IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART

I m p o r ta nt Au stra l i a n + I nte rn ati o n a l Fi n e A r t AUCTION • SYDNEY • 22 NOVEMBER 2023

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99

“Good depth and hue of colour it’s still purple-

points tinted at this age. The

bouquet is fresh and bold,

replete with forest-floor/mint and driedherb nuances, while the palate is very powerful, concentrated, full-bodied and firmly constructed. Deep-set cassis fruit as well, still partially in hiding. This is a dense, power-packed cabernet-driven red with abundant tannins. Tremendously long finish. A magnificent wine, which has what it takes to age and reward cellaring for the long term.”

Huon Hooke, The Real Review, 21 March 2023

Yalumba The Caley Cabernet & Shiraz 2018 available now.

yalumba.com

I m p o r ta nt Au stra l i a n + I nte rn ati o n a l Fi n e A r t Including

Ian Fair weather works from the 1930s and 1940s from the Skinner Collection, Perth and

Yvonne Audet te Important works from the artist's studio New York – Milan – Melbourne 1950s – 1970s

Lots 1 – 63

AUCTION • SYDNEY • 22 NOVEMBER 2023

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SYDNEY • AUCTION + VIEWING

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

GOODH

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FORBE S ST BURTO

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MELBOURNE • VIEWING

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

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sydney auction

melbourne viewing

sydney viewing

absentee/telephone bids

live online bidding

LOTS 1 – 63 WEDNESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 7:00 pm 36 gosbell street paddington, nsw telephone: 02 9287 0600 WEDNESDAY 8 – SUNDAY 12 NOVEMBER 105 commercial road south yarra, vic telephone: 03 9865 6333 11:00 am – 6:00 pm THURSDAY 16 – TUESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 36 gosbell street paddington, nsw telephone: 02 9287 0600 11:00 am – 6:00 pm email bids to: info@deutscherandhackett.com telephone: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 telephone bid form – p. 165 absentee bid form – p. 166 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.

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

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

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

ALEX CRESWICK managing director / head of finance With a Bachelor of Business Accounting at RMIT, Alex has almost 25 years experience within financial management roles. He has spent much of his early years within the corporate sector with companies such as IBM, Macquarie Bank and ANZ. With a strong passion for the arts more recently he was the Financial Controller for Ross Mollison Group, a leading provider of marketing services to the performing arts.

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

DANNY KNEEBONE design and photography manager With over 25 years in the art auction industry as both photographer and designer.

Danny was Art Director at Christie’s from 1998-2007, Bonham's and Sotheby's 2007-2009 and then Sotheby’s Australia from 2009-2020. Specialist in design, photography, colour management and print production from fine art to fine jewellery. Danny is also an artist in his own right, holding regular solo and group exhibitions, winning over 50 national and international photography awards.

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specialists

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

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

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

ELLA PERROTTET registrar Ella has a Masters of Arts and Cultural Management (Collections and Curatorship) from Deakin University together with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Visual Art) from Monash University, and studied in both Melbourne and Italy. From 2014, Ella worked at Leonard Joel, Melbourne as an Art Assistant, researcher, writer and auctioneer, where she developed a particular interest in Australian women artists.

ELIZA BURTON gallery manager – melbourne Eliza has a Bachelor of Arts (English and Cultural Studies and History of Art) from the University of Western Australia and a Master of Art Curatorship from the University of Melbourne. She has experience in exhibition management, commercial sales, and arts writing through her work for Sculpture by the Sea and The Sheila Foundation.

HANNAH JAMES gallery manager – sydney Hannah has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales together with a Master of Arts (Contemporary Art Theory) from the University of London. She has spent time living and working across London, Venice, Munich, and Sydney, in a range of roles including curation, exhibition management, artist liaison, art sales and gallery administration.

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specialists for this auction

Chris Deutscher 0411 350 150

Damian Hackett 0422 811 034

Henry Mulholland 0424 487 738

Fiona Hayward 0417 957 590

Crispin Gutteridge 0411 883 052

Veronica Angelatos 0409 963 094

ADMINISTRATION AND ACCOUNTS

Alex Creswick (Melbourne) 03 9865 6333

Hannah James (Sydney) 02 9287 0600

ABSENTEE AND TELEPHONE BIDS

Eliza Burton 03 9865 6333 SHIPPING

Ella Perrottet 03 9865 6333

auctioneers

ROGER McILROY head auctioneer Roger was the Chairman, Managing Director and auctioneer for Christie’s Australia and Asia from 1989 to 2006, having joined the firm in London in 1977. He presided over many significant auctions, including Alan Bond’s Dallhold Collection (1992) and The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art (2000). Since 2006, Roger has built a highly distinguished art consultancy in Australian and International works of art.

Roger will continue to independently operate his privately-owned art dealing and consultancy business alongside his role at Deutscher and Hackett.

SCOTT LIVESEY auctioneer Scott Livesey began his career in fine art with Leonard Joel Auctions from 1988 to 1994 before moving to Sotheby’s Australia in 1994, as auctioneer and specialist in Australian Art. Scott founded his eponymous gallery in 2000, which represents both emerging and established contemporary Australian artists, and includes a regular exhibition program of indigenous Art. Along with running his contemporary art gallery, Scott has been an auctioneer for Deutscher and Hackett since 2010.

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contents various vendors

page

10

Ian Fairweather works from the 1930s and 1940s from the Skinner Collection, Perth

page

22

various vendors

page

48

Yvonne Audette important works from the artist’s studio new york – milan – melbourne 1950s – 1970s

page

86

various vendors

page

110

prospective buyers and sellers guide

page

160

conditions of auction and sale

page

162

attendee pre-registration form

page

164

telephone bid form

page

165

absentee bid form

page

166

index

page 183

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MARGARET PRESTON (1875 – 1963) PHLOX, 1925 oil on canvas 49.0 x 48.5 cm signed and dated lower left: Margaret / Preston / 1925 signed and dated lower right: M Preston / 1925 ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 240,000

PROVENANCE Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney William Buckle, Sydney Christie’s, Melbourne, 23 March 1978, lot 109A Adler Fine Art, Sydney Ivor John Pereira, New South Wales, acquired from the above on 30 June 1979 Estate of the above, New South Wales EXHIBITED Margaret Preston, Grosvenor Galleries, Sydney, 7 – 31 August 1929, cat. 22 (20 gns) The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 23 May – 22 July 1980, and touring to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. O.14 (label attached to backing verso), lent by Mr & Mrs I. Pereira LITERATURE ‘Art Exhibition. Miss Preston’s Pictures.’ Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 7 August 1929, p. 9 ‘Mrs. Preston’s Art. Elaborate Tribute.’ Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 20 December 1929, p. 10 Ure Smith, S., and Gellert, L. (eds), Margaret Preston, Recent Paintings, Art in Australia, Sydney, 1929, pl. 21 The Home: an Australian Quarterly, Art in Australia, Sydney, vol. 13, no. 9, September 1932, p. 1 (illus.)

The Home: an Australian Quarterly, Art in Australia, Sydney, vol. 15, no. 8, August 1934 (illus., inside cover) North, I., The Art of Margaret Preston, Art Gallery Board of South Australia, Adelaide, 1980, pp. 46 (illus.), 86 Butler, R., The Prints of Margaret Preston: A Catalogue Raisonné, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1987, p. 311 Margaret Preston Catalogue Raisonné of paintings, monotypes and ceramics, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, CD-ROM compiled by Mimmocchi, D., with Edwards, D., and Peel, R., cat. 1925.11

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Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963) Pink Jug (Anemone), 1925 hand–coloured woodcut 38.5 x 36.5 cm (image) The Home, An Australian Quarterly, Art in Australia, Sydney, vol. 15, no. 8, August 1934 National Library of Australia, Canberra

Margaret Preston is without question one of the most important Australian artists of the twentieth century. This view is not simply based on the dynamic beauty of her paintings and woodblocks; it also takes into account her passionate advocacy for modernism, which she honed over many years through exhibitions, articles (twenty-seven alone for Art in Australia and The Home), lectures and curatorial projects. She was also extremely well trained having attended schools and academies in Sydney, Melbourne, Munich, Paris and London before the end of World War One; she also ran her own art school in Adelaide. Preston further succeeded in having her paintings hung during these years at the Royal Academy and New English Art Club in London, and the New Salon in Paris; she was subsequently invited to exhibit at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. Of particular note, however, is the period she spent at the Musée Guimet in Paris where she studied Japanese and Chinese art, learning ‘slowly that there is more than one vision in art.’1 Following her return to Australia in 1919, her driving ambition was to forge a truly national art based on a combination of European, Asian and Indigenous art, rather than solely European as it had been before her. Phlox, 1925, is a superb example of this ongoing objective, painted in the same year that her imagery firmly began to crystalise these ideas.

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Part of Preston’s strategy was passionately arguing her ideas through journals and lectures, with her inaugural article for The Home – ‘Why I became a convert to modern art’ – being a powerful first salvo, illustrated with the painting The pottery of Gladys Reynell, South Australia, 1922 (Kerry Stokes Collection) and two woodblocks featuring Australian subjects. 2 Reynell had studied ceramics alongside Preston in London and subsequently opened her own pottery in Reynella, South Australia; and in the painting, Preston sets one of her friend’s distinctive tea sets on a sharply angled red-lacquered board in front of richly patterned fabrics counter-balanced by Cézanne-esque apples in the foreground. It is a perfectly designed composition through which to explore her ideas. Preston was simultaneously creating some of this country’s most memorable woodblocks, and the shallow space inherent in the process further informed her paintings with the result that deeply recessed perspective became less important to her. Floral still-lifes were a frequent subject, with one of her most famous aphorisms being ‘(w)hy there are so many tables of still life in modern paintings is because they are really laboratory tables on which aesthetic problems can be solved.’3

Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963) Study in white, 1925 oil on canvas 45.2 x 65.9 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1925, the same year that Phlox was painted, Preston created the woodblock Pink jug, anemone (Deutscher and Hackett, 4 May 2022, lot. 2), one of the earliest works that clearly demonstrated her thinking.

Presented in a jug decorated with an Asian motif, the anemones are joined by spiky banksia leaves surrounded by stylised motifs based on Aboriginal shields, with the major plane enclosed within a shallow, semiframed field informed by Cézanne. A similarly ambiguous space exists in Phlox, 1925, with only the reflection in the tabletop signalling the illusion of depth. Painted at her home studio in Park Ave, Mosman, Preston arranges the multi-coloured flowers in a large, centralised pot finished in lead-white glaze with a black, hand-brushed motif. The background is an elegant fabric featuring a stylised cherry (or peach) blossom hovering above silhouetted fern leaves, a pattern which appears to evolve into its own cluster of flowers, partially visible in the ruched cloth below; this, plausibly, was one of the Japanese cloths she had expressed admiration for the previous year.4 When exhibited at the Grosvenor Galleries in 1929, Phlox was rightly singled out for comment by reviewers.

Margaret Preston (1875 – 1963) White and red hibiscus, 1925 oil on canvas 51.5 x 51.0 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

artist looking keenly out at the world; and in a newspaper review, she stated emphatically, but honestly, ‘I am a flower painter – and I am not a flower.’5 This resolute, unsentimental focus was already evident in her aesthetically complex paintings from the mid-1920s. As an indicator of their importance, a number of Phlox’s companion paintings from 1925 are now housed in important collections including: Still life and Study in white (National Gallery of Australia); White and red hibiscus (Art Gallery of South Australia); The green plant (Ledger Collection, Benalla Gallery); Pink Hibiscus (Wesfarmers); and Strelitzia (National Gallery of Victoria).

Phlox is one of the few remaining in private hands from this pivotal stage in Preston’s career.

1. Preston, M., ‘From eggs to Electrolux’, Art in Australia, Ure Smith, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 22, 1 December 1926, non-paginated 2. Preston, M., ‘Why I became a convert to modern art’, Home: An Australian Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2, June 1923, p. 20 3. Preston, M., ‘Aphorism 46’, in Gellert, L. and Ure Smith, S. (eds.), Margaret Preston: recent paintings 1929, Art in Australia Ltd., Sydney, 1929 4. See Edwards et al., Margaret Preston, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2005, p. 116

In 1930, Preston became the first woman artist commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to paint a self-portrait for their collection. This startlingly direct depiction presents a determined

5. ‘“I am not a flower”. Mrs Preston’s Art Gallery Portrait: the modern artist.’, Sun, Sydney, 6 April 1930, ‘Women’s supplement’, p. 6 ANDREW GAYNOR

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DORRIT BLACK

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(1891 – 1951) MUSIC, 1927 – 28 colour linocut on thin cream oriental laid paper printed from five blocks in black, yellow, ochre, brick red, grey–green and cobalt blue 24.0 x 21.5 cm (image) 31.0 x 26.5 cm (sheet) edition: 10/50 signed with initials lower left: D.B. inscribed with title and numbered in margin upper left: Music 10/50 ESTIMATE: $55,000 – 75,000 PROVENANCE Private collection Deutsher Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Canada, acquired from the above in March 1978 Thence by descent Private collection, Canada EXHIBITED First Exhibition of British Lino–cuts, Redfern Gallery, London, 4 – 27 July 1929, cat. 49 (another example) Painting and Sculpture by A Group of Seven, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 26 March – 5 April 1930, cat. 6 (another example) Work by Members of the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria, Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, 13 – 24 October 1931 (another example) Exhibition of Oils, Watercolours and Lino Cuts by Dorrit Black, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 7 – 23 July 1938, cat. 31 (another example) The Drawing, Print and Watercolour Exhibition, Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Melbourne, opened 2 December 1952, cat. 14 (another example) Dorrit Black 1891 – 1951, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, then touring, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, New South Wales; The Ewing and George Paton Galleries, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1975 – 76, cat. 50 (another example) A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutsher Galleries, Melbourne, 13 April – 5 May 1978 Art Deco and works from the period, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 16 June – 14 July 1980 (another example) Project 39 – Women’s Imprint, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 – 31 October 1982 (another example) Claude Flight and his Followers: The Colour Linocut Movement between the Wars, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 18 April – 12 July 1992, cat. 17 (another example) Modernism 1900 – 1950: prints and drawings from the collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 23 July – 25 September 1994 (another example) Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South

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Wales, Sydney, 8 March – 4 June 1995 (another example) Art Deco: from Sydney Cinemas and Pubs to Skyscrapers, Museum of Sydney, Sydney, 12 June – 5 September 1999 (another example) Dorrit Black Collection, Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney, 17 April – 29 May 1999, cat. 1 (another example) Modern Australia Women: Paintings and Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 24 November 2000 – 25 February 2001; then touring to the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney and the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria (another example) The Story of Australian Printmaking, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 30 March – 3 June 2007 (another example) Australian Collection Focus: Colour, Rhythm, Design – wood & lino cuts of the 20s & 30s, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 March – 11 July 2010 (another example) Professor Sadler, Japan and Australian modernism, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, Sydney, 3 April – 24 July 2011 (another example) Dorrit Black 1891 – 1951, Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Adelaide, 24 April – 15 May 2011, cat. 9 (another example) Sydney Moderns, Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 6 July – 7 October 2013 (another example) Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 14 June – 7 September 2014 (another example) Modern impressions; Australian prints from the collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, September 2016 – January 2017 (another example) Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 19 June – 8 September 2019 (another example) LITERATURE ‘Art & linoleum cut out pictures with umbrella ribs’, Sun, Sydney, 16 March 1930, p. 8 (illus., another example) Butler, R., and Deutscher, C., A Survey of Australian Relief Prints 1900 – 1950, Deutsher Galleries, Melbourne, 1978, p. 92 (illus., another example) North, I., The Art of Dorrit Black, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1979, cat. L.1, pl. 5, pp. 27 (illus., another example), 131

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Lady Gordon (centre) opening Miss Black's show. Miss Black is on the left.

'Macquarie Galleries Exhibition', Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 11 September 1930

LITERATURE CONTINUED Waldmann, A., Project 39 – Women's Imprint, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1982, n.p.

Edwards et al., Review: works by women from the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, n.p.

Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1995, pp. 66, 152 (illus., another example), pl. 31, cat. DBI Topliss, H., Modernism and Feminism, Australian Women Artists 1900 – 1940, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1996, p. 142 (illus., another example) Hylton, J., Modern Australian Women: Paintings & Prints 1925 – 1945, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, p. 25 (illus., another example) Butler, R., Printed Images by Australian Artists 1885 – 1955, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2007, p. 205 (illus., another example) Campbell, H., Colour, Rhythm, Design – wood & lino cuts of the 20s & 30s, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010, pp. 2, 16 (illus., another example) Mimmocchi, D., Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2013, pp. 79, 178 (illus., another example), 310, 320 Grishin, S., Australian Art: A History, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2015, pl. 23.4, p. 232 (illus., another example) Lock-Weir, T., Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, pp. 8 – 9 (illus., another example), 154 (illus., another example), 199 (illus., another example) Samuel et al., Cutting Edge: Modernist British Printmaking, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 2019, pp. 15, 16 (illus., another example), 39, 40, 49, 70, 74, 90 (illus., another example) and illus., back cover (another example)

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Cover of The art and craft of lino cutting and printing

by Claude Flight, 1934 Image courtesy of Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Adelaide-born Dorrit Black began her studies at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts around 1910, moving to Sydney in 1915 where she attended Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. In England in late 1927, she studied for several months at London’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art, and later in France sought out other progressive teachers – André Lhote, who introduced her to Cubism and Albert Gleizes, who offered ‘a bridge from Cubism to pure abstraction: from the static to the dynamic.’1 Armed with this firsthand knowledge of developments in contemporary international art, when Black returned to Australia at the end of 1929 she joined the ranks of a small group of female artists, including Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar, and earlier, Margaret Preston, who, through the exhibition of their art, sometimes teaching – and in Black’s case, her energetic proselytising – played a critical role in the introduction and spread of approaches to modern art in Australia.

While Black’s first introduction to the linocut technique was probably through Thea Proctor in Sydney during the early 1920s, 2 the most significant influence on her work in the medium was Claude Flight.

Teaching at the Grosvenor School from 1926 – 30, he revolutionised

‘Art & Linoleum’, The Sun, Sydney, 16 March 1930 Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

printmaking in the 1920s and 30s through his passionate advocacy of the colour linocut, regarding it as the modern medium for the modern age. His 1927 book, Lino-Cuts. A Hand-Book of Linoleum-Cut Colour Printing (1927), was the first major publication on the subject and quickly became the standard manual used by artists across the world.

Although Black only studied with Flight for a few months, she absorbed his example of the use of bold colour, the reduction of subject matter to simplified shapes, and patterns based on a dynamic system of opposing rhythmic lines and forms. 2 One of the earliest colour linocuts Black made after her encounter with Flight, Music, 1927 – 28 clearly reflects his influence in its strong design and lively sense of movement, and the master approved, writing to Black after seeing a trial proof, ‘I think it very good. I especially like the person at the piano… I think you have got away with the idea very well… I believe that rather abstract ideas work better in Lino-cuts than definite views.’3 Indeed, Flight’s admiration for this print was such that he included it, along with four others by the Australian artist, in the first of the regular exhibitions of colour linocuts that he organised at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1929.4

The image was inspired by a jazz evening at the Dominion Arts Club in London and the dynamism of the composition, with its sweeping arcs of background line, colour and pattern, and the stylised dancing figures, gives vivid expression to the energy and excitement of the experience.

Printed on delicate cream paper in five colours – black first, followed by yellow ochre, red-brown, grey-green and blue – from five separate linoblocks, this impression is inscribed with the edition number 10/50, however as was often the case with relief prints (linocuts and woodcuts)

by Australian artists at the time, it is unlikely that the entire edition was ever completed. Other catalogued impressions of Music are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.

1. Lock-Weir, T., Dorrit Black: Unseen Forces, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2014, p. 56 2. Freak, E., ‘The Modern Medium: Colour Linocuts’ in Lock-Weir, ibid., pp. 144 – 145 3. Claude Flight, letter to Dorrit Black, 25 March 1928, cited in Lock-Weir, ibid., p. 36 and Coppel, S., Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School, Scolar Press in association with the National Gallery of Australia, Aldershot, 1995, p. 66 4. The other prints by Black included in the Redfern Gallery exhibition were The Acrobats, 1927 – 28; Wings, 1927 – 28; The Castle, Taormina, c.1929; and Argentina, c.1929.

KIRSTY GRANT

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FRANK HINDER

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(1906 – 1992) LITTLE MAN WITH A BIG GUN (MUSSOLINI), 1939 tempera on gesso on hardboard 28.0 x 22.5 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: FCH–39 ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, acquired directly from the artist, 20 December 1967 EXHIBITED Frank and Margel Hinder: 1930 – 1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 13 July 1980, cat. 107 (label attached verso) Frank and Margel Hinder, a selected survey, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 26 May – 3 July 1983; travelling to Lewers Bequest and Penrith Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, 7 – 27 July 1983, cat. 13 (label attached verso) Brave New World: Australia 1930s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 14 July – 15 October 2017 LITERATURE Free, R., Hinder, F., & Hinder, M., Frank and Margel Hinder, 1930 – 1980, Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1980, pp. 13, 21 Free, R., Henshaw, J., and Hinder, F., The Art of Frank Hinder, Phillip Mathews Book Publishers, Willoughby, New South Wales, 2011, p. 99 (illus.)

Crombie, I., & Taylor, E., Brave New World: Australia 1930s, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017, pp. 151 (illus.), 182 Frank Hinder’s Little man with a big gun (Mussolini), 1939, is a highly significant painting, one of only two known works by Australian artists that comment directly on the rise of European Fascism in the lead up to World War Two. The other is Peter Purves-Smith’s The Nazis, Nuremberg, 1938 (Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art) which was his direct response to the antisemitic horrors he witnessed in Europe. It is important to note that these two works were painted some years before the renowned Anti-Fascist Exhibition of 1942, organised by the Contemporary Art Society, and featuring the work of artists such as Noel Counihan, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. By that stage, war had been declared and the justifiable alarm at the actions of Hitler and Mussolini had finally galvanised artists into action. Ironically, Hinder’s premonitionary painting was not included.

Due to their mannerisms, histrionic theatric s and distinctive appearance, Hitler and Mussolini were easy to caricature to the point of cartoonish buffoonery. Mussolini in particular employed the Italian

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notion of braggadocio (boastful, arrogant behaviour), with jutting jaw, hands on hips, and bald head tilted back with machismo satisfaction.

A pugnacious man, he had founded his National Fascist party (Italian Partito Nazionale Fascista) in 1921 – the first in the world, utilising violent thuggery against his political opponents. Indeed, Hitler was influenced in his own actions by Mussolini, not the other way round, but by the time war was declared, the power-balance had reversed.

It is plausible that Hinder had this in mind by portraying the Italian dictator as a puppet, in turn echoing Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu, the protoDada performance from 1896 about a greedy, foolish king which used marionettes for many of its protagonists. Hinder had used a similar motif earlier that year in his drawing of artist-colleague Eleanor Lange, pictured holding puppets of two Sydney art critics, Will Ashton and Sydney Ure-Smith.1 Even so, whilst Mussolini may be attached to strings, the victims of his actions are not, as they flee from his gun through a flaming city, whilst another lies bleeding at his feet. It is a bold, yet perfectly composed composition, which ‘just came without being planned, and for that reason was particularly respected by the artist.’2 Hinder’s sophisticated technique is fully apparent in Little man with a big gun (Mussolini), with the curves and shapes informed by his indepth understanding of ‘dynamic symmetry’, a reinterpretation of design concepts based on Egyptian hieroglyphics and Greek pottery. 3 Whilst he also found inspiration in Futurism and its English cousin, Vorticism, Hinder did not celebrate the violence of war as they did.

What he did admire was their structural form, stating later that ‘I still believe art is design, discipline and control – but most important, design.’4 Technically, his use of the ancient medium of egg tempera (pigment bound by egg yolk) gives the surface of the painting a smooth, translucent finish which perfectly enhances his use of rich colouration.

Significant works by Hinder from this period are now mostly found in institutional galleries, and include Commuters – two paintings, 1938 (National Gallery of Australia); Dog gymkhana, 1939, and Eleanor Lange, 1939 (both Art Gallery of New South Wales); and Expansion, 1938 (Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art).

1. Hinder subsequently established his own marionette theatre in the late 1940s.

2. Free, R. and Henshaw, J., with Hinder, F., The art of Frank Hinder, Phillip Mathews, Willoughby, New South Wales, 2011, p. 98 3. See Hambidge, J., Dynamic symmetry: the Greek Vase, Yale University, Connecticut, United States of America, 1920 4. Frank Hinder, cited in McGrath, J., ‘Design is still the key’, The Australian, 13 December 1976, p. 8 ANDREW GAYNOR

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JOHN BRACK

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(1920 – 1999) THE SURREY GARDENS, 1961 ink and watercolour on paper 40.0 x 73.0 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 61 inscribed with title verso: The Surrey / Gardens ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne Clive Brown, Melbourne Thence by descent Maureen June Brown, Melbourne Estate of the above

and ironic, such images were primarily motivated by an intense interest in people and the human condition, and the desire to produce an essentially humanist art. These subjects also offered Brack new artistic territory. As he explained, suburbia ‘almost seems to be the invention of Australia. It is a theme which hasn’t the disadvantage of having already been explored by painters better than oneself.’3

EXHIBITED John Brack, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, August – September 1961, cat. 15

The Surrey Gardens, 1961 is one of a small group of works, including North Balwyn Tram Terminus, 1954 and The School, 1959, that depict subjects which were close to the artist’s home at the time and in this instance, just a short walk away. Located in Union Road in the Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills, the Surrey Gardens were established in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Guilfoyle, the renowned botanist who famously designed Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, was consulted about the design and planting scheme.4 Brack was a skilled draughtsman and this work, which combines fine drawing in pen and ink with broad areas of watercolour wash, highlights both the precision of his technique and his careful observation of the world around him. He records the distinctive elements of the Gardens; a pair of cannons which commemorate the end of the Boer War in 1902; the memorial stone cross and cenotaph (with an ornamental Art Nouveau honour roll by wood-carver John Blogg) which were erected after the First World War; and the central rotunda, which was built in 1921 in memory of local resident John Gray. While Brack depicts Surrey Gardens devoid of people, it is a space that is redolent with the implications of human presence and activity. Indeed, the fact that there are no figures in the image only serves to emphasise the loss that is memorialised by these various structures.

