TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART + IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

Twenty Classics of Australian Art + I M P O R TA N T A U S T R A L I A N A N D I N T E R N AT I O N A L F I N E A R T AUCTION • MELBOURNE • 11 NOVEMBER 2020

Twenty Classics of Australian Art Lots 1 – 20

Important Australian + International Fine Art Lots 21 – 63

IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL ART AUCTION • MELBOURNE • 11 NOVEMBER 2020

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

SYDNEY • VIEWING 16 goodhope street, paddington, new south wales, 2021 telephone: 02 9287 0600 • facsimile: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

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melbourne auction

sydney viewing

melbourne viewing

absentee/telephone bids

live online bidding

LOTS 1 – 63 WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER 2020 7:00pm 105 commercial road south yarra, vic telephone: 03 9865 6333 THURSDAY 22 OCTOBER – SUNDAY 1 NOVEMBER 16 goodhope street paddington, nsw telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00am – 6:00pm THURSDAY 5 – WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER By appointment only 105 commercial road south yarra, vic telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00am – 6:00pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 telephone bid form – p. 153 absentee bid form – p. 154 www.deutscherandhackett.com/watch-live-auction

www.deutscherandhackett.com • info@deutscherandhackett.com

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specialists

CHRIS DEUTSCHER executive director — melbourne Chris is a graduate of Melbourne University and has over 40 years art dealing, auction and valuation experience as Director of Deutscher Fine Art and subsequently as co-founder and Executive Director of Deutscher~Menzies. He has extensively advised private, corporate and museum art collections and been responsible for numerous Australian art publications and landmark exhibitions.

He is also an approved valuer under the Cultural Gifts Program.

DAMIAN HACKETT executive director — sydney Damian has over 30 years experience in public and commercial galleries and the fine art auction market. After completing a BA (Visual Arts) at the University of New England, he was Assistant Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and in 1993 joined Rex Irwin Art Dealer, a leading commercial gallery in Sydney. In 2001, Damian moved into the fine art auction market as Head of Australian and International art for Phillips de Pury and Luxembourg, and from 2002 – 2006 was National Director of Deutscher~Menzies.

HENRY MULHOLLAND senior art specialist Henry Mulholland is a graduate of the National Art School in Sydney, and has had a successful career as an exhibiting artist. Since 2000, Henry has also been a regular art critic on ABC Radio 702. He was artistic advisor to the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust Basil Sellers Sculpture Project, and since 2007 a regular feature of Sculpture by the Sea, leading tours for corporate stakeholders and conducting artist talks in Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. Prior to joining Deutscher & Hackett, Henry’s fine art consultancy provided a range of services, with a particular focus on collection management and acquiring artworks for clients on the secondary market.

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE head of aboriginal art and senior art specialist Crispin holds a Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts and History) from Monash University.

In 1995, he began working for Sotheby’s Australia, where he became the representative for Aboriginal art in Melbourne. In 2006 Crispin joined Joel Fine Art as head of Aboriginal and Contemporary Art and later was appointed head of the Sydney office. He possesses extensive knowledge of Aboriginal art and has over 20 years experience in the Australian fine art auction market.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH contemporary art specialist and gallery manager – sydney Lucie completed her studies in Belgium, obtaining Masters of Arts in Art History (Modern and Contemporary Art), together with a Bachelors of Art History, Archaeology and Musicology from the Université Catholique de Louvain. Since returning to Australia in 2014, she has gained sound experience in cataloguing, research and arts writing through various roles with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and with private art advisory firms Tutela Capital and LoveArt International.

VERONICA ANGELATOS senior researcher & writer Veronica has a Master of Arts (Art Curatorship and Museum Management), together with a Bachelor of Arts/Law (Honours) and Diploma of Modern Languages from the University of Melbourne. She has strong curatorial and research expertise, having worked at various art museums including the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice and National Gallery of Victoria, and more recently, in the commercial sphere as Senior Art Specialist at Deutscher~Menzies. She is also the author of numerous articles and publications on Australian and International Art.

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specialists

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.

CLAIRE KURZMANN head of online sales, gallery manager - melbourne Claire has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) from the University of Melbourne.

She gained several years’ experience working as Gallery Assistant at Metro Gallery, Melbourne, assisting with exhibitions, events and marketing. She has acted as Artist Liaison for the Arts Centre Melbourne, coordinating aspects of artist care and has gained experience as a Studio Assistant for a number of emerging Australian artists.

MARA SISON registrar Mara has a Bachelor of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines and a Master of Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies from Deakin University. She gained her experience in the private and not-for-profit sectors as a Gallery Manager and Exhibitions Coordinator for MiFA Asian Contemporary Art and Melbourne Fine Art Galleries and as an Administration Officer for Australia China Art Foundation.

ALEX CRESWICK head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 15 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts. Alex is currently completing his CPA.

DANNY KNEEBONE design and photography manager Danny Kneebone is an award-winning Photographer and Graphic Designer with over 30 years of experience. He was Art Director at Christie’s Australia from 19982007 and then Senior Designer and Photographer at Sotheby’s Australia from 2007-2019. Danny specialises in design, photography, colour management and production and has won many print and design awards for his work. Danny is also an artist in his own right, holding regular solo and group exhibitions, and winning over 50 national and international photography awards.

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specialists for this auction

Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150 Damian Hackett 0422 811 034 Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738 Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052 AUCTIONEER Roger McIlroy Scott Livesey ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333 Lucie Reeves-Smith (Sydney) 02 9287 0600 ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS Claire Kurzmann 03 9865 6333 please complete the absentee bid form (p. 154) or telephone bid form (p. 153) SHIPPING Veronica Angelatos 03 9865 6333 CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Claire Kurzmann 03 9865 6333

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contents lots 1 — 63

page

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prospective buyers and sellers guide

page 146

conditions of auction and sale

page 148

catalogue subscription form

page 151

attendee pre-registration form

page 152

telephone bid form

page 153

absentee bid form

page 154

index

page 163

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part 1

TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART LOTS 1 – 20

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MAX DUPAIN

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(1911 – 1992) SUNBAKER, 1937 printed 1970s silver gelatin photograph 36.5 x 43.0 cm (sight) signed and dated in image lower right: – Max Dupain ‘37 – signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Sunbaker 1937 / – Max Dupain – ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 28 June 2005, lot 458 Private collection, Sydney 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

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 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 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., The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, p. 46 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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BEN QUILTY

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born 1973 PAUL’S FALCON, 2008 oil on linen 183.0 x 214.0 cm signed and inscribed verso: XA Ben Quilty signed, dated and inscribed verso: XA / 2008 / Ben Quilty ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Slade, L. (ed.), Ben Quilty, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2009, pp. 12 – 13 (illus. in studio with artist)

‘As the car came to life, he settled back in his seat. And instantly, all the niggling problems he knew he’d have to deal with seemed totally unimportant’ – General Motors Holden advertisement, The National Times Colour Magazine, 1 October 1982 Ben Quilty’s car paintings constituted his breakthrough moment in the Sydney art scene, emerging from a personal experience of growing up in the suburban outskirts of Sydney, where there was little else to do than hoon around the streets in an elaborate and foolish display of youthful bravado and testosterone. The old maxim of ’paint what you know’ has served Quilty well, and sustained a vast series of candy-coloured and lusciously thick paintings of iconic Australian cars, culminating with this painting of the powerfully masculine muscle car, the Ford Falcon XA (GT) coupe. This one here belongs to Paul, the artist’s friend and fellow rev-head.

As Lisa Slade noted in 2009, ’Cars are, of course, a type of currency – not only do they reflect the identity of their owners, but they also provide a means of bartering, and sometimes altering that identity.’1 Borne of a friendship with the car’s owner, this painting was first imagined as a swap, before the artist found his own, metallic blue XB model. Displayed front-on and posing for the camera in a double-portrait, dominating the little Subaru behind it, owned by Paul’s partner, Jenny, Paul’s Falcon hums with pride. Personified to a point, on the cusp of springing into an anthropomorphised machine, the car is both a portrait and a landscape, describing the strong link between the car and the freedom it lends to the owner to exist within and roam the vast Australian land.

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Considering Australia rates 4th in the world for car ownership per capita, the visual symbol of a second-hand statement car is both ubiquitous and a relatable prism through which Australians have experienced and acted upon the landscape.

The Ford Falcon was known for its distinctive coke bottle shape (a narrow centre surrounded by flaring fenders), lightweight and packed with a powerful V8 engine. The Falcon’s aggressive design evoked a swift, strong and menacing presence that appealed to young men.

Quilty’s signature trowelled application of paint mirrors this emphatic presence, the peaks of paint jutting towards the viewer, extending in paint the forward surge of the car’s own exaggerated forms. Sculpted in harmonious bruise-like tones of black, lilac, slate and ecru with highlights of turquoise, green and pale ochre, the lines follow the bold forms of the car’s drag-racing silhouette. This effect is further reinforced by the expansive gestures of wide brushstrokes in the areas surrounding the car, orthogonal above the car and almost scribbled below, supporting and highlighting the inherent dynamism of the vehicle, poised to roar into action. The paint is frozen in a testament to Quilty’s vigorous fervour and enjoyment of the act of painting, so long as his formal enthusiasm remains subordinate to figuration and realist aesthetics.

Resonating with national significance, this muscle car was released in the peak years of Australian automotive optimism. Locally manufactured and affordably maintained, the high-performance muscle cars of the 1970s were made famous as a feature within George Miller’s trilogy of Mad Max films and today have become highly-prized collector’s items.

Although Quilty often painted these empty cars with doors and bonnets flung open to proudly display their impressive internal mechanics, Paul’s Falcon isn’t peacocking. Quietly parked, its power still emanates through the thick layers of paint, conferring heady confidence-building fumes of what Lisa Slade jokingly called the ’white yobbo dreaming’. 2 1. Slade, L., ‘Ben Quilty – We are History’, Ben Quilty Live!, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2009, p. 22 2. ibid, p. 14 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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LIN ONUS

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(1948 – 1996) DAWN AT NUMERILI, 1993 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 91.0 x 121.5 cm signed lower right: Lin Onus ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1993 (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne Susan McCulloch, Melbourne Caruana and Reid, Sydney (as ‘Dawn at Numillah’) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2004 EXHIBITED Lin Onus: There and Back: An Exhibition of Recent Paintings and Sculpture, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 15 July – 17 August 1993 Lin Onus, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi at ARCO 94, Madrid, Spain, 1994 (as ‘Nubes Juntándose, 1993; de la Serie 24 horas en Numerili’ (Clouds Gathering, 1993; from the series 24 hours at Numerili)) In Lin Onus’ retrospective catalogue, Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus, curator Margo Neale chronicles that from 1986 – 96, he made sixteen ‘spiritual pilgrimages’ to the outstation of Gamardi, the home of his mentor Jack Wunuwun in Central Arnhem land.1 Having first met Wunuwun at Maningrida in 1986 while travelling in his role as the Victorian representative for the Aboriginal Arts Board, his life’s direction from that moment was deeply influenced by this encounter with the late Yolngu elder and artist, who had adopted him as his own son.

Although Onus had explored a range of imagery relating to dispossession, he described himself primarily as a landscape artist until 1986, when he began to title his works using the language of his adoptive family, and his work developed into a combination of images of land depicted in Western style incorporating Aboriginal imagery and stories. Wunuwun was able to offer Onus a kind of cultural sanctuary by welcoming him into the Yolngu kinship system. This relationship 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. Onus acquired his knowledge of symbols, patterns and designs from the community 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. 2

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From a series of 1993 paintings titled 24 hours at Numerili, recording the same site at different times of the day, Dawn at Numerili, is a striking example of Onus’ multilingual visual language. Painted after an annual journey to visit Wunuwun at Gamardi, this work depicts the interplay between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal visual languages. Here are photo-realistic images of a billabong, where reflected tall trees emerge in the dawn light and five fish glide just below the surface of the water, affording glimpses of the traditional markings that cover their bodies.

Details such as these convey the sense that the artist spent hours observing this setting.

Luminous, hypnotically beautiful and multi-layered in meaning, Onus’ paintings claim ownership of the land while subverting the primacy of western modes of representation. They present a duality that Robert Nelson has described as a form of symbolic realism, noting Onus’ ability to use both the traditional idiom of perceptual art in the landscape tradition, together with fish, frogs and reptiles painted according to Aboriginal conventions. 3 Lin Onus hoped that ‘history would see him as some sort of bridge between cultures’4 and as articulated by Ian Mclean, ‘[he] successfully used postmodern strategies to infiltrate issues of Aboriginality into everyday Australian life’5. The convergence of two visual perspectives reflects Onus’ personal and artistic journey. The trees that populate the billabong here are reflected in the cool dark water and its hidden depths suggest unknown worlds and new possibilities. His cross-cultural imagery defies immediate categorisation and leads to a wider discussion and expansion of the space occupied by Aboriginal art.

1. Neale, M., Urban Dingo: The Art of Lin Onus 1948–1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p. 15 2. Leslie, D., ‘Coming home to the land’, Eureka Street, March – April 2006, https://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article/coming-home-to-the-land#, accessed 22 September 2020 3. Neale, op. cit., 2000, p. 16 4. Ibid, p. 21 5. McLean, I., ‘One mob, one voice, one land: Lin Onus and indigenous postmodernism’ in Neale, M., Urban Dingo: The Art of Lin Onus 1948 – 1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p. 41 CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

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HOWARD ARKLEY

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(1951 – 1999) EASTERN SUBURBS PINK HOME, 1991 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 163.0 x 163.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed verso: Name Howard Arkley / Title Eastern Suburbs Pink Home / Date 1991 / Size 630 mm x 630 mm [sic.] / Medium Acryic [sic.] on Canvas ESTIMATE: $700,000 – 900,000

PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, purchased from the above 10 July 1991 LITERATURE Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [http:// arkleyworks.com/blog/2020/09/14/eastern-suburbspink-home-1991/] (accessed 14/09/20)

Around the turn of the twentieth century, by and large, Australian art had only minimal recognition beyond these shores. One may have encountered the odd individual who could recognise a Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly, or a Whiteley Lavender Bay, or even the powerful swirls and slashes of an Emily Kame Kngwarreye canvas. But these were rare occurrences indeed.

There was an exception to this dearth of knowledge however, and that exception was the late Howard Arkley. When the Melbourne-based artist was launched internationally with his ‘Howard Arkley: The Home Show’ at the Australian Pavilion for the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999 it was an instant hit, a blazing contrast to the largely dour European, American and Asian offerings on show. When I was introduced to the famous Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, it seemed that all he wanted to talk about was ‘this Australian artist’ who was, to Lichtenstein, the clear stand-out of the event.

There was a clear reason for this. For one thing, Arkley’s imagery was immediately recognisable and relatable. All industrialised nations have their share of suburbia or versions thereof. These are, of course, largely eschewed locales devoid of ‘culture,’ the realm of the riff raff and

the domain of the mundane. But Arkley, single-handedly, turned this assumption on its head. ‘The Home Show’ was clearly a celebration, a clarion call to the minutiae of our built environments and everyday existence.

Although he dabbled in abstraction and tackled other subject matter, from freeways to shadow factories, it is the suburban home that remains the artist’s singular legacy. Eastern Suburbs Pink Home, 1991, captures the appeal of Arkley’s oeuvre succinctly. It is a trophy from one of Arkley’s suburban safaris, an icon of the kind most of us drive past with nary a nod to its existence. Of course the artist has applied his wonderfully garish, almost hallucinogenic palette, in his homage to the home. He came of age during the Age of Punk and thus breaking rules ran deep. In Eastern Suburbs Pink Home colours that shouldn’t co-exist shudder the canvas into weird harmonies. The body of this single-fronted brick veneer is a mild pink, a sun-bleached frontage which retains it brighter, more garish, origins on the side of the home. But the gable is a vivid orange. One wants to respond that no-one in their right mind would paint a house with that berserk combination of colours. No-one, that is, except Howard Arkley.

In an age when intellectual discourse infiltrates the visual arts on all levels, Arkley’s works are instantly recognisable—they are images that portray a part of the Australian psyche. They are the house down the road, the street we grew up in, the suburb where grandma lives. One of Arkley’s favourite stories was of standing behind two middle-aged women looking at one of his paintings in the National Gallery of Victoria and hearing one of them say, ‘Look, that’s just like Dot’s house!’

For Arkley that was the ultimate compliment. For Arkley his subject was a celebration. And perhaps indeed, Dot once resided in that very Eastern Suburbs Pink Home.

DR. ASHLEY CRAWFORD

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Š The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

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ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

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(1917 – 1999) LEDGER, 1992 split soft drink crates on plywood 81.0 x 43.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1992 / LEDGER ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Phillips De Pury & Company, Sydney, 26 October 1998, lot 106 Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne Gould collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in June 2000 Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 15 March 2017, lot 18 Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 15 April – 2 May 1992, cat. 30 (label attached verso) Annual Collector’s Exhibition 2000, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 3 June – 24 June 2000, cat. 63 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, fig. 25, pp. 34 (illus.), 35, 106, 111 Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, fig. 10, p. 20 (illus.)

Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 441, pp. 121, 137 (illus.), 256 (illus.)

Universally regarded as one of the most significant Australian artists of the twentieth century, remarkably Rosalie Gascoigne did not hold her first exhibition until the age of 57. Immediately attracting the praise of collectors and critics alike, she was soon offered a major survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (1978) and in 1982, was selected to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale (alongside Peter Booth), being the first Australian woman to receive this honour. In more recent years, she has featured in numerous important and international exhibitions, including the prestigious solo exhibition show Material as Landscape held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (1997 – 98), and today is represented in all major collections in Australia and New Zealand, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Of all Rosalie Gascoigne’s achievements, undoubtedly the most striking and widely celebrated are her assemblages such as Ledger, 1992 which incorporate the shimmering black and gold text of weathered wooden Schweppes crates. Having eschewed the use of iconography, Gascoigne thus transforms text into texture – a wordplay of which she was no doubt aware – to create a powerful sense of landscape and light. With their rhythmic pattern composed of words and letters, such works have not surprisingly been described as ‘stammering concrete poems’1, a perceptive analogy, especially given the artist’s predilection for poetry from Shakespeare to Plath. Notwithstanding, Gascoigne stresses that the flickering word fragments, though carefully arranged, are not intended to be read literally: ‘Placement of letters is important, but it’s not a matter of reading the text – it’s a matter of getting a visually pleasing result.’ 2 Similarly, her titles are not literal but rather, ‘leave room for the viewer’ 3, imbued with various levels of meaning to be deciphered according to the nature of one’s experiences. Accordingly, while the meticulous arrangement here of numbers and letters in columns and rows reminiscent of a ledger may perhaps be a tribute to the artist’s brother Douglas who was an accountant, ultimately the specific feeling evoked within the viewer depends largely upon his or her own memories. As John McDonald elucidates, Gascoigne’s work ‘...awakens associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us.’4 Indeed, it is this higher awareness, the ability to recognise beauty in the most humble of materials that Gascoigne demands of her audience. For, as the eye moves through this artful arrangement searching for information and the mind attempts to place different rules of perspective or build upon the suggestion of the marks, ‘in time we realise that the only solution is to stop trying to navigate through the forest of symbols, and enjoy the beauty of the trees.’ 5 1. MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 35 2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. McDonald, J., ‘Introduction’, in MacDonald, ibid., p. 7 5. Ibid.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

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PETER UPWARD

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(1932 – 1983) JANUARY SEVENTH, 1961 oil and synthetic polymer paint on composition board 190.5 x 136.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Upward 61 bears inscription verso: U Blake Prize 1961 label attached verso [not entered] ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 550,000

PROVENANCE Robert Shaw, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney

When we think of his inspired conviction other great painters untroubled with the absence of local focuses come to mind: Ian Fairweather, Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson and Godfrey Miller, each a generation earlier than Upward.

EXHIBITED New Realities by Peter Upward, Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney, 24 May 1961, cat. 1 On long-term loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1990 – January 2003 (label attached verso) Frozen Gestures, The Art of Peter Upward, Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, New South Wales, 20 October – 2 December 2007, cat. 13

He studied at RMIT in 1951, with its capable and conformist modernism, but that lasted for a year.1 When Upward left Melbourne for Sydney later in the year he enrolled at the Julian Ashton Art School under John Passmore. John Olsen recalled the tone, ‘His lyrical nature did not respond to the more stoical side of Passmore’s exercises and he was happier drawing fluently from the model, which satisfied his natural feeling for the immediate.’ 2

LITERATURE France, C., New Directions 1952 – 1962, Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, New South Wales, 1991, pp. 16 (illus. in studio), 39 (illus. with artist) Dean, C., Frozen Gestures, The Art of Peter Upward, Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, New South Wales, 2007, pp. 8 (illus. with artist), 13 (illus. in studio), 30 (illus.), 54 Peter Upward represents a high water mark of prevailing over the ideological battles between Melbourne and Sydney in the fifties and early sixties. His art was the reason for flitting between the two cities and, eventually, leaving Australia. His idiosyncratic single-mindedness establishes him as one of Australia’s most important painters of the late twentieth century. He wasn’t interested in regional variations of new trends: the vastness of his interests and his imagination allow us to view his work as universal. His art makes perfect modernist sense in Australia, East Asia, America or Europe.

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In 1955, he returned to Melbourne, the city of his birth. It was not a satisfying time but his friendship with Clement Meadmore was close.

They lived and worked together in a haphazard arrangement in Johnston Street, Collingwood. Jazz was a hugely important part of their lives and never diminished, improvisation and impulse their instinctive drawcard.

In 1959, Upward had an exhibition at Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art, then on top of a three-level warehouse in the city. 3 It was the year Gallery A opened in Flinders Lane, later moving to South Yarra, and in 1964 it opened in Sydney. 4 The Antipodeans exhibition of 1959 and its manifesto told artists what they should paint. Some felt it made Melbourne an uncertain place where original and adventurous imaginations might not flourish. 5 Upward held an exhibition at Gallery A in 1960 and headed to Sydney with Clement Meadmore. Figuration was anathema to them. Upward rented a shed in Brougham Street, Woolloomooloo and it was here that some of his finest works were created. January Seventh, 1961

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Left: Brougham Street Studio, Woolloomooloo, 1961 photographer unknown courtesy: Julie Harris Right: Peter Upward with JANUARY SEVENTH, 1961 photographer unknown courtesy: Julie Harris

is one which points to his greatness. In many respects it is just as important as June Celebration in allowing us to appreciate the reach and characteristics of his interests and their execution.6

materials themselves – the connection between Gutai and Upward is inescapable. He spent almost a decade in London from 1962, but his gaze was to the East, counterculture and the Beat Generation.

Abstract expressionism is a term often applied to Upward’s paintings and it’s almost a lazy catch-all. Robert Hughes’ original insight was closer to the mark: ‘Franz Kline has often been invoked as a parallel to, or an influence on, Upward’s dramatic swathes … but this is quite misleading. Upward is a calligraphic painter, Kline is not. The act of painting becomes a form of limited meditation …’7 This observation leads us to Upward’s interest in Japan. He had read and owned a copy of the seminal book by D T Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture. 8 Ideas such as practised spontaneity would not be a contradiction to him.

Ideas shaped from curiosity and well beyond a modernism taken and adapted to incorporate local subject matter is the cornerstone of Upward’s career. While June Celebration might be his familiar and much quoted career highlight, January Seventh is no less significant in a life which ended prematurely and unexpectedly at the age of 51, walking near Sydney’s Balmoral Beach.

January Seventh belongs to a group of large works which were painted on the floor. Brushes, ladles, even brooms were essential to the physical energy used in an act of creative and masterly intuition. Nothing is reckless and the gestures hold an expressive poise and grand elegance.

In one sense they might be seen as evocative of Shoji Hamada’s ladlepoured glazes and, of course, the ink-loaded brushed and singlegestured Japanese calligraphy. 9 The Gutai Group emerged after the war and embraced radical individualism as a way of breaking free from the Japanese collectivist mindset. Their desire was physical action with

3. The Museum of Modern Art was founded by John Reed in 1958.

1. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology was established as the Working Men’s College in

1887. In 1951 the painting teacher was Lindsay Edward.

2. Olsen, J., ‘Obituary: Peter Upward’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 21, no. 4, Winter 1984,

p. 456 4. Gallery A opened in 1959, backed by businessman Max Hutchinson and run by Clement

Meadmore. It moved to South Yarra in 1962 with James Mollison as a director.

