigne gains aesthetic impact by virtue of how an underlying grid or cell-like structure serves as a ground for deviations – of wave after wave, mirroring, reorientation, transposition, positivenegative inversion, counter-balance, swivelling and, in the text panels, a play of words.’5
Like all the artist’s work, the creation of All That Jazz was a haptic rather than predetermined experience. Gascoigne was opposed to the idea of planning, and didn’t draw, use collage, or experiment with compositional ideas before commencing a piece. As the artist’s son, Martin Gascoigne has noted, her approach was ‘visual and practical, not conceptual’, and she let her materials ‘take her by the arm’.6 By glueing the slithers of wood to a plywood backing board and working in small component parts, Gascoigne could shuffle the pieces until they settled in place and felt ‘right’. As she remarked,
‘I can’t do anything except I can see and I can arrange… but mostly I can arrange …I can do something that feels like something but I can’t do anything that looks like something.’7
Before beginning, there was no sense as to scale or if the work was single or multi-panelled, horizontal or vertical. This was determined in the making, and in the time sitting with and studying the piece after its completion. This was also the stage at which it was given a title – the title the work seemed to demand for itself.
1. Eagle, M., ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: Artist and Sculptor’, The Age, 1 November 1999
2. Rosalie Gascoigne, cited in Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 187. March Past, 1978 – 79 was first exhibited in the artist’s solo exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney in 1979
3. ibid., pp. 71, 78, 120. The last work Gascoigne made with soft drink crates was Great Blond Paddocks, 1998 – 99. In his catalogue raisonné, Martin Gascoigne gives two different totals, saying Gascoigne made around 127 works from soft drink crates (p. 71) as well as around 130 (p. 120)
4. Gascoigne, S.C.B., ‘The Artist-In-Residence’ in Eagle, M. (ed.), From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, The Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 12
5. Eagle, M., 'Rosalie Gascoigne’s Lyrical Derailments' in Seear, L. & Ewington, J. (eds.), Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966 – 2006 , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2007, p. 200
6. Gascoigne, M., op. cit., p. 70
7. Rosalie Gascoigne, cited in Peter Ross, 'Interview with Rosalie Gascoigne (transcript)', ‘Review’, ABC TV, broadcast 12 August 1990.
KELLY GELLATLY
TONY TUCKSON (1921 – 1973)
UNTITLED, 1970 – 73 synthetic polymer paint on composition board
121.0 x 121.5 cm
ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist Watters Gallery, Sydney James Wolfensohn, New York Watters Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney
Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Company Collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1997
EXHIBITED
Tony Tuckson 1921 – 1973: a memorial exhibition, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 13 – 30 October 1982, cat. 89 (as ‘1982 No 89’, illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 32)
Tony Tuckson’s late paintings have remained a distinctive marker in every art historical account of Australian abstraction.
Untitled, 1970 – 73 is not only remarkable because of its clear stylistic connection with other late master works, but also the subtle echoes it holds from Tuckson’s first painterly abstractions. We are familiar with his whispering veils and sweeping gestures, a quickly executed lyricism common in his large diptychs and overlayed with bold single calligraphic actions. Our work complements Yellow, 1970 – 73 (National Gallery of Victoria), but in Untitled, 1970 – 73 the accentuations remind us of the striking red, black and white works of a decade earlier. Tuckson’s art is always underpinned by his past, reshaped and reinforced by contemporary experience.
In Tuckson’s final decade, he all but abandoned his much-admired figurative work inspired by the School of Paris and an expressive abstraction took hold. But the deftness of Matisse and the boldness of Picasso’s single-brushed gestures remind us of the formative influences that helped shape his natural temperament. Further encounters were of great importance and gave momentum to his final work. In 1967
– 68, Tuckson travelled to America and saw the work of New York abstractionists, where the transcendence of intuition shaped late 20th century modernism and was intellectually energising for Tuckson.
As Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tuckson’s deep interest in Aboriginal and Melanesian and Oceanic art defined Indigenous art’s place in the gallery’s displays and collections. We can also see that it shaped his ideas about art, specifically his own. He responded to simple, effortless lineal arrangements and the casual in-filling of shapes and his deliberate limitation of colour, earthtextures, red, white and black likely has Aboriginal art as an aesthetic underpinning.
The personality of commercial Masonite is seemingly deadpan that denies aesthetic presence, but it became a recurring surface for him. Its artless honesty suited Tuckson where intuitive impulse transcended formal caution. In 1973, James Gleeson wrote a perfect encapsulation of Tuckson’s final works, ‘…Tuckson isn’t interested in the art that conceals the effort. He shows the making of a painting with all the travail fully exposed, without prettification or pretence… the viewer who takes the risk of opening himself to these works will be rewarded by a rare glimpse of the emotional and physical costs of creativity.’1
While we might acknowledge Tuckson’s interests and influences, he never used sources as painting props, his knowledge and accumulated intuition became the work of an artist who was now complete within himself. ‘Tuckson was remarkable for the way he dealt with artistic influences on the level of principle rather than on the level of superficial appearance.’ 2
Untitled, 1970 – 73 holds a significant place amongst Tuckson’s final works. It becomes an expressive encapsulation of his restless curiosity and arrival as one of Australia’s finest abstractionists. He had two landmark exhibitions at Watters Gallery, Sydney, the last in 1973, the year of his premature death.
1. Gleeson, J., ‘The Travail of Painting’, Sun Herald, Sydney, 22 April 1973
DOUG HALL AM
2. Maloon, T., ‘Tuckson and Tradition’, in Painting Forever: Tony Tuckson, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000, p. 13
BRONWYN OLIVER (1959 – 2006) VESSEL, 1991
copper
170.0 x 20.0 x 20.0 cm
ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 250,000
PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1994
EXHIBITED
Bronwyn Oliver: Fabrications , Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand, 7 July – 20 August 1992, cat, 1 Bronwyn Oliver, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 8 September – 8 October 1992
Bronwyn Oliver, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 21 July – 7 August 1993
LITERATURE
Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things , Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, pp. 86, 219
RELATED WORKS
Curlicue , 1991, copper, 45.0 x 250.0 x 15.0 cm, in the collection of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Labyrinth, 1991, copper, 174.0 x 57.0 x 18.0 cm, in the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, New Zealand
Delicate and airy, its grid-like lattice fabricated from small-gauge copper wire, Vessel is as defined by its physical, handmade presence as it is by its absence, by the glimpses revealed through the perforations and the space enclosed within this helicoidal funnel and its pouch. Of a similar fishnet construction to the casual horizontal Curlicue , 1991, the regularity of Vessel’s lattice creates an optical rhythm, redoubled by its projected shadow. Ethereal and yet permanent, Vessel displays an improbable lightness of touch and what Elwyn Lynn identified as an ‘ease of drawing.’1 With slightly wobbly wire lines and a ‘natural’ fall that is not dead-straight, Vessel has a warm, handmade authenticity complementing its swollen, life-affirming shapes. Oliver’s abstract fabrications emphasised craftsmanship, their surfaces shaped by a profound respect for materials and their metaphorical properties – all hallmarks of the New British Sculpture Movement, which the artist had encountered during her time at the Chelsea School of Art in London in the early 1980s. Other practitioners at the forefront of this movement were Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Alison Wilding, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley.
With striking simplicity and an ambiguous sexual charge, Bronwyn Oliver’s open-weave copper Vessel strains vertically, its flared mouth ready to receive intangible nourishment. In early 1991, the young sculptor first embarked on a series of long and thin vertical works. The resulting fabrications exhibited an elegant downward cascade, unfurling organically, or, like Vessel , 1991, a proud rectitude and optimistic verticality. Here, the central shaft, with discernible horizontal wire struts, is finely woven into a helix. It extends from a pendulous spherical base, ringed with hairs, to a mouth which simply gapes open, slightly askew. Like a pistil, the reproductive organ in the centre of a flower, the bulbous base of Vessel supports a long column topped by a flared opening, mirroring the stigma, where pollen is germinated. However, despite these formal associations with natural shapes, Oliver insisted that her works did not consciously stem from any personal investigations into organic morphology. Her verdigris sculptures are instead endowed with an otherworldly aura of mysterious antiquity.
In June 1991, Oliver presented some of her new vertical works in her solo exhibition at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, which was positively reviewed in the local Sydney newspapers. In August of that year, she participated in Perspecta, the only survey show for contemporary Australian art at the time. Victoria Lynn, writing in the catalogue noted that ‘the shadows they [Oliver’s sculptures] cast are clearly intrinsic to the structure of the pieces. Shadows echo and extend the spatial principles, negotiating the border between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, between surface and space, between image and structure.’ 2 Oliver used the relative density, direction and shapes within her metal weaving as a distinguishing feature between works of similar forms and dimensions. For example, Rope , 1991 adopts a very similar shape to Vessel, one with ‘the sense of a parable, of Rapunzel or Jack and the Beanstalk’3 , only rendered with a dense wrapped surface. For those with a delicate and open weave, particularly Vessel’s optical grid, a strong frontal light casts a twin, flat shadow with the layers of Oliver’s three-dimensional form concertinaed into a complex image. This tension between Vessel’s fragile structure and its dense shadow is masterful and animates the subtle torsion inherent in Oliver’s woven helix.
