John Cruthers

MENZIES AUSTRALIAN & INTERNATIONAL FINE ART & SCULPTURE Sydney 24 September 2015 Several of the best works in this sale are well above the buying budgets of my clients, so as usual I have not written about them. This is a shame, because if any of you has a spare $350,000, Ian Fairweather’s Fascismo is a superb late painting and easily museum standard. But overall it’s an interesting sale containing some unusual and offbeat items. So I have taken the opportunity to introduce some new artists I’ve not previously recommended, and to reiterate my enthusiasm for a couple of others I’ve had little success with. Other works I’ve not recommended because I have no-one collecting in the area, for example the two terrific 1973 prints by US pop master Jim Dine, or the 1976 screenprint by Bridget Riley, the major figure in the international op art movement. I hope you enjoy seeing some new artists and, as always, I am very pleased to discuss any works of interest to you that I have not included in the presentation. JOHN CRUTHERS rococo pop pty ltd In a recent sale I recommended a painting by Albert Tucker called Woman 1950, of a prostitute standing in a doorway in a bombed-out looking Paris. I commented that the years Tucker spent overseas, roughly 1947-60, represented a highpoint in his work. He saw a lot of great art, worked hard and strove to produce work that measured up to the best contemporary art he was seeing. The current work is a study in which Tucker tries a variety of stylistic devices borrowed from late cubism to depict the female form in interior space. Picasso is the obvious reference point, and one can feel Picasso’s breakthrough painting Les demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 behind the work. Tucker’s handling of the forms and space is interesting without being radical. Perhaps the strongest aspect is his employment of the pig-like faces first developed in his wartime series Images of modern evil. For a collector interested in radical impulses in Australian mid century modernism, this is a potentially good painting. It shows Tucker working confidently in an international idiom, in a way that few Australian artists were back home. In this way it connects Australian art to the world rather than stressing its difference. The work is under-estimated and I suggest $12- 15,000 as more reasonable. I’d recommend the painting to the high estimate. 1. ALBERT TUCKER 1914-1999 Figures with Red Hair 1949 gouache on paper 26.0 x 33.0 cm $6,000 - $9,000 13. MARGARET PRESTON 1875-1963 Flowers (Australian) 1955 also known as Native Wild Flowers oil on canvas 43 x 35.5 cm $35,000 - $45,000 Margaret Preston’s period of greatest influence in Australian art was roughly 1925- 45. Her work moved from a lively English inflected post impressionism to include radical elements of cubism and stylization, often introduced via her woodblock print-making. Later in the period she turned from still life to the landscape and, under the influence of Aboriginal art she was seeing on her travels in the outback, produced landscapes in an Aboriginal palette and featuring the dramatic stylization of Aboriginal bark paintings. In the final decade of her painting life, roughly 1945-55, she built on these developments in a series of striking monoprints and colour stencils that depicted bush scenes and even overt Aboriginal subject matter. Over the period she made fewer paintings, but those she did mirrored her prints and constitute an overlooked and undervalued area of her oeuvre. The current work is typical. A handful of native flowers, including wattle, bottlebrush, daisies and a dried banksia cone are placed in a white vase and painted quickly and purposefully. They are set against a piece of patterned Aboriginal fabric to stress the Australian-ness of the whole effort. As in many of her late works, Preston is consciously remaking Australian art. Included in the artist’s catalogue raisonne, the current painting was sold at Sotheby’s in 1987 for $30,000. It next appeared at Niagara Galleries’ Blue Chip XVI in 2014, price $65,000. I viewed it then and mentioned it to a couple of clients. It’s now on offer at $35-45,000 and should be buyable within estimates, quite an attractive price. Recommended to the high estimate, but possibly buyable cheaper. John Olsen’s best early work was made from the late 1950s to about 1965. The wild, expressive and calligraphic line work that fueled his painting was used to depict Olsen’s immediate environment, first in Spain and then back in harbor-side Sydney. It culminated in his breakthrough body of