5. The Antipodeans Exhibition was held at the Victorian Artists Society in August, 1959. Bernard

Smith wrote the manifesto. The Sydney Nine group, all abstractionists, of which Upward was a

member, was created in response to the Antipodeans.

6. June Celebration, 1960, synthetic polymer paint on composition board (three panels), 213.5 x

411.5 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Purchased 1972 7. Hughes, R, The Art of Australia, Penguin Books Australia, 1966, p. 282 8. Suzuki, D. T., Zen and Japanese Culture, Pantheon Books, New York, 1959 9. Shoji Hamada (1894 –1978) was a significant influence on Western studio pottery. In 1955,

he was designated a ‘Living National Treasure’.

DOUG HALL AM

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) FIGURE GROUP V, 1968 – 69 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on board 96.5 x 75.0 cm ESTIMATE: $250,000 – 350,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Mr and Mrs G Scott Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane Private collection, Perth, purchased from the above January 1985 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Recent Paintings Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 28 October – 9 November 1970, cat. 17 (label attached verso) Ian Fairweather 1891 – 1974 Tenth Anniversary Exhibition, Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, 18 May – 14 June 1984, cat. 79 (label attached verso, illus. in exhibition catalogue p. 29) Side by Side, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 12 August – 8 October 2000 (label attached verso, as ‘Figure Group’) Finding Fairweather, Rockhampton Art Gallery, Rockhampton Queensland, 4 March – 12 November 2017 LITERATURE McGregor, C. (et. al), Australian Art and Artists - In the Making, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1969, p. 145 (illus., in studio photograph) Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition, 2009, p. 271 (illus. in studio photograph) RELATED WORKS Standing figures I, 1968, reproduced in Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney & London, 1981, p. 214 Standing figures II, 1967-68, reproduced in Goddard, A., Ian Fairweather: late works 1953-74, exhibition catalogue, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2012, p. 86 Figure Group IV, 1970, synthetic polymer paint and gouache on card on board, Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 28 April 2010, lot 14

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By the time Ian Fairweather started Figure group V, 1968-69, he was 77 years old and had been living on Queensland’s Bribie Island for fifteen years. When he first encountered the island in March 1945, he was so entranced that he stayed for seven months in an empty beekeeper’s hut, relishing the view of the distant Glasshouse Mountains and the ‘sunset across the channel (which) comes right to the doorstep – one feels almost in it.’1 Enhancing its appeal was the relative isolation of the island, as access could only be gained via a ferry. This all changed in 1963 when a road bridge was constructed, and regular loads of day-trippers started to arrive. As the fame spread of this legendary art figure, Fairweather became a local curiosity but in spite of this physical intrusion, the visitors’ presence actually began to enhance his work and jostling images of figure groups started to appear regularly in his multi-layered compositions.

Part of the mythic appeal of the Fairweather story was that he was a hermit, but this is incorrect. True, he lived in deliberately straitened circumstances in hand-built huts amidst the pines, with the island’s grey sand as a floor, but this was because he had no need for modern conveniences and sought an austere simplicity to his life. He had always been restless, living for periods in numerous countries, or travelling on a whim under bizarre circumstances, like the ill-advised raft journey to Timor in 1952. A partial cause for this wandering was his sad and unusual childhood, but it was also his deep study of Zen, of the concept of everything and nothing-ness, that directed his actions.

Unlike a hermit, Fairweather kept in regular touch with the outside world, subscribed to newspapers and journals, and welcomed a regular series of guests to Bribie Island. He was a solitary man, but one with an active and enquiring mind.

Allied to his Zen studies was a rich knowledge of calligraphy, and the sinuous lines of this ancient practice are present at every stage of his mature paintings. Fairweather preferred to work simultaneously on many works and, as John Olsen recorded in his diary, all of the walls of the hut ‘were covered with paintings. It was like a little temple, adorned within these marvellous images, out there in the scrub.’ 2 This practice is vividly displayed in a photograph from c.1968 that shows the artist (dressed up for the camera in clean shirt and trousers) before a tableau of eight works-in-progress, with our lot visible in the upper right. Of these, at least three are figure groups which allow the viewer to explore the artist’s strategy as he accumulates his lines into dense webs of texture and colour, flickering into different directions as new shapes are suggested or memories are evoked. This often meant that most of a painting’s original brush marks would be buried under new paint in the process.

Particularly evident in Figure Group V is the effect of dappled light as seen through the pine trees by day, depicted by Fairweather using broad patches of off-white that also serve to unify the background.

1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney & London, 1981, p. 74 2. John Olsen, diary entry 1961. Quoted in Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 52 ANDREW GAYNOR

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Ian Fairweather in his studio hut, Bribie Island, Queensland, 1968 photograph © David Beal (FIGURE GROUP V in background, top right)

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FRED WILLIAMS

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(1927 – 1982) HILLSIDE AT LYSTERFIELD II, 1967 oil on canvas 137.5 x 153.0 cm signed lower centre: Fred Williams ESTIMATE: $1,500,000 – 2,000,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Fred Williams, Melbourne Lyn Williams, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 1 May 2002, lot 30 (illus. front cover) Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 1 September 2010, lot 15 Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Fred Williams: a retrospective, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 7 November 1987 – 31 January 1988; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 February – 3 April 1988; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 18 April – 22 May 1988; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 13 June – 31 July 1988; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 16 August – 30 October 1988; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 24 November 1988 – 30 January 1989; Museums and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 29 April – 4 June 1989; Art Gallery of New

The 1960s began optimistically for Fred Williams. In 1963 he was invited to join the stable of artists represented by Sydney art dealer, Rudy Komon, and the monthly retainer he received gave Williams and his wife, Lyn, the financial confidence to buy a house at Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges. That same year William was awarded the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, spending seven months in Europe in 1964.

The following year was also significant – ‘for the first time [Williams] was able to paint full-time. The concentration and energy, and the time he now brought to his art, resulted in four years of astonishing variety and contrast in his painting.’1

National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, pp. 102, 105 (illus.)

From the beginning of his career Williams drew on his experience of the surrounding world as the source of subject matter for his art and the landscape of Upwey naturally featured in his paintings at this time.

From mid-1965, nearby Lysterfield, which was just a short drive from his home, became a regular destination for outdoor painting trips.

James Mollison, the artist’s great friend, described the area at the time as ‘sparsely settled country, with gently rolling hills and scrubby paddocks – fenced, but otherwise showing few signs of habitation’ 2, the perfect subject for an artist who used his immediate surroundings as a jumping off point for images which distilled the landscape to its essential elements, and in the process, created archetypal images which have become part of our collective visual memory.

RELATED WORKS Hillside Landscape, 1966, oil on canvas, 134.5 x 142.5 cm, collection of News Corporation Hillside at Lysterfield I, 1967, oil on canvas, 111.8 x 127.0 cm, private collection Lysterfield Triptych, 1967–68, oil on three canvases, 152.5 x 122.0 cm, 152.5 x 183.5, 152.5 x 122.0 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Hillside at Lysterfield II and its counterpart, Hillside at Lysterfield I, are revealing in terms of what they tell us about Williams’ way of working.

Painted in May and March of 1967 respectively, this pair highlights Williams’ observation of the changing seasons (and sometimes, different times of day) and how this transition was manifested in variations of colour. The dusky tones of Williams’ first view give way to the lightinfused Hillside at Lysterfield II, where daubs of pink, turquoise, ochre and white sit upon a luminous ground. The horizon line that separates

South Wales, Sydney, 8 August – 24 September 1989, cat. 82 LITERATURE Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian

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the hillside from the sky in the first version has been omitted in the second, as Williams moves towards an increasingly spare depiction of the landscape in a familiar pattern that saw him repeatedly move between representation and abstraction in his art. These images also highlight the important connection between painting and printmaking in Williams’ practice, where his work in one medium influenced developments in the other, and vice versa. The 1965-66 etching, Hillside at Lysterfield (Mollison 239), is closely related to the composition of our painting, and the similarity between some of the etched and engraved lines with those in the painting, suggests he referred to it when working on the canvas in the studio. The hieroglyphic-like marks that Williams used to describe the tall foreground grasses, the scrubby growth across the hillside, and the trees lining the horizon, are distinctively his, and typical of what Patrick McCaughey described as ‘his refined method of painting’ which was by this time, ‘as spontaneous as handwriting.’ 3 1. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927 – 1982, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition, 1996, p. 166 2. Mollison, J., Fred Williams: A Singular Vision, Australian National Gallery & Oxford University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 100 3. McCaughey, op. cit., p. 184 KIRSTY GRANT

Fred Williams is rightfully acclaimed as one of Australia’s finest artists of the twentieth century. As a landscape painter he has no equal, Hillside at Lysterfield II 1967 being one of a number of masterpieces that gives him that honour. His solo exhibition at Georges Gallery, Melbourne in the spring of 1967 opened to great applause. The art critics enthused.

Patrick McCaughey in The Age declared that Williams ‘has established himself as the most exciting landscape painter in Australia, and for sheer originality of vision Williams stands quite apart in Australian painting.’1 Alan McCulloch of the Melbourne Herald said that ‘A truly revolutionary spirit can be found in Fred Williams’s superb landscapes at Georges.’ 2 In recollection, these comments effectively recall the excitement, quality and impact Williams’s work had at the time. We were witnessing the emergence of a brilliant new star in the heavens of Australian art, and the range of oil paintings and gouaches in this exhibition were unforgettable.

Covering the few years from 1965 to 1967, the show included You-Yang

landscapes, an Upwey painting already in the collection of Mr and Mrs Gordon Darling, with Mark Besen, Rudy Komon and the Reserve Bank of Australia among the other lenders. Rupert Murdoch had acquired Hillside Landscape Lysterfield, 1966-67, and Lysterfield Landscape II, 1967 went into the collection of Sir Roderick and Lady Carnegie.

Lysterfield inspired Williams to further heights such as the large Triptych Landscape, 1967-68 in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. And Geelong Art Gallery’s Yellow Landscape, 1968-69, has been described by McCaughey as ‘the crowning glory of the whole Lysterfield group...’ 3 ‘At Lysterfield’ as his close friend James Mollison points out, ‘he often had to paint from the edge of the road, and tall foreground grasses are the key to many of his Lysterfield paintings.’4 These vertical signature marks are the key to these superb paintings, seen in Hillside at Lysterfield I, 1967 and our painting. Both developed out of Hillside Landscape, 1966 in the collection of News Corporation. 5 Hillside at Lysterfield I, was painted in March with ‘yellow & lilac everywhere’.6 Lysterfield Landscape II, is a slightly larger reworking of the subject in seasonal ‘cool tones and a greater elaboration of marks.’ 7 Atmospherically engaging, the horizon fades in the openness of vision and ‘pink haze over everything’ 8 Mollison noted, ‘In the second work, the touches of rose madder lie on top of the first layer of varnish, and may have been added months or even years later in memory of the pink haze the artist had seen.’ 9 Painted over a period of about four years, the Lysterfield landscapes contain some of Williams’ best work. Hillside at Lysterfield II, 1967, distinguished by its painterly spontaneity and assurance, the defused handling of the various motifs, and delicate rainbow colours, makes it one of the finest.

1. McCaughey, P., ‘A Painter Apart’, Age, Melbourne, 27 September 1967, p. 6 2. McCulloch, A., ‘Landscape Revolution’, Herald, Melbourne, 27 September 1967, p. 19 3. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1980, pp. 190-91 4. Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 100 5. See Mollison, ibid., pp. 104-5 for comparative colour illustrations 6. Williams’ diary 28 March 1967, quoted in ibid., p. 102 7. Mollison, op. cit., p. 102 8. Williams’ diary 25 June 1967, quoted Mollison, op. cit., p. 102 9. Mollison, op. cit., p. 102 DAVID THOMAS

Right: Fred Williams, Upwey, Victoria, 1963 photographer: David Moore Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore

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EUGENE VON GUÉRARD

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(1811 – 1901) DIE BERGE VON ST TENADIO IM NEAPOLITANISCHEN, 1847 (THE MOUNTAINS OF ST TENADIO IN THE NAPLES REGION) oil on canvas 108.5 x 146.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Eugen v. Guérard / D. 1847 ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Dr T. Leurs, Roermond, Netherlands, acquired in 1847 Thence by descent Private collection, Germany Sotheby’s, Sydney, 22 April 2008, lot 58 (as ‘Italian Landscape’) Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Annual Exhibition, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, Düsseldorf), 1847 (as ‘Die Berge von St Tenadio im Neapolitanischen’ )

Von Guérard exhibited this major work, his largest known pre-Australian canvas, in 1847 at the Art Association of the Rhineland and Westphalia as Die Berge von St Tenadio im Neapolitanischen [The Mountains of St. Tenadio in the Neapolitan Region].1 The painting depicts the spectacular snow-capped Southern Apennine mountains in the Frosinone province, Lazio, near Sora, their peaks reflected in the famously crystal clear waters of Lake Posta Fibreno. Perched on a rocky hilltop above the lake is the town of Posta Fibreno as it then looked, with the zig-zag road visible on the bare hillside, and towers, which have since disappeared, still standing. It is one of many medieval castled villages found on the hilltops and clinging to the steep walls of this beautiful and history-laden valley, the Val di Comino. Pliny the Elder described the natural wonders of the lake in the 1st century A.D. and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Grand Tourists and artists who beat a trail to the picturesque towns of Sora, Isola di Liri and Posta Fibreno – conveniently located halfway between Rome and Naples – included the Naples-based German landscape painter so admired by Goethe, Jacob Philip Hackert, and von Guérard’s Neapolitan colleague, Anton Sminck Pitloo.

Von Guérard spent three days exploring the region in May 1838 – his first stop on the journey north from Naples to Düsseldorf. On 26 May he sketched the Schneeberge, the snowy mountains, of “St. Tenadio” – it seems that he interpreted San Donato, which is pronounced San Dnat or Sande Denate in the local dialect, as “St Tenadio.” He observed the “beautiful reflections” in Lake Posta Fibreno, the cold clear waters of

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which are fed by snow melt and springs that rise from an underground limestone karst system. He recorded the flat-bottomed oak fishing boats, the nàue, that are traditional to the region, and on multiple pages of his sketchbook he made detailed, annotated studies of the locals in their distinctive regional dress. 2 All of these accurately observed individual elements were drawn together on the canvas that von Guérard painted in his Düsseldorf studio nine years later.

In this work von Guérard’s superb compositional skills – skills he had been honing throughout 1847 at winter evening gatherings during which he and fellow Düsseldorf artists sketched and critiqued their compositions – are brilliantly realized. Most likely working from a large drawing (now lost) of the type he made on this journey, he has subtly realigned and emphasized the distinctive features of this landscape, bringing them into closer proximity with each other. The composition is structured around a central axis, a serpentine line that leads from the curving path in the foreground, along the contours of the lake’s

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edge and up to the centrally-located clifftop village. From there, it shifts into a sequence of sweeping arcs, defined by the sharp ridgeline, which culminates in the snow-capped peak. Like a piece of music, this composition is energized by a series of unifying variations, a rhythmic interplay of recurring, counterpointed and inverted landscape forms and contours. Light plays a dynamic role, the low rays of late afternoon sun articulating the mountain architecture, warming the grassy slopes and filtering through the trees. Warm tones, russets and ochres, the deep greens of oak trees, and the dusty pinks and violets of the mountains, speak of a late spring day coming to a close.

As in his best Australian paintings, von Guérard has woven myriad details into a composition distinguished by its uplifting breadth and powerful geometry. Following the winding path into the landscape we, like travellers, discover a valley alive with activity, its cultural traditions and natural diversity revealed in the minute and lively details observed by the artist: a woman, wearing the elaborate traditional dress for which

Top: EUGENE VON GUÉRARD Schneeberge S. Tenadio, vicino Sora, presso Borgo, 26 May 1838 Sketchbook X, Naples to Rome, 1838 Collection: Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney Left: EUGENE VON GUÉRARD Sora, 27 May 1838 Sketchbook X, Naples to Rome, 1838 Collection: Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

the region known – a full-sleeved white blouse with a red bodice, full blue skirt with trim, embroidered apron and the starched, flat-topped linen head dress designed for carrying vessels – fills her terracotta urn at the fountain; two young men in the white shirts, knee-length breeches and the tall cone-shaped hats of the region relax at the end of the day.

Unexpected vignettes materialize with close inspection: two men and their donkey make their way along the shadowed path on the left of the canvas and a woman pauses at the shrine on the steep diagonal path up to the village. Details such as the exposed roots of an oak tree, individuated blades of grass, wildflowers, rambling dog-rose and banks of sedge at the lake’s edge reflect the emphasis placed upon the close study of nature by the Düsseldorf school of landscape painters, and the artist’s acute memory of the site.

In its scale, compositional sophistication, handling of light and colour and in its successful integration of extraordinary levels of closely observed detail, this work reveals an artist – von Guérard had then

completed his training at the progressive Düsseldorf Academy and he was working alongside some of the most respected landscape painters of the Düsseldorf School – reaching his full maturity. In every stroke of the brush, this painting expresses the connection that von Guérard felt with this very special part of the world.

I would like to thank Paolo Accettola, Sora historian, and author of Artisti e Viaggiatori del XVII -XIX Secolo a Casamari e Presso San Domenico di Sora, Centro di Studie Sorani “Vincenzo Patriarca” and Monastero di San Domenico Abate, Sora, Italy, 2019, for his generous and informed advice on the physical landscape portrayed by von Guérard, and Dr Ilenia Carnevale, Director, Museo Archeologico di Atina e delle Valle di Comino “G. Visocchi”, Italy, for her much-appreciated assistance.

1. Kunstverein Bericht, Vol. 18 , Düsseldorf, 1847; Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung, No. 194, 24 August 1847, p. 3. The region was part of the Kingdom of Naples until 1860.

2. In 2008, Candice Bruce linked this work with the Sora region on the basis of the traditional costumes worn. Bruce, C. ‘Eugene von Guerard, Italian Landscape 1847’, Sotheby’s, Sydney, 22 April, 2008, p. 114.

DR RUTH PULLIN

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ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943) BLUE LAGOON, FRINGED ROUND WITH PALACES, c.1908 oil on canvas 54.5 x 85.5 cm signed lower right: A. STREETON bears inscription with title verso: Blue Lagoon ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE Mrs C.V.M. Mabbutt, United Kingdom Private collection Sotheby’s, London, 22 October 1986, cat. 146 The Dallhold Collection, Perth Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 July 1992, lot 14 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Catalogue of Paintings by Arthur Streeton, The Alpine Club Gallery, London, 26 March 1909, cat. 34 Arthur Streeton’s Venice, Guildhall, Melbourne, 13 – 27 July 1909, cat.2 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Arthur Streeton 1867 – 1943, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 8 December 1995 – 12 February 1996; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1 March – 14 April 1996; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2 May – 16 June 1996; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 9 July – 25 August 1996; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 September – 3 November 1996, cat. 63 (label attached verso) LITERATURE ‘Venice Pictures’, The Herald, Melbourne, 12 July 1909, p. 3 ‘Mr Arthur Streeton’s Pictures’, The Age, Melbourne, 13 July 1909, p. 6 (as ‘Blue Lagoon, Fringed with Palaces’) ‘Venice at the Guildhall’, The Argus, Melbourne, 13 July 1909, p. 6 (as ‘Blue Lagoon, Fringed round with Palaces’) Daily Graphic, London, 6 April 1909 (as ‘Blue Lagoon Fringed Round with Palaces’) de Bussy, D., The Alan Bond Collection of Australian Art, Dallhold Investments Pty Ltd, Perth, 1990, p. 69 (illus.)

Smith, G., Arthur Streeton 1867 – 1943, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 148, 149 (illus.)

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‘He has seen Venice in the happiest of circumstance, when her mirrorlike waters and the marble-clad facades of her palaces are sparkling in sunlight, but before the season when the heat of the sun has become too oppressive … the glittering “Blue Lagoon Fringed Round with palaces” [is one of] the most notable among the many pictures here that cannot fail to raise an intense longing for Venice in every visitor’s breast.’1 Arthur Streeton’s extraordinary ability to capture the effects of sunlight in paint is brilliantly expressed in this view of Venice, where reflections on the water and the pastel haze of the sky conjure up the magic and atmosphere of the most romantic of Italian cities. In January 1908 Streeton married Nora Clench – a Canadian violinist he had met in London where they were both working to establish international careers – and in the spring, they honeymooned in Venice. Working outdoors, often surrounded by crowds of inquisitive onlookers, Streeton painted in oil and watercolour, as well as making a series of sketches in pencil and wash which provided reference for works that he developed later in the studio. Paintings produced during and following this visit, as well

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as a return trip that the couple made in autumn, several months later, depict Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge and numerous other views which feature the canals and striking architecture of the city. Writing later to a friend, Streeton said, ‘… I worked hard and did some good pieces. What a wonderful place it is.’ 2 In this scene, Streeton looks across the Grand Canal from the vicinity of Santa Maria della Salute, the grand domed Baroque church in the Dorsoduro. A group of elegantly dressed women in the foreground lift the skirts of their Edwardian dresses as they board a waiting gondola, and two others hurry along the embankment to join them. Water dominates and divides the composition, leading the eye from the lower left across to the upper right, where pictorial detail dissolves and the canal mirrors the sky, both elements painted in delicate shades of mauve and white, tinged with an underlying warmth. The artist delights in describing the buildings that line the edge of the opposite bank, the distinctive arched colonnade of the fourteenth century Doge’s Palace centrally placed, and one of the famous domes of San Marco Basilica just visible to its left.

Portrait of Arthur Streeton, 1907 photographer: Alice Mills Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

A group of the Venice paintings, including Blue Lagoon, Fringed Round with Palaces, 1908, was exhibited at the Alpine Club in London in March 1909 and received considerable positive attention in the press.

Describing Streeton’s brushwork as ‘swift’ and ‘able’, the critics praised the luminosity of his depictions, one writing that ‘they seem … to radiate the light and colour which fills them.’ 3 Shown later that year at the Guildhall in Melbourne, this painting was similarly praised by the Herald critic for its clever treatment of light and shade, an accolade not surprising for Streeton, a key member of the Australian Impressionists and one of this country’s most important artists.4 1. Daily Graphic, London, 6 April 1909 2. Streeton to Frederick Delmer, 1 July 1908, quoted in Galbally, A. & Gray, A., Letters from Smike, The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne, 1989, p. 113 3. M. Irwin MacDonald, ‘Arthur Streeton’, The Craftsman, Vol. XVII, No. 2, New York, November 1909, p. 163 4. ‘Venice Pictures’, The Herald, Melbourne, 12 July 1909, p. 3 KIRSTY GRANT

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CLARICE BECKETT

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(1887 – 1935) OUT WALKING, c.1928 – 29 oil on canvas on board 29.0 x 34.5 cm signed lower right: C. Beckett ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE Mrs Hilda Mangan, Victoria, the artist’s sister Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne Sonia Grodeck, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1971 Private Collection, Melbourne Mossgreen, Melbourne, 11 October 2015, lot 1 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 30 October – 20 November 1971, cat. 63 We are grateful to Rosalind Hollinrake for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

Out walking, c.1928 – 29, depicts a view close to Clarice Beckett’s home in the Melbourne bay-side suburb of Beaumaris. Beckett moved there from Casterton, near Bendigo, in 1919 with her parents whose health was failing; and the suburb is aptly named, being a truncation of the French ‘beau marais’, meaning ‘beautiful marsh’. Following Melbourne’s European settlement, Beaumaris became a popular holiday destination noted for its winding coastal trails, atmospheric tangles of ti-tree and capacious views over Port Phillip Bay. At the base of the weathered sandstone cliffs lie secluded beaches and rock ledges full of fossils.

Beckett would return to these familiar sites many times throughout her career – and in all weathers – to such an extent that it is impossible to walk the same territory today and not see it through her eyes.