1. Lynn, E., ‘Intimacy and nature’, The Australian, Sydney, 17 June 1989
2. Lynn, V., Australian Perspecta 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991, p. 78
3. Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver. Strange Things, Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 86
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
BRONWYN OLIVER (1959 – 2006) AURA, 1996 – 97 copper 104.0 x 114.0 x 12.0 cm
ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 250,000
PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above in 2000
EXHIBITED
Bronwyn Oliver, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 12 November –20 December 1997
Bronwyn Oliver: Botanic , McClelland Sculpture Park and Gallery, Langwarrin, 13 November 2005 – 5 February 2006
LITERATURE
Fink, H., Bronwyn Oliver: Strange Things , Piper Press, Sydney, 2017, p. 219 (dated ‘1996’)
RELATED WORK
Cocoon, 1995, copper, 185.0 x 15.0 x 15.0 cm, private collection, ibid., p. 219
Bronwyn Oliver’s delicate monochrome sculptures exist in the world with quiet and understated elegance. An unintended consequence of the artist’s formal and material development, their final forms appear organic, albeit parachuted from a mysterious and unknown origin. Having received early training in New British sculpture, Oliver’s practice was deeply rooted in the idea of truth and respect for her materials, her techniques emphasising authentic hand-worked craftsmanship. She was careful to dispel assertions that traced her inspiration directly from nature: ‘My ideas do not begin with natural forms. My ideas develop from the materials which I use and are not even remotely concerned with natural observation. I am interested in structure and what materials will do.’1
Adopting the radiant and divine form of a large crescent, patinated a solemn matte black, Bronwyn Oliver’s sewn copper sculpture Aura, 1996 – 97 is delicately balanced between opposing tensions. While an inner rib of stiff sheet copper is curved into a smooth and distinctive numinous shape, Aura ’s outermost surface is covered in bulbous forms. They appear to bloom outwards, their perforated surfaces straining against tightly crisscrossed cords. While not as stiff and overtly biomorphic as its closely related cousin, the baton-shaped bud-laden stem of Cocoon, 1995, Aura ’s bipartite structure of trussed segments is similarly rendered with the relatively malleable medium of copper gauze. Laboriously individually moulded, parcelled and sewn together, these trussed protrusions are irregular. They cast a knobbly shadow with shifting moiré effects, contrasting with Aura ’s smooth interior sweep. Pleased with this effect, Oliver used a similar technique in later works such as Garland, 2006 (now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia).
Finishing in tapered points, the complete form of Aura is that of a closed biological vessel, its straining tension and breathable gauze skin alluding to an invisible living form enclosed within a bound package. Western Art holds a rich history of wrapped and bound forms, from Michelangelo’s sculptures of bound slaves to Christo’s contemporary environmental interventions, often illustrating tensions between constriction and escape; concealment and unveiling. This dichotomy has been a persistent thread within Bronwyn Oliver’s practice.
Wall-mounted with awe-inspiring proportions, Aura ’s presence is one of resolute permanence, endowed with a strange divine power emanating from its arc-shaped form. A crown of light rays, or disc of radiant light is an ancient iconographic device denoting divinity that has travelled across cultures, from Helios with his radiate crown to modern depictions of Amitabha Buddha. Generally denoting a ring of light encircling the head and bust, an aura is usually attached to a holy or sacred figure. Here, Oliver’s dark Aura is divorced from its gigantic owner, waiting expectantly to confer its divine power to those near it.
1. Bronwyn Oliver, cited in Sturgeon, G., Contemporary Australian Sculpture, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, pp. 73 – 74
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
AH XIAN
Chinese, born 1960
CHINA CHINA – BUST 6, 1998 porcelain, cast from figure, with hand-painted cobalt underglaze and clear glaze
28.0 x 32.5 x 22.5 cm signed in Chinese characters and dated at base signed, dated and inscribed with title on base: Ah Xian. 1998. 10. 20 Sydney / China. China – Bust 6
ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 50,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection
Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 28 November 2002, lot 92
Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne
RELATED WORKS
China China – Bust 1, 1998, cast porcelain with hand-painted underglaze, 30.0 x 41.5 x 23.0 cm, in the collection of Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane China China – Bust 15 , 1999, cast porcelain with handpainted underglaze, 35.0 x 37.0 x 20.0 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Perfectly poised with her eyes closed and full lips pouting, head slightly turned towards the viewer, the bust of this anonymous female figure remains hermetically sealed in a private, peaceful meditation. Made from lustrous white porcelain, Ah Xian’s China China – Bust 6 , 1998 was cast from life, her delicate features and low chignon overlaid with hand-painted vivid cobalt botanical designs of the Qing dynasty. A very early example of Ah Xian’s breakthrough and celebrated sculptural suite, China China , this minimal bust is presented simply with no plinth, its base sharply cut off at the collarbones in the manner of Western European Medieval reliquary sculpture. The surface retains minute naturalistic details of its original sitter, underscoring yet never revealing her individuality. The painted banana-leaf and maple design (symbolising precious attributes of a scholar and strength/stability respectively 1) sprouting from twisting and craggy rocks unobtrusively frames contours of her head and face, covering her ears while leaving large areas of pure negative space.
Ah Xian is amongst the most accomplished practitioners of ceramic sculpture in contemporary Australian art. From his earliest explorations into ceramic casts in the late 1990s to life-size cloisonné works and bronzes, the artist’s practice elevates the individual to a semi-divine icon through a culturally specific, iconographic exploration of the Chinese diaspora in the West. Beijing-born, Ah Xian sought asylum in Australia in 1990, a member of what has now been labelled chuguore
‘leave-the country-fever’, a political and artistic exodus in the wake of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square massacre. 2 Although his first artworks in Australia were dark political paintings and works on paper, by the late 1990s Ah Xian had pivoted to sculpture, experimenting with porcelain, one of China’s most culturally significant inventions. The first works of the ongoing China China series, including Bust 6, cast from the artist’s friends and family, were fired in Sydney at the Ceramics department of the UNSW College of Fine Arts, bearing the unevenness of hand-made authenticity. Following this, Ah Xian won an Australia Council for the Arts grant to study in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, the historical centre for porcelain pottery since the first Ming emperors of the 14th century, the resulting works becoming increasingly uniform and lavish in their decoration. 3 Examples from the China China series are highly prized, with four of the earliest examples held in the collection of QAGoMA and individual busts held in the AGSA, NGV, MCA and NGA, amongst others. Ah Xian’s subsequent explorations into busts cast in concrete, Concrete Forest, won him the final triennial Clemenger Contemporary Art Award to be offered in 2009.
Reflecting on his homeland with the geographic and temporal distance of an émigré, Ah Xian’s works focus on the beauty and mythological power of Chinese materials and symbols, which he then fuses with Western sculptural forms (China having no endemic tradition of the bust preceding its importation from the USSR at the advent of Communism).4 Ah Xian thus expresses the tensions and pride of the fragmented cultural hybridity of contemporary multicultural Australia. Creating a suite of anonymous figures, each one’s surface more lavishly and preciously adorned than the next, Ah Xian elevates the simple individual to a higher plane of dignity and authority. Their slightly translucent white porcelain evoking the pale lead-painted skin of the imperial Chinese court and providing a blank canvas for the application of hand-painted patterns. These protective tattoos and cocoons are fused to their bodies, indicating an inescapable cultural impression, from which they derive an ancient, imperial power and beauty.
1. Eberhard, W., A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1986, pp. 30, 179
2. Chiu, M., ‘China from afar’, Ah Xian Sculpture, Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Germany, 2007, p. 11
3. Desmond, M., Portrait Profile: Dr John Yu, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2009, n.p.
4. Brunner, D., ‘The Bust and Immortality’ in Ah Xian Sculpture, ibid., p. 44
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
HOWARD ARKLEY
(1951 – 1999)
TULIPS AND SPOTTED VASE, 1986
synthetic polymer paint on canvas 161.0 x 120.0 cm
signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Tulips and Spotted Vase / 1986 / Howard Arkley
ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000
PROVENANCE
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1986 Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in May 1995
EXHIBITED
Howard Arkley: Recent Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 20 September – 8 October 1986, cat. 6 Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 14 March – 14 May 1995
LITERATURE
Engberg, J., Downtown: Ruscha, Rooney, Arkley, Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 51 (illus.), 58 Crawford, A., and Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition, 2001, pp. 83 (illus.), 148 (dated ‘1987’)
Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [https:// www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/18/tulips-andspotted-vase-1986/] (accessed 10 October 2024)
© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
Still Life-Petunias , 1987
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
160.0 x 122.0 cm
Private collection
© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
After producing few canvases in 1984 and 1985 – instead working primarily on paper, and in his sketchbooks and diaries – Howard Arkley returned to painting with gusto in 1986.1 His solo exhibition of that year, Howard Arkley: Recent Paintings at Melbourne’s Tolarno Galleries, was an exuberant demonstration of the artist in form, showcasing a strong sampling of characteristic Arkley subjects ranging from suburban houses, skyscrapers and interiors to the artist’s funky, cacti-inspired abstractions. However, the lively compositions and high-keyed colour of most of the works in the exhibition were also tempered by the subject matter and mood of paintings such as The Ritual, 1986 – which depicted a figure about to insert a needle into an extended, tourniqueted arm – Speeding, 1986, and Nubrick , 1986, the latter of which conveyed a darker, slightly sinister atmosphere, despite its setting in a suburban street. As one of only two still life paintings within the exhibition, and the most commanding, Tulips and Spotted Vase , 1986 sat thematically between these two extremes, marrying the joy and exuberance of the artist’s use of decoration and strong blocks of colour with the work’s subject matter and nod to the vanitas tradition. No doubt aware of the rich symbolism of still life painting in art history, Arkley’s placement of the open, drooping tulip in the foreground of the image serves as a subtle reminder to the viewer of the transience of both beauty and life. Sadly, given the artist’s premature death from a drug overdose at the age of 48, it is hard not to see the quiet message within this buoyant painting as somewhat prophetic.