LITERATURE McCulloch, A., ‘Wilder side of Suburbia’, Herald, Melbourne, 16 August 1961 Millar, R., John Brack, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, pp. 54, 56, 65, pl. 18 (illus.), 108 Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. 1, p. 84, vol. 2, cat. p102, p. 53 Lindsay, R., John Brack, A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 121 RELATED WORKS Summer in the Suburbs, 1960, oil on canvas, 75.0 x 115.5 cm, in the collection of the University of Queensland, Brisbane Study for ‘Roundelay’, 1964, ink and gouache, 45.8 x 91.5 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Interviewed by Robert Hughes in 1959, John Brack declared, ‘National style is a thing of the past… I couldn’t care less about Australian Myths and Legends. I suppose bushrangers are very beautiful, but they bore me.’1 Emphasising his perspective on the type of subject matter that was relevant to a local, contemporary audience, Brack continued, ‘there’s only one true sort of Australian painting… and it consists of truthfully reflecting the life we see about us.’2 As a committed painter of modern life, Brack found the subjects of his art in his immediate surroundings, the suburbs and the city of Melbourne. His best-known paintings of 1950s Australia, such as The New House, 1953 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and the iconic Collins St, 5p.m., 1955 (National Gallery of Victoria), are full of acute observations of contemporary living and, although seemingly humorous

The Surrey Gardens was exhibited in a 1961 solo exhibition at Violet Dulieu’s South Yarra Gallery and purchased by Clive Brown, whose family has retained it ever since. In his Age review of the exhibition, Alan McCulloch observed, ‘John Brack… views the case for life in suburbia with notable objectivity… as commentary Mr Brack’s art is right on the ball, the product of a highly intelligent observer or sufferer, depending on how you look at it.’5 1. Brack cited in Hughes, R., ‘Brack: Anti-Romantic Gad-Fly’ in The Observer, 21 March 1959, p. 182 2. ibid.

3. Brack cited in Tony Morphett (director), The Lively Arts: John Brack, ABC-TV documentary, Melbourne, 1965 4. See https://www.surreyhillsprogress.org.au/about-surrey-gardens-and-the-shrine 5. McCulloch, A., ‘Wilder side of suburbia’, The Age, Melbourne, 16 August 1961 KIRSTY GRANT

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IAN FAIRWEATHER WO R KS F RO M T H E 1 9 3 0s A N D 1 9 4 0s FROM THE SKINNER COLLECTION, PERTH Lots 5 – 1 2

(detail) IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 - 1974) CANAL, FOOCHOW, 1945 – 47

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Rose Skinner, West Perth, 1964 photographer: Richard Woldendorp

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JOE AND ROSE SKINNER, PERTH Joe and Rose Skinner were pivotal to the Australian art scene from the early 1950s to mid-1970s.

Skinner Galleries was the country’s third professionally run commercial gallery when it opened in Perth in 1958, but significantly, theirs was the first purpose-built space – an elegant modernist enterprise which was itself a statement of intent. Whilst Joe, a developer and astute collector, was happy to remain behind the scenes, Rose became an increasingly powerful and sophisticated gallerist ‘of unusual energy and charm, with formidable powers of persuasion that ranged in tone from authoritative, to cajoling, to coy.’1 Put more bluntly, ‘she could be discourteous to the point of rudeness, and charming to the point of seduction.’ 2 What cannot be disputed is her superb eye and acutely refined business instincts. Over a period of eighteen years, a roll call of Australia’s leading artists exhibited at Skinner Galleries, often repeatedly, including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Guy Grey-Smith, Fred Williams, Robert Dickerson, Margaret Olley, and many, many others. Frank McDonald, a partner in Clune Galleries in Sydney, described Rose as one of the best dealers in Australia who ‘could have taken on Sydney and been as good as Joseph Brown [one of Australia’s most prominent art dealers] … she was a wizard saleswoman.’ 3 Skinner preferred to describe herself as an agent rather than a dealer – ‘I sell at the artists’ prices. I don’t speculate in pictures’4 – and this combination of vision, ethos and sheer determination led Elwyn Lynn to write in a letter to her in 1966 that ‘the only active person in Perth concerned with the promotion of really modern worthwhile art has been yourself.’5 Between them, the Skinners left an irreplaceable legacy.

Josiah (Joe) Skinner migrated to Perth from England in 1911. He was wounded at Gallipoli (literally saved by two pennies in his trouser pocket) and later prospered by purchasing blocks of Perth CBD real estate. As a developer, Skinner was responsible for some of the more elegant Deco-style hotels and apartments in Perth in the 1930s and 1940s. His politics were left-leaning, and by the time he met Rose, he was a collector of rare books and glass. Rose Dvoretsky was the daughter of Polish emigrants who were well connected in Europe, and Rose travelled there regularly with them. Her father was a successful landholder on the Peel Estate south of Perth, and also owned an Indian carpet business in the CBD, which Rose directed until her third marriage, at a mature age, to Joe in 1946. At that stage, she was a tenant in one his buildings (likely the Chelsea Flats on St George’s Terrace) and as Joe would later recall, ‘I couldn’t help running into her now and then. That’s how we eventually got married.’6 By the early 1950s, they had already bought paintings by Sali Herman, Russell Drysdale and Guy Grey-Smith; and in December 1953 Joe ‘walked into Redfern’s London Galleries to enquire about an “obscure” artist who’d shown there previously – Ian Fairweather. A group of paintings left over from an exhibition of his work in the 1940s was brought out from the stockroom and Joe bought the lot.’7 In 1955, the Skinners purchased a two-storey house in Malcolm Street, Perth, which had been built in 1893 for Edith Cowan, the first woman member of an Australian parliament, and her husband, James Cowan. In 1957, Rose began her plans for a gallery.

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Perth in the mid-1950s was still one of the country’s smallest capitals with just over 350,000 people, approximately half the population of the whole state of Western Australia. There was a nascent modernist art scene featuring names such as Grey-Smith, Howard Taylor, Elise Blumann and a young Robert Juniper, but its exposure to artists with a national reputation was minimal at best. There were no private galleries to speak of, only spaces to hire. In preparation for her venture, Rose met with arts organisations, consulted with the directors of Australia’s state galleries and wrote to international figures. 8 It was an ambitious venture and a pre-opening circular heralded an art centre containing recital rooms, a sculpture garden, studios, and art classes, all to be built in front of the Malcom Street house.

On 14 October 1958, Skinner Galleries opened to much fanfare and in the catalogue introduction, Rose outlined her ambitious vision alongside a transcribed speech by Walter Gropius. The gallery featured a combination of mosaic tile entry, timber stairs, grand piano, copper fireplace, and parquet floors, whilst on the top floor was Leonardo’s Coffee Shop, which became a popular meeting place for art enthusiasts.

It was a spectacular and eventful arrival for Perth and for the Australian art scene as a whole.

Rose was particularly savvy in recognising that Fremantle was the first home port for any Australian artist returning from Britain, which made it easier for her to convince them to stop off for a show at the gallery. A great number of artists were considerably rewarded by showing with Rose, particularly Sidney Nolan whose 1962 exhibition demonstrated her genius for promotion. This was the year that the Commonwealth Games were held in Perth and realising that the Duke of Edinburgh would officially open them, Rose orchestrated for him to also open Nolan’s show. Not surprisingly, it was a complete sell-out, netting £10,000, a huge sum for the day. The Skinners furthered their support by buying art for themselves, and in 1974 Art and Australia featured their personal collection of paintings including Fairweather, Nolan, Matisse, Rouault, Williams and others, set against Persian rugs and suede-covered Bauhaus armchairs.

In her final years, Rose continued her advocacy, campaigning for the artists’ droit de suite, or royalty payable to the artist on each re-sale, ‘indefatigably’ consulting lawyers in Europe and the United States of America.9 Sadly, she suffered a severe stroke in 1975, and the gallery closed in April 1976.

Rose died on 17 September 1979, and following Joe’s death in 1985, a major bequest of sixty-eight paintings was gifted to the University of Western Australia. In business and in private, the Skinners were hugely influential as tastemakers for, and supporters of, the Australian art scene. It is with great pride that Deutscher and Hackett has been entrusted with selections from the remainder of their astutely purchased collection.

1. Snell, T., ‘Rose Skinner: the firebrand Perth dealer neglected by a new art history’, The Conversation at: https://theconversation.com/rose-skinner-the-firebrand-perth-dealer-neglected-by-a-new-art-history-72583 (accessed 19 September 2023) 2. Sharkey, C., ‘Rose Skinner, modern art, and the Skinner Galleries’, Early days: journal of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, Perth, vol. 12, no. 4, January 2004, p. 373 3. Frank McDonald, cited in Snell, op. cit.

4. Rose Skinner, 1974, cited in Hutchings, P., ‘The art collectors 13: The Rose Skinner collection’, Art and Australia, vol. 12, no. 2, October – December 1974, p. 142 5. Elwyn Lynn, Letter to Rose Skinner, 15 April 1966. Rose Skinner archive, Battye Library, Perth, MN1320, File 5, #143 6. Joe Skinner, 1981, cited in O’Brien, P., Robert Juniper, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1992, p. 36 7. Cruthers, J., ‘Creating taste: the collection of Joe and Rose Skinner’, Art World, Melbourne, April/May 2008, p. 155 8. ibid., p. 154 9. See Hutchings, op. cit., p. 149 ANDREW GAYNOR

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The Duke of Edinburgh with Joe and Rose Skinner after opening the Sidney Nolan exhibition at Skinner Galleries, Perth, 1962

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I A N FA I R W E AT H E R w o r k s f r o m t h e 1 9 3 0 s and 1 9 4 0 s DR CANDICE BRUCE

The recent publication of the letters of Ian Fairweather edited by Claire Roberts and John Thompson1 has added substantially to our knowledge of the artist: to his biography, his methods of working, his travels, his childhood, his relationships, but most of all, his thoughts and feelings. A solitary man, Fairweather went to great lengths during his lifetime to guard his privacy. He did however share his travails and gripes – which at times were many – his canny observations and troubled emotions, with a handful of friends and family in a lifetime of letter writing.

Ian Fairweather arrived in Shanghai for the first time in 1929 with a Chinese grammar book, a set of watercolours and a curiosity about all things Asian. He was 38 years old and for many years had nurtured a growing interest in Chinese art, culture and language. He had read key texts on Oriental art and, for at least a decade, had visited the Asian collections at the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert. While studying at London’s Slade School of Art, he also attended Japanese classes at the School of Oriental Studies, but found himself increasingly drawn to Mandarin.

The 1920s had been a difficult decade for Fairweather, characterised by periods of restlessness and depression. Described by his Slade professor, Henry Tonks, as a profoundly melancholy man, Fairweather was sensitive, artistic, solitary and damaged, legacies of both his experiences as a prisoner in Germany during WWI and his conflicted upbringing. Left at the age of six months by his parents when they returned to India with their older children, Fairweather was raised by his elderly spinster aunts and grandmother. Reunited with his parents and eight older siblings at the age of ten, his letters in old age reveal the trauma these events inflicted on him. Intimacy seems to have been impossible. There were no love affairs and few long friendships, his life forever lived at a distance from others.

Unable to settle in postwar England and in conflict with his mother’s conventional expectations (his father had died while Fairweather was

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still a prisoner), he set off for distant places, living frugally and doing outdoor manual work. He did not know yet how he wanted to paint, or even what to paint, for that matter; simply that he did not want to paint the way he had been taught. After visiting Germany and Norway (he relished skiing and mountain climbing), he returned once more to his mother’s house on Jersey, but found family life there stultifying. At the end of that year, he broke finally and forever with his mother and in 1928, emigrated to Canada where his older brother Neville lived.

At first, he went to remote Saskatchewan, but he soon gravitated to the rugged and empty far west coast, becoming a caretaker on a remote island near Vancouver. Lonely, living an almost feral life with the discarded belongings of his predecessor, a defrocked priest, he had one ’relic’ left – his Chinese grammar book printed in Shanghai. Always a believer in omens and fate, it was Shanghai where he decided to head.

He jumped on a ship going west – for some reason Fairweather always believed this was the luckiest direction to travel – and disembarked some weeks later in Shanghai. Shanghai was then known as the ‘Paris of the East’, a sophisticated and dangerous city with a culture that was a fusion of East and West, where great wealth existed alongside great poverty. Fairweather settled in the International Settlement, an enclave outside of the old walled city which, though dominated by the British and holding some 60,000 foreigners, was also inhabited by over a million Chinese. He found a room above a brothel at 235 Szechuan Road overlooking Suzhou (Soochow) Creek and work as a park ranger for the Public Works Department – a ’white man’, he wrote, and thus employable in one of the better paid jobs. He earned sufficient money to hire someone to cook his meals and stir his paints and to travel by rickshaw.

Importantly it gave him the opportunity to move around the city and observe the daily life of the people, and although no works from this time have survived, we know he both sketched and took photographs with a newly acquired Leica camera. Writing in 1963 to his sister Annette (known in the family as ‘Queenie’) he said:

The Bund, Shanghai, 1930 photographer unknown

’Too sad – to think I had a Leica camera in Shanghai with projector and all the works – (went broke and had to sell it) it had a cunning viewfinder – it looked round the corner – So you could pretend to be taking a shot in one direction but actually you were taking one at right angles – I had some wonderful days wandering around the markets and villages around S’hai – Had some grand shots of babies and beggars – canals, bridges, junks – alas all gone now…’2 His rented room was high up and spacious and while he painted into the night, the working girls from downstairs would come and sit to chat to each other in their incomprehensible (to him) Shanghai dialect. He used the projector to magnify portions of the photographs, a way of working that possibly had an unforeseen impact on later compositions, many of which have a sense of being part of a larger sequence of activity.

Although painted in Australia in the late 1940s, the Chinese subjects in this sale carry a feeling of the swiftly noted scene, the photograph quickly snapped with the Leica. They are rapid, sketchy, full of motion, almost as if the rickshaw driver has just passed by or the clouds still tumbled in the sky. The swiftness of execution is an illusion however, for on several occasions Fairweather admitted to being a slow painter who worked and reworked an image. He liked to pin them on the wall, he once said, let them ‘cook’ and often changed things if he were discontented.

Colour is minimised but blue – whether a dark ink or the lighter Reckitt’s – dominates. As Roberts demonstrates in her recent book on

Fairweather which draws on his letters and new archival research, his art was indirectly influenced by the pictographs of the Chinese written language, by the shapes and patterns of Chinese characters. 3 It was an influence, he later confessed, that he was slow to realise. ‘I didn’t know then that I had the makings of a job in my hands’, he would later write to his nephew and namesake Ian Alister Fairweather, adding that, ’art in all its forms is a terrible lonely way of life – unconnected with the everyday world around one.’4 It was a constant struggle, his art during this period labelled by him, almost pitiably, as ‘his strivings’. Always curious, he made the most of short periods of leave by visiting the surrounding countryside and the ancient towns of Soochow (Suzhou), Foochow (Fuzhou), Hoochow (Huzhou) and Hangchow (Hangzhou). He filled sketchbooks and took notes and photographs of all the most picturesque features – the lakes, the temple gardens, mountains, bridges and canals – but also took notes on the ordinary life of the people, rickshaws, horses and carts, the beggars and street vendors; the sifting of the corn and labour in the rice paddies. Although no works from this time survive, clearly these noted observations helped him to remember, to store the images and revive them more than a decade later. A battle raged within him however, as to how to interpret what he saw and experienced. Not yet able to throw off his Slade school training which was based solidly on the figure, he was also unready to embrace abstraction.

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Shanghai post office and Soochow creek, China, 1920s photographer unknown

After two years in China, Fairweather wrote to his old Slade friend the curator and collector H.S. ‘Jim’ Ede to see if he had any useful connections in Australia (‘the never-never land’) as he was clearly already contemplating leaving Shanghai. It is the only extant letter from this period and in it he wrote that he continued to learn Mandarin in his spare time, despite it not being something that the ’best’ people were inclined to do. These were presumably the expats who frequented the elite gentlemen’s clubs springing up along the Bund, such as the Shanghai Club (now the Waldorf Astoria) and the American Club.

Fairweather would later admit to not being entirely comfortable in these environments with their strict codes of behaviour and conformist views.

There was another reason however. Tensions were rising between China and Japan in 1931 and on 28 January 1932 they erupted in the bombing of parts of the International Settlement. It was a sign to leave but before he did, he wanted to see Peking (Beijing) and set off north, climbing the sacred mountain of Taishan (Mount Tai) on the way. He visited the Forbidden City and studied the treasures of ancient Chinese art held in the city’s museums and public gardens. This, he felt, was the true China. He would return to the city in 1934, but for now his restless wanderings began again.

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Taking a ship to Australia, he disembarked in Bali where he remained for nine months, an experience that he described later as ’somewhere near to heaven.’ While there he completed a good body of work, two of which he later sent back to Ede in London. Ede was superbly connected: a curator at the Tate Gallery, secretary for the Contemporary Art Society and a friend and supporter of many artists. Ede went to work pleading Fairweather’s case, despite thinking his eccentric but talented friend a very difficult person to help. Over the coming years he would keep up a regular correspondence with the artist and send him much-needed money.

One of Ede’s contacts was the Redfern Gallery in London. Established in the mid-1920s as an artists’ cooperative and bankrolled by a couple of wealthy Englishmen, by the 1930s the Gallery was an important venue for showcasing contemporary British art. Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicolson, Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and the Grosvenor School artists all exhibited there. It was managed by an ambitious young New Zealander Rex Nan Kivell and through Ede’s introduction Fairweather would establish an important avenue for future sales (though he never took to Nan Kivell). In 1936, Bathing Scene, Bali (1933) was acquired

A guide map by the Sun Sun Company for American marines showing all the entertainment establishments in Shanghai, 1930

by the Contemporary Art Society and presented to the Tate. When told of the sale, Fairweather’s first thoughts ran to his family and the vague hope of their approval. He would never receive it.

Head, c.1934 (lot 10) was possibly painted, or at least started, in Bali as it has much in common stylistically with other Balinese works and was exhibited during the artist’s lifetime as ’Balinese Dancer’. The sketched-in, rounded forms of face and arms and the muted palette are also consistent with other Balinese works, such as Head of a woman, 1933 (National Gallery of Victoria) as well as a plaster likeness that Fairweather made in 1946 while staying with Lina Bryans.

The next decade was so difficult it makes the Shanghai years seem like Shangri-la. Finding himself by mistake in Western Australia (he had been aiming for the east coast) he went to Colombo where officials took most of his money and sent him packing. He then hopped on a boat to Melbourne which, in its dreary monotony, reminded him of the most dreary suburbs of London. Describing it as a ‘matriarchy’ with a million

perfect homes and the pubs always closed, he loathed the rigidity of parochial Australian life, though he met and mixed with George Bell and members of his circle. It was, he wrote, the first time he did not feel like a criminal for being an artist. Living rough during the Melbourne winter was testing however, as was an attempt to complete a commissioned mural for the Menzies Hotel. He exhibited work with Cynthia Reed in March and at the Athenaeum in July with the Contemporary Art Group.

Illness and the cold propelled him to head north once again.

He landed in Davao, living on the beach with some very noisy neighbours who made a racket night and day. He hated the food, the heat, the people and whinged unceasingly to poor Ede and occasionally to Frater in his letters. Despite all these irritations, he was able to produce many works, sending bundles of ‘sketches’ to Ede for sale. Filipino Girl Carrying Fruit (lot 13) is possibly from this time. In it the artist uses a technique of dappled paint to fill in a pencilled outline which is familiar to other work he did in Davao.

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Ian Fairweather Head of a woman, 1933 watercolour, oil, gouache and pencil on paper 36.2 x 26.2 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Ian Fairweather/DACS, London. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

From there he went to Peking (Beijing) where he lived in poverty and was thoroughly miserable: the heat, the cock that woke him at four every morning, every little thing… though he was able to take a bus and tramp all over the hills where once again he was amongst the farms and outlying villages. It was then that he probably painted Landscape with Horses, c.1936 (lot 7) which appears to have been painted in a temple garden with Tang statues of horses (terracotta or bronze) on plinths guarding the entrance. The scene is sketchy, a quick impression in a palette of soft greys and browns. A path, or river, takes the eye to the trees and blue sky beyond.

In his letters to Ede and Frater, he observed the slow encroachment of the Japanese in China and the atmosphere of suspicious observation that came with them. It inhibited his movements and work, and put him out of sorts. He gave up smoking and was irritable. The cold was almost unbearable. He left, traveling through remote parts of Indonesia until

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he arrived at last in Zamboanga in the Philippines where he stayed put and began to paint memories of Shanghai, of Soochow Creek and the tea gardens in Hangchow. These works were sent to artist Lina Bryans in exchange for the help she gave him – money which kept him alive. In the process he lost every material thing he owned several times: once in a house fire he accidentally set; he was hospitalised after injuring his hand which caused the removal of half a finger; he scraped himself while diving for coral, the wounds turning septic; and he fell ill with one cold after another...

In the following years, he lived in Cairns, Brisbane, Calcutta, Cooktown, and Bribie Island. For a while he was happy there and got to work for the first time in years – though it was short-lived. Someone took the sail from his boat and then a few days later his watch (‘my last remaining luxury’), and worst of all, his diary of the previous eleven years in which he had jotted down everything. It was a terrible blow and he left for Melbourne.

Ian Fairweather (Two Philippine children), 1935 oil on plywood 44.9 × 50.9 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne © Ian Fairweather/DACS, London. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia

Several works in this sale – those of Soochow and Foochow – (lots 5, 6, 8, 9 and 11) can be dated from this period which was one of relative stability. He moved into a room in Lina Bryans’ house in Darebin and once again, sleeping during the day and working through the night, after two years sent forty-five paintings to London with a friend Laurie Thomas. He was from the first a loyal supporter who, on becoming director of the Queensland Art Gallery in the 1960s, would mount the first major exhibition of Fairweather’s work. Unfortunately, the next bundle of over one hundred works which Fairweather sent directly to the Redfern arrived so badly damaged, they had to be destroyed.

It is significant that the stolen diary – possibly containing sketches and notes on compositions as well as diary entries of places and names pushed him to paint so many Chinese scenes, as if he needed to pull them from his memory before they faded into thin air. The last vestige of the past, of all his travels and experiences and that in losing them he was set free. They are evocations of mood and feeling, glimpses of places in quickly realised brush strokes and splashes of colour, rather than literal scenes. In a letter to Ede (who was now living in Tangiers with his wife) he wrote: ‘I just had to do them – there are many variations of the same subject… the ones I came up against and couldn’t do – I felt it was no good going on painting till these ghosts were laid – I’ve finished

with them – though sometimes in 10 different ways – and perhaps never satisfactorily – but I do feel that doing them has carried me quite a stage farther along the road…’ 5 One work here Street in Soochow, c.1948 (lot 8) painted after he left Melbourne and went to Cairns is more abstracted than previous Chinese-themed work and seems to have been executed more speedily.

He was a colourist, not a draughtsman. He liked to paint nature, the human form, and was never happy with total abstraction.

Itinerant for most of his life, Fairweather finally settled on Bribie Island in 1953 for what would be his final twenty years. There he was often visited by friends who dropped in to play chess or chat about art and books and down a whisky or glass of red. Those who recognised an artist of outstanding talent. Finding success and fame late in life, a narrative sprang up about the eccentric ‘hermit’ artist who eschewed normal life and lived in a hut on a remote island. It brought him a kind of celebrity status, though one he disliked, for it was never the whole story.

1. Roberts, C. and Thompson, J., Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters, Text Publishing, 2019 2. ibid., p. 324 3. Roberts, C., Fairweather and China, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2021 4. Roberts & Thompson, op. cit., p. 435 5. ibid., p. 145

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) CORNSIFTING, SOOCHOW, 1945 – 47 gouache and pencil on paper 36.0 x 31.0 cm (sheet) signed lower right: I Fairweather bears inscription verso: 27 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 28 October – 20 November 1948, cat. 27 Fairweather, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1 October – 27 November 1994; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 December 1994 – 19 February 1995; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 March – 7 May 1995, cat. 14 (label attached verso, as ‘Corn sifting, Soochow (Shanghai)’) ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 LITERATURE Bail, M., Hemisphere: An Asian Australian Magazine, vol. 27, no. 1, July/August 1982, p. 54 (illus.)

Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 62, pl. 54, pp. 71, 79 (illus.), 89, 237, 249 Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 12, pp. 12, 70 (illus.), 100

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) CANAL, FOOCHOW, 1945 – 47 gouache on paper 37.0 x 39.5 cm signed lower right: I Fairweather ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London (label attached verso) The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above 19 December 1953 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 28 October – 20 November 1948, cat. 19 ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 LITERATURE Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, fig. 36, cat. 75, pp. 88 (illus.), 236 Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 14, pp. 12, 72 (illus.), 100

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) LANDSCAPE WITH HORSES, c.1936 gouache on paper 40.5 x 39.5 cm signed lower right: I. Fairweather bears inscription verso: 3 / 25 ESTIMATE: $90,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Collectors’ Pride, The Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 3 – 26 June 1977, cat. 66 (label attached verso) ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 (as ‘(Tombs at Peking), c.1936’) LITERATURE Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 11, pp. 12, 69 (illus.), 100 (as ‘(Tombs at Peking), c.1936’)

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IAN FAIRWEATHER

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(1891 – 1974) STREET IN SOOCHOW, 1948 gouache and pencil on paper 21.0 x 21.0 cm ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 LITERATURE Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 19, pp. 77 (illus.), 100

Installation view of ‘OREINTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections’, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 Cornsifting, Soochow, 1945 – 47, far right Street in Soochow, 1948, third from right (Landscape, Soochow), 1945 – 47, fourth from right (Canal, Foochow), 1945 – 47, fifth from right Walls of Foochow, 1945 – 47, sixth from right Courtesy: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) WALLS OF FOOCHOW, 1945 – 47 gouache on paper 38.0 x 47.0 cm bears inscription verso: 4 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London Private collection Redfern Gallery, London The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above 3 December 1970 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 LITERATURE Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 13, pp. 12, 71 (illus.), 100

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) HEAD, c.1934 oil and pencil on cardboard 45.5 x 37.5 cm bears inscription verso: Noa’s Woman ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London (label attached verso, as ‘Head, c.1936’) The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above 19 December 1953 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth EXHIBITED Recent Paintings by Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 7 – 30 January 1937, cat. 11 Ian Fairweather: Paintings of China and the Philippines, Redfern Gallery, London, 15 October – 7 November 1942, cat. 46 (as ‘Head of a Woman’) Summer Exhibition, Redfern Gallery, London, 1945, cat. 130 (as ‘Balinese Dancer’) Collectors’ Pride, The Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 3 – 26 June 1977, cat. 64 (label attached verso, as ‘Noa’s Woman’) ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013 LITERATURE Hutchings, P., ‘The Art Collectors 13: The Rose Skinner Collection’, Art and Australia, vol. 12, no. 2, October – December 1974, pp. 142, 144 (illus., as ‘Torso of a Girl’) Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 24, pl. 18, pp. 35, 37 (illus.), 51, 237, 246 Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 4, pp. 62 (illus.), 100

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IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) (LANDSCAPE, SOOCHOW), 1945 – 47 gouache on paper 20.5 x 21.0 cm

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EXHIBITED Ian Fairweather, Redfern Gallery, London, 28 October – 20 November 1948, cat. 32 ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 4 May – 13 July 2013

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000 PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above 19 December 1953 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth

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LITERATURE Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2009, cat. 65, pl. 55, pp. 52, 71, 80 (illus.), 120, 249 Snell, T. et al., ORIENTing: Ian Fairweather in Western Australian Collections, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2013, fig. 15, pp. 12, 73 (illus.), 100

IAN FAIRWEATHER (1891 – 1974) FILIPINO GIRL CARRYING FRUIT, 1945 – 47 gouache on paper 28.5 x 25.0 cm bears inscription verso: 2

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PROVENANCE Redfern Gallery, London (label attached verso, as ‘Phil Girl Carrying Fruit’) The Skinner Collection, Perth, acquired from the above 19 December 1953 Thence by descent Private collection, Perth

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

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Important Australian and International Fine Art The property of various vendors L o t s 13 – 27

(detail)

ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 – 1999) THE FALL, 1981

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FRED WILLIAMS

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(1927 – 1982) SUMMER LANDSCAPE, LYSTERFIELD, 1973 oil on canvas 46.0 x 61.0 cm signed lower left: Fred Williams. inscribed on stretcher verso: 196 ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 150,000

PROVENANCE Estate of the artist (LW196) Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Private collection, United Kingdom, acquired from the above in 1991 EXHIBITED Fred Williams: Small Pictures, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, 7 May – 15 June 1991, cat. 15 (as ‘Summer Landscape, Lysterfield’, 1972) We are grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance with this catalogue entry.