The family lived at ‘St. Enoch’s’ in Dalgetty Road, and Out Walking shows that street’s intersection with Beach Road, with the shimmering blue of the bay beyond. Beckett would already have been a familiar sight to locals, as she walked the paths with her hand-built painting trolley. Her painting technique was aligned to the group of artists called

the ‘tonalists’ who gathered around Max Meldrum; and the trolley, in fact, had a particular use beyond mere transport. ‘Tonalist works were created to be viewed, when complete, from a distance of about six metres (approximately twenty feet). The painting process required much to-ing and fro-ing between the subject and the observation point by both the painter and the painting … Consequently to assist with this process, many of the artists constructed custom-built wheeled easels or painting trolleys. Clarice Beckett was one of the first to adopt a trolley.’1 This description of the dedicated process involved in constructing such images belies the spontaneous sensation given by Out Walking, that of a snapshot briefly glimpsed before being captured in a hurried application of paint. As noted by the curator Ted Gott, ‘Beckett’s compositions have an elusive, phantasmic mystique. [By comparison] everything in our world today is sharp, crystal clear, hard and fast.’ 2 Not surprisingly, critics often attached the term ‘Whistler-ian’ to her work.

Judging by the long coats, Out Walking was painted on an early Spring morning, with the overcast sky punctured at points by sunshine which illuminates patches of the sandy road and grassed verge. To the left, a carer in a blue coat watches a red-caped girl as she rushes towards the intersection. Two older ladies in grey hats and coats walk the other way, deep in conversation; and, crunching the unsealed road between them, the hand-propelled cart in the middle-centre. The rows of telegraph poles create a frame within the frame, anchored horizontally by the white fence line indicating the cliff path. To the left, a flash of muted red indicates an emergency box, a tiny detail of colour which links visually to the girl’s cape and the man’s cart. Like the companion work with the same title, 3 Beckett’s paintings of pedestrians are predominantly solo studies, making this version of Out Walking one of the rarer compositions to include small groups of people.

1. Lock-Weir, T., Misty Moderns: Australian tonalists 1915 – 1950, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008, p. 46 2. Gott, T., ‘Foreword’, Clarice Beckett: 1887 – 1935, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 29 February – 1 April 2000, p. 5 3. Rosalind Hollinrake describes this alternate version as being of Beckett’s young niece Patricia walking along the cliff top path.

ANDREW GAYNOR

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45

RUSSELL DRYSDALE

12

(1912 – 1981) GOING TO THE PICTURES, 1941 oil on canvas 46.0 x 55.0 cm signed lower right: Russell Drysdale inscribed with title on stretcher verso: GOING TO THE PICTURES/ Russell Drysdale 1941 inscribed on stretcher verso: RUSSELL DRYSDALE, 44 RUE DAGUERRE, PARIS 1938 ESTIMATE: $2,500,000 – 3,500,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries or Society of Artists, Sydney Clive Turnbull, Melbourne, acquired from either of the above c.1942 Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the above in 1962 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Paintings by Russell Drysdale, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 11 – 30 March 1942, cat. 8 (label attached verso) Society of Artists Annual Exhibition 1942, Education Department’s Art Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 24 September 1942, cat. 102 Russell Drysdale Retrospective 1937-1960, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 5 October – 6 November 1960, cat. 21 (label fragment attached verso) Russell Drysdale: A Retrospective Exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 22 April – 3 June 1961, cat. 14 Russell Drysdale. 3rd Adelaide Festival of Arts, John Martin’s Auditorium, Adelaide, 4 – 21 March 1964, cat. 58 Russell Drysdale: Paintings 1940 – 72, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 14 June – 21 July 1985, cat. 6 Russell Drysdale, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 13 March – 16 April 1987, cat. 17 Russell Drysdale: 1912 – 81: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 1997 – 9 March 1998; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 March – 10 May 1998; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 18 May – 28 June 1998; Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 20 July – 30 August 1998; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 23 September – 15 November 1998, cat. 7 (label attached verso) On loan to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009 – 2016

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LITERATURE Dreamer, D., ‘Art – and some pictures that mystify’ Truth, Sydney, 6 September 1942, p.26 Society of Artists Book 1942, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1942, pp. 38 (illus.), 68 ‘Russell Drysdale interprets Australia’, Australia National Journal, Sydney, 1 April 1942, p. 41 (illus.)

Duhig, V. J., ‘Drysdale in Queensland’, The Bulletin, Sydney, John Haynes and J.F. Archibald, 3 May 1961, p. 40 Dutton, G., Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, pl. 13 (illus.)

Haese, R., Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Allen Lane, Melbourne, 1981, pp. 260, 262 Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, pl. 36, p. 223 (illus.)

Sturgeon, G., The Painter’s Vision, Bay Books, Sydney, 1987, pp. 179, 182 (illus.)

Wilson, G., The Artists of Hill End, Beagle Press and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 20 (illus.)

Smith, G., Russell Drysdale: 1912 – 81, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, pp. 46-47 (illus.)

Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale The Drawings, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2012, pp. 158, 159 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Study for Going to the Pictures, 1941, pen and ink and pastel on paper, 23.0 x 29.5 cm, private collection, illus. in Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale the drawings, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2012, p. 55 and cover

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE Bernard Smith once described Russell Drysdale as ‘a twentieth-century [Henry] Lawson of painting.’

1

Identifying the poet’s ‘compulsion to tell the truth as he sees it,

he had had the same sort of life that I had led … He had been

his sense of the absurd, his humour, his craftsmanly respect

a jackeroo (sic) and a station manager and we could talk about

for form, his humanity and … sentiment’2 in the painter, he

horses and sheep.’5 Although Drysdale had always imagined a

established a literary precedent for Drysdale’s imagery. When

life on the land, this attention from respected artworld figures

his now iconic depictions of country Australia first appeared in

prompted him to consider a creative career and a subsequent

the early 1940s however, there was no artistic precedent for the

introduction to George Bell, the influential modern artist and

imagery of a harsh and unyielding landscape populated by stoic,

teacher, sealed his fate.

resilient people. Representing a decisive break from the romantic pastoral imagery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

Drysdale enrolled at the Shore–Bell School in Melbourne in 1935

centuries, Drysdale’s vision focussed on the rural experience,

after extended travel in England and Europe. Having seen the

infusing elements of Surrealism and Expressionism into his

work of the Impressionists and modern artists there for the first

realistic approach, and – like Lawson’s verse – making a

time, he was fuelled with the desire to paint, later saying, ‘I … got

profound contribution to the development of Australia’s

to like these things tremendously and I wanted to do it … quite

national identity.

suddenly they had a meaning which they never had in books.’6

The path that led Drysdale to a career as an artist was more

He absorbed Bell’s teaching, which emphasised the importance

coincidence than the result of careful planning. Recovering from

of imagination and encouraged individual expression, as well as

eye surgery in 1932, he passed the time by drawing. Impressed

developing a sound technical knowledge of the materials and

by what he saw, Drysdale’s doctor, Julian Smith – ‘that strange

processes of his craft. Bell also instilled in his students the impor-

and brilliant mixture of surgeon, artist and photographer’ –

tance of drawing, believing that its practice ‘is as essential to an

showed his work to Daryl Lindsay. A successful painter, member

artist as practising scales to a pianist.’7

3

of the famed artistic dynasty, and later director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Lindsay recalled that Drysdale’s work ‘showed

Drysdale’s first solo exhibition was held at Riddell Galleries,

a curious sensitivity and a sharp observation’ . Born into a family

Melbourne in 1938. Including The Rabbiter and his Family, 1938

with extensive farming interests – including Boxwood Park in the

(National Gallery of Australia) and Monday Morning, 1938

Riverina district – the young Drysdale ‘liked Lindsay because

(Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), the

4

Self Portrait, Selbourne Road Studio, Toorak, 1939 Photographer: Russell Drysdale Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (Gift of Lady Drysdale, 1982)

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE Moody’s Pub, 1941 oil on plywood 50.9 × 61.4 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Estate of Russell Drysdale

critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Honing in on the

memories of childhood and deep connection to rural life, he pro-

authenticity and humanity of Drysdale’s depictions – borne in

duced a series of images that represented a major breakthrough

part from his firsthand experience of rural Australia and respect

in his career. His creative momentum was buoyed in 1941 when,

for those who lived and worked there – Basil Burdett wrote, ‘what

in the first institutional recognition of his talent, Monday Morning

really impresses one is that there is nothing merely cerebral in

was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

all this. There is a genial quality about these pictures which the

Included in The Art of Australia 1788-1941, an exhibition which

purely intellectual experimenter never achieves’8. The Sun News-

toured the United States and Canada, the painting had been

Pictorial reported that ‘Mr Drysdale is a young man who is about

borrowed from the collection of Maie Casey – a friend and fellow

to leave for abroad to complete his studies in London and Paris,

Bell student, and wife of Richard Casey, who at that time was

and, judging by this show no student has ever left Australia with

Australia’s first ambassador to the United States. She agreed to

such promise of a brilliant future before him.’9

sell it knowing that being part of such an important international collection would be more beneficial to Drysdale than having the

Impending World War cut Drysdale’s time overseas short and he

painting hanging on her wall.11 Similar acknowledgement of

returned to Australia with his wife and young daughter in April

Drysdale’s work at home would follow soon after.

1939, managing a sheep property in Albury before settling in Sydney the following year.10 Frustrated by his rejection from the

Towards the end of 1941 plans were made for a solo exhibition

army due to ‘defective eyesight’, Drysdale channelled his energies

scheduled to take place at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in March

into painting. Drawing on his recent experience of the country,

the following year. Including nine drawings and thirteen paintings,

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE Sunday evening, 1941 oil on asbestos cement sheet 60.0 x 76.0 cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1942 © Estate of Russell Drysdale

the exhibition was opened by Sydney Ure Smith, the influential

Going to the Pictures, 1941 was purchased soon after the exhibi-

publisher of Art in Australia and keen supporter of young artists.

tion by Clive Turnbull, journalist, author, poet and critic. A highly

Sunday Evening, 1941 was purchased by the Art Gallery of New

respected writer, he worked on the Argus newspaper before joining

South Wales, the largest and – priced at 45 guineas – most expen-

the Melbourne Herald in 1932. Appointed to the role of art critic

sive work in the exhibition. Moody’s Pub, 1941, was acquired by

in 1942, his keen interest and knowledge about contemporary art

the National Gallery of Victoria. Both paintings are now regarded

was such that the newspaper’s chief, Sir Keith Murdoch, consulted

as key works in the history of modern Australian art. The Sydney

Turnbull regarding his own art purchases.13 Turnbull’s selection

Morning Herald reviewer hailed Drysdale as a ‘young painter who

of this painting suggests a fine sense of humour as well as a very

possesses exceptional talents’, noting that he was ‘preoccupied

good eye. Despite the rigours of life in such a setting, where dusty

… with instilling a definite Australian character – country rather

earth and a vast bleached sky dominate the view, the family is

than city – into his work.’12 As a mark of the significance of the

dressed for their outing in their Sunday best. Spindly trees echo

works in this landmark exhibition, others including Man Feeding

the exaggerated form of the father’s limbs, while the dog in the

his Dogs, 1941 (Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art),

foreground, contorting to scratch its neck, mirrors the awkward

Man Reading a Paper, 1941 (University of Sydney), and The Crow

angularity of the playing boys. Water is clearly scarce, and

Trap, 1941 (Newcastle Region Art Gallery), have continued to be

Drysdale’s focus on the galvanised iron tank raised on its timber

acquired for important public collections.

stand and the watering can – which has presumably just

51

‘Showing the true face of ambivalent Australia’, The Age, Melbourne, 31 December, 1997, p. C7

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE Man feeding his dogs, 1941 oil on canvas 51.2 x 61.4 cm Gift of C.F. Viner-Hall, 1961 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art © QAGOMA

been used to fill the car’s radiator – emphasises its importance. While there is humour here, and Drysdale’s characteristically expressive

1. Smith, B., Australian Painting 1788-1970, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, second edition, 1971, p. 247 2. Ibid.

handling of paint, there is also great empathy. Reflecting aspects of

3. Klepac, L., Russell Drysdale, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2009, p. 15

both what Drysdale saw and what he felt , these images are also what

4. Ibid.

14

Geoffrey Dutton insightfully deemed ‘spiritual records’ of Australia.15 Russell Drysdale was not a prolific artist – in a career that spanned

5. Drysdale interviewed by Geoffrey Dutton, quoted in Mary Eagle and Jan Minchin, The George Bell School: Students, Friends, Influences, Deutscher Art Publications, Melbourne, and Resolution Press, Sydney, 1981, p. 91 6. Klepac, op. cit., p. 21 7. Drysdale quoted in JF Nagle, ‘Preface’, Russell Drysdale, Richmond Hill Press, Melbourne, 1979

more than forty years he produced fewer than five hundred paint-

8. Klepac, op. cit., pp. 53-54

ings. Going to the Pictures has remained in the Turnbull family since

9. Ibid., p. 53

the early 1940s, but as a major example of Drysdale’s painting, it has

10. See Klepac, ibid., pp. 66-69 11. Ibid., p. 78

been included in every major exhibition dedicated to his oeuvre since

12. ‘Promising Young Painter’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 March 1942, p. 7

that time – most notably the retrospectives mounted at the Art Gallery

13. Ryan, P., ‘Turnbull, Stanley Clive (1906-1975)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/turnbull-stanley-clive-11893/text21301, published first in hardcopy 2002, accessed 28 August 2020

of New South Wales in 1960 and at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997 – and represents one of the most important examples of modern Australian art to appear at auction in many years.

14. Dutton, G., The Innovators, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1986, p. 87 15. Klepac, op. cit., p. 42 KIRSTY GRANT

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IAN FAIRWEATHER

13

(1891 – 1974) LADS BOXING, 1939 oil and gouache on cardboard 48.0 x 44.5 cm signed lower left: I Fairweather ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Collection of Lina Bryans, Melbourne Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Fairweather: a retrospective exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 3 June – 4 July 1965; 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; Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 9 December 1965 – 16 January 1966; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 13 March 1966, cat. 72 (label attached verso) Ian Fairweather 1891–1974, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 25 September – 6 November 1991 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, cat. 53, p. 68, fig. 24 (illus.)

Ian Fairweather was not a creature of comfort. The creative drive that fuelled his art and his intense commitment to living a life devoted to art-making, saw him eschew the material possessions and comfortable physical environments that most people take for granted. During a peripatetic existence in which the Scottish-born artist travelled between England, Canada, China, Bali, Australia, the Philippines and India, he variously lived in a derelict movie theatre, an abandoned railway truck, and a boat wreck washed up on the shore, before settling in 1953 on Bribie Island, off the coast of southern Queensland. Here, for the rest of his life, he lived and worked in a pair of thatched huts built using materials found in the nearby bush, painting by the light of a hurricane lamp.

With little money and no prospects of finding work, Fairweather left the boarding house he had stayed in on his arrival in Cairns in early June 1939, and relocated to a shanty town at Alligator Creek on the outskirts of town. Writing to his friend, the artist William Frater, he said, ‘as soon as I walked into it – I felt at home again – it is like a little bit of the islands – I

got a place in an old boathouse along with another hobo – and I just had to start painting again’.1 Postmarked 4 July 1939, this letter to Frater in Melbourne was accompanied by four works – the result of Fairweather’s enthusiastic return to painting in this setting – which he asked him to show ‘to a few friends as soon as you get them’, adding, ‘As for selling them I leave it to you any price at all – I’d be glad of at this moment’. 2 The parcel contained two views of Alligator Creek – distinguished as the first of Fairweather’s rare Australian landscape subjects – a portrait of a young local boy and this work, Lads Boxing, 1939. 3 Painting familiar subjects that were part of his everyday experience, Fairweather explained that the landscapes were ‘as seen more or less out of the window’ and the boys boxing ‘come up of an evening to train in this old boathouse’.4 The lamp which can be seen in the top right of the image belonged to the artist and was borrowed by the boys for their training. Acknowledging the quid pro quo involved in this exchange, Fairweather wrote, ‘so I took this [image] off them’. 5 From a close-up viewpoint, he captures the scene in muted colours which are contrasted with daubs of blue paint, and occasional glimpses of pencil underdrawing beneath. The energetic application of oil paint and gouache echoes the action of the subject, but the focus is clearly the boxers themselves. The features of the rear figure’s face are described in some detail, but it is the muscularity and strength of the boys’ bodies which dominates, communicating both the physicality and intensity of their friendly competition.

Lads Boxing and the three other paintings sent to Frater were bought by Lina Bryans, a noted modern artist who would become a close friend and supporter of Fairweather, establishing what was regarded as the best single collection of his art.6 Notifying Fairweather of the sale and sending £20 by telegraphic transfer care of the Cairns Post Office, Frater added a brief but encouraging note, ‘Very good, keep working’.7 1. Fairweather to William Frater, postmarked 4 July 1939, quoted in Roberts, C. & Thompson, J. (eds.), Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2019, p. 104 2. Ibid.

3. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, revised edition 2009, p. 59

Fairweather to Frater, op. cit.

4. Fairweather to Frater, op. cit.

5. Ibid.

6. See Forwood, G., Lina Bryans: Rare Modern 1909-2000, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, 2003, pp. 90-92 7. See Roberts, C. & Thompson, J., op. cit., p. 105 KIRSTY GRANT

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55

JOHN PASSMORE

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(1904 – 1984) BATHERS, 1952 oil on composition board 56.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower right: JP 52 signed verso: J Passmore ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above c.1952 EXHIBITED possibly: Sydney Painting 1952, Macquarie Galleries at Finney’s Gallery, Brisbane, 15 – 25 July 1952, cat. 46 (Bathers, 20gns) RELATED WORK The Bathers, 1951, oil on composition board, 91.0 x 183.0 cm, private collection, New South Wales For me, a visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales was never complete without a quick look at the group of John Passmore works, which occupied a small corner there for many years. This modest group of paintings dating from the early 1950s, bearing titles such as If you Don’t Believe me, Ask the Old Bloke, The Argument and The Fish Stealer, was a beautifully observed, perfectly weighted collection of pictures drawn from seaside life. Set amongst Passmore’s energetic brushwork, the swimmers jostle and cavort as they leap, fall or are pushed from the jetty. They are scenes of hilarity, with each work becoming the epitome of anecdote in paint.

Bathers, 1952, is a major example of Passmore’s painting, which would fit perfectly amongst the group belonging to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. These delicately tuned compositions, poised precisely between chaos and order, successfully evoke the playful atmosphere, mood and energy of the entire activity, rather than merely depicting one aspect of the scene.

The paintings featuring wharves and jetties had their genesis during the artist’s time teaching at the Newcastle Technical College. He had a room above the Star Hotel, near the College, where he also kept a studio. He also had a strong work ethic and lived frugally without distraction, an approach which enabled him to immerse himself in his painting, and

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which partly explains why works from this period are so consistent and focused in their execution. Around Newcastle he would spend weekends at seaside spots, observing the locals before returning to the studio and drawing obsessively before developing the sketches into paintings.

Because the works were not painted en plein air, they are not tethered to the subject and therefore, with more than a nod to impressionism, deliver us a truer, more cinematic representation of the subject.

On his return to Sydney, Passmore became the torch-bearer for progressive painting through his teaching role at the National Art School.

He was a natural teacher; his wit and enthusiasm inspired his students to look beyond the academic brown paintings of the day. A gaggle of devoted students (most notably John Olsen) hung on his every word, savoured his humour and indulged his habit of uttering Delphic maxims.

His passion for Tintoretto and Rembrandt was front and centre, but it was Cézanne whose influence gripped the artist early and wove its way through his entire oeuvre. Passmore also helped to rekindle an earlier abstract art movement, which had flickered out during the Second World War. The earlier generation of abstract painters were formal and analytical, combining bright colour with geometry. In contrast, Passmore’s approach was freewheeling, lyrical and expressive.

Today he is remembered as an elfin-like guru, whose indelible influence lives on through generations of lyrical abstract painters. Murray Bail, writing for Passmore’s 1984-85 retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales remembers, ‘Gradually over time everything fell away, even his Christian name. Unlike Arthur, Lloyd, Sid, Fred … he became known simply as Passmore. It seemed entirely appropriate, fitting the fact of his isolated shape which had become smaller and tighter. Passmore himself referred to himself as Passmore’.1 ‘Guard what is yours’ and ‘nothing in excess’ are two of his Delphic maxims that provide a small portal into Passmore’s approach to art and life.

1. Bail, M., ‘Passmore’s Isolation’, addendum to Pearce, B., John Passmore 1904 – 84, Retrospective, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney 1985 HENRY MULHOLLAND

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RALPH BALSON

15

(1890 – 1964) UNTITLED (NON-OBJECTIVE PAINTING), 1954 oil on composition board 91.0 × 69.5 cm signed and dated lower right: R Balson 54 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Peter Balson, Sydney, the artist’s son Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above, c.1960 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney Throughout his career Ralph Balson tirelessly sought a process of abstract painting that would respect the physical qualities of paint while illustrating what he would call the ‘ineffable’: the sublime and invisible forces of the universe 1 This pursuit led him through a disciplined, logical progression of different styles of abstract painting – from the planar geometry of his Constructive works, to a painterly fragmentation of the ‘Non-Objective’ paintings, and finally, the automatic Matter Paintings.

In the early 1950s, the first of these tipping points, Balson released himself from the impersonal and serene rigour of his constructivism and allowed himself to embrace the ever-changing fluidity of the universe.

His new style of lyrical and painterly abstraction was one that Daniel Thomas qualified as the ’climax of his career’, created at precisely the time when Romantic abstraction became fashionable in the circles of Contemporary art in Sydney. 2 This dramatic adoption of a fractured, kaleidoscopic surface was prefigured in Balson’s pastel works on paper, which were first exhibited at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1952. James Gleeson described these works at the time as a ’descent into a fantastic and delightful jungle. Here in these pastel labyrinths the forms are shattered into a thousand particles which are disposed over the surface in patterns of great complexity and variety.’ 3 While it has been generally accepted by scholars that Balson did not put these restless expressions of overall abstraction into practice in paint until 1955 at the earliest,4 this outstanding example is clearly signed and dated lower left – R Balson, 54 – and handsomely housed in its original 1950s wooden frame. This is a rare and important example in paint of the divergent principles Balson had hitherto only explored on paper, an extraordinarily early outlier in Balson’s painterly investigation into flux, the ever-accelerating pace of modern progress.

This Non-Objective is also aesthetically liminal, presenting (in contrast to later Non-Objective paintings) a wide variety of brush strokes, and a gridlike lattice painted below the surface of these applied daubs. Whipping criss-crossed strokes and smatterings of pure colour are evenly and

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seemingly randomly distributed across the board to create movement and dynamism. With no clear focal point, the marks of the finely mottled surface coalesce in the centre and dissipate towards the edges of the support. The eye is drawn around the painting, attracted by joyful and bold tonal associations, such as the profusion of cobalt in the upper righthand corner. While Balson’s pastel Non-Objectives worked against the tooth of the paper, the dry brushstrokes of this painting are applied to the coarse surface of the composition board, breaking up the pigment into further fractured minutiae.

A precocious disciple of international Modernist theory, Balson focused on the planar quality of the picture’s surface, producing some of the first purely abstract works in Australia. He had initially been exposed to notions of French Art Informel and New York Abstract Expressionism through Grace Crowley’s correspondence with friends overseas, and these were further solidified with the 1953 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition, French Painting Today, which encouraged many young Sydney painters to embrace abstraction.

Non-Objective painting was created at a pivotal point in Balson’s career.

While he remained for most of his life a quiet man removed from the social scene of the Sydney art world, it was in 1953 that Balson finally started to receive a solid critical reception. Not only did the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquire one of his Constructive Paintings for their permanent collection, but the Conference of Interstate Gallery Directors (a meeting of the directors of Australia’s major art museums) selected two of his paintings, both from the 1950s, to be included in a major diplomatic exhibition in London of the best contemporary Australian Art, Twelve Australian Artists, alongside established artists Russell Drysdale, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. 5 1. Adams, B., ‘Metaphors of Scientific Idealism: The theoretical background to the paintings of Ralph Balson’ in Bradley, A. and Smith, T. (eds), Australian Art and Architecture: Essays presented to Bernard Smith, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1980, p. 188 2. Thomas, D., ‘Ralph Balson’, Art and Australia, vol. 2, no. 4, March 1965, p. 257 3. Gleeson, J., ‘Abstract Art Show Exciting’, The Sun, Sydney, 21 May 1952, p. 48 4.