Given Arkley’s well-known love of decoration and ornamentation, Tulips and Spotted Vase is a relatively restrained painting, with the vase itself the only ‘decorated’ part of the composition. However, together the vase and flowers form the kind of decoration that was readily accepted in the interiors of the suburban houses that were to increasingly feature in his paintings from this time. Arkley painted his first house painting in 1983 and remained enchanted by this symbol of the suburban dream until his death in 1999. Having grown up in the Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills, he realised he was speaking to the lived experience of most Australians, and that the classic ‘brick veneer on a quarter-acre block’ provided him with the creative potential to endlessly combine and experiment with both pattern and form, figuration and abstraction. As he enthused in an interview for ABC TV in 1999:
‘Ordinary houses are filled with pattern. You go into a house where there is no art, no paintings, but it is filled with kind of second-degree imagery. The patterning around the fireplace, the carpet, and the different brick on the different houses, and the pattern between the gutter, the nature strip, the footpath; then you have the fence, then you have the green lawn, then you have house, then you have the tiles, then you have the blue sky… and I missed the bushes in between. It’s rich.’ 2
Arkley’s work has been compared to American and British Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein (1923 – 1997) and Patrick Caulfield (1936 – 2005), whose practice shared a penchant for areas of bold flat colour and the
Howard Arkley
depiction of everyday utilitarian objects such as vases, bowls and jugs. While he undoubtedly knew and drew inspiration from their art, Arkley’s oeuvre however, is clearly differentiated by its love and use of pattern –which he initially created by incorporating wallpaper into his interiors 3 , and later, through the use of stencils – and especially, by his use and command of the airbrush. Arkley was first introduced to the airbrush by his art schoolteacher, Fred Cress, and by the time Tulips and Spotted Vase was created, it was clearly in his command (each line required several coats to ensure both the thickness and dense pigmentation that the artist achieves).4 For him, the combination of black outline and flat surface helped to establish a sense of his images as being at one in both the making (‘… I thought it was a pretty interesting kind of medium – that you could make marks without actually touching the canvas’ 5), and viewing; as if his paintings were experienced in reproduction rather than real life. As he noted:
‘I wanted my work to look like a reproduction of a painting, not be a painting. I want it to look like it was a slide or a book. I want it to look like the paintings that educated me, and I saw them in reproduction in
Howard Arkley Roomarama, 1993 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 172.5 x 135.0 cm
Private collection © The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art
books and magazines and slides etc. I didn’t want any great big globules of paint running down, because in a book they don’t have that – they’re nice and flat and shiny.’6
1. Gregory, J., Arkley Works, see: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/18/1986/ (accessed 24 October 2024)
2. Wyzenbeek, A. (dir.), Howard’s Way, 1999, ABC TV Arts, see excerpt at https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=YByGawnhx7E (accessed 24 October 2024)
3. See Howard Arkley, Still Life, 1986 that was also in the 1986 Tolarno Galleries at https:// www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/18/1986/ (accessed 24 October) and Howard Arkley, Suburban Interior, 1983, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne at https://collection.heide. com.au/objects/719/suburban-interior (accessed 25 October 2024)
4. ‘Constanze Zikos, Artist and Friend of Howard Arkley Speaking to Howard Arkley and Friends Exhibition Co-Curator Victoria Lynn’, TarraWarra Museum of Art, 6 February 2016, see: https://www.facebook.com/TarraWarraMA/videos/constanze-zikos-artist-and-friend-ofhowardarkley-speaking-to-howardarkleyandfri/10156517388820385/ (accessed 24 October 2024)
5. Howard Arkley, cited in Wyzenbeek, op. cit.
6. ibid.
KELLY GELLATLY
DEL KATHRYN BARTON born 1972
HARD WET, 2017 synthetic polymer paint, gouache, watercolour and ink on linen
240.0 x 180.5 cm
signed, dated and inscribed left centre: - the / year / that / changed / my / life - / - del / kathryn / barton - / 2017 inscribed with title right centre: - hard / wet - inscribed with title lower left centre: - hard wet -
ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000
PROVENANCE
Albertz Benda, New York
Darren Tieste, Los Angeles, USA, acquired from the above in 2017
EXHIBITED
Mad Love, Arndt Art Agency (A3), Berlin, Germany, 6 June –29 September 2017 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 23)
LITERATURE
Arndt, M,. and Wood, T. (eds.), Mad Love : Australian contemporary art, Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, 2017, pp. 8 (illus., installation photograph), 23 (illus.)
Cabiscol, L., ‘Del Kathryn Barton – From Australia to Berlin’, Metal Magazine , June 2017, (illus.), https://metalmagazine.eu/post/delkathryn-barton-from-australia-to-berlin (accessed 16/10/24) McDonald, J., ‘Del Kathryn Barton shows off Australian art’s risque side in Berlin’, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 18 July 2017
Del Kathryn Barton’s immersive and towering tableau Hard Wet , 2017 presents ethereal intertwined sisters, each tended to by a small, breasted nightingale. Slender, pale and brazenly denuded, this contorted and multilimbed being balances confidently atop a pink planet, from which grows a waratah in full bloom. Barton’s trademark blend of psycho-erotic suggestion and unashamed exuberant decoration endows Hard Wet with a dazzling seductive power. Painstakingly painted with a complex array of mark-making techniques in saturated colours, the work’s surface is entirely covered by a lavish cornucopia of minute details. A highly accomplished mature work, the serious and whimsical Hard Wet was painted during an annus mirabilis for the artist. In 2017, Barton held her first solo exhibition in New York, was honoured with a mid-career survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, and also presented her curatorial début in Berlin – an exhibition including two of her own paintings, one being Hard Wet.
Funded and supported by a bilateral government agreement designed to strengthen cultural ties, Australia Now was a year-long programme celebrating Australian arts, culture, science and innovation throughout Germany. Within this framework, Australia’s collaboration with Arndt Art Agency demonstrated a historical dismantling of segregation between public and private spheres, united in the joint effort to create exposure for Australian art in continental Europe. Presented at the
Del Kathryn Barton Of Pink Planets , 2014 synthetic polymer paint on linen
263.0 x 203.0 cm
Private collection Sold for $527,727 (inc. BP)
Deutscher and Hackett, 16 August 2023, lot 33 AUCTION RECORD FOR THE ARTIST
assiduous art dealer Matthias Arndt’s gallery in Berlin in June 2017, the group exhibition Mad Love was conceived and selected by Del Kathryn Barton, displaying contemporary Australian works with a radical approach to the human figure and human condition. Alongside two of her most recent paintings, Barton chose works by boundarypushing artists Brook Andrew, Pat Brassington, Dale Frank, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty and Paul Yore, and even included a few gestural abstract works by the late Kaiadilt artist from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori – an artist whom Barton greatly admires. A bold and visceral exhibition, Barton’s title Mad Love aptly referenced a famous 1937 collection of poems, Amour Fou, by the French father of Surrealism, André Breton. Breton’s essay, interspersed with autobiographical fragments, explored the conjunction between reality and the unconscious, a mystical vision marrying well with Barton’s paintings of fierce confidence and vulnerable metamorphosis some seventy years later.
Barton’s horror vacui – the creative urge to cover the entire surface of her paintings with pulsating and scintillating patterns and small decorative motifs – is often said to be inspired by the works of Vienna Secession artist, Gustav Klimt, whose symbolist paintings also combined daring psycho-sexual subject matter with sumptuous backgrounds. Contorted into an audacious tantric pose of intertwined
Installation view: Mad Love Arndt Art Agency, Berlin, 2017
limbs and symbolic gestures, the two-headed woman within Hard Wet also evokes two unusual works of art: the curiously erotic, School of Fontainebleau painting of Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters from 1594, and British sculptor Mark Quinn’s 2006 sculpture of model Kate Moss tangled in a complicated yoga posture.
Despite sharing the same wide watery eyes, these poised and tightlipped protagonists are far removed from the childlike beings of Barton’s earliest drawings. Sharing a steely impenetrable expression with the other figures from her world, her many hands are held up to the face(s), caressing her own pale flesh. These ‘fluttering hands’ appear frequently in Barton’s works, conferring a certain spiritual or sacred atmosphere, a quasi-medieval mysticism.1 Sporting only patchworked socks, and feathered and furry cuffs on arms and legs, Barton’s mature beings accumulate otherworldly attributes that signify their belonging to an alternate vivid phantasmagorical world. Evoking the whimsical tiny asteroid home of The Little Prince , her pink orb is more than just a pedestal. Botanical tendrils and veins of bright blue, yellow and scarlet snake from its core to pierce her body and entwine the twin torsos,
nourishing her and creating a symbiotic relationship between her body and the broader environment. Yet, for all these eye-catching details, the subjects of this painting appear resolute and unemotional, gazing, statically transfixed in a trance-like state.
A painting of strange and unknowable rebellious beauty, Hard Wet was described by the artist as ‘A work at play with the poetics and muscularity of private spaces. This she-beast could be understood as a warrior defending and preserving the kaleidoscopic power within the galaxies of our inner lives, both real and imagined.’ 2 A powerful and polychromatic embrace of otherworldly feminine power, this painting was initially purchased by Australian fashion photographer, Darren Tieste, who like Barton, can be counted amongst Australia’s most respected creative ambassadors.
1. Wallis, P., ‘Matrix of Desire’, Del Kathryn Barton, The Highway is a Disco, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, p. 5
2. Cabiscol, L., ‘Del Kathryn Barton – From Australia to Berlin’, Metal Magazine, June 2017, see: https://metalmagazine.eu/post/del-kathryn-barton-from-australia-to-berlin (accessed 16 October 2024)
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
MAX DUPAIN (1911 – 1992) SUNBAKER, 1937 printed later silver gelatin photograph on cardboard 38.0 x 43.0 cm
signed and dated in image lower right: – Max Dupain ‘37 –signed, dated, inscribed with title and dedicated verso: ‘Sunbaker’ / Max Dupain ‘37 / … For David Ell / ….
ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE
David Ell, Sydney, a gift from the artist in 1980 Christie’s, Sydney, 19 August 1993, lot 1670 Private collection, Melbourne
LITERATURE
Newton, G., Max Dupain: Photographs 1928 – 80, The David Ell Press, Sydney, 1980, p. 64 (illus., another example)
Max Dupain’s Australia, Viking Press, Sydney, 1986, p. 104 (illus., another example)
Ennis, H., Max Dupain: Photographs , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1991, p. 18 (illus., another example) White, J., Smee, S. and Cawood, M., Dupain's Beaches , Chapter and Verse, Sydney, 2000, p. 69 (illus., another example)
Annear, J., The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, pp. 40, 50, 104 (illus., another example), 294
RELATED WORKS
Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
This work is sold with the accompanying book, Newton, G., Max Dupain: Photographs 1928 – 80, The David Ell Press, Sydney, 1980
The story of how this modest snapshot from within one of Dupain’s holiday albums, compiled following a trip to the south coast of New South Wales in 1937 with his friends Harold Salvage and Chris Vandyke, would become the subject of such massive exposure in the latter half of the 20th century is a tale of coincidence. This version of Sunbaker, identical in size and format to those in most of Australia’s state and national collections, is the second version of two pictures that Dupain took at the same time in 1937. The artist chose to publish the other, Sunbaker II, 1937, in a monograph of his work in 1948, and sometime after this, its negative was lost. 2 It wasn’t until 1975, thanks to the combined marketing power of a retrospective exhibition of Dupain’s photographs and a later survey of Australian photography, that the image was presented to wide national audiences. The Max Dupain: Retrospective at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney in 1975 used Sunbaker as a promotional image and four years later, it was illustrated on the back cover of the catalogue for Australian photographers: the Philip Morris Collection. The images in Australian photographers were personally selected by James Mollison, founding director of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. 3
There are only a handful of artworks that have been as influential on the creation of a national psyche as Max Dupain’s photograph, Sunbaker, 1937. Its enduring power derives from the incorporation of twin social mythologies prevalent during the inter-war period: that of the ‘old sunburnt country’ and physical health as a symbol for the strength and potential of Modernity. Sunbaker would come to represent in a single recognisable image the new outdoor Australian way of life: the simplicity of composition, dramatic contrast of light, and purity of context coincided to create a powerful and iconic image. Judy Annear, Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney attributed this to Dupain’s ability to ‘adroitly harness a moment in time that came to symbolise the ambitions of a nation.’1
In formal terms, the composition of Sunbaker marked a departure from the artist’s earlier surrealist studio montages, which often featured full-length female nudes. Creating a visual correlation between the geometric solidity of a pyramid and the physical strength of a young man, Dupain’s photograph sits in a neat nexus between modernist formalism and an idealistic focus on physical wellbeing in the interwar years. This young man, with his bronzed skin and muscles glistening with salt, sand, sweat and seawater would come to embody the ideal antipodean (ironically, he was an Englishman who had recently emigrated to Australia). The subject does not call out to the viewer, encouraging them to emigrate to the idealised southern land of sunshine and good health, as he would have in contemporary advertisements. Instead, we as viewers, intrude on his intimacy and respite, the reduced form of his recumbent body jutting out into the foreground of the photograph, almost transcending the barrier of the picture plane. The austere simplicity and lack of spatial context of Dupain’s composition creates a timeless and universal space where man is at one with the land, resting on the horizon’s edge.
1. Annear, J., Photography: The Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, pp. 142 – 149
2. Newton, G., ‘The Sunbaker’ in White, J., Dupain’s Beaches, Chapter & Verse, Sydney, 2000, p. 68
3.
Annear, J., Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, p. 46
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
JERREMS (1949 – 1980)
MIRROR WITH A MEMORY: MOTEL ROOM, 1977
C–type photograph
23.0 x 17.5 cm
edition: 1/9
signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image: MIRROR WITH A MEMORY: MOTEL ROOM 1/9 JERREMS, 1977
ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE
Dr Jonn Mumford, New South Wales, acquired directly from the artist in 1978 Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems , Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 20 July – 12 August 1990, then touring to: Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 24 August – 30 September 1990; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 23 February – 12 May 1991; Albury Regional Centre, New South Wales, 24 May – 23 June 1991; Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria, 29 June – 28 July 1991; The Exhibition Gallery, The Waverley Centre, Melbourne, 4 August – 15 September 1991 (another example) Mirror with a Memory: Photographic Portraiture in Australia, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 4 March – 12 June 2000 (another example)
Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 31 July – 31 October 2010 (another example) Legacy. Your collection. Our Story, Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne, 15 June – 19 September 2018 (another example)
LITERATURE
Ennis, H., and Jenyns, B., Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1990, n.p. Schwarz, K., 'Girl in a Mirror', Art and Australia, vol. 43, no. 2, Summer 2005, p. 245 (illus., another example) King, N. (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark , Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2010, pp. 142 (illus.), 143, 240 Conrad, P., ‘The faith of images’, The Monthly, 1 October 2010 (illus.), https://www.themonthly.com. au/issue/2010/october/1285813730/peter-conrad/ faith-images (accessed October 2024)
RELATED WORKS
Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne
CAROL
JERREMS (1949 – 1980)
LYNN (GAILEY), 1976
silver gelatin photograph
30.5 x 20.0 cm edition: 3/9
signed, dated, numbered and inscribed with title below image: LYNN 3/9 JERREMS, 1976
ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000
PROVENANCE
Peter Leiss, Melbourne
Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne
EXHIBITED
Contemporary Photography from the Collecti on, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 June – 12 August 1984 (another example)
Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 20 July – 12 August 1990, then touring to: Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 24 August – 30 September 1990; Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 23 February – 12 May 1991; Albury Regional Centre, New South Wales, 24 May – 23 June 1991; Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria, 29 June – 28 July 1991; The Exhibition Gallery, The Waverley Centre, Melbourne, 4 August – 15 September 1991 (another example)
Critic’s Choice, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 April –10 July 1994 (another example)
Inheritance, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 21 March –4 May 1996 (another example)
What is this thing called photography?, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 June – 29 July 1999 (another example)
World Without End – Photography and the 20th Century, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2 December 2000 – 25 February 2001 (another example)
Australian postwar photodocumentary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 8 August 2004
Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 31 July – 31 October 2010 (another example)
What’s in a face? aspects of portrait photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 24 September 2011 – 5 February 2012 (another example)
Legacy. Your collection. Our Story, Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne, 15 June – 19 September 2018 (another example)
LITERATURE
Ennis, H., and Jenyns, B., Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1990, n.p. (illus., another example, as ‘Lyn’)
McFarlane, R., Critics Choice, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1994, pp. 1 (illus., another example), 10
Annear, J., What is This Thing Called Photography?: Australian Photography 1975–1985 , Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, n.p.
Annear, J., ‘More Than Meets The Eye’, Look, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1999, pp. 8, 9 (illus., another example)
Annear, A., World Without End: Photography and the 20th Century, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 173 (another example)
Annear, J. (ed.), Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 256 (illus., another example)
King, N. (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2010, pp. 9 (illus., another example), 136, 137 (illus., another example), 240 (as ‘Lynn’)
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, and Museum of Australian Photography, Melbourne
PATRICIA PICCININI
born 1965
PINK SPRING, WHITE SPRING, 2003 (FROM THE 'PRECAUTIONS' SERIES)
fibreglass, polycarbonate and automotive paint
17.0 x 17.5 x 23.5 cm (each)
ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000 (2)
PROVENANCE
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Joan Clemenger AO and Peter Clemenger AO, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2003
EXHIBITED
Precautionary Tales , Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 6 September – 28 October 2003, cat. 1 and cat. 2
Patricia Piccinini’s celebrated photographic and sculptural practice has long grappled with profound questions of what it means to be human and fragile in an age of rapid technological and radical biological innovation. Her works play out scenes of family dynamics in photographic and sculptural tableaux populated by lifelike fleshy beings in silicon or hard-edged, highly polished automotive hybrids. The artist deftly moves between the elements of the ‘biosphere’ and what Linda Michaels labelled the ‘autosphere.’1
Pink Spring, White Spring, 2003 – a pair of gleaming motorcycle helmets of silver and gold, beautifully decorated with stylised sakura blossoms and chirping birds – have been built to accommodate the unusually distended physiognomy of a small and tender head. As suggested within her iconic 2003 Venice Biennale presentation representing Australia,
the voids within these helmets hint at unfamiliar and radically different beings in her world, their wide-eyed and pudgy fragility requiring uniquely crafted protective armour.
Around 2002, Piccinini began a series of anthropomorphised sculptural figures and wall-mounted tiles derived from engine and chassis parts of automotive vehicles. Their rounded and streamlined forms were sumptuously detailed with surface gloss and some were also airbrushed decals of flowers, flames and skulls. Presented as desirable consumer items on a shelf and decorated with stylised kawaii designs, Piccinini’s helmets also comment on the accelerated consumer culture she had experienced in Japan while studying there on a grant in 1998.
A leitmotif throughout her practice, the form of the helmet implies the presence of the most powerful and precious part of the body, which it must protect but also hide from view. Deeply inscribed in the zeitgeist of early 2000s tech innovation, Piccinini’s works have appropriated across disciplines, drawing from new technologies such as computer modelling of aerodynamic engineering and performance optimisation and applying these to imagined bio-technologically enhanced beings. By tampering with the standardised shape of a human helmet, distending, inflating and agglomerating it into atypical profiles, the imagined owner of this helmet is transformed into something that is neither human nor machine, the contours nevertheless streamlined and optimised for speed and protection.