Recent research of the artist's diaries has now recorded this work in the Williams database as Summer Landscape, 1973.

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 Williams 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 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 who accompanied him on some of these excursions, 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 It was 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.

The broad open country depicted in Summer Landscape, Lysterfield, 1972 is divided into three horizontal bands. The deep foreground in the lower section of the picture is painted in warm, variegated tones and enlivened by a series of short, predominantly vertical brushstrokes, which represent sparse, low grassy growth around pools of water. The middle band, with a bright, sandy-coloured ground, sits below a decisive horizon line. The top third of the picture is devoted to the depiction of the sky and painted in a moody grey, captures the familiar heat, humidity and stillness of high summer in Australia. The hieroglyphiclike marks that Williams used to describe 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 What particularly stands out in this painting however is Williams’ great skill as a colourist. During the late 1960s and into the 1970s he expanded his palette so that it included a range of vivid and often unmixed colours, and this work demonstrates his ability to merge the subtle, earthy tones of the underpainting – which are so readily associated with the Australian landscape – with touches of brilliant colour, especially yellow and orange, bringing the image to life and engaging the viewer in the living energy and rich detail of the scene.

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 and Oxford University Press, Canberra, 1989, p. 100 3. McCaughey, op. cit., p. 184 KIRSTY GRANT

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JOHN BRACK (1920 – 1999) WIG SHOP WINDOW, 1970 oil on canvas 146.0 x 114.5 cm signed and dated lower right: John Brack 70 signed and inscribed with title verso: JOHN BRACK / ‘WIG SHOP WINDOW’ ESTIMATE: $600,000 – 800,000

PROVENANCE Leonard French, Heathcote, Victoria, acquired directly from the artist in the 1970s Thence by descent Private collection, Melbourne EXHIBITED John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 10 December 1987 – 31 January 1988, cat. 78 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 78, pp. 125, 140 Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, p. 124; vol. II, cat. o177, pp. 24, 138 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Wig Shop with Pink Lampshade, 1970, oil on canvas, 130.0 x 89.0 cm, private collection, illus. in Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, cat. 79, p. 65

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John Brack The Old Time, 1969 oil on canvas 162.5 x 128.5 cm TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria © John Brack

There has been much discussion in print and digital media about the so-called ‘pink tsunami’ associated with the marketing of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. Our recent saturation in PANTONE 219C (Barbie Pink) in fact has a much longer and wider popular culture context, of which the present work is exemplary.

In the post-war years, prior to John Brack’s painting Wig Shop Window, the association of the colour pink with perceptions of femininity steadily gathered momentum, from the fuschia Trevilla creation worn by Marilyn Monroe in the ‘Diamonds are a girl’s best friend’ sequence of Billy Wilder’s Some like it hot (1953) and Kay Thompson’s fashion anthem ‘Think pink’ in Stanley Donen’s Funny face (1957), to the hot pink Mary Quant A-line modelled by Twiggy in 1966; from the ‘First Lady Pink’ affected by Mamie Roosevelt to the iconic pink wool Chanel suit worn

by Jacqueline Kennedy on the day of her husband’s assassination.

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John Brack’s painting inherits these trends, while addressing the very specific historical context of 1970, when (according to the Women’s Weekly) ‘Summer pink [was] the in color for the current pretty-girl look and for the fashion mood of soft curves. Paris says lots of pink for day and night and it comes in a galaxy of shades – hot pink, soft pink, pink in prints, and the new-again pink worn with black.’1 Brack is notably attentive to this chromatic wave, not only in the present work and its companion Wig shop with pink lampshade, 1970 (private collection), but in other pink pictures from the same season, notably the ballroom dancing series picture The old time, 1969 (TarraWarra Museum of Art), the still life Peonies, 1970 (Wollongong Art Gallery), and one of the first of a new series, Nude with pink rug, 1970 (private collection).

In these works, the subtle dental-plastic greyed pink which the artist had employed in Veterinary instruments, 1963 (private collection) and The scissors shop, 1963 (private collection) is lifted to an almost

John Brack Ray and Judy, 1969 gouache on paper 48.2 x 58.4 cm Castlemaine Art Museum, Victoria © John Brack

shocking lolly shade, as here: in the walls of the shop, and in the legs, skirt and face of the shop assistant, the garishness offset by roseate and purpled browns in the floor and window embrasures, and by the framing lavender-blue metal window frame.

Every bit as intriguing and compelling as its palette is the Wig Shop Window’s disegno, its composition. As with so many of Brack’s paintings, it combines deadpan social-satirical observation and flat finish with a subtle surrealism, a formal and spatial disorientation, an equivocation arising from disrupted vision. As Patrick McCaughey puts it: ‘behind the impersonal, unbroken surfaces lies a world which seethes with irony, ambiguity, where the normal is displaced or held in a difficult balance.’2 In his years working as head of the National Gallery School, then located in what is now State Library Victoria in Swanston Street, Brack did a

lot of walking around the city, and the commercial displays of central Melbourne’s streets – medical suppliers, hardware stores and such – provided sympathetic stage sets for his theatre of waking dreams.

He regularly employed the conceit of the shop window still life for almost a decade, from The scissors shop to Inside and outside, 1972 (National Gallery of Australia), ‘a succession of visionary flashes based on an unspoken contact between the sealed-off occupants (humans or apparently still life) of a glassed-in otherworld, and the intruderobserver-inspector who stares and waits and decides.’3 In the present work, Brack plays his perceptual and conceptual games through the window of Abe Lourie’s Swanston Street shop, ‘Creative Wigs.’ He creates an elusive, preconscious feeling of discomfort in the viewer through the exact alignment of the front of the middle shelf with the bottom edge of the back wall, through the alignment of the back of

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John Brack Inside and Outside (The Shop Window), 1972 oil on canvas 164.0 x 130.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Brack

that same shelf with the bottom hem of the salesgirl’s mini-skirt, through the disappearance of the top of the doorway on the left into a mass of curls, and through the tilted, off-centre, not-quite-straight frame of the window. We feel, with Peter Tyndall, a certain ‘vertigo from… the absence of shadows and the playfully uncertain vanishing points.’4 Within this illusion box, this camera rosea, the consumer products are arrayed four-three-two along three glass shelves, the blank-faced light grey wig-stands looking like silver winner’s cups in a racing trophy case, or even South American Shuar tsantsa (shrunken heads) in a museum vitrine, each one of them surmounted by shiny, writhing Medusa curls in black, brunette and blonde.5 For all that Brack’s aesthetic depends on the flat-patterned, the angulargeometric, and the linear-spiky, he also displays a perverse fondness for the organic and curvilinear, and particularly for the representation of human hair. The big wigs of the present work have a full barber’s

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shop window full of curly-top precedents: from the carefully-painted, pony-tailed, and beribboned Little girl’s head (Vicky), 1955 (private collection) and the tousled top of a short-back-and-sides in Portrait of Fred Williams, 1958 (Art Gallery of South Australia) to the Mister Whippy soft-serve ice cream cloud of hair above a spanner mouth in The queen’s aria, 1960 (private collection) and the cake icing/pavlova impastoed veils and hats of the wedding series of 1960 – 61, even the blue floral hat worn by Barry Humphries in the character of Mrs Everage, 1969 (Art Gallery of New South Wales). Here, bolstered by contemporary tonsorial fashion, he goes to town with half a dozen fantastic inventions of Baroque complexity and Rococo caprice – coils, folds, hooks, S-curves – looking for all the world like microscopic or marine invertebrate flora or fauna.

Perhaps more disturbing either than Brack’s fictive architecture or the alien life form hairpieces is his placement of the figure, presented in

John Brack Wig Shop with Pink Lampshade, 1970 oil on canvas 130.0 x 89.0 cm Private collection © Helen Brack

such a way that she seems to have neither shoes nor arms, with her head appearing to sit on the top shelf, squeezed in between and slightly below the brown and black trichological competition. On her proper left side, the neck curve of the wig-stand in front trims her generous coiffure into a bob. The celebrated flatness, the forwardness of Brack’s painted surface places her on the same plane as the shop’s inventory, while the blank, bored, inscrutable expression on her face, with its heavily mascaraed eyes and straight-line Revlon Sky Pink lips, is oddly inhuman, more that of a mannequin than of a flesh and blood woman.

No Women’s Weekly ‘soft curves’ here. Rather, she is of a piece with the model figures in the earlier shop window series, ‘replicas of human life, figures not quite materialized into human bodies.’6 Reviewing Brack’s series of nudes with Persian carpets that immediately followed this work, Daniel Thomas observed: ‘Obviously he likes toying with real versus artificial. He has been very interested in false legs,

false hair, tailor’s dummies, forced expressions, reflections… All this is a reminder that any picture is itself artificial, too.’7 A masterly exercise in airless artifice, Wig Shop Window is John Brack at the height of his powers: of observation, of construction, and of wit.

1. Keep, B., ‘Summer pink pretty-girl’, Australian women’s weekly, 14 January 1970, p. 20 2. McCaughey, P., ‘The complexity of John Brack’, in Robert Lindsay (ed.), John Brack: a retrospective exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 8 3. Millar, R., John Brack, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971, p. 18 4. Tyndall, P., ‘John Brack retrospective at Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria’, bLOGOS/HA HA, 24 April 2009 https://blogos-haha.blogspot.com/2009/04/john-brackretrospective-at-ian-potter.html 5. The work was formerly owned by Brack’s contemporary and friend, the painter Len French.

He maintained that Brack painted the plain, straight wig at the bottom left as a sly portrait à clef of French’s no-nonsense wife Helen.

6. McCaughey, op. cit.

7. Thomas, D., ‘Display of nudes’, Sunday Telegraph, 11 April 1971 PROFESSOR DAVID HANSEN

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JOHN BRACK

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(1920 – 1999) THREE FIGURES, 1971 oil on canvas on plywood 39.5 x 47.0 cm signed and dated lower left: John Brack 71 inscribed with title verso: Three Figures ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection, Canberra, and the United Kingdom, acquired from the above in 1972 Thence by descent Private collection, Sydney EXHIBITED Recent paintings by John Brack, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 – 17 September 1971, cat. 14 LITERATURE Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. II, cat. o193, p. 27 (illus.)

Lindsay, R., John Brack: A Retrospective Exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987, p. 126

The following excerpts are from Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, vol. I, pp. 121 – 22: ‘…The series of gymnasts of 1971 and 1972 consists of ten oil paintings and eight conté drawings. Thematically, it presents a logical progression from the ballroom dancing series – the concern with senseless ritual as recreational activities are converted into difficult and testing labour.

In its formal language, however, there are signs of a fundamental change. A constant preoccupation in Brack’s art is identity. This can be traced back to a youthful interest in books on physiognomy as well as a later study of Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity with its questions of ‘re-identification’ and ‘personal distinctiveness’ ... Up to this point, Brack’s images of still-life objects – scissors, knives and forks – were kept separate from figure compositions, although he did imbue these still life objects with a symbolic existence. In the gymnast series, the stick-like figures start to lose a little of their human identity and increasingly become formal elements that symbolically convey humanity as observed from a distance. The whole setting is reduced to

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a minimum – the featureless floors and walls of the gymnasium, with a few lines on the bare floorboards marking off the extent of the playing arena. They are very sparse compositions where the figures remain the dominant elements but no longer occupy most of the picture space.

The origins of the gymnast motif probably can be traced back to Brack’s obser vation of his own children when they were young, although when he commenced the series his youngest daughter was almost twenty and all the gymnasts in the first series are boys.

Implied in this association is the artist’s concern that angst is being pushed down onto our children: “... a series of pictures dealing with children doing gymnastic exercises, the idea here is related to balancing and falling, but not absolutely collapsing – you know, the world is going on in a series of stumbling lurches, but not absolutely collapsing... it is not the abyss, it is stumbling, but it is not the abyss.”1 The first series of gymnasts is largely preoccupied with exploring a number of premeditated ambiguities intended as a visual metaphor commenting on the complexity of life... there is a statement about balance and imbalance, movement and stability, unity and discord, implying in the antinomical sense that at the moment of greatest balance there exists the greatest potential for imbalance, that ascent implies descent, and so forth. These slight, almost sexless figures cast against the naked floorboards are involved in part of a ritual as complex as life itself. Having attained for a brief moment a state of triumph, they hover as if frozen on the pinnacle of their success, precariously balancing, tottering on the brink of collapse without actually collapsing.

The more complex compositions such as Three figures, Three Pairs and Four Pairs and a single, all of 1971, explore further the concept of harmonious coordination and competitiveness, with the figures competing against one another and against the other pairs; there is as well the inner competition within each figure, each pushing itself to the very edge of disaster. At the same time there is a need, at least for the outside observer, for the figures to appear to relate to one another in a state of harmony and coherency that masks reality…’

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John Brack on John Brack, Lecture, Australian National University, Canberra, 1977, p. 7

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CRESSIDA CAMPBELL

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born 1960 SPOTTED GUMS, 1999 watercolour on incised woodblock 75.0 x 49.5 cm signed lower left: Cressida Campbell signed on frame verso: Cressida Campbell ESTIMATE: $140,000 – 180,000

PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 13 July – 7 August 1999, cat. 20 (label attached verso) LITERATURE Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010 (3rd ed.), cat. W9904, pp. 134–135 (illus. detail), 137 (illus.), 352

Cressida Campbell’s incised and hand-painted woodblock, Spotted Gums, 1999 is softly and naturalistically immersive. It presents a familiar and awe-inspiring glimpse into one of Australia’s unique primeval landscapes and preserves its fragile integrity in chalky watercolour paint. Through a rhythmic alternation of dark and light mottled tree trunks Campbell endows this harmonious composition with a dynamic depth of field and an uplifting verticality. The late Nick Waterlow, esteemed Australian curator and art historian, wrote in an introduction to Cressida Campbell’s first solo exhibition in London in 2001 that her distinctive artworks had the capacity to ‘provide constant reminders of the unique wonders of nature in this ancient continent’ and constituted ‘a wonderfully refreshing antidote to all those forces that want to separate us from our surrounding environment.’1 Having lived all her life in pockets of Sydney between bush and the constructed urban environment, and with a predilection for utilising her immediate environs within each artwork, scrubby and chromatically muted scenes of the east-coast bush have been recurrent and steadfast subjects throughout Campbell’s career. Using Spotted Gums as her key image, Campbell chose to group a large number of these works together in her 2008 monograph under the unassuming title ‘Bush’, reuniting vast panoramas with intimate single flower studies, linked through their delicate and detailed evocation of native flora. 2

Continuing an enduring tradition of picturing an untouched natural wilderness in Western art, Spotted Gums belongs to a suite of botanical works drawn from life in the endangered, sub-tropical bush around the Stella James House in Avalon, on Guringai country on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. 3 The artist and her first husband, Peter Crayford, lived in this heritage-listed Walter Burley Griffin house over the summer of 1999 – 2000. Enclosed by tall stands of Pittwater Spotted Gums and angophora, the house overlooks thirty thousand square metres of open forest on the slopes below. This pristine vegetation was an enticing pictorial subject for Campbell, appearing in several woodblocks and prints between 1999 – 2000, often featuring a combination of Pittwater’s distinctive eucalypts, cycads, and Cabbage Palms.

Framed in the lower corners by pinnated leaves of cycads and browning ferns, the airy composition of Spotted Gums is dominated by the strong vertical lines of the trunks of these gum trees, which tower way beyond the limits of our vision. In the foreground, a wide and mottled eucalypt trunk bisects the composition cleanly from top to bottom. It draws the viewer into Campbell’s view and directs the eye delicately throughout its dense bush, amongst the trunks, deep indigo shadows, and beyond, into the rising sea mist and pale open sky above the horizon line.

While tall, Campbell’s view of this eucalypt forest is contained, a small fragment of the vast view that the artist had enjoyed from where she stood. The artist’s unusual and painstaking practice of painting her woodblocks with watercolour, using a technique similar to cloisonné, lends a chalky, mottled texture to both finished artworks (block and unique print). The inconsistencies and velvety textures left on the block’s surface after the printing process, provide a tactile evocation of the mottled bark and rough surfaces of its subject matter. The clean incised outlines of tree trunks and detailed clumps of leaves dissolve into the damp and shady depths of the forest, keeping a sense of mystery within its detailed naturalism. Campbell’s prints and blocks display a fragment of her reality, leaving clues to hint at what lies beyond the frame. With reverence, Campbell translates the ancient grandeur of Australia’s native flora, and in evoking its unique beauty, silently entreats the viewer for its continuing respect and preservation.

1. Waterlow, N., Cressida Campbell Recent Paintings, Nevill Keating Pictures, London, 2001 2. Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures, Sydney, 2008, pp. 132 – 191 3. NSW Landcare: https://landcare.nsw.gov.au/groups/stella-james-house-bushcare/ LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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born 1960 INTERIOR WITH RED GINGER, 1998 unique colour woodblock print 119.0 x 84.5 cm signed lower right: Cressida Campbell signed below image lower right: Cressida Campbell ESTIMATE: $160,000 – 220,000

PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 13 July – 7 August 1999, cat. 2 LITERATURE Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010 (3rd ed.), cat. P0306, pp. 231 (woodblock illustrated), 357

Cressida Campbell, through decades of unwavering commitment to a unique, detailed, and labour intensive artistic medium, has recently risen to new heights of critical and public acclaim. Her recent survey exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia is said to have broken attendance records and further cemented her position as a household name. Working at the intersection of printmaking and painting, Campbell conjures mirrored pairs of serene images, their prosaic subject matter often concealing the artist’s considered orchestration. These works, painted and incised woodblocks and printed on paper, are testaments to Campbell’s sophisticated visual intelligence and humble appreciation for the small wonders in her immediate physical environs. At the turn of the 20th century German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin theorised the domestic interior as a refuge of the collector, ‘not just the universe but also the étui (ornamental case) of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces’.1 This sun-drenched and softly mottled woodblock print, Interior with Red Ginger, 1998 displays an interior view of the airy seaside home of the artist’s friend Lynne Clarke (née Drysdale) in Newport. Campbell elaborated on the influence of this friendship in an audio recording for the National Gallery exhibition: ‘[she is] one of my oldest friends and she’s been a huge influence to me in interiors and gardens and the way she places things. [...] She’ll arrange plants amazingly, [an] incredible gardener. [..] I mean it’s brilliant interior design really.’2 The arrangement of contrasting textural details; of tropical floral combs with

shiny broad leaves, white linen couches strewn with soft blankets, worn blond floorboards and discarded camcorder in the foreground alludes to an insouciant holiday atmosphere, with the room perhaps only recently vacated by its bare-footed inhabitants.

Compositionally daring, the artist’s domestic interiors present a feast for the eyes, demonstrating her broad engagement with her personal domestic realm, both at home and in temporary pied-à-terres. In a similar vein to the French intimist painters of the late 19th century, Campbell’s works often start with interstitial spaces (corridors, windows, alcoves) and from this entry point present a combination of several genres: still life in the foreground, moving into a deep view of a room, and finally culminating in a sliver of a landscape glimpsed through a window or open balcony door. Long before Campbell overtly described this process in the title of a work (Journey Around My Room, 2019), her interiors gently coaxed viewers to travel through time and space, living vicariously through the artist and her personal recollections, both known and imagined.

It is clear that Campbell is a pure aesthete. Her works are sublime, carrying no socio-political impetus, nor aiming to surprise or shock viewers. She delights in the form and colour of everyday objects, translating and manipulating them into artworks that express the enduring appeal of quiet tranquillity. Although singled out in the title of this print as the key identifying feature of this interior, the spiky cylindrical clusters of the Ginger Lily are partly obscured in the lefthand side of the image. They are placed within a complex intersection of angular planes and panes of glass, between framed artworks on the wall and French doors opening presumably to a verandah out of view.

While the dark timber balustrade anchors the composition in the lefthand corner, the whitewashed window frames of the bay windows in the upper right reveal a brilliant blue sky, with palm fronds and a second ginger blossom, connecting the interior with the world beyond. Here Campbell is at the height of her technical proficiency, delighting in the intellectual game of representing pictures in pictures, using a printing process that itself requires a mastery of reflected images.

1. Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p. 104 2. The artist, 2022 at https://nga.gov.au/tours/cressida-campbell/stop/123/ (accessed September 2023) LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1917 – 1999) THE FALL, 1981 painted and stencilled wooden boards from soft–drink boxes on plywood backing 218.0 x 137.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: R.G. 1981 / THE FALL ESTIMATE: $400,000 – 600,000

PROVENANCE Pinacotheca, Melbourne Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1981 Yuill|Crowley, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2001 EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 29 April – 16 May 1981, cat. 4 Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 19 December 2008 – 15 March 2009, cat. 25 LITERATURE MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro, Sydney, 1998, p. 106 Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, Council of Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, pp. 20, 90 (illus.), 135 Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 209, pp. 201 (illus.), 353

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Rosalie Gascoigne Autumn, 1989 painted and stencilled sawn wood from discarded soft drink crates on plywood backing, 92.0 x 83.5 cm Private collection © Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023

While the aesthetic, emotional and intellectual appeal of Rosalie Gascoigne’s work is timeless, its material presence speaks of another era – a period in which the local tip was a treasure trove for those with a keen eye, full of a raft of ‘stuff’, ripe for creative repurposing. One of the artist’s earliest exhibitions showcased elements from a carnival sideshow that she had found at the Bungendore tip, on the outskirts of Canberra1, and across her career, her various finds – of kewpie dolls, beer cans, enamelware, linoleum and apiary boxes, amongst other things, are transformed into works that evoke associations and emotions that far transcend their humble beginnings as timeworn found objects. Gascoigne’s ‘hunting ground’ took in Bungendore, Braidwood, Queanbeyan, Captain’s Flat, Tharwa, Michelago, Bredbo, Cooma, Wee Jasper, Yass, Murrumbateman, Gundaroo and Collector 2, as well as the city of Canberra, but she was also not averse to offering a roadside crew some beers in exchange for materials that caught her eye. As her studio assistant, artist Peter Vandermark recalled of these trips: ‘When I went out with her in the car she was almost silent, yet it never felt uncomfortable. At the tip we’d split up and go in different directions.

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After looking, she’d get me to pick up the things she’d selected. Usually she’d come home with something, a couple of pieces of tin maybe, but it didn’t matter if we returned with nothing. There was no music, I’d drive and she’d just check out the landscape. Rosalie would bring the same things each time: a Thermos of coffee, a packet of date roll biscuits, some pieces of fruit – a snack. We’d take time off. At Captain’s Flat, for example, we’d stop at the oval and if there was a road-working team, she’d go up to them, introduce herself, explain how she used the signs.

She knew the best way to get the signs was to carry a slab of beer in the car. She knew the currency of workers.’3 Gascoigne initially discovered an enormous cache of soft drink crates at a depot in Queanbeyan, carrying them home on the roof racks of her car.4 At this early stage, they were available in an array of colours, and discards could be purchased by the truckload. Later, when the artist told Schweppes of her use for their crates, the factory manager gave her unlimited access to their discards yard.5 Sadly, this was not to last, as the company eventually moved to using plastic crates, which were of no interest to her.

Rosalie Gascoigne, with her collection of Schweppes boxes, 1994 photographer: Richard Briggs

Using these materials was a time-consuming and labour-intensive exercise, with each horde having to be sorted, stacked, cleaned and dismantled – including pulling out up to forty nails from each box – before the process of beginning the work could even commence.6 The Fall, 1981 dates from a period in which Gascoigne primarily (but not exclusively) used the whole boards of the crates, arranging them in some of the largest and most ambitious works she made with this material.

The palette of the crates of the different companies – Crystal, Sharpe’s, Swing and Schweppes – is used to great effect, creating a sense of dappled colour and movement across the work as the typography of the various logos jostle and shimmer; their vertical arrangement creating a sense of the planks falling, like autumn leaves, from the top to the bottom of the composition. Together, the gentle movement of the work’s component parts in concert with its title, powerfully evoke the inevitability of time passing, and of seasonal change.

Jean Thomas, mother of celebrated curator and art historian Daniel

Named, as Gascoigne’s works characteristically were, well after its completion, The Fall is unusual in the artist’s oeuvre for drawing upon a real-life event for its titular inspiration. The work in part alludes to Mrs

6. Gascoigne, S.C.B., ‘The Artist-in-Residence’ in Eagle, op.cit., p. 12

Thomas, who was living in Canberra and working at the National Gallery of Australia when the piece was made. As NGA colleague John McPhee later relayed to Thomas: ‘Rosalie told me that the painting was called The fall after an encounter with your mother. She had seen her making her way from the shops in Kingston to our flat and seemed to be making a tough task of it. She picked her up and took her home. The title was more a reference to our fall from youth, grace, etc, rather than a real fall. Autumnal years I suppose.’7 1. Assemblage, Gallery A, Sydney, 1976.