Free, R., Balson Crowley Fizelle Hinder, AGNSW, Sydney, 1966, p. 9; Thomas, D., op. cit., p. 258; Adams, B., Ralph Balson: A Retrospective, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1989, p. 52; Taylor, E., Grace Crowley, Being Modern, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006, p. 50

5. Thomas, D., ‘Ralph Balson and Gallery A’, Gallery A Sydney 1964 – 1983, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, 2009, p.106 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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YVONNE AUDETTE

16

born 1930 CANTATA NO. 14, 1963 – 64 oil on composition board (diptych) 120.0 x 184.0 cm overall signed and dated lower right: YA 64 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Cantata No 14/ Y Audette/ 1963/64 ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORK Cantata no. 12, oil on composition board, 130.2 x 192.2 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Yvonne Audette holds a unique position in twentieth century Australian art as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in an abstract mode. She left Australia to further her studies in late 1952, however unlike most of her peers, headed to New York, influenced by her American-born parents’ agreement to provide financial support if she went there rather than to Europe. While her training had been traditionally academic, with an emphasis on the figure, Audette’s first-hand exposure to the work of artists including Willem de Kooning (whose studio she visited in 1953), Robert Motherwell and Mark Tobey brought her face to face with the burgeoning New York School of Abstract Expressionist painting and she began to move confidently towards abstraction, developing a unique visual language that merged a lyrical use of colour with dextrous markmaking and the textural layering of line and abstract form.

After travelling in Europe Audette settled in Florence, establishing a studio there in 1955.1 Against the backdrop of Italy’s rich culture and artistic past, she was welcomed into a community of professional artists (including Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana) who encouraged her and provided an aspirational example. Focussed and determined, Audette worked hard, holding commercial exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome and London.

YVONNE AUDETTE Cantata no. 12: The journey, 1963 oil on composition board 130.2 x 192.2 cm Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Miss Flora MacDonald Anderson and Mrs Ethel Elizabeth Ogilvy Lumsden, Founder Benefactors, 1994 © Yvonne Audette/Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

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While Audette’s work was rarely seen in Australia during her expatriate years, it has since been recognised for her important contribution to the history of twentieth century art in this country. Acquisitions by major public galleries were followed by a series of institutional exhibitions – Queensland Art Gallery (1999), Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000), National Gallery of Victoria (2008), Ian Potter Museum of Art (2009) and the Art Gallery of Ballarat (2016) – and the publication of a major monograph in 2003.

Audette was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the June 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for significant service to the visual arts as an abstract painter.

1. Audette lived in Florence until 1963, relocating to Milan before returning to Australia permanently in 1966.

KIRSTY GRANT

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‘I am interested in the musicality of the abstract mark. I tried to achieve in paint what I experienced in music, particularly the Bach Cantatas.

Bach’s Cantatas breathed for me a kind of mystical joy.’1 Yvonne Audette’s striking painting Cantata No. 14 of 1963-64 was created by the then thirty-three-year old artist in her studio in Milan during her lengthy period in Europe. Significantly, this major painting has never before been exhibited or illustrated during the fifty-six years since that time.

The best things in life are abstract. Abstract nouns strive to codify an intangible world of ideas, emotions or mental states to outline those core attributes that are the most human of all – beauty, love, hope, emotion and a host of other conceptualised refinements. Audette’s paintings aim to capture and convey such refinements. She addresses and gives pictorial shape to such states of mind – she ‘keeps revealing the inwardness of our being’ in Professor Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s pinpointed phrase. 2 It was this artistic internality that occasioned her noteworthy mention in the New York Guggenheim Museum’s major exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 of 2009, as curated by its Senior Curator, Dr. Alexandra Munroe. 3 In other words, Audette’s paintings are prompted by a ’call and response’ interaction with the world of felt sensation. Her unique artistic ’voice’ and its interactive mode have long been recognised by discerning collectors and curators – from the very first of her thirty-nine solo exhibitions (Gallery Schettini, Milan, 1958) through to her equal number of group exhibitions. Certainly, in Audette, the results of such a mode produce refined paintings with optically seductive richness and compositional finesse, but the sustained power of its prime effect upon the viewer lies in the ways that her paintings induce what might be called an empathetic mentation – that is, the eye wanders over layered surfaces, takes in subtle colours and modulated lines; the mind loosens and is led inwards toward an opened-out and aestheticised self-talk. Clearly, Audette’s paintings are about something rather than of something.

The ‘aboutness’ of Audette’s Cantata No. 14 resides in her heartfelt love of J. S. Bach’s music, which she studied as a young student of classical piano and violin at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. Bach’s aural flows and contrapuntal harmonies remain supreme marvels and it’s best to think of Audette’s painting as an artistic ‘reverberation’ of his music – it certainly is not a ’visualisation’ or an ’interpretation’. The matter runs deeper and might usefully be considered as her visual emulation of Bach’s artistic example – that is, as a personal correlative that creates and sets down painterly elements in abstract compositions in ways that might best draw out inner sensation.

The artist, in her private notes, puts it more movingly: ‘I tried in my paintings to isolate the vibrations of tone and colour to musical sound. … the textural beauty created by combinations of stringed instruments playing the choral melody, and the utterly different vocal parts, send images and messages to me of contrasting colours and a dynamic spatial structure. I tried to create those combinations of two or more independent melodies in line and colour and to create harmonic textures equivalent to counterpoint. … it became an underlying structure that I chose to develop.’4 Given all of the above, Yvonne Audette’s Cantata No. 14 stands as a hallmark painting that represents the artist at a pivotal phase in her notable life.

1. Personal notes in the possession of the artist 2. Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G. and Grant, K., Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949-2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p.20 3.

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2009, pp. 153-154. Audette’s painting The Grey Wall with Lines, 1957 in the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane was requested to be shown in the New York exhibition.

Two factors prevented this: the costs associated with international transportation and the lapsing of Audette’s previous American citizenship.

4. Personal notes in the possession of the artist.

KEN WACH

Right: Yvonne Audette in Florence, c.1964 photographer unknown

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JOHN OLSEN born 1928 SPANISH ENCOUNTER 2, 1960 oil on composition board (diptych) 182.5 x 242.5 cm overall signed and dated upper right: John Olsen 60 signed and inscribed with title verso: John / Olsen / “Spanish” / “Encounter 2” ESTIMATE: $350,000 – 450,000

PROVENANCE Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney State Bank of New South Wales, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1983 Corporate collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Introduction 1961, Gallery A, Melbourne, 23 February – 17 March 1961, cat. 37 17th Anniversary Show, Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Paddington, 11 December 1976 LITERATURE Spate, V., John Olsen, Georgian House, Melbourne, 1963, pl. 30, p. 18 (illus., dated as 1961) Borlase, N., ‘Art’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1976, p. 7 RELATED WORK Spanish encounter, 1960, oil on hardboard (triptych), 183.0 x 366.0 cm (overall), in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

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JOHN OLSEN Spanish encounter, 1960 oil on hardboard 183.0 x 366.0 cm (triptych) Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1960 © AGNSW

Attending the Julian Ashton Art School, life classes at the Datillo Rubbo School and later, the East Sydney Technical College, John Olsen’s studies in Sydney during the late 1940s and 50s provided him with a solid grounding for the development of a successful artistic career.

John Passmore, his teacher at Ashton’s, had the greatest influence, introducing him to compositional principles based on a rigorous study of Cézanne, as well as emphasising, almost in contradiction, the expressive and intuitive possibilities of drawing. Passmore’s belief that art was a ’mystic vocation’1 was critical, an authoritative declaration of validity for the young artist and his fellow students. As Olsen later wrote, ‘he made me feel I was being introduced into something sacred.’ 2 In a review of Olsen’s first major solo exhibition, which took place at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1955, the critic Paul Haefliger wrote, ‘emerging from the countless ranks of students, [he] is so far the brightest hope for a new generation of painters … His disintegration of forms, his sense of corruption [and] … daring … make him an ideal candidate for a trip abroad.’ 3 This came to pass in December 1956, when, on Haefliger’s recommendation, Robert and Annette Shaw offered to sponsor Olsen, providing his fare to Europe and a living allowance in return for paintings which would be sent home for exhibition in Australia.

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Arriving in England, Olsen travelled to Paris spending some months at Atelier 17, the print workshop established and run by Stanley Hayter, before travelling to Spain, the country in which he would spend the majority of his three years overseas.

I remember stopping for lunch at a tiny fishing village, and there like a table cloth laid out upon the sand were long fishing nets – men and women dressed in black but barefooted, donkeys, carts, fishing baskets.

Unlike France which seemed all air and atmosphere, this was figured in an air of symbolism, the shadows for example were more distinctive and fascinating than the actors who cast them. The yellow sand, the white village houses, the cart wheels in shadow reveal an intense atmosphere of surrealism. In an instant, I could understand the Spanish tradition [of] Zurbarán, Velasquez, Goya, Dali, Picasso.4 Spanish culture and the vitality of the Mediterranean lifestyle suited Olsen and the freedom to work, read, think and experiment in this environment had a transformative effect on the development of his art.

The living, meandering line that is such a characteristic feature of Olsen’s art emerged during these years. In part a response to Paul Klee’s famous notion of drawing as taking a line for a walk, this new element introduced

John Olsen in Santa Eulalia, Ibiza, 1957 photographer unknown courtesy: Louise Olsen

the spontaneity and feeling of drawing into his painting. It also enabled him to depict the experience of being in the landscape or a particular place, of moving through it, seeing it from above and observing it close up, all at once. From this time on, multiple viewpoints, calligraphic line and a lively application of paint combined to produce bold compositions which were largely, although not exclusively abstract, and pulsated with energy and life.

Spanish Encounter 2, 1960 was painted in Sydney soon after Olsen’s return to Australia and is closely related to the monumental three-panel work of the same name in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, one of the masterpieces of mid-twentieth Australian gestural painting. 5 The triptych was painted in a burst of creative energy one night and represented, ‘a release and a resolution of the previous years’ expressed in ‘a conglomeration of shapes in the process of metamorphosis.’6 In this double-panelled painting, Olsen’s signature line merges with a similar array of symbolic shapes – arrows, stars, gridded forms – as well as elements which seemingly represent aspects of the landscape, such as the vibrant blue river that flows across the lower right corner. Dynamic intersections of line, shape and pattern, and the careful interplay of forms, at once balanced and irregular, bely the apparent speed with

which Olsen worked on the panels, highlighting his mastery of intuitive composition and gesture. The palette is rich – sandy ochre and brown, dark red, blues, grey and touches of green – and more vibrant than most of the Spanish work, simultaneously recalling memories of Spain as well as suggesting the landscape and colours of Sydney.

With a career that has spanned more than seven decades, John Olsen is rightly hailed as Australia’s greatest living artist. A major work from the period which marked the beginning of his artistic maturity, Spanish Encounter 2 is a joyous testament to his ability to communicate things seen, felt and imagined in a single painted image.

1. Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1991, p. 9 2. Quoted from inscription on Olsen’s drawing of an elderly Passmore in hospital, John Passmore, 1987, pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 75.4 x 54 cm, National Gallery of Australia.

3. Haefliger, P., ‘Big Promise in Work of Painter, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February 1955, quoted in Hart, op. cit., p. 17 4. John Olsen quoted in Hart, op. cit., pp. 37-38 5. Spanish Encounter, 1960, oil on three hardboard panels, 183 x 366 cm (overall) 6. Ibid., p. 51

KIRSTY GRANT

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JOHN OLSEN born 1928 SPANISH ENCOUNTER 2, 1960

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FRED WILLIAMS

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(1927 – 1982) UPWEY, 1965 oil on canvas 86.0 x 70.5 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams bears inscription on backing verso: 1050 ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Fred Williams, Melbourne Lyn Williams, Melbourne Nevill Keating Pictures, London Private collection, London Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Heroic Landscape: Williams/Streeton, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 16 October – 22 November 1970, cat. 38 (label attached verso) Visions of Australia 1950 – 2000, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 6 – 28 July 2000, cat. 3 (illus. cover of exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1987, p. 211 (illus. as ‘Upwey Landscape’) Five years after Upwey, 1965 was painted it was included in a confident and prescient exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria pairing the work of Fred Williams and Arthur Streeton. Williams was 43, Streeton died in 1943 and was last exhibited in a memorial exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1944. Williams admired the Heidelberg School painters and owned a 9 by 5 panel.1 The exhibition’s curator, Brian Finemore, wrote, ‘As the European settlement of Australia progressed

… the visual arts moved from description of a topographical kind to an interpretation of the artists’ personal involvement with this land … taking the landscape as “hero” in their art, each has changed radically and enlarged our awareness of our environment.’ 2 Upwey represents the peak of Fred Williams at his most distinctive and masterful. In 1962 he and his wife, Lyn, moved to Upwey – Streeton retired to Olinda in 1938, a fifteen-minute drive north.

The 1960s was a decade where Williams’ images became important in defining a unique and original Australianness and the vision of our landscape. The works immediately preceding the Upwey paintings reveal more formal and descriptive elements, were usually painted on board and built up through subtle and richly half-tone glazed surfaces.

Important works from this period (1957-1963) are represented in major public collections. But by the mid-sixties, Williams had all but worked through this particular formalism and paintings, watercolours, drawings and etchings of infinite subtly and variation mark a prolific new energy. 3 Works with single demarcated elements such as a high horizon line reoccur. Skies are an infinite space and the landscape below is vast and contained within the artist’s imagination and his deft, painterly control.

The surface becomes an expanse for Williams’ distinctive minimal forms and flecked intonations, where the immediacy of painting never allows for any gesture to be repeated. All the while they suggest the unpatterned irregularity of something observed and formed into an astonishing work of art in the studio.

While the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition might now be viewed as connecting two generations of great landscapists, there are other aspects which Williams and Streeton shared. Both were brilliant painters in using half-tones and neither was timid using black to describe and delineate forms. Similarly, Streeton works from the 1890s often pushed the horizon line to the top of the picture plane. In his Sirius Cove, c.1895 the wood panel is vertical and narrow with rocks in various forms descending to the foreground. 4 Upwey relates to other major works with a high horizon line and expressive gestures arranged below it – a considered spontaneity with the landscape as its wellspring. 5 1. Charles Conder, Impressionists’ camp, 1889, oil on paper on cardboard, 13.9 x 24.0 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gift of Mr and Mrs Fred Williams and family, 1979 2. Finemore, B., ‘Introduction’, Heroic Landscape: Williams/Streeton, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1970 3. Hummock in Landscape, 1967, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 122 cm. Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 15 July, 2020. lot 7. The essay accompanying this work complements the principal stylistic and technical aspects of Upwey, 1965.

4. Arthur Streeton, Sirius Cove, c.1895, oil on wood panel, National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1973

Upwey Landscape, 1965 by Fred Williams and Bush Landscape by Sir Arthur Streeton paired in the Heroic Landscape exhibition, 1970, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne photographer unknown

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5. Upwey Landscape, 1965, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest, 1965.

This work was included in Heroic Landscape: Williams/Streeton, catalogue no. 39. The exhibition’s curator, Brian Finemore, later discussed it in Freedom from Prejudice: An

introduction to the Australian Collection in the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1977.

DOUG HALL, AM

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JEFFREY SMART

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(1921 – 2013) THE TRAFFIC ISLAND, 2009 oil on canvas 82.0 x 104.5 cm signed twice lower left: JEFFREY SMART ESTIMATE: $450,000 – 650,000

PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso, stock no. AG105625) Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Jeffrey Smart, Paintings and Studies 2006 – 2010 and one drawing from 1946, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 22 June – 10 July 2010, cat. 17 LITERATURE Heathcote, C., ‘The Smart Touch’, Art Monthly, Canberra, No. 231, July 2010, p. 35 We are grateful to Stephen Rogers, Archivist for the Estate of Jeffrey Smart, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

Jeffrey Smart followed throughout his career a template of formal geometric composition (almost abstract in its rigour) inhabited by figures acting out an unknowable narrative. In a manner that would have made Baudelaire proud, Smart translated the beauty he found in the impassive observation of his present-day surroundings, placing formal order first and foremost in his practice. Although he spent the last forty years of his life living and working in Tuscany, Smart continued to paint from there the globally uniform imagery of post-war urban boom, particularly the arterial roads which had smoothed out the path to economic progress.

It was the sculptural and semiotic qualities of these concrete and steel monuments that Smart admired and conveyed in his works.

Not quite as hard-edged as some of Smart’s other roadside paintings, The Traffic Island, 2008 is dominated by the sinuous contours of the street furniture itself, further reinforced by its white delimitating lines painted directly on the bitumen. With subject matter and composition reprised from an earlier painting from his extensive back-catalogue, The Island, 1962 (Royal Perth Hospital Collection), here the eponymous traffic island floats in the foreground. While its point juts out towards the viewer, the road rises up behind it, meeting a narrow band of sky on a horizon interrupted by a single multi-storey apartment block and a belt of parked candy-coloured cars and lorries.

For all of Smart’s meticulous realism, his paintings are in fact carefully constructed. Based on real-life locations, his views are then simplified and re-arranged into geometrically logical compositions, whittled into concise images through a process of multiple preparatory studies in both pencil and oil. Through this process, Smart sought out the stillness he felt came from a well-designed picture.1 In this, Smart is an inheritor of the masters of the Italian High Renaissance, whom he greatly admired.

With a painterly texture characteristic of his later works (a product of a more coarsely woven canvas), Smart creates a stark contrast between the creeping shadows of the foreground and the raking afternoon light hitting the street signs and bright white façade of the apartment block.

This confers a rare and unusual beauty on an otherwise banal section of urban planning. By tightly cropping his composition, enough to clip the top of the road sign, Smart creates an impression of a scene isolated with a man-made viewfinder. The eye is drawn throughout the composition in a circular motion, directed by the blue and white arrow, converging on the reversed lollipop sign to the left of the composition.

Dwarfed in scale and almost hidden, Smart has painted two of his classic anonymous workers in overalls, perhaps responsible for the construction and maintenance of his imagined world? They idly chat beside the row of parked cars, resting against the kerbside in an otherwise deserted parking lot. While the parking lot is full, the motorists of these cars exist only outside of the frame. One can only guess at Smart’s suggested narrative.

Although it is tempting to read Smart’s works as critiques of urban alienation, as an evocation of Hopper-esque modern solitude, this wouldn’t give due credit to the wry humour encased within his compositions. Roads, in life like in Smart’s paintings, are carefully engineered and clearly delineated, herding the hidden hordes of citizens throughout space. Smart’s Italian autostrade are not formed by the intuitive and repetitive motions of desire paths; they efficiently direct the lonely viewer (motorist?) through the composition with precise instructions. A contradiction lies in this implied movement of the viewer and the hushed stillness of the freshly empty scene before them. The arrow indicates a direction in which the motorist/viewer should keep moving, circumnavigating this traffic island with no clear exit in sight.

On the horizon, a hedge of tightly packed parked cars taunts with the promise of respite in the form of an unattainable parking spot.

1. Artist quoted in Smart’s Labyrinth, ABC TV, 10 May 1995 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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ARTHUR BOYD

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(1920 – 1999) NEBUCHADNEZZAR FALLEN IN A FOREST WITH A LION (NO.2), c.1968 oil on canvas 174.5 x 181.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd bears inscription verso: 48 / owner / Bill [indistinct] bears inscription on frame verso: APRIL 69 DE MARCO GALLERY [ind.] ION A. BOYD ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000 PROVENANCE Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney Robert Shaw, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works

by Arthur Boyd, Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 14 April – 10 May 1969, cat. 48 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, pl. 17) On long-term loan to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, June 1990 – January 2003 (label attached verso) RELATED WORK Red Nebuchadnezzar Fallen in a Forest with a Lion, 1968 – 69, oil on canvas, 122.0 x 91.5 cm, Bundanon Trust Nebuchadnezzar Caught in a Forest, 1968, oil on canvas, 110.0 x 114.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

‘I’d like to feel that through my work there is a possibility of making a contribution to a social progression or enlightenment. It would be nice if the creative effort or impulse was connected with a conscious contribution to society, a sort of duty of service.’1 According to the Old Testament, Nebuchadnezzar, king of ancient Babylon (602-562BCE), was a successful ruler who fell from grace for placing his own self-aggrandisement before God. As punishment for his pride and arrogance, he thus lost his sanity and was banished into the wilderness for seven years where he underwent various trials and tribulations: ‘...his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses: they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven; til he knew that the most high God ruled in the kingdom of men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will’. 2 Although the Book of Daniel has provided inspiration to the visual arts for centuries from the medieval façade reliefs of Notre Dame La Grande, Poitiers to the Romantic prints of visionary William Blake, no painter has arguably ever devoted him or herself more fully to imagining the degenerative experiences of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness than Australian modernist, Arthur Boyd.

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Imbuing his king with Lear-like characteristics, Boyd embarked upon this impressive Nebuchadnezzar series in 1966 to illustrate a text on the theme by the scholar Thomas S.R. Boase (who subsequently published 34 of the works in his dedicated tome in 1974). 3 Characterised by its frenzied energy, vivid colour and profound symbolic permutations, the series still remains one of the artist’s most sustained, encompassing more than a hundred works and featuring some of the most sumptuously executed paintings of his career. Elaborating upon the appeal of the theme for the artist, Boase suggests: ‘Here is a subject that leads immediately into Boyd’s preoccupation in many other works with the fusion between man and natural forces, the involvement of man and beast... Other echoes link with Boyd’s own symbolism, the sinister dark birds, the gentle mourning dog. Behind the figures there are traces of the Australian landscape of his early inspiration. But if these works are enriched with such references, the myth is newly and freshly created, a second Daniel come to judgment our own contemporary obscure and secret impulses’.4 Given the artist’s renowned social conscience, indeed it is perhaps not coincidental that his Nebuchadnezzar series was produced at the height of the Vietnam War when audiences internationally were assailed with images in the mass media of cruel dictatorial regimes: villages incinerated, men and women tortured, children screaming from the pain of napalm. As one author notes, ‘self-immolations in protest actually took place on Hampstead Heath near Boyd’s house... and once more, a biblical subject by him was seen to be an allegory of the descent of humanity in a conflicted world’. 5 In Nebuchadnezzar fallen in a forest with a lion (No.2), c.1968, the king is depicted fiery red and lying precariously on the ground, while the lion – in stark contrast to the tamed beast of the bible legend – here appears as a menacing force, pouncing towards the exposed king with its piercing claws and bared teeth. As with the finest of Boyd’s Nebuchadnezzar images, the work offers an empathetic and emotive response to a harsh tale of moral instruction, giving compelling form to ‘…good and evil; things elemental and mysterious, things intensely human and vulnerable’.6 1. Arthur Boyd, cited at https://www.bundanon.com.au/collection/exhibitions page/active-witness/ 2. Boase, T.S., Nebuchadnezzar, Thames and Hudson, London, 1972, p. 20 3. Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 26 4. Boase, op.cit., p.42 5. Pearce, op.cit.

6. Oliver, C., ‘A Welcome to Arthur Boyd’ in Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works by Arthur Boyd, ex.cat., Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1969, n.p.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

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part 2

Important Australian and International Fine Art LOTS 21 – 63

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DORRIT BLACK

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(1891 – 1951) THE POT PLANT, 1933 colour linocut on paper 30.5 x 19.0 cm (image) edition: 12/ 50 signed in image with artist’s monogram signed, numbered and inscribed with title below image: The Pot-plant 12 X 30 [sic.] Dorrit Black ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Adelaide Thence by descent, Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Contemporary Group, Farmer’s Blaxland Galleries, Sydney, 24 October – 4 November 1933, cat. 88 (another example) Women Artists of Australia, Education Department Art Gallery, Sydney, 12 – 25 July 1934, cat. 205 (another example) Colour Prints. Also Paintings by R.O. Dunlop, Basil Jonzen, Richard Eurich, Redfern Gallery, London, 12 July – 14 August 1934, cat. 8 (another example) Fifth Exhibition of British Linocuts, Ward Gallery, London, 1 June 1934, cat. 37 (another example) Dorrit Black (Retrospective), Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 25 October 1945, cat. 55 (another example) Dorrit Black 1891 – 1951, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and touring, 1975 – 1976, cat. 57 (another example) Claude Flight and His Followers. The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, and touring, cat. 23 (another example) Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (another example)

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LITERATURE Art in Australia, 15 November 1938, Third Series, No. 73, p. 63 (illus., another example, as ‘Pot Plant’) Draffin, N., Australian Woodcuts and Linocuts of the 1920s and 1930s, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1976, p. 42 (illus., another example) North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Macmillan and Art Gallery of South Australia, 1979, Melbourne, cat. L.19, pl. 15, pp. 60, 61 (illus., another example), 63, 132 Coppel, S., Claude Flight and His Followers. The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, National Gallery of Australia, 1992, p. 19 Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, England, in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995, cat. DB 20, p. 57 (illus.)