1. Michael, L., 'Patricia Piccinini', Museum of Contemporary Art Handbook at https://www.mca.com.au/collection/artists/patricia-piccinini/ (accessed October 2024)
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
WILLIAM ROBINSON
born 1936
CREATION LANDSCAPE – THE ANCIENT TREES, 1998 oil on linen
76.5 x 101.5 cm
signed and dated lower right: William Robinson 98 bears inscription verso: C. L. Ancient Trees study - right bears inscription on backing verso: Creation Landscape – the Ancient Trees 1997 [sic]
ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 150,000
PROVENANCE
Collection of the artist, Brisbane Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Queensland, acquired from the above 18 April 2007
RELATED WORK
Creation landscape – the ancient trees, 1997, oil on canvas, 200.0 x 819.5 cm (overall), private collection, illus. in Darkness & Light: The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, pl. 72, pp. 128 – 129
While many Australian landscape painters traditionally looked towards Australia’s arid interior for inspiration, William Robinson embraced the rich rainforests and towering high country of Queensland mountain ranges for his most profound and important compositions. His unique contribution to the Australian landscape painting tradition involves a radical upending of conventional perspective to encompass the contrasting environments of rainforest and ocean; ground and sky; day and night; the elemental forces of wind, lightning, rain and fire.
The dramatic features of the granite belt, with its soaring cliffs, meandering rivers, creeks and plummeting waterfalls offer Robinson the material he requires to flex his masterly innovations. Each new series is built upon the achievements of the previous, as he pushes the boundaries of his artistic abilities and the conventions of landscape painting.
Amongst Robinson’s most powerful works is the earlier, vast triptych, Creation Landscape – the Ancient Trees , 1997 (private collection), inspired in part by a visit to the French High Gothic masterpiece, Chartres Cathedral. The central panel of the work features a stand of Antarctic Beech trees, believed to be two thousand years old, and
it is easy to compare these ancient giants to the towering buttresses that support the roof of the Cathedral – similarly reaching toward the heavens. Significantly, the present work, Creation Landscape – the Ancient Trees , 1998, was painted after the third panel of the large triptych and was intended for the artist’s private collection. Indeed, the artist felt so strongly about the third panel of his celebrated triptych, that in 1998, following a further visit to Chartres Cathedral, he returned and painted the present composition as a homage. Perhaps he wanted a tangible reminder after the art critic for The Weekend Australian Giles Auty gushed that: ‘…when I first set eyes yesterday on William Robinson’s Creation Landscape – the Ancient Trees , I realised I was standing before a work of primary importance in the whole history of painting in Australia.’1 In his most ambitious work, Robinson gives equal weight to the physical grandeur of ancient forms, as he does to the ephemeral elements of light, mist, mood and atmosphere. But through the 1990s at time when his faith may have been tested, Robinson’s work took on a much deeper spiritual quality.
In the act of painting there is a tipping point where the work 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 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. This state of oneness with the work is achieved by continuous immersion in the act of creation and Robinson typically works every day, all day – except Sundays. The artist is a deeply religious man, and his paintings can be viewed as a personal homage to the Creator. God rested on the sabbath and so does Robinson, reserving this day for reflection and music in humble observance of the Maker’s achievements. Like the Renaissance masters Robinson so much admires who grasped immortality through magnificent architecture and art, he too looks to the heavens for his inspiration.
– 29 March 1998, p. 3
1. Auty, G., ‘Auty Declares: I spy with my learned eye an Australian masterpiece’, The Weekend Australian, 28
HENRY MULHOLLAND
EMILY KAM KNGWARREYE
(c.1910 – 1996)
UNTITLED, 1995
synthetic polymer paint on linen 76.0 x 51.0 cm
signed verso: Emlly [sic] bears inscription verso: Delmore Gallery cat. 95A023
ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000
PROVENANCE
Commissioned in January 1995 by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs, Northern Territory Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above
Renowned for her colourful and vibrant recording of the ever-changing desert landscape in her father and grandfather’s Country of Alhalker, Emily Kngwarreye chronicled on canvas her custodial responsibility for the Yam and the Emu, reflecting Kngwarreye’s connection to country and Women’s ceremonies through body painting and dance. Located at the western edge of Utopia, this triangular shaped country was where Emily was born and where she lived in the traditional ways of the eastern Anmatyerr, following a way of life that had continued unchanged from long before European presence. Her mark-making recorded the seasonal variations, sometime subtle, often dramatic, of the harsh desert environment and the explosion of growth that occurred after rain. Referred to by Emily as the ‘green time’1, the desert would come to life with wildflowers carpeting the red earth and plants and grasses flourishing, supplying the women with seeds, tubers and fruit.
Through her use of pattern and colour, Kngwarreye had seemingly endless variations to call upon in the depiction of her country. Her paintings would often dissolve into fields of layered colour achieved through a build-up of dots upon dots as in Untitled , 1995. Here, meandering vertical lines of white, pink, yellow and red dots hover over an underlying grey ground. Kngwarreye bears witness though her painting to that abundance that carpets the earth after rain, sustaining country and celebrating the hardiness and fertility of their bush tucker and food sources, and in turn, her people’s own resilience.
Emily Kngwarreye , 1994 photographer: Greg Weight
gelatin silver photograph on paper
45.3 cm x 35.6 cm
National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Greg Weight
1. Isaacs, J., ‘Amatyerre Woman’ in Isaacs, J. et al., Emily Kame Kngwarreye Paintings Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 13
CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE
ALBERT NAMATJIRA (1902 – 1959)
GHOST GUM, CENTRAL AUSTRALIA watercolour on paper
23.0 x 34.0 cm
signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA
ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Perth
Thence by descent
Private collection, Perth
RELATED WORKS
Alice Springs Country, c.1955 – 59, watercolour on paper, 37.5 x 53.0 cm, private collection, illus. in French, A. (ed.), Seeing the Centre; The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 143 North Ranges Looking South, c.1950s, watercolour on paper, 30.5 x 41.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
‘Albert Namatjira was a phenomenon… a patient and observant man… who became a watercolourist of real distinction… who recorded what was familiar to him not only as something of sublime beauty, but as a repository of beliefs, laws and legends.’1
A household name by the 1950s, Albert Namatjira set the foundations for the Indigenous art movement that emerged thirty years later and still flourishes today. ‘In skillfully adopting the methods and materials of Western landscape painting he challenged the relegation of Aboriginal art to the realm of archaeology and ethnography.’2 His bright watercolours of central Australia contained an unprecedented richness,
and his depiction of the vivid and exuberant colours of Arrente country transported a mythical and predominantly unknown world into the lounge rooms of White Australians living in cities that hugged the coastal fringe.
Painted in the final years of the artist’s life, and replete with the artist’s recurring motifs, Ghost Gum Central Australia, epitomises Namatjira’s finest work. Located in the foreground, a majestic ghost gum, (Eucalyptus papuana), known as ilwempe to the Western Arrernte, is used as an animated object to frame the carefully controlled viewpoint from which the artist directs the viewer to the distant blue peaks through the intervening slopes in the middle distance. Namatjira’s familiarity with this country is evident in these views where ‘trees, peaks and monoliths provide a rich range of possibilities and responses that arise from constantly re-engaging with the same subject.’3
Namatjira’s dramatic entry into the Australian art world was groundbreaking. Despite his personal vicissitudes, he not only inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia through his art, but he also sought to educate White Australians about the spiritual link between Indigenous people and land. As Brenda Croft contends, the artist’s gift to Indigenous and nonIndigenous people is ‘more than the sum parts of watercolour paints on paper. It is an essence that resides in the strength of Namatjira’s work – his courage, his sorrow, his spirituality… where the enduring influence of this one man upon the entire indigenous arts and culture industry continues to be felt.’4
1. Lynn, E., ‘Introduction’ in Byrnes, M., Albert Namatjira, Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs 1984, p. 2
2. Watson, K., ‘Poetic Justice: an overview of Indigenous Art’, in Perkins, H., One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 20
3. French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 97
4. Croft, B., ‘Albert’s Gift’, in French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira, 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 148
CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE
ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999) WIMMERA, c .1972 oil on canvas
57.5 x 85.5 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd
ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 100,000
PROVENANCE
Ian Gawler, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1976
From his earliest impressionist views of the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne to the masterly depictions of his beloved Shoalhaven River, Arthur Boyd demonstrated a continuing fascination with the Australian landscape. His eye was drawn to the nuances and everchanging vagaries of nature, from the primordial tangle of the Australian bush to the various ways humanity had intervened with farming and mining. This preoccupation continued overseas at his English and Italian residences and where ‘(i)n a snow-bound studio he… envisioned the desert: in a garden of ash and maple trees, he … painted gum and wattle.’1 Wimmera, c.1972 is an evocative example of this aspect of Boyd’s expatriate’s vision, for ‘the Australian landscape, strongly held in memory, was as accessible to him in his Suffolk Studio as any where else.’ 2
Boyd first visited the Wimmera in Victoria’s heat-shimmered north-west in the summer of 1948 – 49, painting at the border of the Wimmera River. Many of the landscapes from this period are recognised masterworks by the artist and he continued to paint variations at different times in his life. These were not copies of or even homages to the earlier works; rather, each was a return by the artist to a treasured memory seeking to
re-depict it in a manner more closely aligned to his current psychological state of mind, creating a painterly oasis for calm reflection. During the 1970s, Boyd exhibited extensively in London and Australia, and following a visit to one such show at Fischer Fine Art, his younger colleague Brett Whiteley wrote to Boyd that ‘it really is remarkable and masterly of you to be able to hold that dry white heat of the bush in your head from 12,000 miles… So really congratulations on the feeling of pale intense beauty you have pulled out of the Australian bush, it’s such a great subject.’ 3
In Wimmera , c.1972, a rudimentary rain gutter provides water to a water tank which in turn feeds a small dam, the edges of which have been eroded by sheep’s hooves. The foreground is a close scattering of spiky native grasses and wheat, a semi-permeable barrier to the scene beyond. Wide verandahs encircle the distant homestead, though its galvanised tin roof receives little relief from the sun due to the complete deforestation of the home paddock. It feels insular, cut off from the outside world, a somnambulist scene which (in real life) would have been rent by the sound of screeching cockatoos. Birds always inhabit Boyd’s Wimmera paintings, others of which include crows and eagles, or in this case, a heron searching among the stalks for stray seeds and insects. Most likely painted at his Suffolk studio, Wimmera, c.1972, remains an inviting and nostalgic elegy to a cherished land by a revered Australian artist many thousands of miles from his home.