2. Clark, D., ‘Standing on the Mountain: The Landscape Impulse in Rosalie Gascoigne’s Art’ in Gellatly, K., Rosalie Gascoigne, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, p. 28 3. Vandermark, P. in Eagle, M., From the Studio of Rosalie Gascoigne, Australian National University Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 2000, p. 23 4. Gascoigne cited in Davidson, K. & M. Desmond, Islands: Contemporary Installations from Australia, Asia, Europe and America, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1996, p. 14 5. MacDonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, pp. 33 – 34 7.

ersonal communication, Daniel Thomas to Martin Gascoigne, 2004 cited in Gascoigne, M., P Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonné, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, p. 201

KELLY GELLATLY

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TONY TUCKSON

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(1921 – 1973) TWO FAINT LINES ON BROWN (TP85), 1970 – 73 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 213.5 x 122.0 cm ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 200,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney, a gift from the artist in 1973 EXHIBITED Tony Tuckson, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 11 April – 5 May 1973, cat. 20 Tony Tuckson 1921 – 1973, a Memorial Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 April – 9 May 1976, cat. 87 (label attached verso) Two Centuries of Australian Painting, Orange Regional Gallery, New South Wales, 19 April – 15 June 1986 Tuckson: The Abstract Sublime, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 November 2018 – 17 February 2019 LITERATURE Thomas, D., Legge, G., & Free, R., Tony Tuckson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1989, pl. 147 (illus.), p. 126 Mimmocchi, D., Tony Tuckson: The Abstract Sublime, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, pp. 52, 71, 140 (illus.), 208 If Tony Tuckson had failed to produce his final late abstractions, he would be admired as an inspired Modernist where the figure predominated.

Paintings which were created with an interest in the School of Paris, Picasso and Matisse in particular.

In 1948 he studied under Grace Crowley and Ralph Balson at East Sydney Technical College where his instinctive curiosity responded to their theories on colour and abstraction. A year later he saw the exhibition ‘Arnhem Land Art’ at David Jones Gallery, Sydney. These moments preceded his interest in New York School lyrical abstraction, yet they appear to share a defining prescience in the making of Two faint lines on brown, 1970.

It is the per fect synthesis, a sublime culmination of his unique abstraction, where in the year it was painted and exhibited at Watters Gallery, Sydney, the paintings attracted immediate and unreserved critical acclaim which has never diminished.

Accounts of Tuckson’s professional role at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, his perceived conflict as a practising artist and working duties, is well recorded. He chose not to exhibit, nonetheless his private and prolific studio activity continued. His role in defining the place of Indigenous art in the AGNSW’s displays and collections was transformative. He hoped to narrow his role there and oversee Aboriginal art and his ever-developing interest in Oceanic and Melanesian art.

Two faint lines on brown, 1970 is a transcendent marker of Tuckson’s vast interests, where nothing becomes a stylistic prompt and his impulsive expression reaches its most individual and resolute form.

Other major works from this time include the celebrated double-panel works, where the composition of vertical lines is complemented by sweeping horizonal gestures. Aside from the wonderful overall sgraffito painterliness, two other factors are always in play in Tuckson’s late work – scale itself and surface edges – our physical relationship to his painterly monumentalism is an important dynamic.

In Two faint lines on brown the chalky dry surface is subtle, rich in nuance and evocative of two interests central to Tuckson’s artistic and cultural preoccupations. The New York School (whose work he experienced when he visited in 1967 – 68), and by this stage, his twodecades long association with Aboriginal art (he had visited Yirrkala in the late 1950s).

While pictorial literalism is something Tuckson avoided, it is not a stretch to connect these interests. Intuitive influences were never stylistic grabs, rather the result of art and cultures seen and experienced from personal encounters. ‘‘Contact between two cultures may not be reciprocal’ he stated, ‘but it can have considerable influence.’ This may well have been a statement in relation to his own painting…’’1 Tuckson admired the work of Barnett Newman whose so-called ‘zip’ paintings were often vast canvases that were larger in scale and reach than most viewers themselves. It is no coincidence that Newman was keenly interested in, and even curated an exhibition on, the native art of Northwestern America.

The irregular falling vertical lines in our work cascade to an ensemble of lyrical, splashed and dribbled gestures at the base at its lowest edge.

Whether we see it as coincidence or a discreet gesture of respect, the association with the narrow, vertical eastern Arnhem Land Mokuy figure seems inescapable. Tuckson first visited Yirrkala and Melville Island in the late 1950s.

Two faint lines on brown is a sophisticated masterpiece – an encapsulation of what immediately defined his reputation as an abstractionist at the forefront of Australian painting from the moment his final works were seen.

1. The artist, cited in Mimmocchi, D. et al., Tony Tuckson, Art Gallery New South Wales, Sydney, 2018, p. 20 DOUG HALL AM

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ALBERT TUCKER

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(1914 – 1999) EXPLORER, EVENING, 1965 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 91.0 x 122.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Tucker '65 dated and inscribed verso: INTRUDER "EXPLORER, EVENING" / 1965 ESTIMATE: $180,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Albert Tucker, Melbourne Thence by descent Barbara Tucker, Melbourne Bonhams and Goodman, Melbourne The Estate of the Late Alan Cardy, Sydney, acquired from the above 7 December 2007 LITERATURE Uhl, C., Albert Tucker, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1969, cat. 18.39, pl. 14 I, pp. 44, 45 (illus. as 'Intruder'), 106

Albert Tucker left Australia bound for London in late 1947, recalling that, ‘for me it was like undoing a coiled spring. You could go and see and experience things you had only known by report.’1 He spent the next thirteen years living and working in Europe and America, absorbing everything he could of the art, history and rich cultures of cities like Paris, Rome and New York. Tucker found that distance from Australia gave him a different perspective on the country of his birth, and during these years, as well as experimenting with various techniques, he introduced new themes to his work which responded to the distinctive history and landscape of Australia. ‘I’d been away long enough to be suffering acute bouts of nostalgia and I was getting all these memory images of Australia – and oddly enough not so much specific imagery, but in images of texture and colour and light and all that kind of thing that’s very Australian, very rough textures.’2 The subject of the figure in the landscape first appeared in Tucker’s oeuvre in the Ned Kelly series of the mid-1950s. He began painting his now iconic antipodean heads – whose distinctive form was based on the shape of an archaic Etruscan double-headed axe – towards the end

of the decade. The face of this 1965 explorer, with its sharp, angular features, extends this pictorial trajectory, although with the addition of a crumpled, well-worn hat and piercing blue eye it becomes more naturalistic; a stylised depiction of a familiar Australian outback type.

Painted in the same colours as the surrounding landscape, the explorer merges with his environment, the deeply incised expression lines on his face like crevices in the dry earth. The searing heat is reflected in vivid shades of orange which shimmer across the canvas. While Tucker powerfully conveys a sense of struggle against the harsh landscape, his stoic figure also symbolises resilience and survival, characteristics which are arguably just as necessary for contemporary artists as they were for colonial explorers.

By the time Tucker returned to Australia in 1960, examples of his art had been acquired for both the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Indeed, one of the two paintings in MoMA’s collection by that time, is a depiction of the illfated explorers Burke and Wills, who both perished in their 1860 – 61 attempt to travel from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. 3 Winning the Australian Women’s Weekly art competition that same year – and famously receiving the news that he had been awarded the 1000 pound prize at a time when he had only a few dollars left in his pocket – Tucker’s return coincided with a major survey exhibition organised by John Reed for the Museum of Modern Art of Australia, which brought due acknowledgment of his work at home and marked the beginning of broad recognition of his contribution to the history of twentieth-century Australian art.

1. Mollison, J., and Bonham, N., Albert Tucker, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1982, p. 42 2. Harding, L., Hinterlands: Albert Tucker’s Landscape, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, 2008, p. 31 3.

E xplorers, Burke and Wills, 1960, oil and sand on canvas, 122.1 x 156.1 cm, Philip Johnson Fund, Museum of Modern Art, New York (124.1960) KIRSTY GRANT

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ARTHUR BOYD

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(1920 – 1999) JINKER ON A SANDBANK, SHOALHAVEN, c.1976 oil on canvas 91.5 x 122.0 cm signed lower right: Arthur Boyd ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 July 1987, lot 396 (as ‘Shoalhaven River, with Jinker Pulled by Swans’) Savill Galleries, Sydney Company collection, Sydney EXHIBITED 1888 – 1988: A Century of Australian Painting, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 21 April – 21 May 1988, cat. 50 (as ‘Figure Driving Swans Pulpit Rock, c.1976’) RELATED WORK Figure Driving Swans Beneath Pulpit Rock, 1976, oil on canvas, 122.0 x 152.5 cm, illus. in McGrath, S., The Artist & The River, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, pp. 270 – 271

‘...The river is, of course, the most compelling image in many of these paintings from this period. Boyd has captured it in all its moods, quiet as floods begin to recede; ugly brown as it swells with water; dark, calm and green in summer when the land is parched; glowing pink at sunset.’1 After almost two decades abroad, in 1974 Arthur Boyd settled on the banks of the Shoalhaven River where once again the magic of the dour, untamed Australian landscape became the impetus for his art. Soulpiercing in its beauty, the region offered infinite potential as a subject – ‘the variation in the area with its great deep tones and high keys’ 2 bearing strong affinities with music. Invariably though, the artist’s abiding love for the region was informed with a deep respect and latent fear, for the Shoalhaven was not always kind. In 1975, heavy rains transformed the placid flowing river into a great swollen torrent that engulfed everything in its path: as Boyd observed at the time, ‘...the river moans and groans in a muted way, and great chunks of what was upstream comes down – dead cattle with their legs sticking up, logs and roof tops. Once a whole house came down the river.’3 When the waters finally subsided, all that remained was an earthly silence and the land strewn with death and debris.

Indelibly influenced by these events which left the artist and his family marooned, Boyd subsequently embarked upon a series of landscapes so redolent with impending disaster ‘...it is as if Nature is holding its breath.’4 Drawing upon the motif of the horse and jinker first employed in his poetic tribute to his mother, Potter’s Wife, Horse and Trap (Rosebud), 1969 – 70, thus Boyd proceeded to explore, through various iterations such as the present, the theme of the lone rider venturing across the watery Shoalhaven landscape. In Black Horse, 1975 for example, the horse stumbles uncertainly towards the river, while in Jinker on Sandbank, 1976 – 77, fear has transformed the rider into a hare, and in Jinker on a Sandbank with Pulpit Rock in the Background, 1975, the composition is dominated by a flock of oversized, menacing black crows whose presence imparts a distinct air of portent or unease.

Infused by contrast with a gentle lyricism, Jinker on a Sandbank, Shoalhaven, c.1976 encapsulates the more optimistic spirit that distinguishes Boyd’s later treatment of the subject from his earlier investigations. With the horse now replaced by black swans (ubiquitous in the Shoalhaven region), the rider charges at full gallop across the sandbar with obvious determination, while in the distance, the warm glow of the pale pink evening sky and sun-kissed peak of Pulpit Rock suggest the promise of halcyon times ahead. Although reminiscent of classical antiquity, Boyd insists that his inclusion of the chariot pulled by black swans here bears no ‘connection with a particular myth or legend’, although ‘…when I saw the swans on the river they did remind me a bit of a four-in-hand as they glided along the water.’5 With the mirror-like expanse of water and colourful afterglow paying homage more directly to his artistic predecessors such as von Guérard and Piguenit, indeed the work is a poignant reminder of how Boyd, comfortable once more with the vast open spaces of the Australian landscape, ultimately did tame his wilderness ‘...what was unfamiliar became familiar, what was menacing became friendly, what was awesome became intimate.’6 1. Boyd cited in McGrath, S., The Artist and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p. 220 2. Boyd cited in Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, pp. 26-27 3. Boyd cited in McGrath, op. cit., p. 58 4. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 73 5. Boyd cited in McGrath, op. cit., pp. 270 – 271 6. McGrath, ibid., p. 79 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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WILLIAM ROBINSON

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born 1936 BIRKDALE FARM CONSTRUCTION WITH AUSTRALORPS, 1982 – 83 oil on canvas 122.0 x 183.0 cm signed lower right: William Robinson bears inscription verso: FARMYARD CONSTRUCTION ESTIMATE: $300,000 – 400,000

PROVENANCE Ray Hughes Gallery, BrisbanePrivate collection Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney Dr Peter Elliott AM, Sydney The Peter Elliott Collection, Mossgreen, Sydney, 30 August 2015, lot 7 The Estate of the Late Alan Cardy, Sydney EXHIBITED William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane, 1985 (as ‘Birkdale Farm Construction’) William Robinson, The Revelation of the Landscape, S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney, 11 January – 2 March 2003 and Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 1 April – 18 May 2003, cat. 1 William Robinson: The Farmyards, William Robinson Gallery, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 23 July 2013 – 8 June 2014 LITERATURE Art and Australia, 1984, vol. 21, no. 3, p. 405 (illus. as ‘Birkdale Farm Construction, 1983’) Watters, J., William Robinson, The Revelation of the Landscape, National Trust of Australia, Sydney, 2003, p. 40 Low, L. A., ‘Wreck ‘n’ roll’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 1 February 2003, p. 11 Fry, G., The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2013, cat. 110, pp. 114 – 115 (illus.)

Robinson, W., William Robinson: The Farmyards, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 2013, p. 34 (illus.)

William Robinson’s farmyard paintings are central to his development as a painter because they form an important stepping stone toward his unique view of the Australian landscape. Birkdale Farm Construction with Australorps, 1982 – 83, is one of the major examples that form the core of this important series. Robinson’s ‘farmyards’ may be seen as microcosms of his world at the time they were created. The usual menagerie of characters are present in the work: Josephine the cow, goats, ducks and chooks (Australorps in this instance) make up the composition. These animals were probably closer to family pets than anything else and Robinson imbues each with a distinct character and personality. At times the arrangements mischievously reflect the machinations of the Brisbane art scene.

The playful, political allusions may also reflect the internal politicking of the art school staff room where he worked as a teacher. In his own words and with an Orwellian overtone, Robinson’s depictions give ‘… some feeling of the relationship of man to domestic animals and also the relationship that exists within the world of these animals’.1 Of course, the whimsical nature of Robinson’s farmyards, along with his hidden innuendo belie the seriousness of these works, for his farmyard series are dissertations on the values of Western painting. The primary influence of modern masters such as Cézanne, Braque, Bonnard and Morandi are all present and each informs the structure of Robinson’s compositions in their own way. We can also assume the influence of the Australian artist Ken Whisson, with whom Robinson shared the walls of the Ray Hughes Gallery many times during the 1970s and 80s. Whisson’s robust distortion of pictorial space during the 1970s culminated in unconventional arrangements, which arguably helped Robinson lay the groundwork for his distorted farmyard paintings.

Robinson’s dealer in these early years was Ray Hughes (1946 – 2017) whose commitment to Robinson was total, verging on obsessive. At times he would violently defend the artist’s importance in the face the cool curatorial currents of the day. It was a winning combination of complimentary opposites; Robinson presented as the shy painter quietly working away on his hobby farm, while the urbane, bon vivant Ray Hughes lead from the front showcasing the work. Eventually the artworld and curators fell into line and Robinson’s work became highly sought-after. Hughes’ efforts and belief in the artist paid off in spades as Robinson was now selling out exhibitions, winning major prizes and living on the proceeds of sales, which enabled him to retire from teaching and to begin painting full time. By then Ray Hughes’s gaggle of loyal collectors – most notably Dr Colin Laverty and Dr Peter Elliott – had well-stocked holdings of the artist’s works. The current work was central to Elliott’s collection and took pride of place alongside Whiteley and Williams in his Potts Point home for decades before it was acquired

by Alan Cardy in 2015.

Major Robinson farmyard paintings such as Birkdale Farm Construction with Australorps will continue to be a touchstone to a time when Robinson was searching for a language that would eventually alter the way we view the Australian landscape through the soaring, majestic landscapes for which the artist became most well-known.

1. Robinson, W., in conversation with the Gold Coast City Art Gallery, 1998, cited in Walsh, J., ‘Goats, Cows and Chooks: The Painters Farmyard’, in Seear, L. (ed.), Darkness and Light: The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p. 72 HENRY MULHOLLAND

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CHARLES BLACKMAN

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(1928 – 2018) BIRD OVER THE CITY, 1952 enamel on board 91.0 x 91.0 cm signed lower right [in 1994]: BLACKMAN original faint signature lower left bears inscription on label attached verso: BIRD OVER THE CITY / 1952 ESTIMATE: $65,000 – 85,000

PROVENANCE Charles Blackman, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above

and simply a bird so all you will receive are bird ones.’1 In May 1951 the Blackman’s moved into a disused coach house in Hawthorn, which Charles quickly converted into a living space and studio. By this time, he had already met many of Australia’s most important artists of the

EXHIBITED Paintings and Drawings: Charles Blackman, New Gallery, Adelaide, November 1953, cat. 3 Charles Blackman: Unseen Images, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, April 2012 LITERATURE Wells, R., ‘Insight into the artist’s studio and mind’, The Age, Melbourne, 12 April 2012, p. 16 (illus.)

RELATED WORK Boy with a Bird, 1952, enamel on board, 91.2 x 91.3 cm, private collection, illus. in Moore, F. St. John, Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 32

period, such as Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd and John Perceval, as well as the influential patrons John and Sunday Reed who showed him Sidney Nolan’s ‘Ned Kelly’ paintings, which were stored at their farmhouse Heide. Brimming with inspiration, Blackman set to work, and mounted an exhibition at the coach house in 1952. He was delighted when Danila Vassilieff, visited the show. ‘We were honoured at his coming. We knew his myth, this Cossack adventurer.’2 Vassilieff was impressed by what he saw but warned Blackman to ‘get off Sid’s back. He’s not a horse, you know,’ a recognition that the young artist needed to find his own voice and not just ape the work of others. 3 Rising to the challenge, Blackman began a sequence of new works featuring cats and birds, as well as his earliest depictions of schoolgirls.

The Blackmans travelled to Brisbane after the exhibition, staying at Barbara’s mother’s house in Kelvin Grove, and here he painted the

Charles Blackman was essentially self-taught as an artist, but he was an omnivorous reader and observer. He honed his distinctive drawing skills as a copy boy on the Sun newspaper in Sydney between 1942 and 1947, but it was the inner worlds he discovered through reading that furnished him with many of his early imagery. These included authors and poets such as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Kafka, and Baudelaire. This was a rich vein of inspiration, but the ‘texture’ of these literary sources was magnified by his practice of reading aloud to his wife Barbara as her sight slowly declined during the early years of their marriage. After a peripatetic period travelling between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the young couple settled in a tiny shed behind a mansion in East Melbourne, and Blackman would often navigate the semi-industrial back streets of nearby Richmond after work at a variety of jobs. Such a landscape may be seen in the background of Bird over the city, 1952, dominated by an all-knowing, powerful owl which stares, unblinking, back at the viewer.

As early as 1950, Blackman identified with birds, writing to Barbara: ‘There are love letters, newsletters, and fish and bird letters, or there used to be, that is; but now the metamorphosis is complete. I am purely

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self-portrait Boy with a bird, with the figures set against a collage of ‘Queenslander’ houses, wallpaper and vegetation. Following their return to Melbourne, he painted Bird over the city, which reconfigures the background to include Richmond’s brewery silos set hard against chimneys of the State Electricity power station. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine some of his schoolgirls scurrying through these darkened lanes. When Bird over the city and its related works were exhibited in Adelaide in 1953, he was praised for the ‘movement (and) vitality’ of his paintings 4, with senior artist Ivor Francis going so far as to claim that Blackman was ‘the most stimulating, original and promising younger painter we have seen for a long time.’5 1. St John Moore, F., Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p. 32 2. Blackman, B., Glass after glass: autobiographical reflections, Penguin, Melbourne, 1997, p. 154 3. Danila Vassilieff, cited in St John Moore, op. cit., p. 33 4. Young, E., ‘City display by young Vic. Artist’, Advertiser, Adelaide, 17 November 1953, p. 14 5. Francis, I., ‘A promising painter’, News, Adelaide, 17 November 1953, p. 5 ANDREW GAYNOR

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JOHN GLOVER

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(1767 – 1849) STUDY OF OAK TREES, c.1840 oil and collage on canvas 75.0 x 112.0 cm bears inscription on plaque: STUDY OF OAK TREES / John Glover / lent by Mr G. R. Chapman frame: William Wilson, Launceston ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 100,000

PROVENANCE Thomas and Catherine Chapman, Sunnyside, New Town, Hobart Thence by descent George S. Chapman, Hobart, acquired in 1884 Thence by descent George R. Chapman, Hobart Thence by descent G. Robin Chapman, Hobart Thence by descent Geoff Chapman, Hobart Thence by descent Peter Chapman, Hobart Estate of the above

This tranquil view, possibly Italian, along a country road is interrupted by a steep bank of trees of varying ages and forms. Framed by overhanging branches, a woman and child walk in shadow, soon to emerge towards us into open land and sunshine. Despite the posthumous title Study of oak trees, c.1840 given on the frame, this is a finished painting of exhibition quality, showing Glover’s skilful application of thin oil paint akin to watercolours and his use of a split brush to evoke leafy texture. Unusually, the figures have been painted onto paper; no other example of collage in his oeuvre is known. 2 While the paper outline is now noticeable, this addition is valuable evidence of a working method previously unrecorded and provides a human focus at the crucial point in the composition. The cerulean sky and muted greens of the landscape have recently been revealed after being hidden for decades by layers of varnish. It now glows in the manner Glover originally intended.

This oil painting was produced in the later years of John Glover’s life, following his long and successful career as a landscape artist and teacher in England and his emigration to Van Diemen’s Land in 1831, aged sixty-four. There he had turned his attention to interpreting the Australian bush, both as it had been managed by the Aboriginal custodians, and as it was being transformed by British newcomers for pastoral and agricultural purposes. Throughout these years he also continued to paint far-distant scenes, based on recollections of his travels throughout Britain and Europe, prompted by earlier sketches contained in the 104 small sketchbooks that he had brought with him.1

This painting has a direct provenance from Thomas Chapman and his wife, who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in late 1841. This is around the date this painting was created although it is unknown when it entered their collection. A merchant by trade and an opponent of transportation, Chapman became a politician and subsequently the fifth Premier of Tasmania (1861–63). Study of oak trees passed down the family to Peter Chapman, a respected scholar and teacher of Tasmanian and Australian history who died earlier this year. His numerous publications included an article on ‘John Glover’s migration to Tasmania’. 3 The painting remains in its original William Wilson frame. Wilson was a Launceston-based ‘Carver & Gilder, Looking Glass, Picture Frame and Composition Ornament Manufacturer, Upholsterer’4 and ‘manufacturer of every description of Ornamental Furniture’, who arrived in the colony in 1842. Less well-known than his Hobart counterpart Robin Hood, Wilson created elegant frames for Glover, Frederick Strange and Robert Dowling among others.5 1. 'Hill and I were the whole of the evening looking over the two books he [Glover] had placed before us. He told us that he had 104 of such…’ G.T.W.B. Boyes (ed. Peter Chapman), The Diaries and Letters of G. T. W. B. Boyes: Volume 1 1820-1832, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 421 – 22 2. Experts John McPhee and David Hansen have not previously seen collage used. The quality of the painted figures suggests that these are by Glover.

3. Chapman, P., ‘John Glover’s migration to Tasmania’, The Art Bulletin of Tasmania, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 1985, pp. 22 – 33 4. See Robyn Lake and Therese Mulford, ‘William Wilson: Rediscovered Tasmanian Frame maker’, Australiana, vol. 23, no. 1, Feb. 2001. pp. 4 – 11 5. The name plate on the frame indicates that this work was included in a loan exhibition when owned by George R. or G. Robin Chapman.

ALISA BUNBURY

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ARTHUR STREETON

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(1867 – 1943) STILL LIFE WITH ROSES, c.1930s oil on canvas 75.0 x 62.5 cm signed lower right: A. STREETON ESTIMATE: $45,000 – 65,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne Christies, Sydney, 23 August 2004, lot 11 Private collection, New South Wales

We are grateful to Brenda Martin Thomas, wife of the late David Thomas AM, for kindly allowing us to reproduce David’s writing in this catalogue entry.

Ar thur Streeton’s interest in painting flower pieces increased considerably after his return to Melbourne in 1920. Purchasing the property ‘Longacres’ at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges and setting up a city home in Toorak, he established gardens at both. They inspired the many flower paintings that now hold a prominent part in his oeuvre.

His favourite bloom was the rose, and so enamoured was he that in December 1932 he held an entire exhibition devoted to it. Shown at Melbourne’s Fine Art Society’s Gallery, it included Roses, Silver and Silk; Roses – Deep Red and Green; Roses Pale in Silver Bowl; and Roses – Pale Yellow. Two years previously both the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales had acquired paintings simply titled ‘Roses’ – the former through the Felton Bequest and the Sydney gallery from Streeton’s solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries. They often contained a touch of drama, as in Roses, c.1929 (Art Gallery of New South Wales). Spot-lit against a dark background, the impact of its realism is powerful, as admired by a viewer at the time: ‘… I noticed a bunch of crimson roses on the wall, so real, that at the same instant I seemed almost to be overpowered by the scent. Having practically to shake myself free of this fancy, I found I was gazing at a picture of what was just a bunch of red roses in a simple glass vase, but so real, so perfect, that one of the roses looked as if it was about to wilt.’1

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These qualities were readily noted by the newspaper critics. Of Streeton’s exhibition at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Gallery in November 1920, the Age critic wrote: ‘a painting of a spray of plum blossom in a glass bowl… reveals the painter’s almost uncanny cleverness.

To paint glass without the help of a dominant color behind it is a problem that most artists would leave severely alone. With a few sure strokes of the brush Mr. Streeton has achieved the translucency, the actual brittleness of the glass.’2 In Still Life with Roses, c.1930s, the painterly subtleties of the setting compliment the seductive reds and textured petals of the flowers, formed and highlighted by the masterly play of light and shade.

Streeton's technique gives added immediacy, increasing the affinity between artist and viewer as they share in a moment of beauty, transcending the transience of nature.

As fellow artist Harold Herbert, reviewing Streeton’s solo Melbourne exhibition of 1934, which included five paintings of roses, remarked: ‘In this show, there are many beautiful flower pieces, all painted with the wizardry that is Streeton’s own… his flower pieces [are] full of fragrant freshness and convincing realism. Not only are the flowers beautifully painted and arranged, but the glazed vase or crystal bowl that contains them is an object to be admired for its masterly treatment in paint.

Backgrounds of silks and velvets are other features of these studies to excite admiration.’3 Such words of praise apply equally to the present Still Life with Roses.