Lock-Weir, T., Dorrit Black. Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 156 (illus.), 202 (illus. another example) RELATED WORK Other examples of this print are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom.

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KEITH VAUGHAN (1912 – 1977, British) BAPTISM, 1963 oil on canvas 127.0 x 101.5 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: BAPTISM / 1963 / Keith Vaughan (inverted) inscribed on stretcher bar verso: commenced Jan 10/ 63 G B VAUGHAN (inverted) label attached to frame verso: James Bourlet & Sons, Ltd London ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000 PROVENANCE Marlborough Galleries, London (label attached verso, dated 1964, stock no. LOLKV23) Robert Shaw, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Keith Vaughan, Marlborough New London Gallery, London, October 1964, cat.4 Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, City of Bradford Art Gallery, England, 1967 (label attached verso) Premio Gaetano Marzotto per la Piuttura: La pittura figurativa in Europa (Gaetano Marzotto Prize for Painting: Figurative painting in Europe), Valdagno Gallery, Italy, 1968, cat.133 LITERATURE Hepworth A. & Massey I., Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Co., Bristol, United Kingdom, 2012, cat. AH421, p. 150 RELATED Bather: August 4th, 1961, 1961, oil on canvas, 102.2 x 91.4 cm, in the collection of the Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom Standing figure – blue background, 1963, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm, Private collection Red landscape with figures, 1964, oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm, in the collection of the Aberdeen Art Gallery, United Kingdom

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Keith Vaughan is associated with the second-wave of Britain’s NeoRomantic artists, a generation forever affected by the horrors of World War Two. Like the movement’s original pre-War members – Paul Nash, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland – these younger artists sought to create a truly British art, one which found its inspiration in the nation’s environment, history and literature, rather than creating a regional variant of overseas modernism. Key antecedents for the Neo-Romantics included the distinctively individual landscapes of Samuel Palmer and the visionary William Blake; and whilst some of Vaughan’s peers, including Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, pursued a bleaker, nihilist view of humanity, he was more optimistic and lyrical. The canvases from the 1960s are considered to be among Vaughan’s finest, and Baptism, 1963, is a significant example that has not been seen publicly for over fifty years.

The major concern for the artist through his four decades of painting was how to reconcile the polarities of realism and abstraction when depicting figures in a landscape. Essentially self-taught, he spent much of the 1930s as a layout artist for the Unilever advertising company Lintas (the Australian painter John Passmore was a co-worker). In response to such training, Vaughan relied on photographs and preliminary drawings for his paintings until the 1950s when he abandoned the practice to work directly from life, a strategy which resulted in freer lines and painterliness within his images. Another key point was his exposure to a 1953 exhibition in London of work by Nicholas de Staël, an artist who utilised paint scrapers to create dramatic impasto paintings that walked the fine line between abstraction and reality. Five years later, Vaughan created his Lazarus paintings, his first series that successfully embraced these strategies. In 1959, he spent six months in the United States of

America, teaching in the art department of Iowa State University, and then travelled along the Mississippi River, sketching the scenery and towns. Vaughan considered this to be a pivotal period, and the powerful paintings from the early years of the 1960s were the result.

The scholar Gerard Hastings points out that in spite of the religious theme of Baptism, Vaughan was an avowed atheist. However, this did not stop him referring to biblical and classical mythologies, and other works from the period allude to St Sebastian, the Laocoön and the deposition of Christ from the Cross. Hastings notes that Baptism is partially inspired by the Piero della Francesca painting of the same title in London’s National Gallery; in particular ‘a figure in the background at the right removing his shirt seemed to occupy Vaughan’s centre of interest. The frozen moment, the revelation of the male form, the awkwardness of the pose.’1 Vaughan reduces this figure to a flurry of marks whose unexpected agitation contrasts with the static, even sombre presentation of the central figures of Jesus and St John the Baptist. This accords with the artist’s stated aim that he wanted to maintain an ‘enigmatic poise’ between his figures, with an associated ambiguity about individual identities. After its exhibition in Italy in 1968, Baptism became part of the collection of Robert Shaw, an Australian businessman who had already shown his significant support for local art by sponsoring John Olsen’s journey through Spain in the 1950s.

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Vaughan scholar Gerard Hastings in cataloguing this work.

1. See Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p.11 ANDREW GAYNOR

Keith Vaughan in his studio, Hampstead, London, 1960 photographer: Ida Kar Collection: National Portrait Gallery, London

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IAN FAIRWEATHER

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(1891 – 1974) MUSICIAN, 1951 gouache on paper on composition board 47.5 x 67.5 cm signed and dated lower right (in Chinese characters): IF 1951 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney Robert Shaw, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Exhibition of Paintings Easter 1953, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 31 March – 20 April 1953, cat. 7 Contemporary Australian Paintings from Private Collections in Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 September – 19 October 1955, cat. 26 (as ‘Reclining Figure’) Fairweather: a retrospective exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 3 June – 4 July 1965; 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; Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 9 December 1965 – 16 January 1966; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 10 February – 13 March 1966, cat. 26 (as ‘Reclining Figure, about 1953?’)

Exhibition of the Private Collection of Robert Shaw Esq., Gallery A, Sydney, arranged by the exhibitions committee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 13 – 16 August 1966, cat. 22 (as ‘Lute Player, 1952’) LITERATURE Art and Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1963, p.34 (illus. as ‘Lute Player (1949) Collection Robert Shaw’) McGregor, C. (et. al), In the Making, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1969, p. 147 (as ‘Reclining Figure’, image reversed) Bail, M., Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney & London, 1981, pl. 48, cat. 95, pp. 98, 106 (illus.), 238 By the time Ian Fairweather painted this voluptuous image, the Britishborn artist had already travelled through China, Bali, the Philippines, and India. The memories of these places, particularly of traditional village life, left tangible traces throughout his subsequent paintings. In spite of his self-imposed exclusion from society, Fairweather was fascinated with the lives of others, and his artworks are full of keenly observed imagery. However, it is the fusion of Eastern and Western painting styles that elevates his work. In the Australian canon, there was no one like him, and Musician, 1951, perfectly encapsulates all of these divergent influences.

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Fairweather’s first solo exhibition was held at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1949, by which time he was living in Cairns. His biographer Murray Bail describes this residence as being ‘an abandoned goat dairy in a forest of lantana. Nearby was the skeleton of a sawmill; within the wall-less space, he constructed a studio.’1 This became a particularly fertile period for the artist as a multitude of images, mostly figurative, poured out of his brushes. A particular subject was his memories of the sub-continent and Fairweather painted ‘dozens of India-based kneeling figures where the brush describes not so much chaste forms as the rhythms of line (and so of life).’ 2 His nomadic spirit caused the artist to leave Cairns in late 1949, and he hitch-hiked to Darwin in early 1950, again setting up in the least likely of places, an abandoned railway truck. Driven out by possums and rats, Fairweather moved into the rear half of a wrecked patrol boat on Dinah Beach at Frances Bay; and here he stayed until the now infamous raft trip to Timor in April 1952.

The figure was again central to the works created in Darwin and key works from 1950-51 include Persimmon (National Gallery of Victoria), Palm Sunday (Queensland Art Gallery), and the boldly evocative Pied-àterre (Art Gallery of New South Wales). In Musician, 1951, the reclining androgynous figure defines the picture plane, eyes shut and engrossed within the music being coaxed from the gourd. This is a hand-made, even rudimentary instrument, which bears only passing resemblance to other gourd-based examples, such as the Indian pungi made famous by snake charmers. Fairweather allows the waves of music to animate the background, undulating lines that mimic the indulgent swell of the musician’s belly. The artist preferred painting at night by the light of kerosene lamps, and would start with a single mark, which would then be added to and amplified as memories, sounds and smells ignited his inspiration. Such a strategy can be determined in Musician, a sense that the image has emerged from the artist’s mind as he progressed. The palette is simple but the sensuous result is not.

Musician was not included in the artist’s exhibitions of 1951 and 1952, having already been purchased by the noted collector Robert Shaw. In 1953, Fairweather was ignominiously digging trenches in England, a result of his deportation from Timor. In the absence of new work, Shaw generously loaned Musician for exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, thus allowing the creativity of this singular artist to remain in public view.

1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney & London, 1981, p.90 2. Ibid.

ANDREW GAYNOR

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) INDIAN ROADSIDE, 1949 ink and gouache on paper 18.5 x 22.5 cm signed with initials (as Chinese character) lower right: IF ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney V.C. Millane, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1953 Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 1 August 1984, lot 11 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED An Exhibition of Drawings, Ian Fairweather, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 21 September – 1 October 1949, cat. 15 We are grateful to Murray Bail for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) HEAD OF A GIRL, 1949 ink and gouache on paper 23.5 x 17.0 cm signed with initials (as Chinese character) lower right: IF

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PROVENANCE Stanley Coe Gallery, Melbourne Guelda Pyke, Melbourne Joseph Brown, Melbourne Christie’s, Sydney, 22 October 1975, lot 489 (as ‘A Girl’s Head, c.1950’) Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000 EXHIBITED Gouache Drawings by Ian Fairweather, Stanley Coe Gallery, Melbourne, 24 July – 1 August 1951, cat. 15 Spring, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 7 – 23 October 1974, cat. 50 (as ‘Head Study’) (illus. in exhibition catalogue) We are grateful to Murray Bail for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

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YVONNE AUDETTE

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born 1930 CANTATA NO. 17, 1968 – 69 oil on composition board 102.0 x 86.0 cm signed and dated Iower right: Audette/69 signed, dated, and inscribed with title verso: Audette / 1968-69 / Cantata No. 17 /… Audette ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above May 2001 EXHIBITED Audette’s Audettes: Works from the Private Collection of Yvonne Audette, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 27 May 2001, cat. 3 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., and Adams, B., Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 125, p.194 – 195 (illus.)

Well-heeled, well-travelled, and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant Garde, Yvonne Audette cut an unusual figure in the Sydney art scene of the late 1960s. Returning to her hometown of Sydney in 1966 after many years living in New York and Italy, Audette had matured as a painter, working now in 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 Victoria. During this time Audette established her overseas credentials and began to carve a spot for herself amongst her largely male peers.

While some of Audette’s works of the early 1960s incorporated calligraphic markings influenced by the sgraffito technique of Cy Twombly, who also lived as an expat in Italy, Cantata #17, 1968-69 stays resolutely geometric. Governed by a densely woven lattice of cumulative blocky brushstrokes and shapes, its vertical composition is reinforced by dense and layered vertical lines. The arrangement of iterated strokes, hatchings, and scumbled squares jostle against each other with sometimes startling colour contrasts, layered upon one another in noisy and dense palimpsests. In 1968, James Gleeson wrote ’perhaps the closest analogy with her [Audette’s] art is the palimpsest, for both are an accretion of written shapes on a surface stirring with earlier writings vanquished by time or by deliberate, though imperfect, erasure.

These phantoms flicker palely among the living signs and there are many

degrees of fading.’1 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 that is built up over time in small accretions and subtractions. The artist is well-known for holding the majority of her works in her studio for review and revision over many years, and while this work was completed in a relatively short span of one year, it was not exhibited until 2005, in an exhibition of works from the artist’s own personal collection. 2 These lyrical abstract compositions reflected the multilayered histories Audette encountered in Europe: ‘When I went to Europe in the mid-50s … my work responded to the layering of society itself – the remnants of murals on walls, the frescoes, the whole antiquity of the civilisation.’ 3 Some marks are sharp and clear, in the uppermost stratum of paint, while others are wiped clean away before being further obscured by super-imposed shapes and competing hues. In this swarming surface, one can discern the bright tones of Sydney harbour, particularly in comparison to Audette’s dark Italian works. Cantata #17 plays on the idea of musical harmony and invention, as hinted by the title of this series. Drawing inspiration from the ’mystical joy’ the artist found in the polyphonic genius of J.S. Bach’s compositions, this series explores variations on a theme, weaving together independent melodies and harmonies of colour.4 The history of art in Australia is indebted to Audette’s choice to return.

For all of 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 an abstract mode.

1. Gleeson, J., ‘Elating Shaking Yvonne’, Sydney Sun Herald, 25 February 1968 2. Audette’s Audettes, Metro 5, Melbourne, 2001 3. The artist quoted in McCulloch-Uehlin, S., ‘Abstraction’s Forgotten Generation’, The Australian, 23 April 1999, p.9 4. The artist’s notes, 1999, cited in Heathcote, C., et. al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949-2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, p. 170 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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ROGER KEMP

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(1908 – 1987) STRUCTURAL CONCEPT, c.1972 – 74 synthetic polymer paint on paper on hardboard 152.5 x 182.5 cm signed lower right: Roger Kemp signed on artist’s label attached verso with title, date, medium, dimensions and artist’s name ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Bellas Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Brisbane RELATED WORK Untitled, illus. in Hurlston, D et al., Roger Kemp: Visionary Modernist, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2019, pp. 122 – 23.

Untitled (Sequence), 1971 – 74, acrylic on paper, 152.0 x 480.0 cm illus. in Heathcote, C., Quest for Enlightenment: The Art of Roger Kemp, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 132 – 33.

Kemp does not abandon his former cosmic geometry, which reaches back to Pythagoras, Galileo and Newton, but he infuses the tensile bars and swerving arcs with that experiential immediacy of Australian cities, how enduring ratios and ageless forms were reappearing in steel, glass and concrete. With its lively freshness, we see in Structural Concept unmistakable suggestions of streets buzzing with redevelopment, of skinny cranes and girders rising on high, of noisy traffic funnelled below, of Melbourne’s bossy BHP tower, and of thrilling Sydney projects by visionary architects like Harry Seidler.

Structural Concept, c.1972 – 74 conveys so directly that dynamic period when Sydney and Melbourne surged with cosmopolitan confidence.

It was painted when Roger Kemp had returned to his homeland after two years working and exhibiting in Britain. The artist was struck at how these familiar metropolises were now so bristling and alive. Office towers were shooting up, freeways were pulsing with traffic, high speed computers and global telecommunications propelled business, crowded streets were energised with positive determined people. This upbeat pace was most apparent when Kemp moved into a city studio with several artists — high-rise construction was going up around them.

This stress was instantly recognised. Kemp’s work was praised for embodying the spirit of a progressive nation which could hold its own on the cultural front—and the artist found himself lifted to the front rank of Australian painting. The Sydney Biennale, a festival to showcase the best international artists, was launched in 1973. Kemp was chosen to represent Australia in the inaugural show, his geometric paintings being installed within Sydney’s glistening Opera House. The Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, also had ambitions to send to Europe an official exhibition of the nation’s ten foremost artists. A group of Kemp’s new paintings were included in that landmark 1974 show, Ten Australians, which toured France, Germany, Italy and Britain. As well the Visual Arts Board commissioned a documentary film on Kemp and this new work, which was screened nationally on ABC television, then Melbourne University offered him a big solo show to fill its just opened gallery.

Structural Concept shows visual echoes of this changing Australia worked into Kemp’s geometric art. He assembled a structure using a palette of spatial blue, rich reds inflected with earthy browns or spicy purples, taut white rods, then firm black lines which tie together a dominant configuration. Kemp set in these forms using the new artists’ sponge rollers shipped from overseas, then completed his work with traditional linear brushwork to clarify the geometry, bringing forth suggestions of a pulsing new cityscape.

Structural Concept, which was painted during this intense creative period, shows Roger Kemp in top form. One can appreciate why the Australian’s critic Christopher Allen was transfixed by a room filled with these mature works in the National Gallery Victoria’s Kemp retrospective late last year (among them an untitled companion piece to Structural Concept). “These paintings look more beautiful and impressive,” Allen declared in his review, insisting how in visual terms this peak in Kemp’s production “can be said, without exaggeration, to be breathtaking.”1 1. Allen, C, ‘Rethinking an artist cast in a whole new light’, Weekend Australian, 11—12 Jan 2020 DR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

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ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

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(1917 – 1999) GOLD RUSH, 1996 sawn retroreflective plywood road signs and painted wood from soft drink boxes on board 77.0 x 60.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Rosalie Gascoigne / 1996 / GOLD RUSH ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000

PROVENANCE Greenway Art Gallery, Adelaide Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 1 September 2010, lot 5 Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Greenaway Art Gallery at Fifth Australian Contemporary Art Fair, Melbourne, 2 – 6 October 1996 LITERATURE MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 108 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 579, p. 289 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Goldfield, 1996, Private collection, Switzerland, illus. in Gascoigne, M., op cit., cat. 578, p. 289 ‘Gascoigne’s use of modernist strategies, her simple but complex means of construction – those of fragmentation, re-assemblage, repetition, tessellation and compression – effect an ordering and accentuation which is also poetic in its workings … She experiences, selects and creates, using a relatively narrow range of materials in order to present the work to us resonating with a virtually endless allusive power. Her results are spectacular, exquisite distillations and extractions, grounded in her personalised experience of the land’.1 With her training in the formal discipline of Ikebana complementing her intuitive understanding of the nature of materials, her deep attachment to her environment and later interest in modern art, Rosalie Gascoigne remains one of Australia’s most revered assemblage artists. Bespeaking a staunchness and scrupulous eye, her works are artful and refined, yet always maintain a close connection with the outside world, powerfully evoking remembered feelings or memories in relationship to the landscape; they are ‘instances of emotion recollected in tranquility’ to quote a phrase of Wordsworth’s which was so dear to her.

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Although inextricably linked in their inspiration and materials to her physical surroundings on the outskirts of Canberra, Gascoigne’s achievements nevertheless encapsulate a larger, more intangible sense of place that is, paradoxically, ‘both nowhere and everywhere at once’. 2 Having eschewed the use of iconography, she favours rather allusion and suggestion to capture the timeless ‘spirit’ of the landscape so that her art ‘may speak for itself’, awakening ‘… associations that lie buried beneath the surface of consciousness; inviting a higher degree of sensitivity and attentiveness to the world around us’. 3 Occupying that space between ‘the world and the world of art’4, Gold Rush, 1996 offers an impressive example of Gascoigne’s assemblages, particularly as it features two of her most celebrated materials – the shimmering yellow and black wooden Schweppes soft-drink crates alongside sawn retroreflective plywood road signs. Executed the same year as her monumental Afternoon, 1996 (TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria) indeed the work embodies Gascoigne at her finest, functioning both ‘allusively’ as a rich repository of memories and associations, and ‘illusively’ as a purely abstract form of art – transcending both the material of its construction and the landscape with its emphatic frontality, use of the grid, and formal interest in qualities of colour, texture and repetition. For as Gascoigne herself reiterates, ultimately such works are about ‘the pleasures of the eye’, with her manipulations of natural and semi-industrial debris to be appreciated simply as objects of aesthetic delight. Like the materials themselves, beauty is a quality that is easily and thoughtlessly discarded; as John McDonald muses, ‘When we value things for their perceived usefulness, we overlook a more fundamental necessity. Life is impoverished by the inability to recognise beauty in even the most humble guise’. 5 1. Edwards, D., Rosalie Gascoigne: Materials as Landscape, Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p. 11 2. Cameron, D., What is Contemporary Art?, exhibition catalogue, Rooseum, Malmo, Sweden, c.1989, p. 18 3. McDonald, J., ‘Introduction’, MacDonald, V.,Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 7 4. Edwards, op. cit., p. 15 5. McDonald, op. cit., p. 7 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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IMANTS TILLERS

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born 1950 OUTBACK: C, 2005 synthetic polymer paint on 54 canvas boards 228.0 x 213.0 cm overall each panel numbered sequentially with stencil verso: 76222 – 76275 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000 (54)

PROVENANCE Sherman Galleries, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2005 EXHIBITED Imants Tillers: Land Beyond Goodbye, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 20 October – 12 November 2005, cat. 9 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Spring 2019, Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney, 4 September – 12 October 2019

Imants Tillers’ Outback paintings comprise a specific chapter in the vast anthology of his canvas-board works, numbered consecutively since 1981, and titled The Book of Power. This series, embarked upon in June 2003, refers to what the artists calls ’the spiritual heart of Australia’1 and forms a kind of historiography of the Western artistic interpretation of the landscape, reprising well-known works from Glover to Gascoigne. Key to Tillers’ work is the idea that the landscape is a constructed space and one haunted by the spirit of the place, the genius loci, for the first Australians and their colonisers. A postmodern artist par excellence, Tillers’ longstanding artistic practice has been founded on its devices: appropriation, grid-based reproduction and application of text, and stenciled overlay on the painted surface. The canvas boards have become a system through which Tillers can compartmentalise and study the Australian landscape in art, creating a continuous dialogue between the artistic object, the subject and the audience. In the vast scale of Outback:C, Tillers has appropriated Rosalie Gascoigne’s iconic retro-reflective street sign assemblage, painstakingly reconstructing the segmented panels of her work, Conundrum, 1989-90, held in the collection of the University of Melbourne.

Outback: C addresses succinctly Tillers’ key themes of diaspora and post-colonial identity. In blue writing, on the uppermost layer of superimposed text, Tillers has copied out the words ‘A throw of the dice will never change history’. Read in conjunction with the adjacent cascading list of place names from north to south of the continent – Kununurra to Bendigo – this aphorism alludes to the underlying truths of belonging and sovereignty over the land. The artist describes his use of place names in these works as a kind of ’ready-made poetry’. In addressing the historical issue of misappropriated land, Tillers’ reprisal of road signs through the prism of Gascoigne’s works, is fitting. Both artists arrange sliced and spliced lettering into grids on to a backing support. Rosalie Gascoigne was herself a post-modernist, working with industrial readymades from the 1980s, using plywood road signs with retroreflective film in grid-like assemblages. The words in Gascoigne’s works sometimes remained intact, arranged into cryptic haikus of syllables – here the composite nature of language mirrors the cumulative experience of the Australian landscape, the checkered history of political oppression and subjugation. Tillers, as a first generation Australian, feels endowed with a special insight into post-colonial cross-cultural identity, which he places foremost in his practice.

An influential practitioner and advocate of conceptual art and postmodern discourse in Australia, Tillers’ interrogates the ways in which we interact with the landscape, and addresses the unique perspectives which have coloured each previous artistic attempt to capture its essence. With an overarching systematic approach, Tiller’s oeuvre is remarkably cohesive and each separate work is in constant dialogue with its siblings, constructed of over one hundred thousand individual canvas boards. Two-time winner of the Wynne Prize for landscape painting, Imants Tillers’ artistic discourse is commanding, an impressive string of accolades further confirming the importance of his contribution to the landscape of contemporary art in Australia.

1. Artist’s statement, Land Beyond Goodbye, exhibition catalogue, Sherman Galleries, 30 August 2005 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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MICHAEL COOK

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born 1968 CIVILISED, 2012 suite of fourteen inkjet prints on archival Canson Rag Infinity Photographique cotton paper 160.0 x 140.0 cm each edition: AP aside from an edition of 3 each signed and bears artist’s thumbprint, inscribed with title and numbered on artist’s stamped label verso ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000 (14)

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Brisbane Private collection, Brisbane EXHIBITED Michael Cook. Civilised, Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane, 9 – 22 December 2012 (#11 illus. on exhibition invitation) unDisclosed, 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 11 May – 22 July 2012 (another example) Seventh Asia-Pacific Triennial APT7, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 8 December 2012 – 14 April 2013 (another example) Michael Cook : hear no... see no... speak no..., Queensland Centre for Photography at The Depot Gallery, Sydney, 14 – 25 May 2013 (#13 illus. on exhibition invitation, another example) My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1 June – 7 October 2013 (another example) Episodes: Australia Photography Now, 13th DongGang International Photo Festival, Yeongwol, South Korea, 18 July – 21 September 2014 (another example) Michael Cook – Civilised, The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong, 5 – 28 February 2015 (another example) Mapping Australia: Country Cartography, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, Netherlands, 4 October 2015 – 15 January 2016 (another example) All Dressed Up, Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 9 December 2016 – 5 February 2017 (another example)

LITERATURE APT7, the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2012, pp. 5 – 6 (illus.), 27 (illus.), 80 (illus.), 104, 105 (illus.), 299 Watson, B., ‘Public Works’, The Australian, 31 August – 1 September 2013 (#13 illus., another example) Emmerich, D., ‘Michael Cook’s ‘What-If’ Retake on Australia’s History’, Write About Art – Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts, Queensland, issue 5, 2015 Arcilla, M., ‘Michael Cook. The Skins We Live In’, Vault, Issue 13, February 2016, p. 49 (illus., another example) Michael Cook lives and works in Brisbane Bidjara people of South-West Queensland SELECTED COLLECTIONS Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Artspace Mackay, Queensland Australian War Memorial, Canberra British Museum, London, United Kingdom Gold Coast City Art Gallery, Queensland McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, Leiden, Netherlands National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne National Maritime Museum, Sydney National Museum of Australia, Canberra Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales Parliament House Collection, Canberra Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart REPRESENTED BY THIS IS NO FANTASY + Dianne Tanzer Gallery, Melbourne Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane

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GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT

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(1935 – 2013) STILL LIFE WITH FOUR BOWLS, 1998 glazed Limoges porcelain, 12 pieces (6 bottles, 4 bowls, 2 beakers) 100.0 cm length each stamped with roundel on base ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000 (12)

PROVENANCE Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 April 2010, lot 6 Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne, 7 November – 3 December 1998, cat. 7 ‘...Beauty, and our response to it, remains a mystery. But it seems to me that, in the alchemy of making, the pot becomes subtly humanised.