1. McGrath, S., ‘Boyd still the master’, The Australian, Sydney, 12 March 1980
2. Niall, B., The Boyds, Melbourne University Press, Victoria, 2007, p. 342
3. Brett Whiteley, cited in Bungey, D, Arthur Boyd: a life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, p. 497
ANDREW GAYNOR
FRED WILLIAMS
(1927 – 1982)
UPWEY LANDSCAPE, c .1965
gouache on paper
52.5 x 38.0 cm
signed lower centre: Fred Williams
ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000
PROVENANCE
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 21 August 2001, lot 62 (as ‘Hillside Upwey’)
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 20 April 2011, lot 56 (as ‘Hillside Upwey’)
Private collection, Sydney
EXHIBITED
Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 14 September 1982, cat. 105 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p.)
RELATED WORK
Upwey Landscape , 1964 – 65, gouache on paper, 55.0 x 38.0 cm, formerly in the collection of Gene and Brian Sherman, Sydney
We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.
One of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century, Fred Williams transformed the tradition of landscape painting in this country. His unique vision of the natural environment – from areas of scrubby bush on the edges of suburbia, to the vast inland country –captured its essence and created archetypal images that have become part of our collective visual memory. Produced during the mid-1960s at a time when Williams, confident and mature, emerged as a key figure in contemporary Australian art, the Upwey Series sits alongside the preceding You Yangs works as ‘classic’ Williams. Articulating their significance both within Williams’ oeuvre and the broader context of Australian landscape painting, Patrick McCaughey wrote, ‘They were clearly paintings of substance, well made and fully fashioned and yet they still allowed [his] touch to operate. They made of the drab
and featureless bush, a landscape of enduring, even monumental proportions and dignity. They revalued Australian landscape painting… and renewed hope in the genre.’1
While Williams had previously painted in and around Upwey, in the Dandenong Ranges to the east of Melbourne, it was the experience of living there from 1963 which provided the impetus for a major series. Now able to paint full-time, he established a studio in the house by joining two rooms together, and the view looking from the valley up the hill to the sky above informed the composition of these images, which are characterised by a narrow band of sky running across the top of a steep, treed slope. 2 The strength of the series was recognised early, with the National Gallery of Victoria acquiring Upwey Landscape III, 1965 from the studio the year it was painted. Major Upwey paintings also entered the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales and Tate, London.
Williams worked in various media throughout his career – the technical possibilities and creative innovations of one, influencing his work in another – and Upwey subjects feature in drawings, etchings, gouaches, as well as oil paintings. A quick-drying medium composed of watercolour mixed with white pigment (which renders it opaque), gouache was his preferred medium for painting outdoors during the mid-1960s. 3 As this example shows however, in addition to its convenience and ease of use, in Williams’ hands, gouache also offered something of the richness of oil paint in terms of the pictorial possibilities and textural manipulation it allowed. The familiar format of the Upwey landscapes is combined here with a luscious wintry palette, a hillside of deep browns, ochre, grey and highlights of ultramarine, beneath a pale sky streaked with painterly clouds. Williams’ trademark daubs and dots of paint describe dense vegetation growing across the top of the hill while tree trunks, strongly defined in black, mark out the topography of the hillside, the verticals of standing trees creating a staccato-like rhythm across the picture which is counterbalanced by the series of horizontal sweeps in the foreground.
1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, p. 170
2. See Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 89
3. In the late 1960s Williams began to make small outdoor oil sketches, adding synthetic polymer paint to his repertoire of outdoor materials in 1971.
KIRSTY GRANT
ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)
SHOALHAVEN RIVER VI, 1975 oil on canvas
58.5 x 86.0 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription on frame verso: AG 2361 bears inscription verso: F25/5 / AG
ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE
Australian Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above 2 December 1975
‘The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly. His paintings are a celebration of grandeur and wonder of Nature. It is to Boyd’s credit that a single landscape can inspire such diversity of work. He gives us the impression that there are infinite possibilities, as long as we train ourselves to see.’1
Eager to rediscover his roots, his ‘Australianism’, after more than a decade abroad, in 1971 Arthur Boyd returned to the country of his birth to take up a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Over the blazing summer of 1971 – 72, Boyd and his wife Yvonne were invited by the Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald to visit Bundanon for the weekend, staying at a home he shared on the south coast of New South Wales with art historian Sandra McGrath and her husband Tony. Here the artist’s joyful rediscovery of the Australian bush with its stark contrasts and clarity of light was nothing short of an epiphany, and thus in 1974, Boyd purchased the nearby property Riversdale on the banks of the Shoalhaven River. Once again, the magic of the dour, untamed Australian landscape became the impetus for his art, and over the subsequent twenty-five years until his death in 1999, Boyd would dedicate himself almost exclusively to capturing the myriad moods of the Shoalhaven in images that are today imprinted upon the national psyche as some of our most beloved and iconic.
Soul-piercing in its beauty, the Shoalhaven region offered both refreshing solace for the artist’s world-weary eyes, and endless potential as a subject – ‘the variation in the area with its great deep tones and high keys’ bearing strong affinities with music. As Boyd elaborated, ‘in the desert there is only one note, just one low singing note. In this landscape the tonal range – not tonal in the obvious sense of colour, but the actual fact of the horizon which can vary from very high to low, to infinite, depending on your line of vision – makes it a greater challenge. It has a knife-edged clarity. Impressionism could never have been born here, but Wagner could easily have composed here.’ 2 Wild and primordial, the region differed completely from the ordered English countryside to which he had grown accustomed and thus, a new vision was required to unlock its tangled mysteries. If previously Breughel and Rembrandt had offered inspiration, now Von Guérard, Piguenit and Buvelot became Boyd’s spiritual mentors.
With its shimmering light, vibrant palette and signature format of the landscape divided into three horizontal bands of air, earth and water, Shoalhaven River VI, 1975 offers a superb example of the early, ‘pure’ Shoalhaven landscapes which – devoid of the mythological creatures and symbolic narrative punctuating later versions – simply pay homage to the sheer beauty, grandeur and wonder of Nature. Capturing the beauty of the Shoalhaven in the blistering heat of a midday sun, indeed the work is a poignant reminder of how Boyd, comfortable once more with the eternal diversity of the Australian landscape, ultimately did tame his wilderness: ‘...what was unfamiliar became familiar, what was menacing became friendly, what was awesome became inti mate.’ 3
1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 42
2. Boyd quoted in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, pp. 26 – 27
3. McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 79
VERONICA ANGELATOS
ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)
WIMMERA LANDSCAPE, c .1982 oil on composition board
90.0 x 120.0 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd
ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000
PROVENANCE
Calvary Hospital Auxiliary, Canberra
Private collection, Canberra, acquired from the above in January 1983
Estate of the above, Victoria
EXHIBITED
Calvary Hospital Art Exhibition, Calvary Hospital, Canberra, 1982, cat. 34
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 golden 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 England and Italy. A later iteration completed during the early 1980s, Wimmera Landscape , c.1982 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 shimmering palette, the image is one of intimacy and warmth, with the radiant glow of the midday sun imparting 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
JOHN OLSEN (1928 – 2023)
DESERT LAKE, KIMBERLEY, 1997
watercolour and pastel on paper
100.0 x 94.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: John / Olsen 97
ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 28 April 2010, lot 56
Private collection, New South Wales
We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s writing in this catalogue entry.
Desert Lake, Kimberley, 1997 demonstrates well John Olsen’s brilliance as a master watercolourist. Here is the same fluidity of medium as in his oils, lyrically translucent or built up in a series of washes, sometimes overlaid with pastel for greater effect, while the intricacy and lively boldness of line also captures the viewer’s attention. In paintings such as Desert Lake, Kimberley, one experiences both the artist’s visual and emotional response to the landscape, achieved through Olsen’s engaging style and extension of his lively personality into the painting. He often adds a particular image, word or line – in this painting, the shadow of an aeroplane that acts as a metaphorical link. Miniscule in the vastness of the landscape, it complements the witty meanderings of his line, restless and vital. There is also that characteristic Olsen informality, encouraged as much by the off-centre placement of the lake, as the casualness of the whole composition. The curve of water
to one side features in other Olsen works of the time, especially the oil, Bathurst Butter, 1999, which Olsen gave to his wife at the time, Katherine Howard, on their tenth wedding anniversary.
Olsen’s fascination with the aerial view enables him to give his landscapes breadth and spaciousness – the sight, as well as the feel of the Australian outback. As the eye ascends the picture plane of Desert Lake, Kimberley, it is brought back to ‘reality’ by the abiding horizon line of the conventional landscape format and the field of blue sky. A device also used in the painting Road to Bathurst, 1997, and many other works, the flatness achieved through the shallowness of the picture field is contrasted with the illusion of depth in the sky. Map-like, the aerial view details the form of the land and reflections in the lake, of Olsen’s ability to capture the sense of long-awaited desert rain, and in other watercolours, of tropical damp. The folds of the landscape in Desert Lake, Kimberley are reminiscent of Sidney Nolan's central Australian landscapes of 1950, one seen from above, the other in profile.