1. W.G.E., ‘The Streeton Collection’, Letters to the Editor, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 10 December 1931, p. 4 2. ‘Mr. Arthur Streeton Among The Grampians’, The Age, Melbourne, 2 November 1920, p. 8 3. Herbert, H., ‘The Art of Arthur Streeton’, The Argus, Melbourne, 5 June 1934, p. 5 DAVID THOMAS

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ERIC WILSON

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(1911 – 1946) PONT NEUF, c.1939 oil on canvas 51.0 x 61.5 cm signed lower left: Eric Wilson ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Sir Keith Murdoch, Melbourne A collection of Antiques: The Property of Sir Keith and Lady Murdoch from their former residence ‘Heathfield’, Toorak, Decoration Co. Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, 20 August 1947, lot 220 (as ‘Pont de Neuf’) Private collection Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne possibly Ted Lustig, Melbourne Eastgate & Holst, Melbourne Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 2004

Netherlands and Italy, absorbing, among other things, that sense of rounded volumetric form so revered in the work of Italian Quattrocentro primitives such as Piero della Francesca. Above all though, it was the city of Paris that inspired Wilson most – ‘not the large-scale vistas of the master-planned metropolis… but the more intimate curves and corners of narrow streets, and tree-lined quays of the Seine’3 – and thus, he spent hours capturing en plein air the picturesque streets and majestic bridges in drawings that would later provide the basis for his celebrated series of Paris cityscapes undertaken upon his return to Australia in late 1939 following the outbreak of World War II.

EXHIBITED Eric Wilson Memorial Exhibition, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 May – 29 June 1947, cat. 34 (lent by Sir Keith Murdoch) Spring Exhibition 1975, Joesph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 14 – 30 October 1975, cat. 44 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Collectors 2004 Exhibition, Eastgate & Holst, Melbourne, 21 July – 11 August 2004, cat. 56

Immortalising the oldest and arguably most iconic bridge in Paris with its noble arches linking the Île de la Cité to both the left and right banks, the present work encapsulates superbly Wilson’s earlier explorations of the Paris theme that are distinguished by an underlying sense of construction and careful attention to composition and architectural form. Indeed, as Wilson’s experience of Europe grew more distant in time later iterations such as By the Seine, c.1945 (Mr and Mrs Crebbin collection) or Pont Neuf, 1945 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) by contrast evidenced a much looser treatment and a greater preoccupation with impressionistic effects of light and colour – leading one critic in 1947 to disparagingly remark upon the ‘heavy cookery’4 of these late works, citing their use of thick impasto and absence of formal definition. Resonating throughout all Wilson’s pensive European landscapes however, including Pont Neuf, is a pervading sense of isolation, of the artist as outsider – a feeling perhaps derived from the impending war which had precipitated his trip in the first place, and which no doubt prevented him from stepping outside the role of tourist. The invariably wet and chilly vignettes are either disconcertingly empty, or when peopled – as is the case here with the fishermen scattered along the embankment – such figures remain oblivious of the artist, continuing the closed activities of their daily lives. In this respect, Wilson’s perspective contrasts starkly with that of his artistic peer, William Dobell, with whom he lived and studied in London. For where Dobell found the inhabitants of a city such as Paris or London much more intriguing and typical than their surroundings, Wilson concentrated rather upon the streetscapes and buildings as his subjects, discerning in the architecture the unique character he was seeking.

RELATED WORK Pont Neuf, 1945, oil on paper on hardboard, 48.5 x 61.5 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Hailed by Douglas Dundas as ‘one of the bright stars in the firmament of Australian art during the 1940s’1, Eric Wilson is remarkable for having achieved widespread success not only as an abstractionist (whose still-lifes represented some of the first experiments in Cubism by an Antipodean artist), but equally, as a modern realist painter of European cityscapes – impressively exemplified here by Pont Neuf, c.1939.

Awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1937, Wilson accordingly embarked for England in June the same year, studying first briefly at the Royal Academy before enrolling at the more progressive Westminster School under British modern painters, Mark Gertler and Elmslie Owen. The latter was especially influential, urging the young artist to proceed in the vein of the French avant-garde ‘according to knowledge rather than mere vision’ 2, and encouraging Wilson to pursue his cubist explorations further at Amedée Ozenfant’s Academy in Earl’s Court. In the early months of 1939, Wilson departed London for the Continent where he travelled and sketched in Belgium, the

1. Dundas, D., ‘Eric Wilson’, Art in Australia, vol. 12, no. 1, July – September 1974, p. 48 2. Diary of the artist, 2 June 1938 cited in Sayers, A., ‘Introduction’, Eric Wilson, exhibition catalogue, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, Newcastle, 1983, p. 9 3. Dundas, op. cit., p. 56 4. ‘ Wilson And Elyard Exhibitions’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 28 May 1947, p. 9 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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ELIOTH GRUNER

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(1882 – 1939) MORNING, BACCHUS MARSH, VICTORIA, 1930 oil on canvas 50.5 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: GRUNER / 1930 inscribed with title verso: MORNING / Bacchus Marsh / Victoria ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE Elioth Gruner (possibly ledger no. 365, presented to the Returned Soldiers' Imperial League c.1930) Norman Schureck, Sydney, by 1958 Geoff K. Gray Auctions, Sydney, 28 November 1973, lot 44 Private collection Christie’s, Melbourne, 14 March 1974, lot 432 (as ‘Bacchus Marsh, Victoria’) Private collection, Sydney Private collection, New South Wales EXHIBITED Norman Schureck Loan Exhibition, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 27 May – 29 June 1958, cat. 49 We are grateful to Steven Miller, Head of the Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library and Archive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, for his assistance with this catalogue entry.

frost, 1919 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) winning the prestigious Wynne Prize; he would eventually be honoured with the Wynne awards seven times during his career. In 1923, the British artist Sir William Orpen roundly criticised Gruner’s Valley of the Tweed, 1921 (which had also won the Wynne) in front of the artist whilst the painting was on exhibition in London. At first shocked by the encounter, Gruner subsequently travelled to France and began putting some of Orpen’s suggestions into practice, such as a greater emphasis on design, a flattening of forms and a heightening of colour, all of which may be detected in Morning, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria. In January 1930, Gruner’s On the Murrumbidgee won yet another Wynne and shortly after the announcement, he climbed into his Model A Ford and headed for Gippsland. Several significant works resulted including Mitchell River, Victoria (Deutscher and Hackett, 14 September 2022, lot 24) and Valley near Bairnsdale (Deutscher and Hackett, 10 November 2021, lot 47). Journeying further to join Bell and Lindsay in mid-April, he painted Morning, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, plausibly one of the ‘24 by 20’ inch (50.5 x 61.0 cm) canvases he mentions in a letter to Basil Burdett, describing them as being ‘quite different to anything so far.’2

In the June 1930 edition of The Home magazine, it was announced that ‘Elioth Gruner, who has been painting in Victoria, has been sketching with George Bell and Darryl Lindsay in the Bacchus Marsh district.’1 Gruner was midway through an epic road journey that had taken him from Sydney down to Gippsland, and would subsequently include Adelaide before his return to Sydney in August. He was already one of Australia’s most celebrated landscape artists but was also notable for his considered response to new ideas concerning art, one result of which was his exploration of a mannered form of modernism since the mid-1920s. The fact that he was now painting alongside two well-known artist-peers on Woiwurrung and Wathaurong country in Bacchus Marsh implies that conversations regarding technique and approach would have been high on their agenda, and subtle results of these may be seen in the perfectly composed Morning, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, 1930.

Gruner’s great love was light and its effect upon land cultivated by European hands. As a result, the broken brushwork of impressionism had influenced much of his early input with, for example, Spring

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Of particular note is the powerful and dynamic interplay between the angled bank of clouds to the right and the contrasting copse of trees which counterbalance the soft curves of the hills and river below; such bold sky-versus-land interplays are not prominent in Gruner’s earlier work. In a companion painting done a few kilometres away, Myrniong, Victoria, 1930 (location unknown), he sets a similar bank of clouds to the alternate side, this time echoing the route of a country road. It is these harmonious yet dynamic contrasts which underscore Gruner’s opinion the Bacchus Marsh paintings were ‘different’; indeed, he subsequently wrote to Burdett of his triumphant belief that he had ‘painted a sky at last.’3 1. 'Art Notes', The Home: an Australian Quarterly, Art in Australia, vol. 11 no. 6, 2 June 1930, p. 13 2. Elioth Gruner. Letter to Basil Burdett, May 1930. Art Gallery of New South Wales archives.

MS1995. 9, 1/17/09 3. Elioth Gruner. Letter to Basil Burdett, 29 May 1930. Art Gallery of New South Wales archives.

MS1995. 9, 1/17/10 ANDREW GAYNOR

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Y VO N N E AU D E T TE Important works from the artist’s studio New York – Milan – Melbourne 1950s – 1970s Lots 28 – 33

(detail)

YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 THE SPIRIT LAUGHS, 1964 – 65

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Y VO N N E A U D E T T E An Appreciation GERARD VAUGHAN In his introduction, Christopher Heathcote recalls his first encounter with Yvonne Audette’s work in 1994, and his astonishment that pictures of such quality and sophistication by a contemporary Australian artist could have somehow passed under the radar. Six or seven years later, when I came to the National Gallery of Victoria as Director, I experienced my own moment of discovery, when I saw her abstract paintings for the first time. Like Christopher, I was blown away by their powerful presence, the sheer quality of her painting method, and their inherent ability to provoke in the viewer an emotive response, as music does.

I asked our curator Jennifer Phipps to tell me about Yvonne, as I was keen to learn about her training and background, and her experience as an abstract painter of consummate skill in a city which, at the time, had demonstrated far less interest in abstraction than Sydney. So, what was her story? Jennifer quickly invited Yvonne to visit us in our temporary home in Russell St, during the NGV redevelopment, and I still recall with great clarity our fascinating conversation over several hours, outlining her remarkable and courageous career.

Yvonne arrived in New York at the very moment that the New York School (and Abstract Expressionism in particular) was being recognised as the preeminent global avant-garde. Since then, I have had the privilege of many discussions with Yvonne, for which I am very grateful, as well as the access she has given me to her studio notes and commentaries on the exciting new world she was then encountering. Significantly, when Yvonne arrived in New York in late 1952, the New York School and Abstract Expressionism were hardly known in Australia, even to those artists, mostly clustered in Sydney rather than Melbourne (where figuration remained dominant), who might be seen as representing the Australian avant-garde. When thinking about modernism, most Australian artists still looked to Paris and London first, and it has been said that the term ‘Abstract Expressionism’ first appeared in Australian critical writing in a commentary by Elwyn Lynn as late as 1955.

When Yvonne initially left Sydney, she was really en route to Europe, with New York as an important first stop. It is entirely explicable, therefore, that after several exciting years immersed in New York’s art scene, she decided in 1955 to continue her odyssey, going first to Italy, where in due course she worked in Florence, before the attractions of Milan and the buzz of its postwar avant-gardism drew her north. There, she

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found influential friends, including the already globally-renowned sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who assisted her in finding a studio, and introduced her to northern Italian abstractionists such as Emilio Vedova.

Milan largely remained her base in the decade before she returned permanently to Australia in 1966, though regularly punctuated by visits to New York.

Her experience of the New York School was absolutely fundamental to her artistic practice. No other Australian artist had an opportunity to become absorbed as a part of the New York scene so early in the 1950s.

These seminal years were the catalyst for Yvonne to create and refine her personal style, and there can be no doubt that, in her own way, she became a part of that scene. In her notes, Yvonne defines herself as an ‘Abstract Expressionist’, though she eschewed the vigour and layering of impasto paint typical of the ‘action’ painters, preferring instead her personal system of making active, fluid marks on a more thinly painted surface, activated in a more lyrical and considered way, akin to the effect of music.

Indeed, Yvonne had studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music before attending art school and, as suggested above, the sense of a correspondence between music and painted form and colour dominated her aesthetic. She describes the exhilaration of working in a studio filled with music, and her great love for Bach above all, whose approach to counterpoint, to contrapuntal and fugal melodies, has always informed her way of working. Above all, she articulates the centrality of musical experience most directly through her ‘Cantata’ paintings, and describes her ‘counterpoint’ arrangements as enabling ‘the mystical experience of space’. Her use of calligraphic marks, signs and implied graffiti defines her style. She studied Zen philosophy both at art school in Sydney (in common with several of her fellow students) and again in New York, and she acknowledges the great influence which Mark Tobey’s Zeninspired art had upon her – as well as discussions in Rome in 1957 with Cy Twombly about ancient and modern graffiti both on city walls and in the catacombs.

For Yvonne, the matter of ‘gender’ has sadly been an issue, and likely a key reason why this most accomplished and inspiring Australian abstractionist, whose impeccable experience and training at the centre of the global avant-garde should have guaranteed celebrity, has not

Opposite: Yvonne Audette in her studio at Piazza Donatello 25, Florence, c.1956 – 57

been better known, or acknowledged earlier than was the case. She describes the effort it took to break into the Australian art world upon her return in 1966, which operated as a kind of ‘boys club’ at the time.

Today however, Yvonne is widely recognised as occupying a unique place in Australian art history. In 1999, Doug Hall honoured Yvonne with a major exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, curated by Julie Ewington, which was followed by exhibitions at Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000); the National Gallery of Victoria ((2007 – 2008); and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at Melbourne University (2009). There

will no doubt be many more. At present, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is displaying a pair of her works from the early 60s on facing walls, in close proximity to major pictures by Picasso and Bacon, which works well and feels entirely appropriate.

The group of works being offered by Deutscher and Hackett are among her very best, all of high museum quality, and retained until now for personal reasons. At 93, she feels the time has come to make them available to a wider audience.

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Y VO N N E A U D E T T E T h e E x p a t r i a t e Ye a r s DR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

Nothing since has compared with the thrill of spotting her overlooked talent. It was June 1994, I was The Age’s art critic, and one wet afternoon I came upon an exhibition that took my breath away. Ten authoritative Abstract Expressionist paintings from the 1950s and 60s were displayed around two rooms in North Melbourne. ‘The neglect of Yvonne Audette must rank as one of the great injustices in Modern Australian Art,’ my review of that show began. Little did I realise the attention my piece on this local artist would spark; indeed, curators from the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and Queensland Art Gallery quickly made a beeline for the gallery.

Audette’s story was fascinating. Having completed the traditionalist studio program at Sydney’s Julian Ashton School, as well as receiving expert instruction from John Passmore—a disciple of Cézanne—the 22-year-old had intended to take that rite of passage then followed by rookie artists. It was customary to sail for London and spend time absorbing British culture, after which a young Australian might roam the art capitals of Europe. Audette expected to do likewise. But her American-born father offered to fund her travels provided she went first to the United States. Accordingly, when the artist departed Sydney in October 1952, her destination was New York.

Yvonne Audette arrived in the city at a decisive moment. A new movement, nicknamed ‘Abstract Expressionism’ by the New York Times, had broken out across the art scene. In fact, within weeks an exhibition opened which changed the course of modern art. Audette, who had enrolled in the painting program at the conservative New York Academy of Design, heard from other students that one of the movement’s leaders, Willem de Kooning, was showing paintings of female figures.

Curious, she tagged along when her classmates went to see his work at Sidney Janis Gallery on East 57th Street, the hub of Manhattan’s commercial gallery district.

Will Barnett’s class at the Art Students’ League, New York, 1950s photographer unknown

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

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Elaine and Willem De Kooning, 1952 photographer: Hans Namuth National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington © Hans Namuth

Spring 1955 saw Audette now make her way to Europe. After roaming through Spain, France then Italy, she took a studio in Florence and began working toward a show: ‘Living in that great town,’ she said, ‘taught me that art is wrought out of day-to-day labour, out of constant application...’ Interest in the new abstraction was strong in Italy, and from 1958 Yvonne Audette averaged a solo exhibition there every year1.

During her first show, at Galleria Schettini in Milan, the rising young sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro asked to be introduced. He would soon bring her into a circle of vanguard artists, including the leading painters Emilio Vedova, Renato Birolli and Gastone Novelli. Thrilled to meet an artist familiar with New York, they always wanted to know her opinion when American Abstract Expressionism was exhibited in museums at Milan, and the Venice Biennale. 2

Audette told me she was shocked and confused at the gallery; and also strangely overwhelmed. Having herself mastered the classicallybased academic manner, de Kooning’s abstracts looked to her like a hoard of destructions. Six large scale Woman paintings hung around the main room, with another thirteen pastels and a pencil drawing on the same theme, as well as two small oils, displayed in a side gallery.

To coincide with the show ArtNews magazine published an article, ‘De Kooning Paints a Picture’, which used in-progress photographs taken in his studio to trace the creative evolution of a key exhibit. The Australian pored over those illustrations and began visiting the venues which showed this stirring new form, wanting to understand.

These years saw Audette’s own studio work straddling American and European values. She took to painting on wood panels as they offered a firm support for her increasingly fine layers of brushed, trowelled, smeared and scraped pigment. Instead of continuing with that loose spontaneity of New York ‘action painting’, where a work was produced mostly in a single fervent session, Audette now deliberated upon a composition, crafting the increasingly supple paintwork over months.

Her stress was on steady control.

We see this very strikingly in Different Directions, 1964, where unrushed surface brushstrokes of blue, black, green, brown and yellow are carefully positioned upon a semi-transparent chalk white field. Initially

Eighteen months later Yvonne Audette was herself painting New Yorkstyle abstractions. Overpass 2, 1954 shows her laying down thickened oily paint in earth colours, greys and black with brushes and painting knives. In keeping with vanguard values, which held that energised line alone was sufficient to convey visual meaning, Audette worked the viscous pigment into broad expressive marks and gestural scrapes.

Using a palette which smacks of brickwork, concrete and rusted steel while composing with those jagged, structured forms of interweaving roadways, apartment buildings and elevated railways, her self-assured composition evokes inner-city experience.

Yvonne Audette and art critic, Giuseppe Bonaccurso, discussing her paintings on show at Galleria Schneider, Rome, 1965

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the eye attends to the animation of those marks, how they dance in different ways and speeds. But behind an immediate linearity there is a distinct feeling here for the importance of placement. The coloured strokes will be positioned so each retains its own value, the artist wanting her marks to perform in this elegant painting like individual notes in a serene melody. It was in these years Yvonne Audette began to liken making her abstractions to composing music.

The Italian artists Audette mixed with were intrigued with simple marks which acted as signs, as in exclamation marks, drawn arrows, and diagram notations. She is seen responding to this with The Spirit Laughs of 1964, exhibited at Galleria Schneider, Rome in 1965 – one of several compositions which began with a surface layer recalling yellowing parchment. The artist next applied a loose arrangement of semi-diagrammatic marks. Once the pigment dried they were thinly painted over, and the process repeated several times. The finished quite joyous work resembles an index of Audette’s brushstrokes: we see iterated blue strokes and brown hatchings, rough crosses and V-shapes, broken squares and lopsided circles, zigzags, a meander, plus assorted repetitious dashes, all of them intended to suggest marks associated with human habitation across the ages. There is no mistaking the pleasure the artist took in crafting this upbeat work: the very lines exude merriment.

Audette kept in touch with her Sydney teacher John Passmore. The pair regularly corresponded, and Passmore visited her on a trip to Europe.

So it is little surprise a subtle allusion to his oeuvre crept into Audette’s overtly International abstractions in the mid 1960s. Take The Music Score, 1967, a handsome composition where blue and black strokes tilt across upon a pale grey field of trowelled paint. That backdrop comprises loose oblongs of grey and umber blended in a manner echoing Passmore’s flattened paint slabs hanging in space. Audette uses the field to assert gravity, giving a downward pull that her lively strokes of colour react against. The outcome is testimony to how Yvonne Audette could not only blend International with regional concerns in a skilled manner, but how she has always aimed to craft works of beauty.

Yvonne Audette with Arnaldo Pomodoro in the Italian Pavillion after Arnaldo received the prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, 1964

1. Audette held two solo shows in Milan (Galleria Schettini 1958, 1964), another two in Rome (Galleria Schneider 1965, 1966), and three in Florence (Galleria Numero 1958, 1959, 1963), as well as one each in Paris (Gallery L’Antipoete, 1961) and London (Hamilton Gallery, 1964).

2. A large survey exhibition of Abstract Expressionism, organised by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was held in Milan’s Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in June 1958. The American abstract artist Mark Tobey also represented America in that year’s Venice Biennale, where he took the main prize.

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Y VO N N E A U D E T T E Return to Australia KELLY GELLATLY

The Australia that Yvonne Audette returned to in 1966 at the age of thirty-six was a vastly different place to the country she had left as a young and ambitious artist in 1952. Longstanding Prime Minister Robert Menzies retired in January and was replaced by Harold Holt (who went on to win a landslide victory in the November election); decimal currency was introduced; Jorn Utzon resigned as architect of the Sydney Opera House, and in late August, 200 Gurindji people walked off Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory in an unprecedented protest against low wages and poor working conditions. 1966 also marked the fourth year of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Change was equally happening in the art world. The landmark Museum of Modern Art exhibition Two Decades of American Painting – which included the work of artists ranging from Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol to Barnett Newman and Helen Frankenthaler – had travelled to the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1967, and abstraction was now a well-accepted part of the local scene.

Indeed, with the opening of The Field exhibition at the new National Gallery of Victoria just two years after Audette’s return, Colour Field painting and hard-edge abstraction were the pervading influence – reinforced and promulgated by the 1968 lecture tour of American art critic Clement Greenberg, who was described by Bernard Smith as ‘the critical god of abstraction.’1 Yet one can imagine that after experiencing the heights of the art worlds of both New York and Europe, Audette’s transition to life in Sydney, even despite these changes, was not an easy one. Just as Australia was looking to the influence of American abstraction, she had returned home, seeking separation, in her words, from ‘all those countries rich in the impregnation of man’s mind and hand through the centuries, where man’s spirit has caressed every stick and stone and almost every plot of land.’2 Australia seemed to provide Audette with an opportunity to find her own voice unencumbered, and to importantly, return to nature.

As she continued:

Yvonne Audette, Vaucluse, Sydney, 1968 photographer: David Moore National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore

Opposite: Yvonne Audette, Vaucluse, Sydney, 1968 photographer: David Moore National Portrait Gallery, Canberra © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore

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Installation view of ‘Yvonne Audette: Six Decades of Painting’, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, 28 August – 21 November 2009

‘Out here there is a challenge to the self. Away from the spirits of those old cultures one must delve into the mainstream of oneself, deeply, and find there another “heritage” that could breed independence of thought and spirit. It is this which excites me now, as never before, to find the spirits in our own climate which have their own story.

I think it’s an artist’s job to discover a new vision – but to do this one has first to have an attitude of independent thinking. Out here I feel one has perhaps a better perspective, a greater chance of independence.’3 Audette established herself in Sydney’s Rose Bay, holding an exhibition of her work at Bonython Galleries in February 1968 with friend and fellow artist Robert Klippel, who she had first met through John Passmore in the late 1950s. Klippel had also been central to her ability to retain, and importantly, store the paintings that she had shipped home from Europe, providing a room in his home in Birchgrove for her to house her earlier work.4 This established a lifelong practice for Audette of retaining important, key pieces from across her oeuvre, which served as both a source of inspiration and an aide de memoire for work in coming

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decades. It is for this reason too that later museum audiences have been able to experience such a rich selection of work from her time in Europe, which would have been otherwise almost impossible to reconvene for Australian exhibitions.

However, just one year after this successful reintroduction to the Australian scene, Audette moved to Melbourne, settling in the Dandenong Ranges. Isolated from the city’s galleries and art community, her desire to immerse herself in nature, and through this, concentrate wholly on her practice, had become a reality. As she explained at the time: ‘I chose the Dandenong Ranges where I could be close to nature, surrounded by the landscape. Having travelled and moved since 1952, from city to city, I had never lived in the bush, never had I allowed myself the luxury to wake up to the sounds of nature at my doorstep. I knew to develop more profoundly as an artist and as a person, I needed the stillness and silence of the landscape and the closeness of the wildlife.

I needed to experience my outer space and my inner space up in the high country.’5

Yvonne Audette at her Dandenongs studio, 2003 photographer: Mark Ashkanasy

This site was to remain Audette’s home and studio until a decade or

the artist’s 1999 exhibition, Yvonne Audette: Abstract Painting 1950s –

so ago. Accessible by a narrow dirt road and perched high on a hill,

1960s at Queensland Art Gallery (curated by Julie Ewington) that a wider

her large light-filled studio had an enormous window that looked out,

public came to recognise both the depth and breadth of her practice,

over the valley, creating the sense that one was soaring above the

and the significance of her contribution. Not surprisingly, further

landscape, and equally, that this vista was an extension of the artist’s

museum exhibitions followed: at Heide Museum of Modern Art (2000),

working space. This environment was not without its challenges and

at the National Gallery of Victoria (2007), and at the Ian Potter Museum

sacrifices however, as each bushfire season saw the paintings shipped

of Art at the University of Melbourne (2009). Now widely collected in

to storage in Melbourne to both ensure their safety and quell Audette’s anxieties about the risk of their potential loss. Surrounded by treasures that she had collected on her travels, Audette also assumed the role of teacher in this space, continuing the tradition and commitment of her own teachers and mentors as she ran composition workshops from home, while also teaching Saturday morning life drawing classes in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.6 Successful commercial exhibitions continued throughout the 1970s and 80s, but as taste and fashions changed, knowledge of Audette’s work became largely restricted to a small, dedicated audience. It was not until

Australian art museums, Yvonne Audette is today celebrated for her dedication to her craft, for her unique visual language, and for the singular position she holds in the story of Australian art.

1. Bernard Smith was responsible for bringing Clement Greenberg to Australia to deliver the inaugural John Power Lecture at the University of Sydney. Skerrit, H. F., ‘Bernard Smith 1916 – 2011’, Art Guide Australia, November/December 2011, pp. 48 – 50, ‘Henry F. Skerritt’, https://henryfskerritt.com/tag/clement-greenberg/ (accessed 27 August 2023) 2. The artist, cited in Thomas, L., ‘The mainstream of self’, The Australian, 24 February 1968 in Adams, B., ‘Yvonne Audette, The Later Years’ in Heathcote, C. et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 155 3. ibid.

4. Adams, B., ‘Yvonne Audette, The Later Years’ in Heathcote et al., op. cit., p. 155 5. The artist’s notes, February 2003, cited in Adams, ibid., p. 163 6. Vaughan, G. & K. Grant, ‘Every Day a Drawing: Yvonne Audette’s Works on Paper’ in Heathcote et al., op. cit., p. 243

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 OVERPASS NO. 1, 1954 – 55 oil on canvas 80.0 x 110.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 54 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Audette / OVERPASS / 54 – 55 dated and inscribed with title on backing board verso: OVERPASS NO 1 / 1954 ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000 PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette/Different Directions/1954 – 1966, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 13 September 2007 – 17 February 2008 (label attached verso, illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p.)

LITERATURE Yvonne Audette/Different Directions/1954 – 1966, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2008, n. p. (illus.)

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 16, p. 72 (illus.)