It is as though a kind of knowing is translated - through care and consideration, and an intimate connecting with the stuff under our fingers, the fluidity, the resistance, the wetness, the toughness - into a form with an independent life, with its own power to move... So we speak of pots as though they are animate: we call them gentle or generous or strong or vulnerable.’1 One of Australia’s most successful ceramic artists, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott is revered internationally for the abstract simplicity of her meditative porcelain assemblies that epitomise the concept of shibui or ‘truth beauty’ espoused by her mentor Bernard Leach - ‘honesty, ordinariness,

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nobility, simplicity, humility, astringency’. 2 Profoundly inspired by Leach, and other modernist potters such as Lucie Rie and Michael Cardew, these poised groupings of smooth-sided vessels, bowls and bottles are also highly evocative of Giorgio Morandi’s transcendent still life studies, sharing an affinity in their composition, stillness and meticulous attention to form.

A metaphorical work encapsulating the artist’s enduring interest in social relations, movement and travel, the present Still Life with Four Bowls 1998 thus conveys a powerful sense not only of passage, but also, of purpose - shifting beyond the idea of the still life to evoke identities that occupy and move within their own space amidst the collective whole. Yet as Hanssen Pigott continually reminds her audience, such groupings are also ordinary domestic objects, ‘...just pots, that some days we might not look at twice. But they have for a moment pulled on our attention with, perhaps, a reminder of our own vulnerability, and beauty, and possibility of transformation and repose.’ 3 1. Hanssen Pigott, G., Object of Ideas: Ten Approaches to Contemporary Craft Practice, Queensland, 1996.

2. Leach cited in Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: Caravan, a parade of beakers, bottles, bowls, jugs and cups, Tate St Ives, England, 2004, p. 3 3. Hanssen Pigott, op.cit.

VERONICA ANGELATOS

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CHUN KWANG YOUNG born 1944, Korean AGGREGATION 02 – D106, 2002 Korean mulberry paper, polystyrene foam and string on board 46.5 x 66.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title in Hanja and English verso: Chun, Kwang-Young / AGGREGATION 02 – D106 … / – 02 KY Chun ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Probably: Chun, Kwang-Young Recent Works, Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney, 5 September – 18 November 2003

KUNO GONSCHIOR (1933 – 2010, GERMAN) WEISS, 2003 – 04 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 120.00 x 100.0 cm signed twice, dated and inscribed with title verso: KUNO / KUNO GONSCHIOR WEISS 2003/4 inscribed on stretcher verso: NR. 11.1.04

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PROVENANCE Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $14,000 – 18,000

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CHARLES CONDER

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(1868 – 1909) RANDWICK, 1888 watercolour on paper 17.5 x 21.5 cm (sight) signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: C. Conder / Randwick / Sep / 88 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE John Young, Sydney Barry Humphries, London Piccadilly Gallery, London (label attached verso) Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, purchased from the above November 1969 (label attached verso) Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 29 May 1984, lot 35 Christopher Day Gallery, Sydney Masterpiece Gallery, Hobart Private collection, Queensland Private collection, Hobart EXHIBITED Charles Conder: 1868 – 1890, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1 September – 1 October 1967, cat. 7, lent

by Barry Humphries (label attached verso) LITERATURE Hoff, U., Charles Conder, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1972, cat. C33, p. 100 RELATED WORK Rainy Day, 1888, oil on cedar cigar box lid, 12.0 x 19.0 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, (formerly in the collection of James Fairfax AC)

In the very month that Charles Conder painted this captivatingly aqueous watercolour, Randwick, 1888, the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased his masterpiece, Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay, 1888, then on show in the 9 th Annual Exhibition of the Art Society of New South Wales. Singled out for praise in the press, it was one of ten works exhibited by Conder, leading to his recognition as a young artist of particular promise and one of the outstanding figures of Australian Impressionism. Acknowledging its purchase by the National Gallery, the critic for The Sydney Morning Herald described it as ‘one of the most character-marked pictures in the exhibition this year’.1 Also noted by the Illustrated Sydney News, Conder was acknowledged as a ‘rising young artist … represented by several smaller pictures, which show a wonderful conception of color and great boldness of treatment’. 2

These included the classics Spring Time, 1888, purchased by the Felton Bequest for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1941, and An Early Taste for Literature, 1888, acquired by the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, in 1944.

As seen in Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay, Conder’s enthusiastic embrace of plein air painting, combined with an impressionist verve, gained much from the Italian-born Girolamo Nerli. Nerli, who moved to Sydney in 1887, had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, where teaching had been influenced by the Macchiaiaoli, said to have introduced plein air painting into Italy. Giovanni Fattori, Professor at the Accademia, for example, favoured painting outdoors on small panels, usually cigar boxes of unprimed wood. 3 In Sydney there was also the teaching of A.J. Daplyn’s Saturday afternoon classes for the Art Society of New South Wales, and Julian Ashton’s evening sketch club, which Conder joined in 1888. It was a particularly important year for Conder’s development. During Easter he was at Coogee with Tom Roberts, each painting their own version of the seascape. In late July into August 1888 Conder joined Julian Ashton and A. H. Fullwood on a sketching holiday at Griffith’s Farm, Richmond, NSW, where their influences were more apparent in further classics such as Herrick’s Blossoms, 1888, in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and The Farm Richmond, New South Wales, 1888, which was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. In October 1888 Conder moved to Melbourne to join Roberts and Arthur Streeton. What is held to be Conder’s finest Australian painting, A Holiday at Mentone, 1888 (Art Gallery of South Australia) was exhibited in the Victorian Artists’ Society Spring Exhibition of November.

The creative and technical brilliance of Conder’s 1888 winter masterpiece, Departure of the Orient – Circular Quay, was preceded by lively oil studies on cigar box lids. In February 1888, Rainy Day, (Art Gallery of New South Wales) for example, had preceded in a masterly mood of dampness, and Bronte Beach, Queen’s Birthday, 1888 (D. R. Sheumack Collection), followed in September by our individual watercolour Randwick – the historic Chinese market gardens apart – the engaging landscape viewed almost entirely from an aesthetic point of view. Rapidly painted and composed from a slightly raised viewpoint, Randwick has that deftness which singles out the best of Conder’s work of this time.

1. ‘The Art Society’s Exhibition, The Sydney Morning Herald,18 September 1888, p. 5 2. ‘The Art Society’s Exhibition’, Illustrated Sydney News, 27 September 1888, p. 7 3. Galbally, A., Charles Conder, The Last Bohemian, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp. 25-28 DAVID THOMAS

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ARTHUR STREETON

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(1867 – 1943) FIRE BEGINS, 1930 – 31 oil on canvas 51.5 x 66.0 cm signed lower left: A STREETON ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 23 August 1993, lot 140 Company collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 27 August 2014, lot 74 Private collection, Western Australia EXHIBITED Exhibition of Paintings by Arthur Streeton, Fine Art’s Galleries [Fine Arts Society Gallery], Melbourne, 31 March – 14 April 1932, cat. 9, 60 gns From Bunny to Boyd: A Selection of Australian Art, Gould Galleries, Melbourne, 17 March – 15 April 1995, cat. 5 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) LITERATURE Streeton, A., The Arthur Streeton Catalogue, Melbourne, 1935, cat. 1034

While Arthur Streeton’s landscapes celebrate a land of golden summers, the other side of the coin is shared by droughts and bushfires. In Australian colonial art bushfires provided a subject of drama, as in William Strutt’s panorama of terror and flight from the flames, Black Thursday, February 6th. 1851, of 1864 in the collection the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, and later Eugene von Guérard’s Bush Fire, Taken on the Spot from Meningoort, in March 1857; locality between Cloven Hill and Timboon, now Camperdown, of 1859, in the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria. The length and detail of their titles highlight the terror of such events as the European settlers confronted a landscape that

was forbidding and alien. The subject became part of the heroic struggle of the pioneers against fearsome odds, as in John Longstaff’s huge canvas, Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898 in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The growing nationalism of Streeton’s time, however, led to a happier accommodation of the landscape and eventually an immense pride in it, as seen in paintings of noonday’s sunny might. In Fire Begins, 1930-31, the bushfire is almost tamed, becoming more an incident, not the dominant narrative of before. The threat, nevertheless, is present, kindled by Streeton’s own conservation concerns, something slightly sinister in the way in which the smoke rises in an accumulative vertical contrasting with the gentler horizontals and curving hills bathed in sunlight and an atmosphere of stillness. Streeton takes up the mood of calm and pictorializes the old saying of ‘the calm before the storm’.

Fire Begins, 1930-31 was among a number of oil paintings shown by Streeton in his 1932 exhibition held at the Fine Arts Society Gallery, Melbourne during March into April. The major works included The Sylvan Dam and Cliff and Ocean Blue, among such others as Studio and Lodge,’Longacres’, and numerous paintings of flowers. The art critic for the Melbourne Argus commented - ‘The mastery of a gifted painter of long experience is shown in all ... The recent work [he added] has remarkable freshness, combined with its strength and distinction.’1 Streeton’s ability to capture the panoramic majesty of the landscape is a highlight of many of these paintings, the extraordinary feeling of distance in Fire Begins, 1930-31, being shared with The Sylvan Dam, and Cliff and Ocean Blue. The latter painting, which belongs to a group Streeton painted during a visit to Victoria’s Port Campbell at the time, expresses another feature they share - the awe inspiring might and miracle of nature. In Fire Begins, 1930-31, Streeton celebrates the splendour of the heavens in harmony with the nobility of the earth.

1. Lilley, N., ‘Mr. Streeton’s Mastery. Bush, Sea, and Flowers. Work of Charm Exhibited’, Argus, Melbourne, 31 March 1932, p. 8 DAVID THOMAS

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HANS HEYSEN

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(1877 – 1968) PRIMROSES AND PORCELAIN, 1925 oil on canvas 53.0 x 56.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Hans Heysen 1925 signed and inscribed verso: No 4 Primroses and Porcelain Hans Heysen / Ambleside / Sth Aus ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, New South Wales, acquired April 2010 EXHIBITED Exhibition of Paintings by Hans Heysen, Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne, 16 – 27 November 1926, cat. 4 (label attached verso)

The 1920s was a productive decade for Hans Heysen and it was at this time that he turned to still life painting when the weather was poor and prevented him from sketching out of doors. His approach to the still life subject was different and more direct than his method of painting the landscape. Sourcing flowers from his garden at The Cedars in Hahndorf, Heysen would set up an arrangement and paint directly from the motif for three or four days, before they spoiled and wilted.

Heysen held seven one-man exhibitions during the 1920s in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney, and two issues of Art in Australia were devoted to the artist and his work. The Art of Hans Heysen, a Special Number of Art in Australia was published in 1920 and a second issue dedicated to Heysen appeared in 1926. Additionally, Lionel Lindsay wrote an article titled ‘Heysen’s Flower Pieces’, which featured in the June 1925 edition: ‘…In Fantin [-Latour] I feel the solicitude of tranquil afternoons; he was not a nature lover, a painter of landscape like Heysen, but entirely an

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indoor artist. With Heysen the desire is to portray the untarnished bloom, the vivacity of fresh-picked flowers, the breath of the morning still upon them. To catch this quality, once he has settled his arrangement, he works arduously while the light lasts, his eye on every form, every colour relation, painting with the assurance and ease of a ripe draftsman.’1 The growing popularity of Heysen’s flower and still life subjects was supported by several state gallery purchases. In 1921 the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased Flowers and Fruit (Zinnias), 1921 from the Society of Artists Annual Exhibition in Sydney, and this work was subsequently shown in the Exhibition of Australian Art in London held at the Royal Academy in 1923. The lavish still life Autumn Fruits, 1928 was purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia in the same year, and A Bunch of Flowers, 1930 was acquired through the Felton Bequest for the National Gallery of Victoria in 1931.

Primroses and Porcelain, 1925 is a particularly fine example of Heysen’s still life paintings and was first exhibited at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne in 1926. Depicted in extravagant detail, the tight bunch of sharply defined primroses in shades of cream and burgundy, sits beside an elaborately decorated ginger jar. Heysen’s skill is on clear display, highlighted by the array of reflections seen amidst the dark polished timber and the mirror-like platter behind the flowers.

1. Lindsay, L., ‘Heysen’s Flower Pieces’, Art in Australia, Sydney, third series, no. 12, June 1925

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BESSIE DAVIDSON

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(1879 – 1965) INTÉRIEUR, c.1938 oil on board 81.0 x 64.5 cm signed lower left: Bessie Davidson signed and inscribed verso: Bessie Davidson / No. 2 / 3 ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide Warren & Bunty Bonython, Adelaide Mossgreen, Adelaide, 4 May 2014, lot 177 Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED 28e Groupe des Artistes de ce Temps (28th Group of Artists of our Time), Petit Palais, Paris, March – June 1938, cat. 2 Salon des Femmes Peintres (Salon of Women Artists), Paris, October 1938, cat.3 (label attached verso) Possibly: Bessie Davidson, Osborne Art Gallery, Adelaide, 31 May – 13 June 1967 Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 20 March – 26 July 2020 LITERATURE Wilson, S. C., From the Shadow into the light: South Australian Women Artists Since Colonisation, Delmont Pty Ltd, South Australia, 1988, pl.43, p. 31 (illus. as ‘Interior’) Curtin, P. (ed.), Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2020, p.63 (as ‘Interieur 1930s’) Adelaide-born Bessie Davidson spent most of her creative life in Paris, absorbing the elegance and sophistication which we associate with the French capital and manifesting it in her art. It touches her landscapes, and especially the interiors and still life paintings in which she excelsIntérieur being a fine example. Her excellence in this genre was, no

doubt, influenced by her earlier association with Margaret Preston (then Rose McPherson), in whose studio she studied from 1899 to 1904.

Together, they travelled abroad, Davidson continuing her studies at the Munich Künstlerinner Verein, and in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Although Davidson returned to Adelaide in 1906 and taught for a number of years with Preston, her home became Paris where, from 1910 until her death, her studio was in Rue Boissonade, Montparnasse.

In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, she joined the French Red Cross and worked voluntarily as a nurse. Afterwards, her involvement in French life and art led to her being the first Australian woman to be elected to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also a founder-member of the Salon des Tuileries, and vice president of the Société Nationale des Femmes Artistes Modernes. Her contribution to French art and to the nation resulted in the 1931 award of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She exhibited regularly in Paris and London, being included in the 1938 ‘L’Exposition du Groupe Feminin’ at the Petit Palais and, the following year, in the exhibition of French art that toured the U.S.A. Internationally, she is represented in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Musée d’Orsay, and Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, as well as in collections in The Netherlands, Edinburgh, and Fife. Like her friend and fellow-Australian artist resident in Paris, Rupert Bunny, she never gave up her Australian citizenship.

The exhibition ‘Bessie Davidson: Une Australienne en France, 18801965’, was held at the Australian Embassy, Paris, May-July 1999 and recently the Bendigo Art Gallery curated the exhibition ‘Bessie Davidson: An Australian Impressionist in Paris’.

DAVID THOMAS

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ETHEL CARRICK FOX

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(1872 – 1952) FISH MARKET IN NICE, c.1930 oil on canvas 49.5 x 60.0 cm signed lower left: CARRICK FOX artist’s label attached verso with title ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, acquired in the 1950s Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED Ethel Carrick, Everyman’s Lending Library, Melbourne, 24 May – 7 June 1933, cat. 6 Exhibition of Paintings by The Late E. Phillips Fox and Ethel Carrick, Athenaeum Art Gallery, Melbourne, 27 February – 10 March 1934, cat. 60 (as ‘The Fish Market, Nice’) Pictures by the Late E. Phillips Fox and E. Carrick Fox, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 28 April – 8 May 1942, cat. 34 (as ‘A Fish Market in Nice’) Ethel Carrick and E. Phillips Fox, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 14 – 26 March 1945, cat. 6 (as ‘Fish Market’)

Describing Ethel Carrick’s 1933 solo exhibition at Everyman’s Lending Library in Collins Street, Melbourne, the Age newspaper critic noted, ‘The oil paintings … treat chiefly of picturesque French market places and bridges, together with a number of flower studies. In most of these pictures the obvious aim of the artist has been to express the aesthetic essence of her subject in pattern and color harmonies, rather than by direct representation of its individual elements, and having chosen this path she has followed it faithfully and with a considerable measure of success’.1 The market place had long been a favoured subject in Carrick’s oeuvre and a survey of the paintings and prints included in the Melbourne exhibition highlights this – with flower markets in Paris, Ghent and Nice depicted alongside other market scenes in the Italian town of Merano and Pollensa in Spain. Carrick’s art reflects the breadth of her travels, but it is her images of life in the environs of Paris and regions further

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afield in France for which she is best known. English-born, Carrick studied at the Slade School in London from the late 1890s, and met the Australian artist E. Phillips Fox at the seaside town of St Ives in 1901, marrying him four years later. The couple settled in Paris, living in Montparnasse near the Luxembourg Gardens, where they were part of a circle of expatriate artists who exhibited regularly and found rich inspiration for their art in and around the French capital.

Located on the Mediterranean coast in the south of France, close to Monaco and the Italian border, Nice was a popular destination and featured in Carrick’s art during the 1920s. In paintings including The Fruit Market, Nice c.1923 (Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth) and Flower Market, Nice c.1926 (Art Gallery of New South Wales), she relishes the pictorial variations her subjects afford – the bright colours and varied forms of the flowers and produce on display, and the diverse details of contemporary clothing. Her interest in the effects of light is also evident, from the dappled shadows of the trees which shade the flower stalls, to the bright sunlight that plays across the white umbrellas of the fruit market.

Carrick’s later view of the Nice fish market shows a similar focus, as the late afternoon sun, high in the sky, illuminates pink and white facades of stone buildings within the square, as well as others which are seen through the tall archway in the distance. The more subdued colouring of this work suggests an autumn or early winter scene, timing corroborated by the coats and hats worn by the mostly female shoppers, their modern style adding weight to a circa 1930 date. While this canvas is bigger than the panels Carrick typically used when painting outdoors directly from the subject, the application of paint is lively, combining confident painterly expression with attention to detail that conveys both the activity and atmosphere of the busy market place.

1. The Age, Melbourne, 24 May 1933, p. 10 KIRSTY GRANT

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EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX

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(1865 – 1915) THE CREEK AT STANWELL PARK, 1914 oil on canvas 38.0 x 46.0 cm signed lower left: E. Phillips Fox ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 180 Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Possibly: Paintings by E Phillips Fox and Mrs Fox (Ethel Carrick), Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, 5-16 May 1914 Possibly: Catalogue of Pictures by the Late E. Phillips Fox, Upper Athenaeum Hall, Melbourne, opened 29 February 1916 RELATED WORK The Creek, Stanwell Park, Sydney c.1914, oil on canvas, 37.0 x 44.5 cm, illus. in Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1995, C 75, cat. 467, p. 230

‘When the Foxes arrived back in Australia on 20 May 1913, having boarded the Orvieto in Toulon, it was not for a permanent stay. They rented out their apartment in Paris, and the Australian press reported their plans to return. The Bulletin even had a definite date: ‘[they] propose to depart for the other side of the earth on Christmas Day’, 1914. Fate willed otherwise – war intervened and eventually Fox became ill and died.

These last two years were filled with intense energy. The couple organized a number of exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide (the last one never took place). They painted scenes around Sydney Harbour, and travelled to Tasmania and Tahiti. Fox also executed a number of important portrait commissions. The artists’ principal reason for returning this time was to exhibit widely and to sell, although meeting the family and its younger members was always a heart-warming experience. In Australia by 1913 economic recovery was fully underway and exhibitions and sales were reaching maximum levels. In Europe, as Fox had written to Heysen in 1912, declaring his plans to come, there were almost no sales…’

The two artists arrived in Sydney during September 1913 and remained there until late December. ‘By 1914 Fox was again back in Manly, painting Green Wave, Manly…Some time during 1914 Fox also painted at Stanwell Park. This locality offered him a glorious variety of motifs – from a dried-out riverbed to gnarled ti-trees and rocks, and a hill steeply rising above the water, which he painted at moonrise. Perhaps another reason Fox went there was the fact that Edward Officer lived at Stanwell Park for a time. The two artists were well acquainted and were both connected with the newly formed Australian Art Association, in which Officer was an active organizer…Some of the scenes Fox painted at Stanwell Park are among his finest inland works painted during these years in Australia.’1 1. Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 163, 165-66

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HANS HEYSEN (1877 – 1968) WINTER SUNSHINE, 1953 watercolour on paper 31.5 x 38.0 cm signed and dated lower right: HANS HEYSEN 1953 ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE D. R. Sheumack, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist, 1953 Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 25 August 1997, lot 189 Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED The D. R. Sheumack Collection of Australian Paintings, S. H. Ervin Museum and Art Gallery, Sydney, 17 May – 12 June 1983, cat. 52 LITERATURE Christie, R. and Miller, J. (eds), The D. R. Sheumack.

Collection. Eighty Years of Australian Painting, Sotheby’s Australia, Sydney, 1988, cat. 38 (illus.)

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LLOYD REES (1895 – 1988) SYDNEY HARBOUR, 1918 pen and ink on paper 16.5 x 20.0 cm signed and dated lower right: LLOYD REES 1918 ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE probably, William S. Ellenden, Sydney, 11 August 1987, lot 101 (as ‘Sydney Harbour from Eastern Suburbs’) Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Klepac, L., Lloyd Rees Drawings, Australian Art Editions at Artarmon Galleries, Sydney, 1978, pl. 9, pp.19 (illus.), 104

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CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935) ROSE AND GREY, c.1928 – 29 oil on pulpboard 27.5 x 37.5 cm signed lower right: C. Beckett bears inscription with title verso: B / Grey + Rose ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

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PROVENANCE Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 28 April 1976, lot 452 The Estate of Peter Greenham, Melbourne EXHIBITED Clarice Beckett, Athenaeum Gallery, Melbourne, opening 26 November 1929, cat. 6 Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 12 November – 1 December 1972, cat. 43 (as ‘Yacht at Sunset’) We are grateful to Rosalind Hollinrake for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

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CLARICE BECKETT (1887 – 1935) SUNSET GLOW, 1928 oil on pulpboard 24.5 x 34.5 cm bears inscription verso: B / Indefinite / 48 Sunset Glow bears label verso with statement of authenticity signed by the artist’s sister Mrs Hilda Mangan ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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PROVENANCE Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) The Estate of Peter Greenham, Melbourne EXHIBITED Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887 – 1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 12 November – 1 December 1972, cat. 44 (as ‘Last Light’) We are grateful to Rosalind Hollinrake for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

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ARTHUR BOYD

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(1920 – 1999) SHOALHAVEN HILLSIDE, c.1974 – 1976 oil on composition board 96.5 x 89.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Peter Greenham, Melbourne

Eager to rediscover his roots, his ‘Australianism’, after more than a decade abroad, in 1971 Arthur Boyd returned to Australia to take up a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra. Over that 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, 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 infinite 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.’1 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 Guerard, Piguenit and Buvelot became Boyd’s spiritual mentors; as he mused, ‘I see the landscape looking very much like a Von Guerard, much more than the look of the Australian Impressionist school. In this area you are aware again and again how those old boys got it right all the time.’ 2 Suffused with warmth and lyricism, Shoalhaven Hillside, c.1974 – 76 is an exquisitely painted example of the ‘pure’ Shoalhaven landscapes which - devoid of the mythological creatures and symbolic narrative punctuating versions elsewhere – simply celebrate Nature in all her beauty and grandeur. Indeed, the work is a poignant reminder of how Boyd, comfortable once more with the eternal diversity of the Australian landscape, ultimately did tame his wilderness - ‘...what was unfamiliar became familiar, what was menacing became friendly, what was awesome became intimate.’ 3 1. Boyd cited in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, pp. 26 – 27 2. Boyd cited in McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 220 3. McGrath, ibid., p.79 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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ARTHUR BOYD

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(1920 – 1999) WATERHOLE NEAR CANBERRA, c.1971 oil on composition board 44.5 x 60.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Sydney, 17 November 1988, lot 376 Private collection, Melbourne ‘Throughout the course of his career, Arthur Boyd has been an untiring and extremely skillful and beautiful painter of landscapes… The effects of great distance and extreme clarity of light are nostalgic, and the most everyday objects and happenings become literally transfigured.’1 From his earliest impressionist vignettes of the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne, to his shimmering golden depictions of the Wimmera wheat district and masterful works immortalising his beloved Shoalhaven River (see lot 44), Arthur Boyd is without doubt one of the country’s most revered landscape painters. Fascinated by the vagaries of nature - from the primordial tangle of the Australian bush to the various ways humanity has intervened with farming and mining – indeed, his highly personalised, expressive visions of his homeland are deeply embedded within our national consciousness.