The year 1997, from which this watercolour dates, was like so many others a significant one for Olsen, especially for the publication of his autobiography, Drawn from Life . This followed Deborah Hart’s fine monograph published by Craftsman House in 1991, and later the appropriately titled Teeming with Life: John Olsen; His Complete Graphics 1957 – 2005 , published by Macmillan Art Publishing in 2005. Twice winner of the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, his retrospective exhibition shown at the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales during 1991 – 92 confirmed his enduring place as one of Australia’s finest artists.
DAVID THOMAS
YVONNE AUDETTE
born 1930
STORM OVER THE BAY, 1989 oil on composition board
83.0 x 103.5 cm
signed with initial and dated lower right: A / 1989 signed and inscribed with title verso: Storm over the / bay. / Audette
ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000
PROVENANCE
Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in October 2009
EXHIBITED
Water, Wind and Fire: The Art of Yvonne Audett e, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, 4 – 29 July 2009, cat. 5
Well-heeled, well-travelled, and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant-Garde, Yvonne Audette cut an unusual figure in the Australian art scene upon her return in the late 1960s. Having spent many years living in New York and Italy, Audette had matured as a painter, transitioning into a subtle and nuanced abstract style derived from the ambiguous mark-making of European ‘Art Informel’. She would spend three years in Sydney before moving permanently to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, seeking a tree-change. ‘I chose the Dandenong Ranges where I could be close to nature, surrounded by the landscape. Having travelled and moved since 1952, from city to city, I had never lived in the bush, never had I allowed myself the luxury to wake up to the sounds of nature at my doorstep.’1 This vivid and gestural landscape, Storm over the Bay, painted in 1989, reflects this profound change of focus in the artist’s oeuvre – from rigidly geometric urban abstracts to expansive and painterly calligraphy linked to the elemental shapes and rhythms of the physical world.
Shot with pearlescent lilacs and turquoise hues above a faint horizon, Storm over the Bay is a dramatic and ambiguously abstract evocation of the buffeting winds and surf as a storm cell travels over Port Phillip Bay. The vast horseshoe bay, entrance to Melbourne and Geelong, provided
an ever-changing atmospheric subject for Audette’s later paintings, while her new house in the mountains surrounded by towering ash trees carried the threat natural drama in their proneness to bushfires. Thus, the grandiose theatre of the Australian landscape provided a vital thematic source for the painter throughout the 1980s, rendering the resulting works more specifically Antipodean than they had ever been before – a change from the internationalism of her early abstract works which had embodied ‘a unique blend of American energy and European sophistication.’2
While her subject matter was different, Audette’s approach to markmaking and composition has never wavered: a lyrical accretion of unblended geometric lines and blocky dashes built up and scraped back to reveal the tension of a hundred consecutive decisions. Indeed, Audette’s paintings are often more than the sum of their parts, not clean-edged and decisive, but ambiguous and edging closer to a resolution built up over time in small increments. Storm over the Bay is painted in a restricted colour palette almost entirely composed of vibrant blues, purples and greens, with rare glimpses of Naples yellow, peach and pink through its interstices. Audette’s overlay of strong black diagonal and rectilinear guiding lines provide the skeletal evocations of ship masts, jetties, the horizon and jagged atmospheric phenomena.
The history of art in Australia is indebted to Audette’s choice to return. For all her thrilling globe-trotting, the pull of the Australian landscape was too strong to ignore. She returned to these shores convinced that the country’s comparative isolation presented a strong opportunity for Australian artists to forge their own path in abstract art, one that was an expression of national identity rather than one opposed to it. Within this milieu, Audette holds a unique place as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in as a gestural abstract painter.
1. The artist’s notes, February 2003, cited in Adams, B., ‘Yvonne Audette, The Later Years’ in Heathcote, C. et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 163
2. Thomas, D., Yvonne Audette – 1950s – 2008 , Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, 2008, p. 5
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH
TONY TUCKSON (1921 – 1973)
SEATED NUDE NO. 3 (TD 473), 1952 – 56 oil wash on paper
102.0 x 76.5 cm
ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 16,000
39
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Sydney Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2005
EXHIBITED
Tony Tuckson: Woman, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 15 February – 12 March 2005, cat. 14 (illus. in exhibition catalogue)
LITERATURE
Thomas, D., Legge, G., & Free, R., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, fig. 52 (illus.), p. 149
TONY TUCKSON
(1921 – 1973)
MAN’S HEAD NO. 1 (TP 337), c .1949 oil on canvas
51.0 x 40.5 cm
ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000
PROVENANCE
Estate of the artist, Sydney
Watters Gallery, Sydney (label attached on backing verso)
Jan Reid, Sydney
Justin Miller Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney
40 EXHIBITED
Tony Tuckson...heads, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 6 – 23
September 1995, cat. 1 (illus. on catalogue cover)
A Selection from a Significant Collection, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 21 March – 8 April 2017, cat. 23
LITERATURE
Thomas, D., Maloon, T., Free, R., & Legge, G., Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2006, pl. 19, p. 61 (illus., reversed)
JOHN PERCEVAL
(1923 – 2000)
BOATS AND MOONS, 1943 oil on composition board
54.5 x 43.5 cm
signed and dated lower right: Perceval / '43
ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000
PROVENANCE
Collection of the artist, Melbourne Acland Street Gallery, Melbourne, 1987 Irving Fine Art, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney M. J. Dougherty, by 1992
Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above c.1994
EXHIBITED
John Perceval, Albert Hall, Australian National University, Canberra, 14 – 27 July 1966, cat. 13 (label attached verso)
John Perceval, A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings 1935 – 1972, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 10 July – 26 August 1984, cat. 12
Of Dark and Light, The Art of John Perceval, retrospective exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 30 April – 12 July 1992; Art Gallery of New South Wales, 6 August – 20 September 1992 (label attached verso)
LITERATURE
Reid, B., Of Dark and Light, The Art of John Perceval, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1992, p. 16 Allen, T., John Perceva l, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 41 (illus.), 42, 148
We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s writing in this catalogue entry.
John Perceval’s art is strikingly individual, seen equally in those night paintings of the forties as in his later Gaffney’s Creek and Williamstown series. Nowhere is such originality more apparent than Boats and Moons , 1943 with its pulsating rhythms and idiosyncratic images. The youngest of those pioneering Melbourne artists of the 1940s – Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Danila Vassilieff and others – the passionate involvement of Perceval and his contemporaries in the urban life around them completely changed the direction of Australian art. It
was wartime. Perceval, Boyd and Nolan were uncomfortably in uniform, and the streets of Melbourne were packed with soldiers, especially American. John Reed evoked the mood:
‘At night, and particularly around Flinders Street station, the scene was something to remember, with thousands of people, mostly in uniform, and with a fair sprinkling of the inevitable camp-followers, all aimlessly milling around, with nothing much to do and only too ready to be entertained with any drama or comedy which might eventuate.’1
Reed saw Perceval ‘having the time of his life’, noting that he was ‘drawn to people where a certain atmosphere exists’, to ‘the tension of a crowd, or the particular air of an hotel or bar.’2 It was this feeling of integration that Reed rightly saw as being a distinguishing feature of Perceval’s art. Moreover, he took the lead in his painted experiences of the city at night, preceding those of Tucker’s Images of Modern Evil. Masterpieces from this period include Negroes at Night, 1944, housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Flinders Street at Night, 1943 – 44 (private collection) which, featuring a female dancer with a death mask and two trumpet players all united in erotic frenzy, offers a macabre commentary upon the slaughter of human life and distorted social relations produced by the war.
A major work from this period, Boats and Moons is closely related to Railway by Night, 1943 (Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art) in which Perceval introduced the State Theatre as the architectural background. As in this latter composition from the same year with its motif of the crescent moon-come-sail-come-boat, the scene in Boats and Moons is nearby Flinders Street station. The gothic tower and spire complete with grotesque gargoyle refer to St Paul’s Cathedral and the arched bridge to Princes Bridge across the Yarra River. The rest is pure fantasy – the repeated shapes of the descending crescent moon transformed into boats, sails, and a gondola of grand proportions and colour. The touch of Venice and its Carnivale culminates in the costumed foreground figures, masked, yet revealing in their revels. Perceval’s early attachment to scenes bubbling with life and bobbing boats was later to be richly realised in the fullness of maritime busyness in his great Williamstown series of paintings.
1. Reed, J., ‘John Perceval’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 5, no. 1, June 1967, pp. 354, 358
2. ibid., p. 358
DAVID THOMAS
ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999)
THE PRINCESS OF SHAMAKHAN (FROM A PUSHKIN FAIRYTALE) VERSION II, 1983 oil on canvas
152.5 x 122.0 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd
ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000
PROVENANCE
Fischer Fine Art Limited, London (label attached verso)
Bonython-Meadmore Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Adelaide, acquired from the above in 1984
EXHIBITED
Arthur Boyd: Recent Work, Fischer Fine Art Limited, London, 26 October – 25 November 1983, cat. 16 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, p. 14)
Arthur Boyd, Bonython-Meadmore Gallery, Adelaide, 30 November – 22 December 1984, cat. 8
LITERATURE
Forwood, G., ‘Ballets Russes: from St Petersburg to St Kilda,’ Art and Australia, vol. 26, no. 2, Summer 1988, p. 273 (illus.)
As a child, Arthur Boyd was mesmerised by the Old Testament stories his grandmother read to him from the lavishly illustrated family bible. These and related allegorical tales, full of human frailty and struggle, appealed to Boyd’s humanist nature so it is not surprising that a number of his celebrated works were based on subjects including the expulsion of Adam and Eve, the return of the Prodigal Son, the dissembling of Nebuchadnezzar, or Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. Boyd was the most talented of his artistic family and demonstrated formidable skills in painting, ceramics, drawing and printmaking, the latter of which were utilised in a number of collaborative books with the poet Peter Porter. A similar project was a translation of fairy tales by the Russian author Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 – 1837), illustrated by Boyd and published in 1978,1 which included an earlier lithographic rendering of The Princess of Shamakhan (from a Pushkin Fairytale) Version II, 1983.