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 COMPOSITION OF LINE AND COLOUR, 1957 – 58 oil on composition board 51.0 x 61.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 5… signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Audette / composition of line and colour / 57 – 58 ESTIMATE: $30,000 – 40,000

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne

Installation of Four Constructions in gouache and ink, 1956, exhibited at Galleria Schettini, Milan, 1958

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 THE SPIRIT LAUGHS, 1964 – 65 oil on plywood 128.0 x 100.0 cm signed and dated lower right: Audette 65 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Yvonne Audette / The Spirit Laughs / 1964 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette, Galleria Schneider, Rome, 22 April – 10 May 1965, cat. 11 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p.)

Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s – 1960s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 19 February – 16 April 2000 LITERATURE Gellatly, K., Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s – 1960s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2000, p. 9 (illus.)

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 99, p. 133 (illus.)

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, 1964 oil on plywood diptych 128.0 x 161.5 cm (overall) signed and dated lower right: Audette 64 signed, dated and inscribed with title on right panel verso: Audette / 1964 / 1964 / “DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS” / Part 1 signed, dated and inscribed with title on left panel verso: Audette / Audette / “DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS” / Part 2 / 1964 ESTIMATE: $120,000 – 160,000 PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne EXHIBITED Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s – 1960s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 19 February – 16 April 2000 (illus. on front cover of exhibition invitation) LITERATURE Gellatly, K., Constructions in Colour: The Work of Yvonne Audette 1950s – 1960s, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2000, p. 10 (illus.)

Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 93, pp. 128 – 129 (illus.)

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 THE MUSIC SCORE, 1967 oil on plywood 91.0 x 119.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: YA 67 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: MUSIC SCORE / Audette / 1967 / 1967 MUSIC SCORE / ‘MUSIC SCORE’ signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Y Audette 1967 inscribed with title on handwritten labels verso: THE MUSIC SCORE ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000 PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne EXHIBITED Yvonne Audette, South Yarra Gallery, Melbourne, October 1971, cat. 38 Sight and Sound: Music and Abstraction in Australian Art, The Arts Centre, Melbourne, 12 June – 19 September 2010 LITERATURE Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 115, pp. 182 – 183 (illus.)

Tonkin, S., Sight and Sound: Music and Abstraction in Australian Art, Victorian Arts Centre Trust, Melbourne, 2010, p. 8 (illus.)

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YVONNE AUDETTE born 1930 SPACE SYMBOLS, 1976 – 78 oil on composition board 122.0 x 91.0 cm signed with initials and dated lower right: YA 76 – 78 signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Y. Audette / 1976 – 78 / SPACE SYMBOLS / AS SEEN IN A WINTER / LANDSCAPE / 1976 – 78 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Melbourne EXHIBITED Audette’s Audettes, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 8 – 27 May 2001, cat. 6 (illus. in exhibition catalogue, n.p., dated ‘1974’) LITERATURE Heathcote, C., Adams, B., Vaughan, G., & Grant, K., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2003, Macmillan, Melbourne, 2003, pl. 128, p. 198 (illus. dated ‘1974’)

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Important Australian and International Fine Art The property of various vendors L o t s 34 – 63

(detail)

GUY GREY–SMITH (1916 – 1981) CASCADES, 1976

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CHUN KWANG YOUNG

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Korean, born 1944 AGGREGATION, 03–S142, 2003 Korean mulberry paper (hanji), styrofoam and string on board 175.0 x 145.0 cm signed and inscribed verso: CHUN KWANG-YOUNG / AGGREGATION 03-S142 / 175 X 145 CM / MIXED MEDIA WITH KOREAN MULBERRY PAPER / -03 KYCHUN bears inscription on gallery label verso: CHUN KWANG-YOUNG / Korea / Aggregation 03-S142, 2003 / Mulberry paper on board / 175 x 145 cm ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000 PROVENANCE Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2003 EXHIBITED Chun, Kwang – Young, Aggregation, Newcontemporaries gallery, Sydney, 17 October – 30 November 2003

Revered as one of Korea’s foremost contemporary artists, Chun KwangYoung built his reputation in the United States upon a single fertile idea which has sustained over thirty years of continued practice – a unique means of conveying universal ideas about the human condition through a poetic and abstract form, using materials derived from his personal cultural heritage.

Chun’s sculptural reliefs are constructed with thousands of triangular prisms, building blocks each wrapped in printed Korean mulberry paper (Hanji) and held together with paper string, arranged into vast and complex configurations. A soft and durable natural material, this paper was ubiquitous in everyday life in pre-modern Korea, indispensable for the printing of academic and artistic texts, and was even used, when laminated with rice starch, for food preservation and as an architectural building material. Working on both a macro and micro scale, these prisms became the atoms that form Chun’s sculptural and topographical reliefs, each finished work titled Aggregation and numbered sequentially. By highlighting the subtle differences between relative size, tone and density and spatial orientation of the blocks, Chun creates effects of light, texture and even movement.

For Chun, each unique carved and wrapped prism is representative of a unit of information that, when collated (or aggregated) en masse, can be used as a metaphor for human collaboration and conflict. When

viewed holistically, the prisms move as one in vast tides against one another and in opposition to the outside world. Chun spent many years in America training as an Abstract Expressionist painter and used this understanding of gesture and dynamic composition to create works which bristled with energy, at times even exploding out of the confines of their planar supports.

When viewed from a distance, the commanding presence of Chun Kwang-Young’s large wall hung sculpture Aggregation 03-S142, 2000 is undeniable. With a jagged texture, the physical limits of his unique paper medium extend far beyond the traditional rectangular picture plane, in abstract and poetically expressive formations. The individually dyed prisms jut forth and recede en masse, creating an impression of topographical waves converging into pitted and salient sections of light and dark. Beyond Chun’s dextrous manipulation of three-dimensional forms, the tonal contrast of natural red dyes across the picture’s surface is heightened by an arrangement of the relative density of printed text on each wrapping. Attracting close attention from the viewer, it is this textural detail that reveals the threads of cultural nostalgia and identity politics that form the foundations of Chun’s works.

For Chun, the significance of Hanji paper within his artwork was threefold: it heralded a return to traditional artisanal methods of creation, it linked his art to his own personal cultural heritage, and nostalgically connected his artworks to the wealth of human experience that had preceded him. The Hanji paper used in Chun’s Aggregations is second-hand, torn from the pages of old Korean and Chinese publications hoarded by the artist. It has become, for the artist, an extension of the lives of the hundreds of people who have come into contact with these sheets: ’For me, old paper has a life, a history... In a way, I’m wrapping the stories of people’s lives.’1 1. The artist, cited in Kloesnikov-Jessop, S., ‘Korean Artist Turns Old Mulberry Paper Into Modern Art’, The New York Times, New York, 14 August 2006, accessed online 16 March 2018 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/14/arts/design/14chun.html) LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881 – 1973) NU ASSIS, 1962 coloured crayon on paper 32.0 x 24.0 cm (sheet) dated and numbered upper right: 7.1.62 / I bears inscription in pencil verso: 1091.2 / Z 20 u o 182 ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Pablo Picasso Thence by descent Marina Picasso Collection Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva Private collection, Tokyo Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland LITERATURE Zervos, C., Pablo Picasso, vol. 20, Oeuvres de 1961 à 1962, Editions Cahiers D'Art, Paris, 1968, no. 182, pl. 90 (illus.)

The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties I, 1960-1963, Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, San Francisco, 2002, no. 62-003, p. 213 (illus. as ‘Seated Nude’) Accompanied by copy of document with Marina Picasso stamp and inventory numbers.

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Pablo Picasso Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe d'après Manet (Luncheon on the the Grass, After Manet), 1960 oil on canvas, 130.0 × 195.0 cm Musée Picasso Paris © Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency 2023

Pablo Picasso’s last great era of furious creative energy, the ‘époque Jacqueline’1, was remarkable for its bold and self-reflexive interest in both the works of the great masters of art history and of his own, by now very extensive, oeuvre. At Mas Notre-Dame-de-Vie, the artist’s estate in Mougins on the slopes above Cannes purchased as a wedding gift to Jacqueline Roque in June 1961, Picasso used large sketchbooks in the studio, recording in a diaristic manner the preparative, intermediary and responsive drawings to his oil paintings of the same period. Recording his life’s work with minute and sequential detail, Picasso filled 175 separate notebooks, each providing crucial records to the artist’s creative inventiveness, his detailed experimental processes and the interwoven development of the various artistic mediums he employed.

Within each private sketchbook, the drawings of each day mostly remained unsigned, and were simply annotated with the date, and numbered as each day progressed. These two coloured figure studies are two of three drawings in wax crayon made on the same day 2, 7th January 1962, within the first few pages of notebook No. 166, titled “Dessins”, which Picasso had started fresh on the 5th of January. 3 They are individual and intimate studies of seated female nudes, closely related to the artist’s ongoing and long-term thematic series: variations on Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe which featured

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figures in Picasso’s favourite poses, and the series of formal portraits of his new muse Jacqueline that were to follow. The progression of these studies is logical, intimately linked with the artist’s current artistic preoccupations, with forms reappearing and feeding into one another, moving from group compositions, to seated nudes, to formal portraits of the face and torso.

Realised in vigorous and emphatic outlines of contrasting cobalt blue and burnt umber coloured wax crayons, Picasso’s two voluptuous nudes are endowed with a strong sculptural quality. In coiled poses, these studies exhibit multiple points of view of the human female figure at once, the artist and viewer manipulating these planes into a cohesive and weighty physical presence. Picasso concertinas these multiple perspectives into one planar image, reusing techniques he had devised many years before within Analytical Cubism, here applied with the exceptionally confident and loose gestures of a seasoned master.

Jacqueline became the default subject for portraits and figure studies of this last phase of the artist’s career. In both drawings the head of the woman is small, foreshortened and receding into space and shadow while large, crossed legs and feet occupy the majority of the pictorial space. The first drawing (lot 35) of a nude seated on a blue

Pablo Picasso The artist and his model, 1963 oil on canvas, 130.0 × 195.0 cm Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid © Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency 2023

chair presents a more clearly defined head in profile, endowed with Jacqueline’s recognisable aquiline nose and long dark hair. However, through over-emphasised sexual physical attributes, this seated nude becomes a symbolic archetype. Her raw fleshy contours, flanked and barely contained by the chair’s rectilinear structure, evoke the implied submissive position of the naked artist’s model and the pantomime of desire that played out in Picasso’s late works. In assertive lines drawn without revisions, the artist imposes his voyeuristic understanding of the woman’s body, paying close attention to her face and torso while broadly sketching the flattened and rounded morphology of the rest of her body.

the front. Douglas Cooper remarked of this series: ‘[Picasso] takes special pleasure in pushing on beyond the point at which some other man stopped. So we find him turning things upside down or back to front, juggling with them’, in a demonstration of artistic and technical bravado.5 In a similar manner to Manet, Picasso highlights the nude’s powerful presence presenting through negative space her pale flesh stark against a brooding dark background. Translating the real physical presence of his seated model into a symbolic and universal nude, Picasso exerts his demiurgic power and reflects on the act of voyeurism as the starting point of creation.

Between 1959 – 1962, Picasso embarked on a themed cycle of works based on Édouard Manet’s 1861 scandalous masterpiece Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.4 Acknowledging Manet’s role as progenitor of Modern Art, Picasso freely adapted the format of observed female nudes in a bucolic setting as a vehicle to address his own ongoing theme of the ‘artist and model.’ The pages of his previous 1961 and following 1962 notebooks are almost completely subsumed by iterative variations of the recognisable fête champêtre, gleefully irreverent in their stylised reinterpretation. While not explicitly referencing Manet’s work, the second Seated Nude (lot 36) adopts a similar pose to the iconic figure of the Déjeuner. Here Picasso rotates Manet’s figure to be viewed from

1. Coined by Sir John Richardson KBE, British art historian and Picasso’s biographer, after his muse and last wife, Jacqueline Roque, whom Picasso married in 1961 and lived with from September 1954 until his death in 1973.

2. The third numbered drawing from 7th of January 1962 was a portrait study of Jacqueline, Tête appuyée sur la main, relating to recent painted portrait, Head of a Woman (Jacqueline), 18 December 1961 (private collection) and a concurrent portrait Woman in a Yellow Hat (Jacqueline), 19 December 1961 – 20 January 1962 (private collection).

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limcher, A., and M. (eds.), The Sketchbooks of Picasso, Thames and Hudson, London, G 1986, p. 344. The full notebook, No. 166, to which these drawings belonged was inherited

by Picasso’s granddaughter Marina, with individual sheets later dispersed through her dealer Jan Krugier in Geneva.

4. See: Late Picasso: paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953 – 1972, Tate Gallery, London, 1988, p. 70 5. Cooper, D., Pablo Picasso. Les Déjeuners, Editions Cercle d’Art, Paris, 1963 p. 11 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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PABLO PICASSO (Spanish, 1881 – 1973) NU ASSIS, 1962 coloured crayon on paper 32.0 x 24.0 cm (sheet) dated and numbered upper right: 7.1.62 / II bears inscription verso: 1091-3 / Z 20 uo 183 ESTIMATE: $200,000 – 300,000

PROVENANCE Estate of Pablo Picasso Thence by descent Marina Picasso Collection Galerie Jan Krugier, Geneva Private collection, Tokyo Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland LITERATURE Zervos, C., Pablo Picasso, vol. 20, Oeuvres de 1961 à 1962, Editions Cahiers D'Art, Paris, 1968, no. 183, pl. 90 (illus.)

The Picasso Project (ed.), Picasso's Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture, The Sixties I, 1960-1963, Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, San Francisco, 2002, no. 62-004, p. 213 (illus. as ‘Seated Nude’) Accompanied by copy of document with Marina Picasso stamp and inventory numbers.

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GUY GREY–SMITH

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(1916 – 1981) CASCADES, 1976 oil and beeswax emulsion on gauze on composition board 120.0 x 90.0 cm signed and dated lower right: G. Grey Smith / 76 inscribed verso: Guy GREY–SMITH “Cascades” ESTIMATE: $40,000 – 60,000

PROVENANCE Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above in 1977 Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the above in 2018 EXHIBITED Ten Western Australian Artists, The Western Australian Art Gallery, Perth, 18 August – 26 September 1976, cat. 2 (illus. in exhibition catalogue) Guy Grey–Smith, Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide, opened 11 September 1977, cat. 12 (as ‘Cascade’) Guy Grey-Smith had an emotional attachment to the landscape of Western Australia, with an intensity that was directly transferred to his paintings. As with many who have walked those lands, this connection was also spiritual, even transformative, and for a man whose soul had been so damaged by his experiences during World War Two and then Cambodia in the late 1960s, the dense karri forests of the state’s southwest, where Cascades, 1976, was painted, were particularly healing. He and his wife, the artist Helen Grey-Smith, moved there in 1974 when the encroach of suburbia and a constant stream of visitors made their previous home in the Darling Ranges outside Perth less of the haven that it had been; and the purchase of a small wood-cutters cottage in the timber town of Pemberton ‘suited the two self-described ‘country personalities’ perfectly.’1 Cascades dates from the same year as Grey-Smith’s extensive and acclaimed retrospective was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in November 1976, which then toured to Queensland the following year. Although it was not in that show, Cascades was exhibited at the AGWA some months previously in the exhibition Ten Western Australian Artists which is credited as being a moment when the Gallery had ‘finally come out in favour of local art,’ 2 the retrospective being their next clear statement of intent. By chronologically surveying Grey-Smith’s

works from 1945 to 1976, the retrospective allowed viewers to follow his evolving technique from his early days as a patient receiving art therapy in a sanitorium treating him for tuberculosis contracted after four years as a prisoner-of-war followed by study at the Chelsea School of Arts on recovery. By the late 1950s, his painting, ceramics and fresco skills all began to coalesce into masterworks such as Horseshoe Range, 1958 – 61 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) which contained clear indications as to why his subsequent discovery of the work of Nicolas de Staël became so inspirational. By using scrapers and trowels, combined with paint bulked up by a home-made wax medium, GreySmith’s paintings were now tectonic expressions of the very essence – the ‘life force’ – of the subjects in front of him. He was no longer a plein air painter and would instead travel extensively through Western Australia, sketching as he went, before returning to the studio to create painterly reimaginings. In the late 1960s, as a result of journeys to Sri Lanka and Bali, he reintroduced the brush which allowed for fluid curves and arcs to counterbalance the planes of slab-paint.

Grey-Smith was appointed Professor of Fine Art at Phnom Penh University in 1969, which tragically coincided with the outbreak of war.

He suffered a total nervous collapse as a result which incapacitated him for an extended period, but by 1974 and the move to Pemberton, optimism had returned to his work. The cascades featured in the painting are on the Warren River, not far from the Pemberton cottage, and Grey-Smith perfectly captures the ‘evocative … visual experience of moving between light and dark, so common in a thickly wooded place, and firmly makes the viewer part of the scene.’3 The counterplay of deep blues and striking emerald-green, orange and bruised purple, demonstrates Grey-Smith’s mastery of colour and clearly invokes his deeply emotional reaction to the scene.

1. Gaynor, A., Guy Grey-Smith: life force, University of Western Australia, Perth, 2012, p. 92 2.

Cruthers, J., ‘Visual Arts: the gallery scene and a retrospective’, Westerly, Perth, no. 4, December 1976, p. 122 3. Harpley, M., Guy Grey-Smith: art as life, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2014, p. 14 ANDREW GAYNOR

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ROSALIE GASCOIGNE

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(1917 – 1999) ARCHIPELAGO, 1993 torn and cut patterned linoleum on treated Masonite panels on composition board five panels 30.5 × 50.5 cm (each) left panel: signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: ARCHIPELAGO / Rosalie Gascoigne / 1993 / 1. / LEFT AS FACING WALL each panel inscribed with the numbers 1 to 5 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000 (5)

PROVENANCE Collection of the artist, Canberra Thence by descent Private collection, Canberra EXHIBITED Rosalie Gascoigne, Pinacotheca, Melbourne, 5 – 22 May 1993, cat. 5 Rosalie Gascoigne, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 22 April – 22 May 2004, cat. 12 LITERATURE Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne. A Catalogue Raisonné, ANU Press, Canberra, 2019, cat. 465, pp. 70, 115, 261 (illus.), 339, 352 Anderson, P., ‘An Eye for Poetry in the Ordinary’, The Australian, 11 May 2004, p. 14

Quintessentially ‘Australian’ materials such as corrugated iron and linoleum appear early in Rosalie Gascoigne’s oeuvre, often alluding to the physical hardships of colonial settlement and attempts to cultivate the land, while managing to capture ephemeral sensations specifically related to an experience of this continent – feelings of heat, light, air, space, and of making one’s way through the landscape.1 While Gascoigne categorically denied the connection to domesticity evoked by the use of humble household linoleum in her works, 2 as a letter to her son Toss reveals, she was clearly drawn to the potential of its gaudy, high-keyed colours and its richly decorative patterns: ‘Another domestic buy I made is abt [sic.] 8 metres of Clarke [sic.] rubber lino… It is gaudy, with colour-photo flowers – seed packet plus. Very blue and peach and yellow and white and green – delphiniums, roses, daisies, peonies – the lot. The young man looked at it with distaste and said ‘you can have the lot for $10, we’ll never sell it. There’s about $80 worth there.’ ‘Done’ I said. After all, I can reline the kitchen cupboards if worst comes to the worst.’3

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Made late in the artist’s career, Archipelago, 1993 demonstrates the way in which Gascoigne returned to her vast material stockpiles over the decades, using a particular material when both the mood and intuition inspired her. Between 1977 and 1993 she made around fifty works with lino, with over fifteen different patterns, in what was, in her words, a ‘twenty-year love affair’.4 As the artist’s studio assistant, Peter Vandermark has observed, Gascoigne ‘liked the hazard of not knowing’, 5 and would have initially worked on the individual units of Archipelago with no predetermined sense of its final scale. On completion, the individual panels would similarly have sat in her studio for a time before being named. Gascoigne preferred to allow her works to simply ‘be’, waiting until the moment when the work itself presented an evocative title that managed to open up, rather than shut down, its allusive possibilities.

It is through this astute combination of name and material form that the pieces of torn linoleum in Archipelago transform into a group of islands floating in the sea, their jagged coastlines viewed from above as if in an old-school atlas. Yet despite the sense of mystery and nostalgia that recollection of this activity invites, in the twenty-first century,

Archipelago’s evocation of a cluster of potentially vulnerable islands on a map cannot help but transcend the artist’s initial intentions, becoming a poetic meditation on power, borders and boundaries, and the impacts of climate change. Given Gascoigne’s description of herself as ‘a sideways thinker’,6 one can fairly assume that she would have enjoyed the new and vital associations that the work continues to bring.

As she has said: ‘I like going foraging with an open mind and happening upon things. It is a non-binding sort of art. I can fly off at tangents and be diverted by the unexpected. I read somewhere of ‘lyrical derangements.’

It fits my approach.’7 1. Rosalie Gascoigne’s first major work in corrugated iron was Standing Piece, 1973 – 74; her first works in linoleum were River Banks, 1977 and Step Through, 1977/c. 1979 – 80.

Gascoigne, M., Rosalie Gascoigne: A Catalogue Raisonée, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2019, pp. 63 & 159 2. Artist’s notes on Step Through, 1977/c. 1979–80, dated 24 February 1987, National Gallery of Australia artist file 3. Gascoigne, R., Letter to Toss Gascoigne, c. 10 June 1979, supplied to the author by Martin Gascoigne. Martin Gascoigne states the lino purchased from Clark Rubber was never used.

4. The artist, lecture delivered at Auckland Art Gallery, July 1999. Transcript in Auckland Art Gallery Library, cited in Gascoigne, ibid., p. 115 5. Vandermark, P., cited in Gascoigne, ibid., p. 70 6. Macdonald, V., Rosalie Gascoigne, Regaro Pty Ltd, Sydney, 1998, p. 12 7. Gascoigne, R., cited in Bottrell, F., The Artist Craftsman in Australia, Jack Pollard Pty Ltd, Crows Nest, New South Wales, 1972, p. 39 KELLY GELLATLY

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HOWARD ARKLEY

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(1951 – 1999) PHYSIOGNOMY, 1987 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 163.0 x 122.0 cm signed and dated verso: Howard Arkley 87. signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: HOWARD ARKLEY / “Physiognomy” / 1987 ESTIMATE: $60,000 – 80,000

PROVENANCE Private collection Deutscher~Menzies, Melbourne, 25 – 26 April 1999, lot 81 (as ‘The Physiognomy’) The Estate of the Late Alan Cardy, Sydney EXHIBITED Howard Arkley: Suburban urban messages, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 19 September 1987, cat. 11 (as ‘Happenstance’) Howard Arkley, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane, 13 June – 1 July 1989, cat. 2 Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 5 December 2015 – 28 February 2016 LITERATURE Crawford, A., and Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, revised edition 2001, p. 76 (illus., as ‘Strange Fruit’) Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia, The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, fig. 6.14, p. 170 Fitzpatrick, A., and Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2015, pp. 95, 143 Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [https://www.arkleyworks. com/blog/2009/11/19/physiognomy–1987/] (accessed 9/10/23)

When Howard Arkley died in July 1999 just three days after his return to Melbourne following the enormous success of his exhibition The Home Show at the Venice Biennale, the career of one of Australia’s most highly productive and endlessly innovative contemporary artists was tragically cut short. However, as a painting such as Physiognomy, 1987 highlights, Arkley’s work never ceases to surprise and delight in both its unexpected combination of colour and form, and in its ability to continually reveal the artist’s idiosyncratic grab-bag approach to inspiration and making. As curator Anthony Fitzpatrick has astutely observed: ‘…it was this kind of unresolved, liminal juncture between high and low, reality and simulation, planning and improvisation, rational and irrational, the abstracted and the constructed, detachment and involvement, firsthand experience and second degree quotation, that Arkley occupied throughout his entire career. From a seemingly endless flow of dislocated and disjointed cultural fragments, the artist generated and synthesised his own web of references and connections, a method

and a structure that would underpin his potent, highly distinctive and instantly recognisable visual identity.’1 Physiognomy was first exhibited in September 1987 at Roslyn Oxley9 Galler y, Sydney under the name Happenstance, 1987 and was subsequently shown at Bellas Gallery, Brisbane in June 1989 under its present title. 2 Part of a group of intriguing images that transformed cactus-like forms into strange humanoid creatures (with some more obviously bearing human body parts, such as arms and legs, often placed in anatomically impossible positions) the work was a creative and decorative extension of the artist’s exhibition Howard Arkley: Cacti and Succulents held at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney in May 1984.

The spiky, somewhat surreal forms of these plants obviously appealed to Arkley, who emphasised their structural qualities through his expressive and skilled use of the airbrush and celebratory combination of decorative elements.

While the work’s title refers to the capacity to determine a subject’s personality or character through their facial features, Arkley’s teardrop shaped ‘head’ remains blank, revealing nothing. This impenetrable visage, with its areas of rich block colour and dotted hairlike tendrils become the perfect foil for the shifting chromatic spectrum of Arkley’s complex crisscross background and black spray outline, which seem to physically pulse, and always hover, on the edge of focus. Drawing upon the imaginative lineage of Surrealism and Pop, Arkley often replaced the human head with a cactus in his drawings, and in turn, his first major portraits – Tattooed Head, 1983 (Collection TarraWarra Museum of Art) and Zappo Head, 1987 (Bendigo Art Gallery) – included several plant-like features. 3 Over time, these cactus heads became ‘something of a signature for the artist’s persona – another alter ego and mask’.4 As Arkley’s wife and long-term assistant, Alison Burton has recalled: ‘…I of ten associate [his cacti succulent works] as par ticularly characteristic of him. They were a motif Howard used many times in his sketches and doodles, meandering across newspapers, coasters and novels, anything that he could draw on. I think his cacti works to be rather like I remember him, spiky, quirky and sometimes chaotic, but also contained, thoughtful and ordered.’5 1 Fitzpatrick, A., ‘Sampling: The Art of Howard Arkley’ in Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2015, p. 22 2. John Gregory has since determined that Happenstance, 1987 is another composition: https:// www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/19/happenstance-1987/ (accessed 24 October 2023) 3. See Lynn, op. cit., p. 62 and Fitzpatrick, op. cit., p. 18 4. Lynn, ibid.

5. ibid.

KELLY GELLATLY

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HOWARD ARKLEY

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(1951 - 1999) FELONY, 1987 synthetic polymer paint on canvas 160.0 x 122.0 cm signed verso: Howard Arkley signed, dated and inscribed with title verso: Howard Arkley / Felony / 1987 ESTIMATE: $150,000 – 250,000

PROVENANCE Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (label attached verso) Private collection, Melbourne, acquired from the above c.1987 EXHIBITED Howard Arkley: Suburban urban messages, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 19 September 1987, cat. 10 Howard Arkley, Anima Gallery, Adelaide, October – November 1987, cat. 3 Howard Arkley, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 18 October – 30 November 1991, cat. 63 Howard Arkley: The Retrospective, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 17 November 2006 – 25 February 2007 and touring (label attached verso, erroneously catalogued as ‘Felony, 1983’) LITERATURE Duncan, J (ed.), Howard Arkley, Monash University Gallery, Melbourne, 1991, p. 27 (illus.)