After twenty-one years living abroad in England, in late 1971 Boyd and his wife returned to Australia to take up a five-month residency at the Australian National University, Canberra. Reacquainting himself, Boyd was immediately struck by the beauty of the bush terrain surrounding the capital which, untamed and rugged, was far removed from the romantic English countryside to which he had grown accustomed. As he recalled, from his apartment in the inner suburb of Garran he ‘could literally walk into the country in five minutes. It was quite marvelous: there was this undulating, rolling quality. And the weather – the blueness of the sky…

the blue is so intense compared to the Victorian [light].’ 2 It was also during this period that Boyd was introduced to the unspoilt magic of the Shoalhaven River region, having been invited by the Sydney art dealer, Frank McDonald, to spend the weekend at his Bundanon property on the south coast of New South Wales. Describing his first experience of the area, Boyd reminisced ‘I can remember the day vividly. It was so hot and searing, the oil ran from the palette onto the sand. I never paint in the shade or wear a hat because it distorts the light on whatever I’m painting. I can remember the heat was terrifying.’ 3 With its crystalline blue sky, parched blonde ground, straggly gum trees and signature cockatoo wheeling around the waterhole, Waterhole near Canberra, c.1971 tangibly conveys the somnolent mood and dry white heat of one such blazing summer’s day. In his treatment of this harsh, inland landscape, there are also unmistakable affinities with the lyrical depictions of artistic predecessors such as celebrated Heidelberg painter Tom Roberts, as well as echoes of Boyd’s own earlier oeuvre – most particularly, the groundbreaking Wimmera series. Exuding a sense of colour, light and atmosphere that is unmistakably Australian, indeed the work encapsulates well what author Sandra McGrath extols as Boyd’s ‘…prodigious ability to take the nature of the subject and render it in a manner which captures the essence of its particular properties at that time, to imbue it with a sense of character and meaning which is the result of his own immediate emotional or psychological response.’4 1. O’Shaughnessy, B., ‘Introduction’, Arthur Boyd: Retrospective exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962, pp. 16 – 17 2. Hart, D., Arthur Boyd: Agony and Ecstasy, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2015, p. 115 3. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 486 4. McGrath, S., The Artist and The River: Arthur Boyd and The Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 63 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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SIDNEY NOLAN

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(1917 – 1992) BIRD IN LANDSCAPE, c.1977 – 78 oil and enamel on composition board 91.5 x 122.0 cm signed lower right: Nolan ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, UK, by descent from the artist Christie’s, London, 11 October 2011, lot 33 Private collection, Sydney

Bird in Landscape, 1977-78, by Sidney Nolan, was painted during a period of dramatic events in the artist’s life. In December 1976, his wife Cynthia died; and the next month, Nolan’s long-time friend and collaborator, the British composer Benjamin Britten died too. Nine months later, they were joined by another artist-colleague, the poet Robert Lowell. On the positive side, in April 1976 Nolan turned sixty, an event marked by accolades and multiple exhibitions. He also reconnected with Mary Boyd, whom he had known since the 1940s, and they married in January 1978. Amidst all this, Nolan returned to an earlier sequence of paintings inspired by his travels with Cynthia through central Australia in 1948.1 Bird in Landscape may thus be interpreted as an attempt by the artist to memorialise his wife and colleagues through a fusion of memory and image.

Nolan has frequently been described as being a ‘bower bird’ in his approach to art. An inveterate traveller, he would pick up myriad inspirations wherever he went, accumulating them within his mind before reassembly as paintings. In a similar fashion, images that appeared in previous series would suddenly re-animate and jostle their way into subsequent artworks, but in new settings and utilising different techniques in their application. Nolan’s great narrative, of course, was

Ned Kelly and the outlaw’s progress followed the artist’s own throughout his career. However, a multitude of birds also populate his works – emus, swans, parrots, finches, even chickens – and Bird in Landscape is a return to this theme.

Against a swirling background full of colour and painterly incident, a heron surveys an imagined landscape. Informed by Nolan’s celebration of surrealism, the bird seems to have arrived from a dream and into an uncertain land. Such a strange juxtaposition was not unusual for Nolan, and Bird in Landscape has its roots in the sequence of paintings from 1948-49 depicting central Australian pubs, mines and landscapes augmented by unnaturally large-scale birds tumbling through the air, none of whom seem able to use their wings. The bird in this image at least has its feet on the ground, and is an update of Great Heron, 1949 (private collection), set within the saltpans of Lake Eyre. This newer version is further informed by Nolan’s subsequent travels, particularly the grand images he painted after his and Cynthia’s journey to Africa in 1962. Whilst the foreground of Bird in Landscape links to the eroded furrows of Central Australia, 1950, the orange hill in the background, vanishing within a dust-storm, harks back to paintings such as African Landscape, 1963, where ‘fumes, marks or bands of intense bright colour … anchor or atmospherically envelope’ the land. 2 The painting’s dream-like tenor is also informed by Nolan’s understanding of Australia’s ‘opalescent’ light, how it ‘glow(s) in transparent layers, which don’t stay as layers but flow into each other … Birds sweep by and change the colours and your eye jumps from one colour to another … sometimes with memory of the fleeting colour, the one that flashed by.’ 3 1. The Nolans also took Britten through central Australia in 1970.

2. Underhill, N., Sidney Nolan: a life, New South Publishing, Sydney, 2015, p.288 3. Sidney Nolan, 21 April 1978, quoted in Lynn, E. and Nolan, S., Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1979, pp.180, 192 ANDREW GAYNOR

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FRED WILLIAMS

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(1927 – 1982) UPWEY I, 1965 gouache on paper 52.0 x 70.0 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Fred Williams, Melbourne Lyn Williams, Melbourne Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney Deutscher~Menzies, Sydney, 14 June 2006, lot 5 Private collection, Brisbane EXHIBITED Fred Williams (1927 – 1982), Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1 November – 2 December 1995, cat. 18 Fred Williams (1927 – 1982) Landscapes – Paintings, Gouaches & Etchings, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 6 – 31 October 1998, cat. 6

Upwey 1, 1965 comes from a period of outstanding creativity, which included such masterpieces as Upwey Landscape I, 1965, formerly in the collection of British Petroleum, London; Upwey Landscape II, 1965, in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Upwey Landscape III in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; and Upwey Landscape V, 1965, now in the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria through the bequest of Blair Ritchie. Hailed as being ‘at his best’ in his solo show at Rudy Komon’s gallery in September 1966, Wallace Thornton in The Sydney Morning Herald presciently observed: ‘There is every chance he will go down in history as Australia’s greatest landscape artist’.1 Consisting of twelve oils and the same number of supporting gouaches, together with some etchings, the exhibition was packed with treasures. They included both oils and gouaches from the Waterpond in Landscape series, Green Cloud and Owl, 1966, formerly in the Mertz Collection, USA, and Red Landscape, 1966. Of the latter, Patrick McCaughey commented perceptively: ‘The quality of the gouache for Red Landscape, possibly finer than the oil painting itself, suggests Williams was looking for a painting that would come out at a single shot, not something to be laboured over’. 2 Williams often exhibited gouaches with his oil paintings, their importance in his oeuvre continuing to be recognised in later major shows including the National Gallery of Australia’s 2011 retrospective, Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons.

1. Thornton, W.,’Is this our greatest landscape painter?’ Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 12 October 1966, p. 22 2. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 1996, p. 176

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FRED WILLIAMS

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(1927 - 1982) THE BLUFF, WALKERVILLE, 1971 gouache on paper 34.0 x 77.0 cm signed lower right: Fred Williams ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE The Estate of Fred Williams, Melbourne Lyn Williams, Melbourne Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Mrs Barry O’Keefe, Sydney Gould Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Company collection, Melbourne Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 9 May 2007, lot 6 Private collection, Melbourne

‘The strip format was well established as a formal device in Williams’ work by 1970, and reached its culmination in 1973 with the Adelaide Festival Theatre mural which was based in part upon sketches of the Murray River.

EXHIBITED Some Aspects of the Work of Fred Williams, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 15 August – 2 September 1989, cat. 13 (label attached verso)

Not only did these gouaches provide Williams with the formal innovation of the strip landscape, but they also helped changed his colour palette.

In concentrating on marine scapes, such as the Walkerville gouaches, Williams needed blue and green rather than the earth colours of his earlier landscapes. In the Tibooburra and Mornington series he had introduced a brighter high-key palette and the marine gouaches introduced a new range of colours.’1

RELATED WORK The Bluff, Walkerville, 1971, gouache on paper, 36.4 x 79.8 cm in the collection of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

The strip format is ideal for depicting river and marine scapes, and in January 1971 Williams worked extensively on this theme in gouache at four main locations: Westernport Bay, Queenscliff, Walkerville and Sorrento, of which the largest group is from Walkerville.

1. Lindsay, R., and Zdanowicz, I., Fred Williams: Works in the National Gallery of Victoria/ Paintings-Gouaches-Prints, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1980, p. 54

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ARTHUR BOYD

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(1920 – 1999) LOVERS IN FOREST WITH BLACKBIRDS AND BEAST, c.1966 oil on canvas 109.0 x 114.5 cm signed lower left: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 19 August 1996, lot 214 Private collection Christie’s, Sydney, 26 August 2003, lot 88 Private collection, Sydney

Encapsulating the heroic and poetic in an Antipodean tragedy of thwarted lovers, Arthur Boyd’s ‘Love, Death and Marriage of a HalfCaste’ series 1954 – 59 is universally considered among his finest. Thus, upon his arrival in London shortly after the completion of the landmark series which had won him so much acclaim, Boyd did not immediately abandon this hauntingly beautiful theme, but rather began to expand its imagery further – transforming the poignant narrative into more general meditations upon the destinies of Eros and the mythology of desire.

Profoundly influenced by the great masterpieces of Renaissance art which were now so readily accessible in the vast museum collections of Europe, Boyd was attracted in particular to the work of fifteenthcentury painter, Piero di Cosimo with his famous painting, A Mythological Subject in the National Gallery, London, leaving a particularly indelible impression. Unlike Titian, Tintoretto and Rembrandt, di Cosimo was not considered one of the masters of his time, but rather its unicum; ‘he loved to see everything wild’ wrote Vasari and accordingly, his most memorable work explores the development of man from animal state to early civilization.1 Consciously or otherwise, it was this streak of primitivism and the slightly macabre association of eroticism and death by the Renaissance artist that would inexorably pervade Boyd’s images of love for decades to come.

Upon first glance, the present Lovers in a Forest with Blackbirds and Beast, c.1966 bears echoes of Boyd’s Angel Spying on Adam and Eve, 1947 – 48 with the two lovers embracing furtively behind a tree in the woods, accompanied by Boyd’s signature motif of the ram. However, if playing a passive, almost protective role in the earlier composition, here the horned beast is decidedly more active as it aggressively charges towards the swooping birds, perhaps evoking allusions to the nature of sexuality in the vein of Boyd’s sensuous mythological tableaux from the same decade – for example, the ‘Nude with Beast’ series inspired by Titian’s The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery, London). Significantly, Lovers in a Forest with Blackbirds and Beast is also distinguished from Boyd’s work prior to the 1960s by a more sophisticated painterly technique in which the relative flatness of the picture surface is exchanged for a heavier impasto style featuring thick streaks of paint carefully worked with a knife or brush handle akin to the vigour of expressionism. While no doubt deriving its impetus from the Antipodean artist’s first-hand experience of viewing works by Tintoretto and Rembrandt, such stylistic transition arguably carries powerful iconographic implications as well; the united lovers here seemingly merging into a ‘joined figure’ suggestive of the ‘oneness’ of the Platonic myth, and possibly even extending to notions of fertility-death or Narcissistic doom, as contemplated by Boyd elsewhere.

Imbued with energy, drama and multifaceted meaning, Lovers in a Forest with Blackbirds and Beast offers a compelling example of one the most tender and enduring themes in Boyd’s highly idiosyncratic oeuvre – the concept of lovers brought together by mysterious forces and their struggle to make sense of themselves, both as individuals and a couple, in a universe that invariably conspires against them.

1. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 53 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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JOHN OLSEN

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born 1928 SPANISH LUNCH, 1992 oil on composition board 92.0 x 122.0 cm signed lower right: John Olsen signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: SPANISH / LUNCH / John Olsen 92 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Metro Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne

potential to add to the richness and celebration of life. This sensibility would remain with him always, and the subject of food, and paella in particular, would recur in his later paintings and drawings’.1

LITERATURE McGregor, K., John Olsen: Drawing – The Human Touch, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p.67 (illus.)

Olsen infuses his paintings with a life beyond the literal. They do not simply present an event as a static image, but as a rollicking yarn which unravels across the painting’s surface with often contradictory viewpoints. Olsen’s Spanish Lunch, 1992 is a cacophony of activity, in which the artist’s characteristic repertoire of marks are present in this celebratory painting. With diners’ arms stretching across the table to reach bowls and filled wine glasses, Olsen flexes his ability as a draughtsman and pushes the expressive limits of his medium.

In many ways, Olsen’s life and his art are inseparable. His oeuvre represents the cumulative response of an artist intoxicated with the landscape, its people and their attitudes towards food, life and art. The artist’s dedication to the good life is legendary, and this along with his love of poetry has inspired much of the artist’s work. The alchemy of the kitchen and the joyous conviviality of a shared meal in particular has been the subject of many of his most important paintings, often combined with memories of travels on the Iberian peninsula, including Portuguese Kitchen No. 1 and Portuguese Kitchen No. 2, both 1966, Love in the Kitchen, 1969, Duck à l’Orange, 1981, Spanish Kitchen, 1992 and Kitchen Story, 1993 (all various private collections). These later works, including Spanish Lunch, 1992, here, are vigorous and vibrant distillations of his recollections – revived and amplified by a return to Spain in 1985.

In her monograph on the artist in 1991, Deborah Hart revealed that it was necessity that introduced Olsen to the world of fine food: ‘In Ibiza and Deya, Olsen worked for brief periods as an apprentice chef.

Before he left Australia he was hard pressed to boil an egg; by the time he returned he had developed a great admiration for Mediterranean attitudes to food and wine – the joy of preparing and sharing meals with feeling – which, even when enjoying the simplest ingredients, had the

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As with most Olsen paintings, the line is central to the artist’s language as it forms the arteries that pulse colour around the canvas and bring life to the painting. In Spanish Lunch, against a stark white ground, Olsen’s gestures are emphatic in both line and colour. His brushstrokes collide and speed over one another with raw, untamed energy. They coalesce primarily in the four corners of the painting to form the grinning, ruddy faces of the diners, who share in the joys and mysteries of life around this disjointed table.

The parallels between cooking and painting are many - the studio and the kitchen, the table and the canvas, the ingredients and the paint. Even the line between kitchen utensils and the artist’s tools has blurred in recent decades. Olsen’s adaption of a cooking methodology to studio life has blended the two inseparably in his work. Perhaps it is this merged celebration of life which has kept his paintings feeling so vibrant and vital over decades of artistic practice.

1. Hart. D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 42 HENRY MULHOLLAND

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GARRY SHEAD

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born 1942 DUSK THIRROUL, 1992 (FROM ‘D.H. LAWRENCE’ SERIES) oil on composition board 89.5 x 120.5 cm signed and dated lower right: Garry Shead 92 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Michael Nagy Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from above in 1993 EXHIBITED Possibly: Garry Shead: ‘D. H. Lawrence series’, Michael Nagy Fine Art, Sydney, 6 – 25 October 1992

‘The only way to do justice to a man like Lawrence who gave so much, is to give another creation. Not explain him, but prove... that one has caught the flame he tried to pass on’.1 Having first discovered the work of D.H. Lawrence during a trip to Papua New Guinea in 1968, Garry Shead immediately discerned significant affinities between his own experiences and those of the author who wrote his novel Kangaroo while living in the coastal township of Thirroul on his visit to Australia in 1922. As Grishin elucidates, ‘When Shead speaks of Lawrence the word ‘synchronicity’ features frequently; he uses the word in the sense of the strange coincidences or correspondences...

[A]t various forks in the road of his life, Lawrence crops up - when he was in New Guinea and decided he would marry Merril, he was reading Lawrence’s letters; it was in Vence, where Lawrence died that he met his wife Judith... He introduced Whiteley to ‘Wyewurk’, Lawrence’s cottage at Thirroul, and it was from the house next door... that they painted their diptych (Portrait of D.H. Lawrence, 1973). Whiteley could also feel the presence of Lawrence hovering around the place; and it was at Thirroul that Whiteley died’. 2

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Although unfolding against the steep escarpment and sweeping bush backdrop that unmistakably characterises the landscape surrounding Thirroul on the northern New South Wales coast, Dusk Thirroul, 1992 does not offer a literal depiction of a specific incident from Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Exploring universal themes of love and conflict, identity and alienation, the spiritual and the human, instead the work encapsulates the artist’s poignant homage to D.H. Lawrence as ‘a personal, intuitive response, rather than an attempt to illustrate Lawrence’s narrative’. 3 Thus, the figures – presumably Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriet of the novel – appear strange and ambiguous, taking on the features of Lawrence and Frieda while at the same time, bearing more than a passing resemblance to Shead and his wife Judith. Similarly, the chief antagonist in the novel, prominent ex-soldier and lawyer Benjamin Cooley (whose fictional nickname is ‘Kangaroo’), is here represented both by the silhouetted figures and the symbolic motif of the omniscient kangaroo, all of which loom ambivalently in the shadows below the verandah railing – the manifestation of a spiritual ‘presence’ rather than a tangible character. A poetic scene – recognisably Australian yet strangely timeless and mythical – indeed Dusk Thirroul eloquently embodies the drama and enormous sense of anticipation present in the novel where the reader remains ‘... waiting, waiting for something to happen, waiting for this spirit of the land to strike’.4 1. Miller, H., The World of D.H. Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, Capra Press, California, 1980 2. Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse, Fine Art Publishing, Sydney, 2001, p. 94 3. Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the D.H. Lawrence Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 14 4. ibid.

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EMILY KAME KNGWARREYE

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(c.1910 – 1996) OF RARE WINTER RAIN, 1990 synthetic polymer paint on linen 151.0 x 121.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name and Delmore Gallery cat.

0P03 ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE Commissioned by Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs Chapman Gallery, Canberra Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in 1990 EXHIBITED The Singing Earth, Chapman Gallery, Canberra, 28 November – 23 December 1990, cat. 23 LITERATURE Grishin, S., ‘Brilliant paintings from deserts’, Canberra Times, Canberra, 1 December 1990, p. 23 This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Delmore Gallery, via Alice Springs

In his review of the 1990 exhibition, The Singing Earth, at Chapman Gallery in Canberra, Sasha Grishin highlights Of Rare Winter Rain, 1990, observing that, ‘Emily Kngwarreye’s haunting and mysterious creation (is a work) to which one is constantly drawn back, as if by a magnetic presence’.1 As with much of her painting, this vibrant and colourful work struck a chord with almost all who saw it, a portent perhaps of the global clamour for her art, yet to come, which confirmed Kngwarreye as undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest painters of the twentieth century.

Kngwarreye’s individual response in acrylic paint to the everchanging landscape of her traditional homelands at Alhalker (Alalgura) offers a record of her acute observations, often described in minute detail, of the shifting fluctuations of the flora and landscape that surrounded her.

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Her painting technique of covering the canvas with fluid dots or blobs of colour that formed pulsating layers, literally embodied her sense of the changing, yet ordered, rhythms of the natural world. Painted in November 1990, Of Rare Winter Rain records the effects of unseasonal winter storms on the landscape where, as Janet Holt notes in the accompanying certificate, ‘the transformation of the desert … has a different colour and mood than that of the more frequent summer rains, here the colours are more sombre, recalling verdant greens and misty dawns over frosted grasses and wild flowers.’ 2 ‘Clearly Emily Kngwarreye was a mark-maker extraordinaire … she ventured further with masses of dots and marks, making intimate and grand gestures layering and intensifying the dots to the exclusion of graphic elements.’ 3 And here, the layered dots of pink, olive, green, purple, blue and grey, in many places applied by the artist using her fingers, faithfully evoke the colour and mood of her country.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s wellspring came from a lifetime of making art, her paintings manifesting deep affinity to country and profound devotion to women’s ceremony in song, dance and the ceremonial painting of bodies. To Kngwarreye, it was all one, the differing elements merged together and she was immersed in the experience of painting and the interconnectedness of life, landscape and culture, connecting her back to country.

1. Grishin, S., ‘Brilliant paintings from deserts’, Canberra Times, 1 December 1990, p. 23 2. From the accompanying Delmore Gallery certificate of authenticity 3. Ryan, J., in Isaacs, J. et al., Emily Kngwarreye Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1998, p. 77 CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

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ROVER THOMAS JOOLAMA

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(1926 – 1998) LISSADELL STATION, 1990 natural earth pigments and synthetic binder on canvas 100.5 x 140.0 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size and Waringarri Artists cats. AP3356 and S-2804 ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Waringarri Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia Chapman Gallery, Canberra Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above in April 1993 This painting is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from Waringarri Arts, Kununurra

Individual in style, the paintings of Rover Thomas created a new typology and visual language distinct to the east Kimberley region of Western Australia. By condensing complex mythological and topographical information and paring it back to its bare bones, Thomas articulated a highly personal way of telling stories and establishing connection to the land and its related ceremonies. His paintings map tracts of country utilising both planar and aerial views of land, whilst exploring the regional history and ancestral tales of these same locations.

Painted in the same year that Thomas and Trevor Nickolls (1949 - 2012) became the first Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, Lissadell Station, 1990, is characteristic of his work. Executed in earth pigments the painting depicts an aerial view of the landscape where a central red ochre expanse narrows between two imposing and

irregular forms painted in yellow pigment. These forms, which recall the rocky outcrops of the Kimberley plateau, are outlined in white dots made from huntite, a type of chalky white pigment. When used in ceremonial contexts and rock art in the eastern Kimberley, huntite is applied raw (that is, with little or no fixative) in order to retain its elemental purity. In his earlier canvases, Thomas applied the pigment in a similar way and over time, the huntite tended to absorb the resins in the surrounding paint. In this work, the white dots on the red ochre have taken up the underlying colour and become a deep pink.

According to the accompanying Waringarri Arts catalogue notes, Thomas has depicted the traditional story of the Bat and the Crocodile. The painting shows the place on Lissadell Station where, in mythological times, the Crocodile (Lalanggarrany), a renowned dancer, was killed by the Bat (Binyjirrminy). Thinking the Crocodile would be good tucker and wanting him killed, the goanna told Bat that Crocodile had said he was too smelly. That evening everyone gathered for the Joonba (Ceremony) and Crocodile, dressed in his tall paperbark headdress, danced in the light of the fire. Lurking in the shadows and feeling slighted by Crocodile, Bat produced a spear and threw it, hitting him in the side and killing him.

Everyone chased Bat, who escaped to the limestone caves on Lissadell Hill. Safely hidden in the caves, Binyjirrminy transformed into a bat permanently, hiding in the caves by day and venturing out only at night.

CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

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RONNIE TJAMPITJINPA born c.1943 WAPILKA, 1995 synthetic polymer paint on linen 121.5 x 121.5 cm bears inscription verso: artist’s name, size, and Papunya Tula Artists cat. RT950563 and Fireworks Gallery cat. FW1536 ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

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PROVENANCE Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, Northern Territory Fireworks Gallery, Brisbane Private collection, Melbourne This work is accompanied by an artist’s profile and certificate of authenticity from Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs that states: ‘this painting depicts the swamp site of Wapilka located to the south-west of the Kintore community. In mythological times, the Two Travelling Women travelled from the south, though Kintore and then continued to the west. As they journeyed they sang the songs and performed the dances associated with the various places they passed through.’

ROBERT CAMPBELL JNR (1944 – 1993) GAMMON RED OCHRE MAN, 1986 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 121.0 x 91.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed lower right: ROBERT / CAMPBELL / JR. / 10.11.1986 / NGAKU

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PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Robert Campbell Jnr., Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 7 – 25 April 1987, cat. 24 (as ‘Red Ochre Man’)

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 15,000

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ARTHUR BOYD (1920 – 1999) LOVERS IN A BOAT, c.1994 oil on board 30.0 x 37.5 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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PROVENANCE Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney RELATED WORK Lovers in a Boat, 1961, oil and tempera on board, 122.0 x 152.0 cm, formerly in the collection of Bryan Robertson, London

JUSTIN O’BRIEN (1917 – 1996) FRAGMENTS, c.1968 oil on composition board 35.0 x 50.5 cm signed lower right: O’BRIEN ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

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PROVENANCE Macquarie Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1968 Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1993 EXHIBITED Recent Paintings and Drawings by Justin O’Brien, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 16 – 28 October 1968, cat. 25

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detail: top right image

BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992) A DAY AT BONDI, 1984 etching and collage on paper suite of ten etchings plus title page and collaged flag 20.0 x 18.0 cm (image, each) 24.0 x 22.0 cm (sheet, each) edition: 21/30 each signed and numbered below image ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000 (12)

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PROVENANCE Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Brett Whiteley: The Graphics 1961 – 1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1992, cats. 76 – 86, pp. 79–83 (illus. another example), 114 Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cats. 132P – 142P, vol. 5, pp. 160 – 161; 163; 165 – 169; 171 – 175 (illus.), vol. 7, pp. 836 – 837

BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992) STRANGE TREE AND ROCK FORMATION NEAR PALM BEACH, SYDNEY, 1976 ink on paper 33.0 x 40.5 cm inscribed with title lower right: strange tree and rock formation near/ Palm Beach Sydney bears artist’s studio stamp lower right

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PROVENANCE Marlene Antico Fine Art, Sydney Private collection, Sydney Stanley & Co., Sydney, 21 May 2005, lot 38 Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2008 EXHIBITED Brett Whiteley, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 16 September – 15 October 1994, cat. 34

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000 LITERATURE Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat.168.76, vol.3, p. 338 (illus.), vol. 7, p. 372

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TIM STORRIER born 1949 THE CAPRICORN LINE, 1986 synthetic polymer paint and rope on composition board 40.0 x 50.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title lower right: ‘The Capricorn line’/ Storrier/ 1986 ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 29 November 2000, lot 131 Private collection, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, by 2008

LEONARD FRENCH (1928 – 2017) CHILD WITH A KITE, c.1990 enamel on hessian on hardboard 61.0 x 68.0 cm signed lower left: French

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PROVENANCE The Estate of Leonard French, Victoria Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2017

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE (1912 – 1981) OLD HARRY pen and ink and wash on paper 39.0 x 28.5 cm signed lower right: Russell Drysdale inscribed with title verso: Old Harry. bears inscription on backing board verso: ‘Old Harry’

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PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Drysdale, R., Russell Drysdale, Richmond Hill Press in association with Collector Reproductions, Victoria, 1979, cat. 22 (illus., np)

ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000 RELATED WORK Old Harry, 1961, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 61.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Dutton, G., Russell Drysdale, Thames and Hudson, London, 1964, pl. 120, n. p.

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RUSSELL DRYSDALE (1912 – 1981) THE HORSEBREAKER pen and ink and wash on paper 38.0 x 28.5 cm signed lower right: Russell Drysdale bears inscription on backing board verso: “The Horsebreaker” ESTIMATE: $10,000 – 15,000

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PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney LITERATURE Drysdale, R., Russell Drysdale, Richmond Hill Press in association with Collector Reproductions, Victoria, 1979, cat. 37 (illus., np)

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PURCHASE PRICE AND BUYER’S PREMIUM The purchase price will be the sum of the final bid price (including any GST) plus a buyer’s premium set at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. Buyers may be liable for other charges reasonably incurred once ownership has passed.

ABSENTEE OR COMMISSION BIDS AND TELEPHONE BIDS As a courtesy service, Deutscher and Hackett will make reasonable efforts to place bids for prospective buyers in absentia provided written or verbal instructions (as indicated on absentee bid forms included at the back of this catalogue or online) are received 24 hours prior to auction. Where successful, lots will be purchased at the lowest possible bid and in the event of identical absentee bids, the bid received earliest will take precedence. Deutscher and Hackett accepts no responsibility for errors and omissions in relation to this courtesy service and reserves the right to record telephone bids.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX Buyers are required to pay a 10% G.S.T which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in the buyer’s premium.

Where GST applies to some lots the final bid price will be inclusive of the applicable GST. If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

RESERVE Unless indicated otherwise, all lots are subject to a confidential reserve price determined by the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett or the auctioneer may place any number of bids on behalf of the vendor below the reserve price and is not obliged to identify that the bids are being placed on behalf of the vendor.

COLLECTION Lots paid for in full may be collected from Deutscher and Hackett premises the day after the auction occurs but lots paid for by cheque may not be collected until all funds have cleared. Proof of identification is required upon collection and lots not collected within seven days of the sale may incur costs associated with external storage and freight.

BIDDING INCREMENTS Bidding usually opens below the listed pre-sale estimate and proceeds in the following increments (the auctioneer may vary the bidding increments at his or her discretion): $500 – 1,000 by $50 $1,000 – 2,000 by $100 $2,000 – 3,000 by $200 $3,000 – 5,000 by $200 / $500 / $800 $5,000 – 10,000 by $500 $10,000 – 20,000 by $1,000 $20,000 – 30,000 by $2,000 $30,000 – 50,000 by $2,000 / $5,000 / $8,000 $50,000 – 100,000 by $5,000 $100,000 – 200,000 by $10,000 $200,000 – 300,000 by $20,000 $300,000 – 500,000 by $20,000 / $50,000 / $80,000 $500,000 – 1,000,000 by $50,000 $1,000,000+ by $100,000 SUCCESSFUL BIDS The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer indicates the final bid and the buyer assumes full responsibility for the lot from this time.

UNSOLD LOTS Where a lot is unsold, the auctioneer will announce that the lot is “bought in”, “passed”, “withdrawn” or “returned to owner”.

LOSS OR DAMAGE Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on either the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made, or on collection by the buyer, whichever is earlier. The buyer is therefore encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from the payment due date.

TRANSPORT AND SHIPPING Deutscher and Hackett directly offers services including storage, hanging and display, appraisals and valuations, collection management and research and in all instances will endeavour to coordinate or advise upon shipping and handling, insurance, transport, framing and conservation at the request and expense of the client. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept liability for the acts or omissions of contracted third parties.

EXPORT Prospective bidders are advised to enquire about export licences — including endangered species licences and cultural heritage permits, where relevant — prior to bidding at auction. Telephone the Cultural Property and Gifts Section, Museums Section, Ministry for the Arts, on 1800 819 461 for further information. The delay or denial of such a licence will not be grounds for a rescission of sale.

COPYRIGHT The copyright in the images and illustrations contained in this catalogue may be owned by third parties and used under licence by Deutscher and Hackett. As between Deutscher and Hackett and the buyer, Deutscher and Hackett retains all rights in the images and illustrations. Deutscher and Hackett retains copyright in the text contained in this catalogue. The buyer must not reproduce or otherwise use the images, illustrations or text without prior written consent.

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The terms and conditions of business set forth below are subject to amendment by verbal or written notice prior to and during the auction and sale. They constitute the entire contractual agreement with the buyer in respect to any lot offered at auction.

By bidding at auction in any manner compliant with bidding procedures, the buyer and all bidders agree to be bound by these terms and conditions and the terms of the prospective buyers and sellers guide contained in this catalogue, as amended. To the extent that an agent acts on behalf of the buyer, liability for obligations arising from these conditions of business will pass to the buyer. Multiple buyers are jointly and severally liable for obligations arising from this agreement.

DEFINITIONS 1. Definition of terms: a. The ‘buyer’ refers to the party with the highest accepted bid for any lot at auction and/or such party’s principal where bidding as agent. b. The ‘vendor’ refers to the party consigning property for sale and/or such party’s principal where acting as agent.

conditions of auction and sale

c. ‘Deutscher and Hackett’ refers to Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd ACN 123 119 022, its subsidiaries, officers, employees and agents. d. The ‘hammer price’ refers to the final bid price (including any GST) accepted by the auctioneer, or in the case of a post-auction sale, the agreed sale price (including any GST). e. The ‘buyer’s premium’ refers to the 25% (inclusive of GST) payable by the buyer calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. f. ‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended.

ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue. h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

PRELIMINARY CONDITIONS AND DISCLAIMER 2. Agency: Deutscher and Hackett acts as agent for the vendor and the contract of sale for the lot will be between the buyer and the vendor.

3. Property is sold ‘as is’: To the extent permitted by law: a. no guarantees, warranties or representations are made (express or implied) by Deutscher and Hackett or the vendor in relation to the nature and condition of any lot; and b. Deutscher and Hackett disclaims liability for any misrepresentations, errors or omissions, whether verbal or in writing, in the catalogue or any supplemental material.

All factual information provided by the vendor is merely passed on by Deutscher and Hackett from the vendor or other source. Deutscher and Hackett has made no attempt to verify this information. All additional statements of opinion represent the specialist opinions of Deutscher and Hackett employees and should not be relied upon as statements of fact.

4. Responsibility to inspect: Responsibility remains with the buyer to satisfy its, his or her self by inspection and evaluation prior to purchase as to the nature and condition of any property.

CONDITIONS AT AUCTION 5. Registration: Bidders must register to bid and obtain a bidder’s paddle prior to the commencement of the auction. Registration requires that bidders provide proof of identity and Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

6. Auctioneer’s discretion: Deutscher and Hackett reserves the right to absolute discretion over the conduct of the auction including the regulation of bidding and its increments. This discretion extends to the challenge or rejection of any bid, the right to withdraw any lot and the right to determine the successful bidder or reoffer a lot in the event of a dispute. The prospective buyers and sellers guide details an indicative process for the conduct of auctions. All parties are strongly urged to read the prospective buyers and sellers guide included in this catalogue.

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7. Bidding: Deutscher and Hackett may sell each lot to the highest bidder at auction provided the reserve price has been met or where the net amount accounted to the vendor is at least equivalent to the net amount that would have been achieved for a sale at the reserve price. The fall of the auctioneer’s hammer marks the acceptance of the highest bid and the conclusion of a contract for sale between the vendor and the buyer. Unless otherwise agreed in writing with Deutscher and Hackett, the individual physically present at the auction who signals the bid accepts personal liability to pay the purchase price, including the buyer’s premium and all additional fees, taxes and charges.

GOODS AND SERVICES TAX 8. Amounts inclusive of GST: Unless otherwise specified, all amounts specified in this section as payable by the buyer, or otherwise used to calculate payment to Deutscher and Hackett, are inclusive of any GST component. Deutscher and Hackett will provide buyers with a tax invoice that meets the requirements of the Australian Taxation Office.

9. Application of GST to buyers: Buyers are required to pay a 10% GST which sum is: a. included in the final bid prices where buying from a GST registered vendor; and b. included in any additional fees charged by Deutscher and Hackett; and c. included in the buyer’s premium.

If a buyer is classified as a “non-resident” for the purpose of GST, the buyer may be able to recover GST paid on the final purchase price if certain conditions are met.

POST-SALE CONDITONS 10. Post auction private sale: Should the lot fail to sell at auction, Deutscher and Hackett is authorised to sell the lot privately for a period of seven days in which event this agreement shall apply to the relevant buyer to the full extent of its provisions.

11. Payment: The buyer will not acquire title until payment has cleared in full.

Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for services rendered by Deutscher and Hacket t, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide.

Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue. In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

12. Risk and Title: Risk in the lot, including risk of loss or damage, will pass to the buyer on the earlier of: a. the date payment is due, whether or not it has been made; and b. collection by the buyer.

The buyer assumes risk for the property in all respects from this date and neither Deutscher and Hackett nor the vendor will be liable for loss or damage occurring after the payment due date. The buyer is encouraged to make arrangements to ensure comprehensive cover is maintained from this date. Title in the lot does not pass to the buyer, even if the lot is released to the buyer, until the buyer has paid all sums owing to Deutscher and Hackett. If a buyer makes a claim against Deutscher and Hackett for damage or loss after sale, the buyer’s premium and the final bid price shall be payable notwithstanding.

13. Freight: a. The buyer may only remove a lot from the Deutscher and Hackett premises once payment has been cleared in full and must be removed no later than seven days after the date of sale. Should items not be removed by this time, storage and insurance costs may be charged to the buyer. If a lot has not been collected within 30 days after the date of sale and alternative arrangements have not been with Deutscher and Hackett, the lot may be re-sold by Deutscher and Hackett without reserve at the next auction and Deutscher and Hackett may set off any amounts owed for storage and insurance costs and its standard commission before remitting the proceeds to the buyer. b. Buyers are required to make their own arrangements for packing, handling, shipping and transit insurance for their property. Deutscher and Hackett does not accept responsibility or liability for the acts or omissions of any third party, such as a shipping agent, whether or not such a party has been recommended or suggested by Deutscher and Hackett.

14. Limited Warranty of Authorship: If a buyer is able to establish that a lot is a forgery in accordance with these conditions for sale within five years of the date of sale, the buyer shall be entitled to rescind the sale and obtain a refund of the hammer price from the vendor. The buyer must return the lot in the state in which it was sold within fourteen days of notifying Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations.

For a lot to be established as a forgery, the following conditions must be satisfied: a. the buyer must supply two independent expert testimonies attesting to the forgery. Deutscher and Hackett is entitled to request further expert evidence where it deems the evidence provided to be unsatisfactory; b. there must be no conflict of opinion among accepted experts in the field; and c. the forgery must be able to be proven through means that at the time of publication of the catalogue were commonly employed and that will not damage or otherwise put the lot in jeopardy.

The limited warranty and the right to rescind the sale is not assignable and the buyer must have retained title to the lot without disposing of any interest in it up until the buyer notifies Deutscher and Hackett of the forgery allegations. The buyer acknowledges that it has no rights directly against Deutscher and Hackett if a lot is established to be a forgery.

15. Termination, Breach and Legalities: a. Deutscher and Hackett breach: To the extent permitted by law, the sole and maximum remedy to a buyer for breach of warranty is a refund of original purchase price, including buyer’s premium. In such an event the sale contract shall be rescinded and all costs associated with returning the property (in the state in which it was sold) to the premises of Deutscher and Hackett are to be borne by the buyer. Deutscher and Hackett is not liable for any indirect or consequential loss or damage for any matter arising directly or indirectly as a result of the sale. b. Buyer breach: Deutscher and Hackett may, in addition to other remedies available by law, exercise one or more of the following rights or remedies for breach: i. Cancel the sale and retain any payment or property in Deutscher and Hackett custody as collateral or liquidated damages. ii. Charge the buyer interest at the rate of 2% above the rate fixed under section 2 of the Penalty Interest Rates Act 1984 (Vic). iii. Resell the property without reserve at the next auction or privately on five days notice. Any disparity between sale and resale prices, including associated costs such as, but not limited to, legal, storage and sale expenses, will be to the account of the defaulting buyer. iv. Apply any part payment received from the buyer in respect of any lots at its discretion. v. Retain any of the buyer’s property held by Deutscher and Hackett until the buyer has satisfied its obligations to Deutscher and Hackett. vi. Take any other action Deutscher and Hackett deems necessary or appropriate. vii. Refuse to permit the buyer to participate in future auctions. viii. Provide the vendor with the buyer’s details to permit the vendor to take action against the buyer to recover the money.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction: These terms and conditions and any matters concerned with the foregoing fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of the state in which the auction is held.

17. Severability: In the event that any provisions of this agreement should be found unenforceable in a court of law, that part shall be discounted and the remaining conditions shall continue in full force and effect to the extent permitted by law.

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EXHIBITS ELEGANCE

EACH OF THE 2,772 BOTTLES PRODUCED FROM THE 2014 VINTAGE IS A CELEBRATION OF THIS NOBLE VARIETY; ONE OF A TINY RELEASE THAT IS DESTINED TO BE REMEMBERED LONG AFTER IT’S BEEN ENJOYED.

jansz.com.au

CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTION FORM

SALE CODE: CLASSICS SALE NO.: 062 TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART + IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 11 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

q Fine Art (Single issue) $45* q Aboriginal Art single issue (Single issue) $45* q Annual Fine Art Auctions (3 issues) $120* q Annual Fine Art & Aboriginal Art Auctions (4 issues) $160*

q Tax invoice required

* Price includes G.S.T. postage and handling. Additional $10 per catalogue for international orders

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

State

Telephone/Home

Fax

Business/Mobile

Post Code

Email

Subscription Payment by:

q Visa q AMEX q Mastercard

Name on card

Card number

Signature

Expiry date

Date

info@deutscherandhackett.com

153

ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM SALE CODE: CLASSICS SALE NO.: 062 TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART + IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Mobile

Email

State

Post Code

MELBOURNE AUCTION 11 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

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

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com

154

TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: CLASSICS SALE NO.: 062 TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART + IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART MELBOURNE AUCTION 11 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

State

Post Code

1.

2.

Telephone numbers for auction date in order of preference

Facsimile Email

Signature (required)

please email, post or fax this completed form to:

LOT NO.

Date

ARTIST/TITLE

COVER BID*

1.

DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

2.

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344

4.

info@deutscherandhackett.com

3.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

DATE

TIME

*Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales.

By completing this form, I authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to contact me by telephone on the contact number(s) nominated. I understand it is my responsibility to enquire whether any Sale-Room Notices relate to any lot on which I intend to bid. I also understand that should my bid(s) be successful, a buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST), will be added to the final hammer price.

I accept that DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to its clients, that there are inherent risks to telephone bidding, and I will not hold DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT responsible for any error.

155

ABSENTEE BID FORM SALE CODE: CLASSICS SALE NO.: 062 TWENTY CLASSICS OF AUSTRALIAN ART + IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN AND INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

(Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

Telephone

State

Post Code

Business/Mobile

Facsimile Email

Signature (required)

LOT NO.

ARTIST/TITLE

MELBOURNE AUCTION 11 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 105 COMMERCIAL ROAD SOUTH YARRA VIC 3141

Date

MAXIMUM BID*

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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

tel: 03 9865 6333 fax: 03 9865 6344 info@deutscherandhackett.com

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. *Not including buyer’s premium or GST (where applicable). Bids are made in Australian dollars.

Absentee bids must be received a minimum of twenty-four hours prior to auction. All absentee bids received will be confirmed by phone or fax. In the event that confirmation is not received, please resubmit or contact our office.

Please refer to the Prospective Buyers and Sellers Guide and the Conditions of Auction and Sale in this catalogue for information regarding sales. By completing this form, absentee bidders request and authorise DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT to place the following bids acting as agent on their behalf up to and including the maximum bid specified.

Lots will be bought at the lowest possible bid authorised by a bidder in absentia.

Should the bid be successful, the buyer will be obliged to pay the final bid price plus buyer’s premium of 25% (inclusive of GST) of the final bid price. DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT provides this complimentary service as a courtesy to clients and does not accept liability for errors and omissions in the execution of absentee bids.

156

INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

DATE

TIME

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

#NGVEVERYDAY FOLLOW FOR DAILY STORIES AND INSPIRATION FROM NGV

160

161

DONORS ARE THE VERY LIFE BLOOD OF THE GALLERY

When you become a donor to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, you are keeping our collection alive with new and significant acquisitions. It is the loyalty and generosity of our donors that enable the Gallery to be consistently fresh and relevant. Donations are also tax deductible. If you are a lover of art, could there be anything more satisfying than giving to the Gallery? It’s a gesture that brings vitality to the heart of our arts culture, and reaches every part of the Gallery’s dynamic functioning body. Your contribution could assist in the restoration of an artwork, in the cost of a publication, the acquisition of a work or the development of an entire department. Supporting the Gallery is also an ideal way to mix with fellow art lovers. Donors are included in Gallery events and can choose to have their generosity publicly acknowledged or remain anonymous.

Why not contact us for further information or to discuss your bequest in confidence, by phoning Jane Wynter, the Head of philanthropy on 02 9225 1818 or email jane.wynter@ag.nsw.gov.au

John Nixon Black and orange cross 1992, enamel on chipboard.

Purchased with funds provided by the Rudy Komon Memorial Fund

COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 1

© Max Dupain/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 2

© Ben Quilty

Lot 30

© courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery

Lot 3 Lot 4

© Estate of Lin Onus/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 36

© Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2020

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed

by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

Lot 40

© Hans Heysen/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 41

© Alan and Jancis Rees/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 5

© Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 44

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 6

© The Estate of Peter Upward

Lot 45

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 7

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 46

Lot 8

© Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2020

© The Sidney Nolan Trust. All rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 12

© The Estate of Russell Drysdale

Lot 47

© Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 13

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 48

© Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 16

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 49

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 17

© John Olsen/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 50

© John Olsen/Copyright Agency, 2020.

Lot 18

© Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 51

© Garry Shead/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 19

© courtesy of The Estate of Jeffrey Smart

Lot 52

© Emily K Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 20

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 53

© Rover Thomas/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 23

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 54

© Ronnie Tjampitjinpa/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 24

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 56

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 25

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 58

© courtesy of Wendy Whiteley

Lot 26

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 59

© courtesy of Wendy Whiteley

Lot 27

© Estate of Roger Kemp

Lot 60

© courtesy of the artist

Lot 28

© Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 61

© Leonard French/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 29

© Imants Tillers/Copyright Agency, 2020

Lot 62

© The Estate of Russell Drysdale

Lot 63

© The Estate of Russell Drysdale

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES Lot 5

Rosalie Gascoigne

Lot 16

Yvonne Audette

Lot 17

John Olsen

Lot 30

Michael Cook

RESALE ROYALTY Some lots consigned for this sale may be subject to the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 (Cth). Any payments due under the obligations of the Act will be paid by the vendor.

© Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2020 978-0-6483839-6-3

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CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section: Department of Communications and the Arts GPO Box 2154 Canberra ACT 2601 Email: movable.heritage@arts.gov.au Phone: 1800 819 461

index A

R

ARKLEY, H.

4

AUDETTE, Y.

16, 26

G

REES, L.

GASCOIGNE, R.

5, 28

GONSCHIOR, K.

33

B BALSON, R.

15

BECKETT, C.

11, 42, 43

BLACK, D. BOYD, A.

H HEYSEN, H.

20, 44, 45, 49, 56

C CAMPBELL JUNIOR, ROBERT

THOMAS (JOOLAMA), ROVER

53

TILLERS, I.

29

TJAMPITJINPA, RONNIE

54

30

46 U

O O’BRIEN, J.

1

OLSEN, J. ONUS, LIN

UPWARD, P. 17, 50 3

V VAUGHAN, K. VON GUÉRARD, E.

P PASSMORE, J.

14

W

FAIRWEATHER, I.

PIGOTT, G.H.

31

WHITELEY, B.

7, 13, 23, 24, 25 38

FOX, E. P.

39

FRENCH, L.

61

WILLIAMS, F.

Q QUILTY, B..

6

57

F FOX, E. C.

60 10, 35

52

COOK, M.

12, 62, 63

STORRIER, T.

KNGWARREYE, EMILY KAME

34

DUPAIN, M.

19

T

CONDER, C.

DRYSDALE, R.

SMART, J.

27

NOLAN, S.

37

51

KEMP, R

32

DAVIDSON, B.

SHEAD, G.

K

55

D

S

STREETON, A.

N

CHUN, K.Y.

36, 40

21

41

22 9

58, 59 8, 18, 47, 48

2

165

166

167

specialist fine art auction house and private gallery