The Princess appears in Pushkin’s The Tale of the Golden Cockerel (1834) which tells of a seductive but malevolent siren who lures a hapless Tsar in search of the sons he had sent off to war: ‘Day and night they moved on; it was becoming unbearable. They found no sign of killing… Suddenly, among the highest peaks, they saw a silken tent.’ Here, the Tsar found his fallen army and the bodies of his sons ‘dead, without their armour, their swords driven through each other.’ The tent opened and an apparition appears, ‘a princess of Shamakhan, shimmering with beauty like the dawn’ who led the Tsar, now washed of his sadness, into her domain ‘in utter entrancement, spellbound.’ 2 On returning to his kingdom, the Princess’ dark intentions are revealed and the Tsar dies from his delusion. It is a tale of the folly of human vanity that appealed to Boyd and he painted a larger version The Princess of Shoalhaven, 1978, with the eponymous river winding sinuously to the left.
Boyd revisited the theme in The Princess of Shamakhan, Version II, a far more personalised variant using the concept of a Biblical grand narrative but one located within an unmistakably Australian setting. As before, the Princess is shown in all her alluring nudity as she steps from her tent, the hapless Tsar fallen at her feet. Yet whilst The Princess of Shoalhaven is almost monochromatic, this second version is enriched with reds and ochres which amplify the sensuality of the scene. This atmosphere is further charged by the background of a tumbling river nestled in a cleft surrounded by spiky forests reminiscent of the artist’s celebrated nudes and ‘brides’ from the early 1960s. Boyd did not shy away from sexuality in his paintings and indeed the background of The Princess of Shamakhan, Version II is based on the clefts of the Shoalhaven River which to Boyd, had ‘a meaning to me apart from their geological grandeur. At times they seem quite erotic and explicitly anatomically sexual.’ 3 When originally exhibited in 1983, the painting was shown alongside other works by Boyd inspired by Gustave Courbet, and indeed, allusions may also be found here to Courbet’s The Source , 1862 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) showing a naked woman in front of a small waterfall emerging from the rocks.4
1. Dalley, J. (trans.), Pushkin’s Fairy Tales, lithographs by Arthur Boyd, Barrie & Jenkins, London, 1978, n.p. Shamakhan is likely based on Shamakhi, home to the biggest mosque in Azerbaijan.
2. All quotes taken from Dalley, ibid.
3. Arthur Boyd: Recent Work, Fischer Fine Art Limited, London, 1983, p. 15
4. See Faunce, S., ‘Courbet: feminist in spite of himself’, in Pearce, B. (ed.), Body, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, pp. 95 – 108 ANDREW GAYNOR
(1879 – 1965)
FLEURS oil on canvas on board
46.0 x 55.0 cm
signed with initials lower left: B.D. signed and inscribed with title verso: “Fleurs” / Bessie Davidson / Paris
ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000
43 PROVENANCE probably Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Adelaide
BESSIE DAVIDSON
DAVIDSON (1879 – 1965)
LE CHATEAU
oil on plywood on composition board
88.5 x 72.5 cm
signed lower right: Bessie Davidson bears inscription verso: 12
ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000
44 PROVENANCE
Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide (label attached verso)
Private collection, Adelaide
EXHIBITED
Exhibition of Paintings by Bessie Davidson, Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide, 31 May – 13 June 1967, cat. 12
BESSIE
MORTIMER MENPES
(1855 – 1938)
GOING TO BED – ENGLAND, c .1889
oil on board
40.5 x 31.5 cm
signed lower left: Mortimer Menpes bears inscription verso: 186 / Going to Bed / World’s Children / No 6 / England
ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000 (2)
PROVENANCE
Private collection, UK
Lawrences Auctioneers, Somerset, 18 January 2019, lot 1943
Private collection, Sydney
LITERATURE
Menpes, M., & Menpes, D., World’s Children,
A. & C. Black, London, 1903, pl. 6 (illus.)
accompanied by
MORTIMER MENPES
(1855 – 1938)
GOING TO BED (ENGLAND), c .1889 etching in colours
11.0 x 8.0 cm
edition: unknown (no other recorded copies) signed lower right below image (faded) bears inscription on label attached verso: “Study of a Child”
PROVENANCE
Kenulf Gallery, Gloucestershire, UK (label attached verso)
Mallams, Oxford, UK, 26 February 2020, lot 81
Private collection, Sydney
LITERATURE
This work will be included in a forthcoming Supplement to Morgan, G., The Etched Works of Mortimer Menpes (1855 - 1938), Stuart Galleries, Adelaide, 2012
According to Gary Morgan, author of the catalogue raisonné The Etched Works of Mortimer Menpes , this painting and etching likely depicts one of the artist's children, possibly Dorothy Whistler Menpes (born 1883).1 Dorothy co-authored several illustrated books with her father, including World's Children, 1903, in which the painting Going to bed – England is illustrated. Menpes was a devoted follower of American artist James McNeill Whistler, and despite a dramatic falling out in 1888, Menpes remained an admirer.
Having attended Whistler's funeral in 1903, Menpes wrote the memoir, Whistler as I Knew Him, published in 1904. 2 Dedicated to Dorothy, the frontispiece of the limited edition (of 500) of Whistler as I Knew Him, was an etching by Whistler, The Menpes Children, which Whistler originally produced in 1887. 3 Dorothy, who was four at the time, would have been one of the children featured in the etching. The frontispiece of the other editions of Whistler as I Knew Him featured a portrait of Whistler painted by Menpes.
1. Correspondence with Gary Morgan, 23 March 2020
2. Menpes, M., Whistler as I Knew Him, A. and C. Black, London, 1904
3. James McNeill
Whistler, The Menpes Children, 1887, etching, in Kennedy, E. G., The Etched Work of Whistler, New York, 1910, cat. 261
GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984)
HILL IN THE BUSH, 1952 oil on cardboard
27.0 x 22.0 cm
signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 52 signed and inscribed with title on artist’s handwritten label verso: Hill in the Bush / Grace Cossington Smith / 40 Gns.
ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009
EXHIBITED
Landscape Exhibition, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 22 October – 3 November 1958, cat. 25 (label attached verso) Christmas Exhibition, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 9 – 23 December 1959, cat. 23
Macquarie Galleries Adelaide exhibition, Royal South Australia Society of Arts, Adelaide, 30 August – 10 September 1960, cat. 76 (bears inscription on label verso)
GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984)
LANDSCAPE, 1950 oil on canvas on board 33.0 x 40.5 cm
signed and dated lower left: G. Cossington Smith 1950
ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000
47
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2009
EXHIBITED
probably Macquarie Galleries Adelaide exhibition, Royal South Australia Society of Arts, Adelaide, 30 August –10 September 1960, cat. 74 (bears inscription on label verso)
CHARLES BLACKMAN (1928 – 2018)
ST KILDA PROMENADE, 1951 enamel on board
45.5 x 56.5 cm
signed lower left: BLACKMAN
signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ST KILDA PROMENADE / BLACKMAN 1951 XMAS
ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, acquired directly from the artist
Thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne
Eastgate Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2004
48 In 1951, Charles Blackman moved to Melbourne where he found the urban environment congenial to his work which reflected domestic and city life, as well as themes stimulated by the literature he was reading at the time. During this first year in Melbourne, Blackman also discovered the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where he would travel by tram to swim, draw and visit Luna Park. The drawings led to a series of paintings on the same theme, one of which, Luna Park , c.1951 – 52, is today housed in the National Gallery of Australia. The present composition features the Esplanade in St Kilda with its distinctive lights designed by the architect Walter Burley Griffin.
HERMAN (1898 – 1993)
46.0 x 66.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: S. Herman, 65
ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000
49 PROVENANCE
Private collection
Sotheby’s, Sydney, 14 August 1990, lot 294
Henry Krongold, Melbourne
Thence by descent
Private collection, Melbourne
SALI
TERRACE HOUSE, WOOLLOOMOOLOO, 1965 oil on canvas
BESSIE DAVIDSON (1879 – 1965)
PAYSAGE PUYCERDA (ESPAGNE), c .1930 oil on compressed card
22.0 x 27.0 cm
signed lower right: Bessie Davidson inscribed with title verso: No 4. Paysage Puycerda (Espagne)
ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, France
Montargis Enchères, France, 27 January 2024, lot 282
Private collection, France
KATHLEEN SAUERBIER (1903 – 1991)
FLOWERS IN GREEN CERAMIC JUG oil on canvas on board
69.0 x 52.0 cm
signed lower left: K. SAUERBIER / K Sauerbier
ESTIMATE: $6,000 – 9,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, Adelaide
RUPERT BUNNY
(1864 – 1947)
FRENCH RIVER SCENE, c .1898 oil on canvas
55.5 x 46.0 cm
signed lower left: Rupert C.W. Bunny
ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000
52 PROVENANCE
Private collection
Christie’s, Melbourne, 27 November 2001, lot 41
Private collection, Melbourne
LITERATURE
Thomas, D., The Life and Art of Rupert Bunny, A Catalogue Raisonné in Two Volumes , Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2017, cat. O111, vol. II, p. 25
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PETER RUSSELL (1858 – 1930)
Souvenir de Belle-Île (Marianna Russell with Goats, Goulphar, Belle-Île), 1897 oil on canvas, 65.0 x 81.5 cm
Sold for $3,927,273 (inc. BP) August 2023, Melbourne
JOHN