Crawford, A., & Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1997, pp. 63, 65 (illus. erroneously catalogued as ‘Felony, 1983’) Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: [https://www.arkleyworks. com/blog/2009/11/19/felony-1987/] (accessed 24/10/23) RELATED WORKS Felony, 1983, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 160.0 x 120.0 cm, private collection, Melbourne Felony, 1983, synthetic polymer paint on paper, 158.0 x 117.0 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney: Gift of Loti Smorgon and Victor Smorgon, 1995 In 1986, Howard Arkley painted one of his most confronting and realistic images, The Ritual, which depicted a figure about to insert a needle into an extended, torniquet-ed arm. Whether or not the subject matter reflected the artist’s own drug use at the time is now a moot point, but the painting was undeniably part of a small group of images from the 1980s which sought inspiration from the darker side of life and the harsh realities of inner urban living. This group includes Suicide, 1983; Ever Feel Like Drowning, 1987; and Felony, 1987 – which is a second version of a painting of the same title, originally produced in 1983.1 In 1981, Arkley moved from Chapel Street, Prahran to St Kilda, which was a haven of the punk and alternative music scenes and home to now iconic venues like the Crystal Ballroom. Arkley and his then-wife,

artist Elizabeth Gower, had been introduced to punk in 1977 by New York-based Australian artist, Denise Green, who sent the pair to CBGBs during Arkley’s first trip to New York. 2 Arkley continued to seek out punk gigs during their travels abroad, drawing influence from the unexpected nature of this wild new world: ‘He had little to say about the music as such and was struck primarily by the mood of events, the gritty urban environment and the air of violence and threat. Punk was about the scene and the style. It represented mean streets, edgy behaviour and tight-knit, energetic subcultures.’3 The source image for Felony is a copy of the Boys Own Annual from the early 1950s, which was held in Arkley’s personal collection.4 When combined with the artist’s punk sensibility and high-keyed maximalist style however, these rather tame beginnings are transformed into a painting full of movement and potential threat – both that of being robbed, and of the felon being caught. With its tilting planes and competing decorative surfaces – the fluttering curtain, the brick wall, and the strange, cactus-like doodle forms just within the thief’s grasp – nothing sits still, creating a sense of tension and unease that belies the painting’s comic book style and Pop Art origins. Yet unlike the narrative journey of the comic book, where the action progresses from one gridded image to another, Arkley’s work is a singular frame, suspended in time and space without resolution.

The artist’s encounter with the work’s source as an image in reproduction was to increasingly influence his working method, and in turn, the way he both conceptualised and thought about his practice. Arkley emphasised the remove that the airbrush provided and celebrated the fact that his works weren’t handmade. Indeed, he saw his paintings as a form of ‘second-degree culture’ and wanted them to look ‘false’.5 Yet despite these intentions, there is, ironically, only one Howard Arkley, and in his distinctive subject matter and working methods he stands alone.

1.

The Ritual, 1986 was controversially acquired by the State Library of Victoria in 1988.

For images of these works see: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2009/11/19/ happenstance-1987/ 2. McAuliffe, C., ‘Raw Power Meets Electronic Music Sounds: Howard Arkley and Popular Music’ in Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V., Howard Arkley and Friends, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, 2015, p. 32. CBGBs is a small bar on the Bowery in New York, largely regarded as the birthplace of punk in the United States. In the 1970s it was an important venue for punk and new wave bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Misfits, Television, Patti Smith Group, The Dead Boys, The Dictators and The Cramps.

3. ibid.

4

Crawford, A., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 65

5. Preston, E., Not Just a Suburban Boy, Duffy & Snellgrove, Potts Point, 2002, p. 224, cited in ‘Howard Arkley: Learning Resources’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne at https://www. ngv.vic.gov.au/school_resource/howard-arkley/ (accessed 24 October 2023) KELLY GELLATLY

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PATRICIA PICCININI

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born 1965 GLADE, 2005 ABS plastic and automotive paint 16 panels 49.0 x 49.0 cm (each) 200.0 x 200.0 cm (overall) each signed verso: P. Piccinini ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000 (16)

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the artist in 2005 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS 2023 Encounters of Another Plot, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin, USA 2023 Metamorphosis, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands 2021 – 2022 Every Heart Sings, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and touring various venues throughout Australia 2021 ALPHA60, Hugs, Heide Museum of Art, Melbourne 2020 Omfamna Framtiden, Boras Museum of Art, Boras, Sweden 2019 Life Clings Closest, Cairns Art Gallery, Queensland 2018 Curious Affection, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 2016 Patricia Piccinini: Bodyscape, Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun, Taiwan 2015 Another Life, University of Quebec Art Museum, Montreal, Canada 2015 ComCiencia, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil 2014 Like Us, Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales 2013 Structures of Support, Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra 2011 Once Upon A Time, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide 2010 Relativity, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth 2009 Evolution, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart 2006 In Another Life, Wellington City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand 2003 We are Family, Australian Pavilion, 50th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

SELECTED LITERATURE Creed, B., Stray: Human/Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene, Power Publications, Sydney, 2016 Dantas, M., ComCiencia, exhibition catalogue, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brazil, 2015 Sasse, J.R., Blurred Boundaries: A History of Hybrid Beings and the Work of Patricia P., University of Arizona Press, Arizona, 2014 McDonald, H., Nearly Beloved, Patricia Piccinini, Piper Press, Sydney, 2011 Engberg, J., Relativity, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2010 SELECTED COLLECTIONS Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria Griffith University, Queensland Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, Belgium Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Newcastle Art Gallery, New South Wales National Gallery of Australia, Canberra National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, USA Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, USA Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane University of Melbourne, Victoria Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina, USA REPRESENTED BY Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA

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DALE FRANK

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born 1959 I WAS SENT OFF TO FIND AN 18TH CENTURY DIAMOND BROOCH, DRESSED IN A DONKEY JACKET AND CEMENT-DUSTED WORKMAN’S BOOTS. HE UNDERSTOOD THE PAST, WHEREAS TODAY’S BRILLIANT BUTTERFLIES WHO DINE OUT TALK ONLY ABOUT THE NEW AND KNOW ONLY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THEIR ART PORTFOLIO’S PRICING STRUCTURE. THEIR LEAD SHOES ARE VERY MUCH IN NEED IN THE LIGHT GRAVITY-LESS ATMOSPHERE, 2005 varnish on canvas 200.0 x 260.0 cm signed twice verso: Dale Frank 2005 / Dale Frank / 2005 ESTIMATE: $50,000 – 70,000

PROVENANCE Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 2006

outcome is ‘forced upon the Painting by the vagaries of its own Nature and makeup: its environment and material personality determine its image, its future, its relations within the world.’1

EXHIBITED Dale Frank, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2 – 27 May 2006, cat. 1

If Frank’s technique appears ostensibly random or unpredictable however, such spontaneity belies a painstaking process of ‘endurance and isolation.’ As the luminous pools of pigmented varnish are poured onto the horizontal canvas and immediately begin to resist and coalesce, the artist must remain continuously attentive to the passing of time, the variations of climate, and the actions required by him at every stage – adding more varnish or changing the angle of support as necessary. As Frank reveals, ‘It is a totally hands on and cerebral way of painting... The process can take up to twenty-four hours where I have to be permanently standing over the painting, constantly considering every minute aspect.’2

LITERATURE Frank, D., So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980, Schwartz City Publishing, Melbourne, 2007, p. 16 (illus.)

Featuring glistening marbled flows and ponderous slides of ultramarine, indigo and ochre poured across the canvas in layers of varying viscosity and translucency, I was sent off to find an 18th century diamond brooch…, 2005 offers a particularly stunning example of the sumptuous, glossy abstractions for which Dale Frank has become so widely acclaimed. Brilliantly evocative in their epic scale, intense colouration and mesmerising, plasma-like reflections, such works typically engage with paradigms of science, poetics, spatialisation and time to offer a continually evolving dialogue upon the individual’s relationship to the immersive universe. Possessing the remarkable ability to completely absorb the viewer’s consciousness, thus Frank’s ‘performances’ not only complicate the customary roles of artist as creator and audience as passive observer, but powerfully highlight the psychological dimension inherent in perception itself.

Indeed, despite their inordinately specific, often witty titles and the swirling tides of sensuous, tinted varnish which seem to convey the forces of nature in a manner reminiscent of Romantic painting, Frank is emphatic in his eschewal of any reference to the literal – his works are neither real nor imagined. Rather, each performance ‘creates itself’, evolving over time through the movement and chemical reactions between layers of strident, pulsating varnish in its molten liquid form (‘a living entity’). As Frank elucidates, the blank white canvas is never a pristine ground that must be filled, rather ‘a black space’ where the final

With his visionary eloquence and technical ingenuity, Frank occupies an esteemed position at the forefront of Australian contemporary art practice. Awarded the prestigious Red Cross Art Award by John Olsen at the tender age of sixteen, his was a precocious talent and within only five years, he had achieved international recognition with solo exhibitions across Australia, Europe and America. Significantly, in 1983, his work was selected for display alongside Thomas Lawson and Anselm Kiefer at the Museo Palazzo Lanfranchi in Pisa, Italy, and in 1984, he was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. In 2000, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney mounted the touring survey exhibition of his work Ecstasy: 20 years of painting; in 2005, Frank won the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize at the Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria and in 2007, his achievements were documented in the magnificent monograph So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980. Today, his paintings are held in every major public collection across Australia, as well as numerous private and corporate collections around the world.

1. The artist, cited in Chapman, C., ‘Dale Frank: Performance into Painting’ in Frank, D., So Far: the Art of Dale Frank 2005 – 1980, Schwartz City Publishing, Melbourne, 2008, p. 134 2. The artist, cited in Crawford, A., ‘Dale Frank’, Art & Australia, Sydney, vol. 42, no. 2, 2004, p. 214 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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CAROL JERREMS

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(1949 – 1980) VALE STREET, 1975 silver gelatin photograph 15.0 x 20.0 cm edition: 2/9 signed and dated lower right below image: JERREMS, ’75. numbered and inscribed with title lower left below image: VALE STREET, / 2/9 ESTIMATE: $80,000 – 120,000

PROVENANCE Rennie Ellis, Melbourne Bonhams, London, 14 May 2004, lot 495 Barry Taffs, Sydney Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Private collection, Melbourne SELECTED EXHIBITED Carol Jerrems, Photographers’ Gallery, Melbourne, December 1975 – January 1976 (another example) Carol Jerrems, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, February 1976 (another example) Carol Jerrems, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 1 November – 2 December 1978 (another example) A Decade of Australian Photography 1972 – 1982: Philip Morris Arts Grant at the Australian National Gallery, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 8 October 1983 – 29 January 1984 (another example) Living in the 70s: Australian Photographs, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 13 June – 13 September 1987 (another example) Living in the 70s: Photographs by Carol Jerrems, Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Hobart, 20 July – 12 August 1990; and touring nationally (another example) Counterpoints: Photographs by Carol Jerrems and Wesley Stacey, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 23 February – 12 May 1991 (another example) World Without End: Photography and the 20th Century, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2 December 2000 – 25 February 2001 (another example) Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901 – 2001, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 8 December 2000 – 11 February 2001; and touring nationally (another example) Australian Postwar Photodocumentary, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 12 June – 8 August 2004 (another example) Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 31 July – 31 October 2010 (another example) What’s In a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 24 September 2011 – 5 February 2012 (another example)

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Carol Jerrems: Photographic Artist, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 25 August 2012 – 28 January 2013; and touring nationally (another example) The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 21 March – 8 June 2015 and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 4 June – 11 October 2015 (another example) Carol Jerrems: Portrait of a Decade, Smith and Singer, Melbourne, 27 February – 20 March 2020; Smith and Singer, Sydney, 24 March – 17 April 2020, cat. 5 (another example) SELECTED LITERATURE Le Guay, L. (ed.), Australian Photography 1976, Globe Publishing, Sydney, 1976, p. 83 (illus., another example) Mollison, J., Australian Photographers: The Phillip Morris Collection, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1979, cover and p. 96 (illus., another example) Ennis, H., and Jenyns, B., Living in the 70s: Photographs

by Carol Jerrems, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1990, n.p. (illus., another example) Ennis, H., and Jenyns, B., Living in the 70s: Photographs

by Carol Jerrems, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1990, n. p. (illus., another example) Annear, A., World Without End: Photography and the 20th Century, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, pp. 23, 122 (illus., another example) McDonald, J., Federation: Australian Art and Society 1901–2001, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2000, pp. 220, 221 (illus., another example) King, N. (ed.), Up Close: Carol Jerrems with Larry Clark, Nan Goldin and William Yang, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne and Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2010, cover (illus., another example), pp. 130, 131, 132–133 (illus., another example) Annear, J., The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2015, pp. 46, 50, 108 (illus., another example), 295 RELATED WORK Other examples of this photograph are held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria; Murray Art Museum, Albury; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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CLEMENT MEADMORE

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(1929 – 2005) SCRONCH, 1994 bronze 23.0 x 28.5 x 21.0 cm edition: 5/8 signed, dated and numbered at base: Meadmore 1994 5/8 dated, numbered and inscribed with title on base: ‘Scronch’ / 1994 5/8 / ART ESTIMATE: $35,000 – 45,000

PROVENANCE The Clement Meadmore Foundation, New York, USA David Klein Gallery, Birmingham, Michigan, USA Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, Chicago, USA, 14 December 2017, lot 7 Private collection, Sydney Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 28 November 2018, lot 45 Private collection, Sydney

‘I am interested in geometry as a grammar which, if understood, can be used with great flexibility and expressiveness.’1 One of the most highly regarded and internationally acclaimed Australian artists of his generation, Clement Meadmore remains revered for thoughtful, impeccably executed sculptures that unify pure stark geometry with expressive gesture. Invariably constructed from one single square-sectioned beam that has been bent and coiled to the artistic aim of the artist, indeed his masterful constructions evince a seemingly implausible sense of dynamism and musical rhythm that belies their unyielding medium. Whether monumental outdoor commissions or smaller scale domestic maquettes, Meadmore’s forms typically twist, turn and writhe – their suggested animation thus adding a humanising balance to the all-too-often bland immobility and visual harshness of our modern built environments. As Gibson astutely observes, the opposition between line and mass lies at the very core of Meadmore’s sculptures: ‘…in their form they suggest the rapid motion through space of a limb or

body…or the residue of such motion. They have more in common with purely aesthetic things such as a drawn line, than with a recognisable object existing in the world even though, by virtue of their sheer physical bulk and size and scale, they are undeniably that…’2 Bearing a title that evokes the notion of something being crushed, crunched or crumpled, Scronch, 1994 offers a superb example of Meadmore’s constructions from his final decade during which he returned to his dense, coiled sculptures of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Such free-flowing exchange of ideas within his own oeuvre was not uncommon for Meadmore, and thus the present maquette is strongly reminiscent of large-scale sculptures such as Hunch, 1974 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) or Clench, 1972 (Kitz Valve Co., Makuhari, Japan. Closely related to works such as Terpsichore, 1993 (Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts) and Helix, 1993 (Collection of the artist’s estate), both executed the year prior, Scronch nevertheless departs from the coil configurations of previous decades in its more pronounced Baroque flavour. Evolving in an intuitive manner from a geometric vocabulary in a similar way to a Jazz improvisation, moreover these creations all share unmistakable affinities with the musical genre of which Meadmore was a well-known aficionado; as Gibson suggests, ‘Rhythms gather and are released – they pick up momentum and slow down, begin with sudden intensity and stop with equal abruptness. His sculptures simultaneously suggest uninterrupted flow and caesura.’3 1. Meadmore cited at: https://bluefruitdesign.blogspot.com/2012/01/clement-meadmore-notjust-sculpture.html (accessed October 2023) 2. Gibson, E., The Sculpture of Clement Meadmore, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1994, p. 52 3. ibid., p. 57 VERONICA ANGELATOS

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BRUCE ARMSTRONG

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born 1957 BUNJIL, 2003 painted bronze 95.0 cm (height) 234.5 cm (height including base) from an edition of 9 bronzes stamped at base with Perin Sculpture foundry mark ESTIMATE: $70,000 – 90,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORKS Bunjil, 2002, painted aluminium and wood, 2500 cm height, unique, commissioned by the Melbourne Docklands Authority, Melbourne Eagle, 2002, painted wood, 500 cm height, unique, in the collection of the Pt. Leo Estate, Victoria

Towering high, perched on a smooth-edged timber plinth, Bruce Armstrong’s gleaming white bronze eagle, Bunjil, 2003 surveys his domain. Best known for having created monumental heraldic animals built to exist in open public spaces, from 2003 – 2012 Armstrong also created in parallel a small suite of editioned bronzes based on selected timber sculptures. From a small edition of 9, each with its own unique timber plinth, this eagle was amongst the first to be cast and coloured

by Bill Perrin, whose technical prowess simulated almost exactly the materiality, appearance and texture of the artist’s original timber maquette.1 Originally conceived around 1996 as a painted timber totem roughly hewn from cypress wood, the simplified polychrome design of a sea eagle at rest was later scaled-up into a vast seven-story aluminium public sculpture, Eagle (also known as Bunjil), commissioned by the Melbourne Docklands Authority in 2002. 2 Later joined by the pair of aquiline Guardians, 2009 installed at the entrance of the Hyatt Hotel, Armstrong’s avian sculptures have changed the aesthetic fabric of the city of Melbourne and provided its urban environment with a deeper, more spiritual connection to the land.

Bruce Armstrong, a self-confessed twitcher, writes: ‘Bird’s are everyone’s allegory, a totem for all personalities. Every culture has bird stories… one can sift through the history of art and find images of birds in the earliest of humanity’s imagery.’3 His oeuvre is peppered with avian

forms, most devoid of naturalistic detail and adopting symbolic shapes of varying simplification. Some resting, others using their outspread wings as protective, encircling shields.

Painted a uniform white with pigments mixed with marine acrylic (a defensive weather patina), this bronze Bunjil stands proud with a striking silhouette, his eyes narrowed and beak slightly lowered, a watchful sentinel. Armstrong’s simplified colours and volumes serve to highlight the tactile surface texture of the bronze, the grooves and rough traces of his carpentry tools having been preserved throughout the casting process. This carved muscularity creates a raw commanding presence for Armstrong’s broad-shouldered bird of prey, evoking the ancient power of the wedge-tailed eagle creator spirit and ancestral being of the local Kulin Nations of South-Eastern Australia.

For the Wurundjeri-Woi Wurrung people of the lands around the Birrarung (Yarra River) and even further south to the Boon-Wurrung lands around Port Phillip Bay, Bunjil is revered as one of two moiety ancestors, the other being Waang, the crow. In these language groups, orally transmitted stories singing Country and Law featured Bunjil.

They explained the creation of the local lands and provided guidance for moral and social behaviour. In these creation myths, the wedgetailed eagle plays a very active role. Using his massive wingspan and from his beak, he blew winds of change and fashioned living things with his talons.

In spite of this energetic, world-building activity, Armstrong’s Bunjil is solidly static, its heavy mass finally at rest, balancing evenly on stylised columnar legs and roughly incised talons. With an endearing and habitual untidiness, Armstrong’s sculptures are raw and vernacular, their simplicity providing a blank and accessible canvas for interpretation and engagement with each viewer and environment.

1. Gott, T., ‘Acts of Love: The Art of Bruce Armstrong’, Bruce Armstrong. An Anthology of Strange Creatures, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2018, p. 36 2. ibid., p. 35 3. Armstrong, B., ‘Why Birds?’ in Webb, V., MCA Unpacked II: Six Artists Select from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2003, p. 8 LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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BERNARD BUFFET

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(French, 1928 – 1999) HINDELOOPEN, EN FRISE, 1985 oil on canvas 98.0 x 130.0 cm signed upper left: Bernard Buffet inscribed with title verso: Hindeloopen / en Frise ESTIMATE: $100,000 – 150,000

PROVENANCE Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris (bears gallery stamp verso) Private collection, Japan, acquired from the above in January 1989 Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland RELATED WORK Hindeloopen, en frise, 1986, colour lithograph, 50.0 x 65.0 cm, edition of 150, published by Mourlot Editions, Paris We are grateful to Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris, for their assistance with this catalogue entry.

Bernard Buffet, once hailed as France’s finest post-war painter 1, and reaching dizzying heights of fame and fortune before his thirtieth birthday, suffered from institutional and critical denigration in his home country throughout the second half of the 20th century. Only now, some thirty years after his death, is his abundant oeuvre and its influence on the course of modern art being reevaluated. Growing up in occupied France and coming of age during the material privations and societal malaise that followed World War Two, Buffet’s acclaimed early works were infused with Gallic spleen 2, sapped of colour and spatial depth. In stark contrast to these spiky, grey and anguished paintings, Buffet’s picturesque landscapes of the 1970s and 1980s, including Hindeloopen, en Frise, c.1985 present with a flat graphic frankness an optimistic and sentimental view of the Western world.

A member of the L’Homme Témoin (Man as Witness) group supporting expressive social realism as opposed to modern abstraction, Buffet emphasised the everyday nature of his subject matter, insisting ‘realist painting for me is concreteness… the representation of things.’3 Buffet painted by lamplight only the scenes that he had seen with his own eyes, from poignantly desolate grey Parisian cityscapes in the 40s through to the brightly coloured, postcard views of landmarks from expensive holidays later in life. Buffet’s landscapes were often likened to the Post Impressionist ‘Peinture Montmartroise’ of Maurice Utrillo, his heavily outlined naive cityscapes replicating views from mass-produced postcards.4 From 1952, Buffet enjoyed the artistic freedom of producing yearly thematic suites of paintings at his representative gallery in Paris, Galerie Maurice Garnier, with subject matter ranging from the allegorical and historical (Passions of the Christ, 1952 and Joan of Arc, 1958) to more broadly appealing subject matter (Snowy Landscapes, 1976, and Flowers, 1979) and many based on the artist’s recent holiday destinations, both near and far: Churches of France, 1969, and Peking, 1996. Closely related to works in Buffet’s 1986 solo exhibition at Galerie Maurice Garnier, descriptively titled Les Pays-Bas (The Netherlands), Hindeloopen, en Frise, presents with detached rigour a large, crisp and famous view of the manual lock and drawbridge of the mediaeval town of Hindeloopen, in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. Other paintings from the Pays-Bas suite included kitsch, timeless and emblematic scenes of windmills and friezes of canal houses and bridges in Amsterdam.5

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Bernard Buffet at work in his studio, Paris, 1958 photographer unknown Keystone Press/Getty Images

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Exhibition catalogue cover for 'Bernard Buffet - Les Pays Bas' at Galerie Maurice Garnier, Paris, 6 February - 28 March 1986

A recurring subject in Buffet’s landscape paintings, the canal and its sluice gate provided a linear architectural structure suiting the artist’s strong graphic and linear style, doubled in mirrored reflections on the water in the foreground. Closely related to a colour lithograph produced

by Mourlot Editions in an edition of 150 in 1986, this view of the small town celebrates the enduring triumph of man over nature and the ingenuity of Dutch engineering. Painted from the vantage point of a swing bridge over the Zijlroede canal, the single focal point of Buffet’s strict linear perspective is the sluishuis, the historical landmark of the lockkeeper’s house built in 1619 and an important strategic building in this longstanding trading port. Strangely devoid of people, Buffet’s landscape is stilled and muted, painted with a restricted and unmodulated colour palette of the terracotta red of tiled roofs, bright green lawns and a sky tinged with grey.

still standing and in continuous use despite the material destruction of world wars and a rapidly changing contemporary landscape. Only the bright white canal boat moored to the right of the composition remains as an indicator of the modernity of Buffet’s view of this quaint town.

Hindeloopen, en Frise, painted with Buffet’s characteristic black outlines, with exacting geometry set out like an empty stage set, acknowledges the enduring historical value of European landmarks,

3. Charbonnier, G., Le Monologue du peintre, Julliard, Paris, 1959, reprinted 2002, pp. 213 – 14

Wealthy Japanese businessman Kiichiro Okano was instrumental in fostering the widespread popularity of Bernard Buffet in Asia, building and dedicating a museum to the artist in 1973 in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, where it has housed the largest private collection of the artist’s work outside of France. The painting Hindeloopen, en Frise, never before seen at auction, has remained the same Japanese private collection since its purchase from Galerie Maurice Garnier in 1989.

1.

Connaissance des Arts, Paris, No. 36, 15th February 1955 2. Coined by writer Charles Baudelaire, “spleen” describes a French feeling of melancholy and existential ennui.

4. ‘Parcours de l’exposition’, dossier de Presse, Bernard Buffet Rétrospective, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2016, p. 10 5. ibid.

LUCIE REEVES-SMITH

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LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD–MACK (German/Australian, 1893 – 1965) ABSTRACT COMPOSITION WITH PLANT FORMS, 1933 oil on board 35.5 x 46.0 cm signed and dated lower right: MACK / 1933 bears inscription verso (in German): Dass dieses bild / in deine hande kommt, Luciano – / wie hatte sich mein vater gefreut! / 15 August 1996 (That this picture comes into your hands, Luciano – how happy my father was pleased) bears inscription verso: 5.