work, the You Beaut Country series. Later in this period he visited Hill End and like many artists was inspired by the atmospheric old gold mining town to develop a new approach to painting that involved heavier brushstrokes, walking the paintbrush rather than a graphic line around the painting. While the current work’s title does not suggest a Hill End subject, it is similar in style and palette to Hill End works from the same year included in Olsen’s AGNSW retrospective. The other reference point in the work is the 1962 Ian Fairweather exhibition at Macquarie Galleries. This put Fairweather on the map as a major artist and was lauded by critics, included Olsen’s close friend Robert Hughes. The over-painting and sense of shifting faces within the image, ‘sliding’ as Olsen calls it, is typical of Fairweather’s 1962 works such as Nightlife. This is a powerful small painting that would suit an Olsen collector with Olsen’s more common early 1960s styles already covered. It would benefit from the paper support being bleached to lessen browning, but the paint layer is in good shape overall. The estimates 14. JOHN OLSEN born 1928 are toppy and I’d hope to buy it mid estimate. The Image Slides 1963 Strongly recommended. oil and gouache on paper 55.0 x 75.0 cm $18,000 - $26,000 John Perceval overcame a broken home and childhood polio to become one of Australia’s most interesting young artists in the 1940s. A close friend of Arthur Boyd, his tough street scenes of the war years were the equal of Boyd’s, but his focus was often on children, not the tormented adults of his friend. In the post-war period he painted bucolic landscapes and achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success in the late 1950s with his Williamstown series. Painted en plein air at the old dock town near Melbourne, the works were a passionate alla prima response to the tugboats and jetties, buoys and scudding swans of the ramshackle location. Their thick impasto and heavily worked surfaces gave them a liveliness of paint that expressed Perceval’s almost ecstatic view of the world. By the early 1960s Perceval had begun to drink heavily. He could maintain enough control to complete successful paintings, but by about 1965 he was struggling, and the next two decades were lost years for Perceval. He did not emerge until the later 1980s to paint disappointingly lifeless versions of his best earlier works. In Suburb through the heath Perceval presents a view out of bush towards suburbia. The intensely worked foreground of flowers, grasses and trees gives way to houses with windows and roofs. The surface is almost knitted in paint, with heavily interwoven brushstrokes. While not a work of the best quality, it’s quite a good painting and purchased at the lower estimate, represents the chance to own a strong work by a major post-war painter. 17. JOHN PERCEVAL 1923-2000 Suburb Through the Heath 1963 oil on canvas 81.5 x 97.0 cm $30,000 - $40,000 When viewed, this mid period landscape by Ken Whisson has a satisfying blockiness, the outlined buildings suggesting stage sets in a play – fittingly given the title, Ghosts on the lake, which could refer to a Russian play by say Anton Chekhov. The painting has a distinct whiff of late 19th century European modernism. The lack of human presence is very noticeable – the buildings and walk ways are empty and somehow transparent. Whisson’s approach to painting is to begin each work with no idea what he will paint. He makes the first marks and a subject or subject matter suggests itself. If he stalls or reaches a dead end, he puts the painting aside to return to it later. The current painting was completed in four sittings over four years, which even for Whisson is a slow gestation. At 70 x 80 cm the painting is in Whisson’s smallest size. Estimates are high at $20-28,000 and I’d suggest it will sell closer to $18,000, at which it would be reasonable buying. 21. KEVIN WHISSON born 1927 Ghosts on the Lake: The Guest House 1992-96 oil on linen 71.0 x 80.5 cm $20,000 - $28,000 71. LYNDON DADSWELL 1908-1986 Abstract Tower c1974 bronze 42.5 x 21.0 x 16.0 cm $10,000 - $15,000 Lyndon Dadswell was a significant post-war sculptor and teacher in Sydney. From 1935 he studied sculpture in London at the Royal Academy, influenced by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Later he enlisted in the Australian Infantry Forces where, after being injured in service, he was appointed a war artist. In 1943 he returned to Sydney to continue what was to become a long and successful career as a teacher at East Sydney Technical College.

Load more