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

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47

PROVENANCE The estate of the artist Private collection, Italy

CLAUDE VENARD (French, 1913 – 1999) LE DOIGT DANS L'OEIL oil on canvas 147.0 x 113.5 cm signed lower right: C VENARD

48

PROVENANCE Galerie Felix Vercel, Paris Private collection Tokyo, acquired from the above in September 1988 Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland

ESTIMATE: $25,000 – 35,000

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CRESSIDA CAMPBELL born 1960 PUMPKIN AND EGGPLANT, 1991 unique colour woodblock print 27.0 x 28.0 cm signed, dated and inscribed with title below image

49

PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1991 EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 9 April – 4 May 1991, cat. 19

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000 LITERATURE Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010 (3rd ed.), cat. W9108, pp. 27 (woodblock illustrated), 343

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CRESSIDA CAMPBELL born 1960 VASE, 1999 watercolour on incised woodblock 19.0 x 20.5 cm signed lower left: Cressida Campbell

50

PROVENANCE Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1999 EXHIBITED Cressida Campbell, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 13 July – 7 August 1999, cat. 32

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000 LITERATURE Crayford, P. (ed.), The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, Public Pictures Pty Ltd, Sydney, 2010 (3rd ed.), cat. W9914, p. 352

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SAM FULLBROOK (1922 – 2004) (FACE IN SUNLIGHT), c.1980s oil on canvas on board 29.5 x 38.0 cm signed with initials lower left: SF. ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000

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51

PROVENANCE The Skinner Collection, Perth Thence by descent Private collection, Perth

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

HOWARD ARKLEY (1951 – 1999) HEAD OF YOUNG MAN (DALE), 1998 synthetic polymer paint on arches paper 71.5 x 56.0 cm (sheet) signed and dated lower left: Howard Arkley 98 signed, dated and inscribed verso: Howard Arkley / Head of Young man (Dale) / 1998 / Acrylic on paper / 570 x 710 mm

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PROVENANCE Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the artist in 1998 LITERATURE Howard Arkley Online Catalogue Raisonné: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2021/10/09/ untitled–head–2–1998–w–p/ [accessed 17/08/23]

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000

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GEORGE WASHINGTON LAMBERT (1873 – 1930) HEAD OF A GIRL WITH REDDISH BROWN HAIR, 1915 oil on canvas on board 43.5 x 33.0 cm Lambert Memorial Trust stamp verso, signed by Gladys Owen and Basil Burdett ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000 PROVENANCE Anthony Hordern & Sons Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso) possibly Sir Edward Hayward, Adelaide David Dridan, South Australia Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne Peter Walker, Adelaide Private collection, New South Wales, acquired from the above c.2001

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EXHIBITED Lambert Memorial Exhibition, Anthony Horderns’ Fine Art Gallery, Sydney, 25 September – 15 October 1930, cat. 32 (as ‘Portrait Study, Head of Girl with Reddish–brown Hair) Australian Paintings Colonial / Contemporary, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 2 – 19 April 1984, cat. 38 (illus., in exhibition catalogue, n.p.)

LITERATURE The Home: an Australian Quarterly, Art in Australia, Sydney, vol. 11, no. 9, 1 September 1930 (illus., on cover as ‘Head of a Girl’) Burdett, B., ‘THE LAMBERT EXHIBITION’, Art in Australia, Sydney, 3rd series, no. 34, October – November 1930, p. 66 Gray, A., George Lambert 1873 – 1930: Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculpture, Drawings in Public Collections, Bonamy Press, Perth, Sotheby’s Australia and Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1996, cat. P185, p. 60

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH (1892 – 1984) PORTRAIT IN THE ROOM, 1961 oil on board 35.0 x 23.0 cm signed and dated lower right: G Cossington Smith 61 signed and inscribed with title on artist’s handwritten label verso: Portrait in the Room / Grace Cossington Smith inscribed on artist’s handwritten label verso: Interior with Sewing Machine / Grace Cossington Smith

54

PROVENANCE Private collection Barsby Auctions, Sydney, 18 August 2018, lot 364 Private collection, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

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55 JOSEPHINE MUNTZ ADAMS (1862 – 1949) STANDING NUDE oil on canvas on board 76.5 x 23.0cm signed lower left: MUNTZ Adams ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 18,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above c.1998

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NORMAN LINDSAY (1879 – 1969) FAUN AND LOVERS, 1952 watercolour on paper 54.0 x 56.0 cm signed and dated lower right: NORMAN LINDSAY / 1952

56

PROVENANCE Private collection, acquired directly from the artist Thence by descent Dr Peter Elliot AM, Sydney The Peter Elliott Collection, Mossgreen, Sydney, 30 August 2015, lot 53 The Estate of the Late Alan Cardy, Sydney

ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

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EMANUEL PHILLIPS FOX (1865 – 1915) LES ANDELYS–ON–SEINE, c.1909 – 1911 oil on canvas board 36.5 x 44.0 cm signed lower left: E. PHILLIPS FOX ESTIMATE: $16,000 – 20,000 PROVENANCE Collection of Douglas Dundas and Dorothy Thornhill, Sydney Thence by descent Kerry Dundas, Sydney Robyn Brady Pty Ltd, Sydney

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Private collection, Sydney, acquired in 1989 Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 27 November 2013, lot 62 Private collection, Melbourne RELATED WORKS Chateau Gaillard on the Seine, c.1909 – 1911, oil on canvas, 65.0 x 81.4 cm, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, illus. in Zubans, R., E. Phillips Fox: His Life and Art, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1995, C49, cat. 335, p. 226 Chateau Gaillard, Les Andelys on Seine, c.1909, oil on canvas on hardboard, 64.7 x 80.6 cm, in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth

ARTHUR STREETON (1867 – 1943) THE ROYAL BARGE AT ETON, 1903 watercolour and pencil on paper 36.5 x 53.0 cm signed and dated lower left: Arthur Streeton / 1903 bears inscription on gallery label verso: THE ROYAL BARGE AT ETON / SIR ARTHUR STREETON / 1903.

ESTIMATE: $15,000 – 20,000 PROVENANCE Sir Baldwin Spencer, Melbourne, by 1907 P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd, London, by 1940 (label attached verso) Private collection Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne Private collection Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 25 November 2009, lot 33 Private collection, Melbourne

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EXHIBITED An Exhibition of Pictures by Arthur Streeton Prior to his return to Europe, Hibernian Hall, 20 – 27 April 1907, cat. 52 Sir W. Baldwin Spencer’s Collection, National Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1 December 1916, cat. 29 (as ‘Royal Barge at Eton’) Loan Exhibition of Australian paintings, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 9 July - 29 August 1925, cat. 43 (label attached verso, as 'The King's Barge at Eton') RELATED WORKS The King’s Barge, Eton, oil on canvas, 76.0 x 51.0 cm, private collection, Victoria The King's Barge at Eton, watercolour, 36.7 x 52.8 cm, The Howard Hinton Collection, in the collection of the New England Regional Art Museum, New South Wales The King’s Barge, Eton, 1905, watercolour on paper, 21.5 x 31.5 cm, private collection

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ALBERT NAMATJIRA

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(1902 – 1959) NORTH GULLY LOOKING TO MT GILLEN, ALICE SPRINGS, c.1955 – 57 watercolour and pencil on paper on card 26.5 x 37.5 cm (sheet) signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA bears inscription verso: NTH GULLY LOOKING TO MT. GILLEN, ALICE SPRING [sic.]

ESTIMATE: $30,000 – $40,000

PROVENANCE Private collection, Sydney Private collection, Queensland, acquired c.1980 Thence by descent Private collection, Queensland RELATED WORK Alice Springs Country, c.1955 – 59, watercolour on paper, 37.5 x 53.0 cm, illus. in French, A. (ed.), Seeing the Centre; The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 143

‘Albert Namatjira…emerges…as an artist of genuine creativity, whose work embodied the love of, and identification with the land.’1 In transporting his evocative landscapes of Central Australia into the lounge rooms of White Australia in the mid-twentieth century, Albert Namatjira set the foundations for the recognition of an Indigenous art that was to emerge thirty years later and flourish into the twentyfirst century. A household name by the 1950s, and the first Aboriginal person to be granted full Australian citizenship, his depictions of country were fundamental to how Australians viewed their island home. ‘Namatjira’s dramatic entry into the Australian art world was both inspired and inspiring. He inspired his own and subsequent generations of Aboriginal people and artists across Australia. In skillfully adopting the methods and materials of Western landscape painting he challenged the relegation of Aboriginal art to the realm of archaeology and ethnography.’2 Painted in the final years of the artist’s life, and typical of Namatjira’s later works, North Gully Looking to Mt Gillen, Alice Springs, c. 1955 – 57 is an exemplar of the artist’s recurring motifs. Located in the

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foreground, a majestic ghost gum (Eucalyptus papuana) – known as ilwempe to the Western Arrernte – frames the view to the abrupt slopes of Akngwelye (Mount Gillen) in the middle distance and out to the distant peaks beyond. ‘Namatjira’s familiarity with this country is evident in these views where trees, peaks and monoliths provide a rich range of possibilities and responses that arise from constantly re-engaging with the same subject.’3 One of three prominent hills surrounding Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and sacred to the Arrernte, Akngwelye (Mount Gillen) is found approximately ten kilometres to the west of Alice Springs rising up from the Larapinta valley. In Mythological times, Mount Gillen was the site of a struggle between an ancestral wild dog named Akngwelye and an intruder.

Their skirmish created many of the natural features of the landscape to the west of Alice Springs and the striking peak of Mount Gillen is the resting place of Akngwelye. Wenten Rubuntja, artist and Chairman of the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority in Mparntwe, explained the sensitivity to plural meanings required in the appreciation of Namatjira’s artworks: ‘…we’re not photographers, taking pictures. The country has got sacred sites, that stone, that mountain has got Dreaming and himself is sacred country. Not just free mountain. We sing that one – we got that song. Well, the song is the history of the country. […] Albert Namatjira used whitefella’s side of the story – he painted landscape. He painted the Twerrenge (Dreaming) side there as well. Namatjira used two Laws.’4 1. Nuggett Coombs, H. C., ‘Introduction’ in Amadio, N., Albert Namatjira; The Life and Work of an Australian Painter, McMillan, Melbourne, 1986, p. vii 2. Watson, K., ‘Poetic Justice: an overview of Indigenous Art’, in Perkins, H., One Sun, One Moon: Aboriginal Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007, p. 20 3. French, A., Seeing the Centre: The Art of Albert Namatjira 1902 – 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p. 96 4. Rubuntja cited in French, A., ‘We’ve Got to Follow that Old Man’s Tracks: Engaging with the Art of Albert Namatjira’, in Perkins, op. cit., p. 159 CRISPIN GUTTERIDGE

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ALBERT NAMATJIRA (1902 – 1959) MT LIEBIG FROM THE SOUTH, c.1945 watercolour on paper 33.0 x 50.0 cm (sheet) signed lower right: ALBERT NAMATJIRA inscribed verso: 60 gns / Mt Liebig from the South ESTIMATE: $18,000 – 25,000

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60

PROVENANCE Private collection, New South Wales, by 1953 Thence by descent Private collection, New South Wales

PADDY NYUNKUNY BEDFORD (c.1922 – 2007) UNTITLED, 2003 gouache on crescent board 51.0 x 76.5 cm bears a written dedication to the recipient verso, dictated

by Paddy Bedford and transcribed by Tony Oliver

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PROVENANCE Jirrawun Arts, Kununurra, Western Australia Paddy Bedford, Kununurra Private collection, Melbourne, a gift from the above

ESTIMATE: $12,000 – 15,000

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BRETT WHITELEY (1939 – 1992) BIRD ON A BRANCH, 1977 sugarlift aquatint on paper 43.0 x 75.0 cm (image) 68.5 x 78.5 cm (sheet) edition: artist’s proof aside from an edition of 60 with 8–10 APs signed and numbered below image stamped with studio stamp lower right: BW ESTIMATE: $8,000 – 12,000 PROVENANCE Australian Galleries, Melbourne Private collection, Perth

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EXHIBITED Brett Whiteley, Recent Painting and Drawings, Fischer Fine Art, London, September 1977, cat. 76 (another example, as ‘Bird on Branch’) LITERATURE Mandy, R., Brett Whiteley: The Complete Graphics, 1961 – 1982, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1983, cat. 29, p. 27 (illus., another example) Deutscher, C., Brett Whiteley The Graphics 1961 – 1992, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 1995, cat. 44, p. 52 (illus., another example) Sutherland, K., Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, cat. 87P, vol. 3, p. 442 (illus., another example), vol. 5, p.

92 (illus., another example), vol. 7, p. 824

JOHN COBURN (1925 – 2006) PHOENIX, 1971 gouache on paper 55.0 x 76.0 cm signed lower right: Coburn signed, dated and inscribed verso: John Coburn / Phoenix / Paris 1971 ESTIMATE: $20,000 – 30,000

63

PROVENANCE C. Dorothy Lewis Irrevocable Trust, New York Doyles, New York, 11 April 2018, lot 19 Private collection, Singapore Klas Art Auction, Malaysia, 23 September 2018, lot 52 Private collection, Malaysia RELATED WORK Phoenix, 1971, oil on canvas, 79.5 x 98.0 cm, private collection

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1. PRIOR TO AUCTION CATALOGUE SUBSCRIPTIONS Catalogues can be obtained at Deutscher and Hackett offices or by subscription (see the Catalogue Subscription Form at the back of this catalogue or online for more information).

PRE-SALE ESTIMATES The price range estimated against each lot reflects the opinion of our art specialists as to the hammer price expected for the lot at auction and is informed by realised prices for comparable works as well as the particularities of each lot including condition, quality, provenance and rarity. While presale estimates are intended as a guide for prospective buyers, lots can be sold outside of these ranges. Pre-sale estimates include GST (if any) on a lot but do not include the buyer’s premium or other charges where applicable.

prospective buyers and sellers guide ALL PARTIES ARE STRONGLY URGED TO READ THE CONDITIONS OF AUCTION AND SALE INCLUDED IN THIS CATALOGUE

RESERVES The reserve is the minimum price including GST (if any) that the vendor will accept for a lot and below which the lot will not normally be sold.

PRE-AUCTION VIEWINGS In both Sydney and Melbourne pre-auction viewings are scheduled for several days in advance of each auction. Deutscher and Hackett specialists are available to give obligation free advice at viewings or by appointment and prospective buyers are strongly encouraged to thoroughly examine and request condition reports for potential purchases. Pre-auction viewings are open to the public and are free to attend.

SYMBOL KEY ▲ Unless ownership is clearly stated in the provenance, this symbol is used where a lot is offered which Deutscher and Hackett owns in whole or in part. In these instances, Deutscher and Hackett has a direct financial interest in the property or means that Deutscher and Hackett has guaranteed a minimum price. ● Used to indicate lots for sale without a reserve.

EXPLANATION OF CATALOGUING PRACTICE AND TERMS All information published in Deutscher and Hackett catalogues represent statements of opinion and should not be relied upon as fact. All dimensions are listed in centimetres, height before width and are approximate. All prices are in Australian dollars.

ARTIST’S NAMES All reference to artists make use of common and not full names in accordance with the standards outlined in the National Gallery of Australia reference publication Australian Art: Artist’s working names authority list. For instance, John Brack rather than Cecil John Brack; Roy de Maistre rather than Leroy Leveson Laurent De Maistre; Rosalie Gascoigne rather than Rosalie Norah Gascoigne.

Terms used in this catalogue have the meanings ascribed to them below: a. NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by the artist. b. Attributed to NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, probably a work by the artist, in whole or in part. c. Circle of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work showing the influence and style of the artist and of the artist’s period. d. Studio/Workshop of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work possibly executed under the supervision of the artist. e. School of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work by a follower or student of the artist. f. Manner of NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a work created in the style, but not necessarily in the period, of the artist. g. After NICHOLAS CHEVALIER: in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, a copy of a work by the artist. h. “signed” / “dated” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has been signed/dated by the artist. i. “bears signature” / “bears date” in the opinion of Deutscher and Hackett, the work has possibly been signed/dated by someone other than the artist.

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PROVENANCE Where appropriate, Deutscher and Hackett will include the known provenance, or history of ownership of lots. Non disclosure may indicate that prior owners are unknown or that the seller wishes to maintain confidentiality.

2. THE AUCTION Auctions are open to the public and are free to attend. Deutscher and Hackett may exclude any person at any time in its discretion.

REGISTRATION Bidders must register to bid prior to the commencement of an auction. Deutscher and Hackett may impose other obligations on the registration of bidders in its discretion.

CONDUCT OF AUCTION Lots are offered for sale on a consecutive basis. Deutscher and Hackett will determine the conduct of the auction in its absolute discretion, including the regulation of bidding. Consecutive or responsive bids may be placed by the auctioneer on behalf of the vendor up to the reserve.

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

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

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

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

3. AFTER THE AUCTION PAYMENTS Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer. If payment is made by credit card the price will increase by any merchant fees payable

by Deutscher and Hackett (1.15% (including GST) for Visa and Mastercard and 1.65% (including GST) for American Express). In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Cleared funds will be held in an interest bearing trust account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to retain any interest earned during this period. Payment by the vendor of any charge to Deutscher and Hackett is to be made within fourteen days of invoice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEFINITIONS 1.

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

conditions of auction and sale

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

‘GST’ refers to the goods and services tax imposed by the A New Tax System (Goods and Services) Act 1999 as amended.

g. The ‘lot’ refers to the item(s) described against any lot number in the catalogue.

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

h. The ‘reserve’ refers to the minimum price (including any GST) the consignor will accept for a lot.

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

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interest at a rate of 17.5% p.a. will be charged over outstanding accounts where no extension of terms has been granted. Interest will be payable from the payment due date. With respect to each lot purchased, the buyer agrees to make the following payments within seven days from the date of sale: a. The hammer price. b. In exchange for ser vices rendered by Deutscher and Hackett, a buyer’s premium calculated at 25% (inclusive of GST) of the hammer price. c. Post sale packing, handling, shipping and storage where applicable. d. If payment is made via Visa, Mastercard or American Express, any merchant fees payable by Deutscher and Hackett on the transaction as indicated in the prospective buyers and sellers guide.

Payment must be made within seven days of the date of sale in Australian dollars by cash, cheque, direct deposit, approved credit cards or electronic funds transfer using the form and/or trust account details provided at the back of this catalogue.

In certain circumstances, extension of payment may be granted at the discretion of Deutscher and Hackett. Once funds have cleared, the proceeds of the sale less the buyer’s Premium, GST and any commission or costs charged as agreed will be remitted to the vendor within thirty-five days of the date of sale provided payment has been received in full. Funds will be held in an interest bearing account by Deutscher and Hackett until remitted to the vendor. Deutscher and Hackett will be entitled to any interest earned during this period. Application for a cultural heritage export licence or any other licence in no way affects the buyer’s obligation to make payment or collection within the periods specified in sections 10 and 13a.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

163

ATTENDEE PRE-REGISTRATION FORM (Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Business name

Address

City

Telephone/Mobile

State

Post Code

SALE CODE: SKINNER SALE NO.: 076 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 22 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

Email

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611 info@deutscherandhackett.com

164

TELEPHONE BID FORM SALE CODE: SKINNER SALE NO.: 076 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 22 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

(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 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

2.

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

4.

info@deutscherandhackett.com

5.

3.

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.

165

ABSENTEE BID FORM (Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss) Name (please print)

Billing address (PO Box insufficient)

Address

City

Telephone

State

Post Code

Business/Mobile

SALE CODE: SKINNER SALE NO.: 076 IMPORTANT AUSTRALIAN + INTERNATIONAL FINE ART SYDNEY AUCTION 22 NOVEMBER, 7:00 PM LOTS 1 — 63 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

Facsimile Email

Signature (required)

LOT NO.

ARTIST/TITLE

Date

MAXIMUM BID*

1.

2.

3.

please email, post or fax this completed form to: DEUTSCHER AND HACKETT 36 GOSBELL ST PADDINGTON NSW 2021

4.

tel: 02 9287 0600 fax: 02 9287 0611

5.

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.

166

INTERNAL USE ONLY RECEIVED BY

DATE

TIME

© Wendy Whiteley/Copyright Agency, 2023 © Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori/Copyright Agency 2023

consigning now important australian indigenous art AUCTION • MELBOURNE • MARCH 2024 for appraisals please contact

MELBOURNE • 03 9865 6 333 SYDNE Y • 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

MIRDIDINGKINGATHI JUWARNDA SALLY GABORI NINJILKI, 2008 synthetic polymer paint on linen 198.5 x 302.5 cm

Sold for $251,591 (inc. BP) Melbourne, 22 March 2023

© Wendy Whiteley/Copyright Agency, 2023

consigning now important australian + international fine art for appraisals please contact

MELBOURNE • 03 9865 6 333 SYDNE Y • 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

4 NOV 2023 — 25 FEB 2024

SURREALIST LEE MILLER

Made possible through the generous support of our Principal Partner Joy Anderson image: Lee Miller, Self portrait with headband, New York c.1932 © Lee Miller Archives England 2023. All Rights Reserved. www.leemiller.co.uk 170

NADINE CHRISTENSEN

24.11.23 – 07.04.24 Wednesday–Sunday, free admission Nadine Christensen, Up all night (detail) 2023, courtesy of the artist and Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne. Photograph: Christian Capurro 171

172

173

ON SHOW IN CANBERRA

15 DECEMBER 2023 – 8 SEPTEMBER 2024 nma.gov.au/ancient-egypt

TICKETS NOW ON SALE

PRESENTING PARTNER

174

MA JOR PARTNER

The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, the Netherlands), the National Museum of Australia, the Western Australian Museum and the Queensland Museum Network. Inner coffin of Amenhotep (detail), 21st Dynasty, about 1076–944 BCE, Thebes, Egypt. © Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.

Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art 20 Oct 2023 – 21 Jan 2024

AGSA Kaurna yartangka yuwanthi. AGSA stands on Kaurna land. agsa.sa.gov.au Adelaide

175

FREE ENTRY 3 DEC 2023 – 7 APR 2024 ONLY IN MELBOURNE SMACK Speculum 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the artists and Colección SOLO, Madrid © SMACK PRESENTING PARTNER

PRINCIPAL PARTNER

MAJOR PARTNERS

NGV TRIENNIAL CHAMPIONS FELTON BEQUEST

|

DESIGN PARTNER

NGV TRIENNIAL LEAD SUPPORTERS

JULY CAO

|

BARRY JANES & PAUL CROSS

LOTI & VICTOR SMORGON FUND

|

NGVWA

|

|

NEVILLE & DIANA BERTALLI

JOE WHITE BEQUEST

|

MICHAEL & EMILY TONG

|

BOWNESS FAMILY FOUNDATION

ELIZABETH SUMMONS GRANT IN MEMORY OF NICHOLAS DRAFFIN VIVIEN & GRAHAM KNOWLES

|

BYOUNG HO SON

TAPESTRY FOUNDATION OF AUSTRALIA

176

LEARNING PARTNER

|

LISA FOX

| |

|

JO HORGAN AM & PETER WETENHALL

ORLOFF FAMILY CHARITABLE TRUST SOLOMON FAMILY FOUNDATION

|

|

|

177

Creating new beginnings for women and children at risk of homelessness with permanent and affordable homes.

Donate now at

wpi.org.au/donatenow 178

Kungka Kunpu

179

artgallery.wa.gov.au

e t a t n Sf o i t c a o bstr A

rks o 6 w rn 9 ng este i s ca of W st w o Sh some ’s mo ts n. o i s a i t by trali t art trac s Au ortan in abs imp rking 24 R o w MA 0 –1 V O 4N

180

Helen Smith May 2014 Alighiero e Boetti from Wikipedia, United Nations 2014 (detail). Oil on canvas, 150 x 210 cm. The State Art Collection, The Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased through the Sir Claude Hotchin Art Foundation, The Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation, 2014. © Helen Smith, 2014.

The Perry Collection comprises over 300 works of the Meldrum school of Australian Tonalism. This new publication illustrates and describes the work of Max Meldrum and his principal early associates including Bale, Beckett, Colahan, Colquhoun, Farmer, Hurry, Jorgensen, Frater, Leason and Shore.

Extensively researched with five Appendices, Bibliography, and Catalogue of Works, the publication provides new information on Meldrum. There are 145 colour reproductions and 40 black and white images. Foreword by Dr Gerard Vaughan AM. Printed in an edition of 500 numbered copies. $50 plus $15 for postage and handling.

Email order direct to: peterwperry13@gmail.com

181

COPYRIGHT CREDITS Lot 1

© Margaret Preston/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 23

© Charles Blackman/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 47

© Courtesy of the artist's estate

Lot 3

© Frank Hinder/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 28

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 48

© Claude Venard / Copyright Agency, 2023

Lot 4

© courtesy of Helen Brack

Lot 29

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 49

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 5

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 30

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 50

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 6

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 31

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 52

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed

Lot 7

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 32

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 8

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 33

© Vivienne Yvonne Audette/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 56

© H.C. & A. Glad

Lot 9

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 35

© Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 59

© Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 10

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 36

© Succession Picasso/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 60

© Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 11

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 38

© Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 61

© courtesy of The Estate of Paddy Bedford

Lot 12

© Ian Fairweather/DACS. Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 39

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed

Lot 62

© Wendy Whiteley/Copyright Agency, 2023

Lot 13

© Estate of Fred Williams/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 63

© John Coburn/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 14

© courtesy of Helen Brack

Lot 15

© courtesy of Helen Brack

Lot 16

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 17

© Cressida Campbell/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 18

by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art Lot 40

© The Estate of Howard Arkley. Licensed

Lot 41

© Patricia Piccinini. Courtesy of the artist

© Rosalie Gascoigne/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 42

© Dale Frank

Lot 19

© Tony Tuckson/Copyright Agency 2023

Lot 44

© Meadmore Sculptures, LLC/VAGA.

Lot 20

© The Albert & Barbara Tucker Foundation.

Lot 45

© Bruce Armstrong

Lot 46

© Bernard Buffet / Copyright Agency, 2023

Courtesy of Smith and Singer Australia Lot 21

© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency 2023

by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney

Copyright Agency, 2023

CULTURAL HERITAGE PERMITS

LOTS CONSIGNED BY GST REGISTERED ENTITIES

Under the provisions of the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act, 1986, buyers may be required to obtain an export permit for certain categories of items in this sale from the Cultural Property Section:

Lot 21

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

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

Design and Photography: Danny Kneebone Design and Photography Manager © Published by Deutscher and Hackett Pty Ltd 2023

978-0-6457871-1-5

182

Arthur Boyd

by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

index ARKLEY, H.

39, 40, 52

ARMSTRONG, B. AUDETTE, Y.

P

G

A 45 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33

18, 38

PICASSO, P.

35, 36

GLOVER, J.

24

PICCININI, P.

41

GREY-SMITH, G.

37

PRESTON, M.

1

GRUNER, E.

27

GASCOIGNE, R.

R

B

ROBINSON, W.

BEDFORD, P.

61

H

BLACK, D.

2

HINDER, F.

3

BLACKMAN, C.

23

HIRSCHFELD-MACK, L.

47

BOYD, A.

21

BRACK, J,

4, 14, 15

BUFFET, B.

46

CAMPBELL, C.

16, 17, 49, 50

CHUN, K. Y.

34

COBURN, J.

63

COSSINGTON SMITH, G.

54

F FAIRWEATHER, I.

S STREETON, A.

25, 58

J JERREMS, C.

43

L

C

22

LAMBERT, G. W.

53

LINDSAY, N.

56

T TUCKER, A.

20

TUCKSON, T.

19

V VENARD, C.

48

M MEADMORE, C.

44

W

MUNTZ ADAMS, J.

55

WHITELEY, B.

62

WILLIAMS, F.

13

WILSON, E.

26

5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

FOX, E. P.

57

N

FRANK, D.

42

NAMATJIRA, A.

FULLBROOK, S.

51

59, 60

183

184

187

specialist fine art auction house and private gallery