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Lot 89
ARR Olwyn Bowey (born 1936) - Oil painting - "Artists and Flower Study" - Still life of jug of flowers and toilet mirror on a chest of drawers, canvas 24ins x 20ins, apparently unsigned, in original grey painted wide frame Provenance : Fieldborne Galleries, 63 Queens Grove, St. Johns Wood, London NW8 6ER, with copy of invoice dated 28th September 1982, price £475
Lot 152
Peter Cushing (1913-1994) - Watercolour - "Impression of an Oil Painting by Grimal" - Still life with fruit, 10.25ins x 14.5ins, apparently unsigned but inscribed in Peter Cushing`s hand and worded "With love and thanks to dear Joyce and Bernard, and may God`s blessing be with you always, as ever Helen and Peter 6.ix.86", in modern gilt moulded frame and glazed Note : Last picture by Peter Cushing O.B.E. from his home at 3 Seaway Cottages, Whitstable, Kent, bequeathed to his Co-Executor. Image was published in the 2008 Pilgrims Hospice Calendar, photography sponsored by The Canterbury Auction Galleries"
Lot 11
Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1931) red still life the rare etching with aquatint printed in colours 1989 signed in pencil numbered 23/50 on wove paper with full margins in good condition 200 x 250mm. IMPORTANT: This lot is sold subject to Artists Resale Rights details of which can be found in our Terms and Conditions.
Lot 204
* MANEVICH, ABRAHAM 1883-1942 Still Life with Fruit and Bouquet of Flowers (on the reverse) one side stamped with a signature, with several estate stamps on the stretcher Oil on canvas, 79 by 66.5 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from the estate of the artist. Ben Rifkin, New York. Private collection, New York, c. 1985. Authenticity of the work has been confirmed by Alan Pensler and Mimi Ginsberg, authors of forthcoming monograph on Abraham Manevich.
Lot 205
CHUPYATOV, LEONID 1890-1941 Speeding Train signed and dated 1924 Oil on canvas, 66 by 94 cm. Provenance: Private collection, St Petersburg. Private collection, Europe. During the last few years, interest in Leonid Chupyatov’s work has not simply grown, his name is now synonymous with the best work of the vibrant decades in Post Civil War Soviet Russia. First and foremost, Chupyatov was one of K. Petrov-Vodkin’s best students. From him Chupyatov adopted an extraordinary vision for compositional and spatial aspects of art, boldness of palette, and most of all faultless taste. Less sensual, but more rational and constructive in his technotronic approach than his great teacher, Chupyatov created a whole series of picturesque canvases that resemble “camera obscura”, where his views of inner courtyards, apertures of ladders, deserted industrial landscapes, and even still-lifes are hypertrophied. They resemble the shocking, in-your-face works of the Stenberg brothers and the metaphysical monochrome fantasies of Rodchenko. “Immobility” of Chupyatov’s works contrasts with the sense of movement penetrating a scene of action and time. This is especially evident on the picture presented for the auction. The illusion of speed literally takes the viewer’s breath away, while the dispersion of the vectors of the composition conveys the power of the streams of air. In this brilliant solution of the most complicated problem of absolute balance, the massive train, nearly falling off the slope as it speeds frenziedly, appears almost weightless, as though kept afloat by a dense trail of its own smoke. This work was executed by Leonid Chupyatov in 1924, when he belonged to the artistic community Zhar-Tsvet. It was, perhaps, the best period of his life, a time of revelations and unexpected, courageous discoveries, of mature self-evaluation of his creative path
Lot 219
* SEREBRIAKOVA, ZINAIDA 1884-1967 Self-Portrait signed and dated 1938, also stamped twice by Z. Serebriakova`s atelier and numbered "20F/2248" on the reverse Oil on canvas, 73.5 by 60.5 cm. Provenance: The Serebriakova Foundation. Anonymous Sale, Sotheby’s London, November 2001, Lot 120. Related literature: For similar works, see V. Kruglov, Zinaida Serebriakova, Zolotoi Vek, St Petersburg, 2004, pp. 65, 101, 190. Serebriakova produced a great many self-portraits in her time. They reflect the artist’s life and offer an account of her feelings and thoughts, creative pursuits and objectives, as well as of a love for her children and a penchant for games and dressing up. The work offered for the auction represents an important turning point in the artist’s oeuvre. It was executed soon after the closing of a large exhibition of Serebriakova’s works in the gallery of J. Char pentier which despite its impressive contents did not yield material success. The artist was clearly painfully aware of her separateness from the artistic life of Paris which had only intensified over the years, but she had no wish to change herself. Alongside commissioned and non-commissioned portraits and still-lifes, she increasingly began to resort to painting self-portraits, with which she attempted to seize the transience of time and track its imprints not only on her appearance, but also on her growing skill and in the changing of her own outlook. A letter written in May 1938 to her children who had remained in Leningrad, is a testimony to how Serebriakova assessed the quality of her self-portraits: “But what rubbish my ‘self-portrait’ has turned out to be yet again!! I never knew that I was capable of producing such a mediocrity! My dear children, I implore you to destroy it…” In painting the self-portraits, Serebriakova is clearly setting herself different objectives. From an artistic viewpoint, the 1938 Self-Portrait is outstanding: in it, we no longer see the young, carefree woman of the self-portrait At the Dressing Table, or the romantic young lady of the Young Woman with a Candle. Rather, we face a mature artist. Serebriakova depicts herself at work, with paint-brushes in her hand. There is nothing deliberate in her choice of setting or her dress; moreover, paraphernalia neither underscores the exclusiveness of her craft, nor diverts the viewer’s attention from the artist’s radiant and serene expression. The portrait attracts with its immediate, captivating simplicity of feeling, its lyricism and tranquillity of a human being living in spiritual inner piece. In this self-portrait, Serebriakova achieves the confluence of the material and the ideal, a feature that distinguishes a true masterpiece. Dmitry Sarabyanov wrote that Serebriakova “is quite unique in her distrust of the mirror. It is of no concern to her that her left hand in the mirror becomes her right, and that it is her left hand…that holds the paint-brush. Serebriakova paints as she sees it. For her, the reflection of objects in the mirror is not an illusion, not a vacillating ephemeral phenomenon hovering on the boundary between reality and imagination, but a reality that is just as legitimate as that of the items themselves… Serebriakova never placed her own personality at the centre of the universe, did not impose her ideas about the world or her lifestyle upon anyone, and certainly did not pride herself on her features or her body. A self-portrait for her was simply a sign of one’s own existence in a world of nature, people and things – in a world of equivalencies. For the artist, it was the most ‘immediate’ manifestation of the existence of reality. The idea behind her self-portraits is surprisingly simple: it could even be interpreted as foolishly naïve, if this simplicity had not expressed the truth. In the second decade of the 20th century, the artist startled her contemporaries by reminding them how the truth could be expressed through simple words and acts without the need to resort to contrivances and subterfuge. Yet she was able to do this – and, moreover, she did this so naturally, without any particular effort. All she had to do was strive towards a conduct that would not dissipate what had purely and simply been conferred upon her by nature.”
Lot 236
* GUDIASHVILI, LADO 1896-1980 Devi Abducting a Beauty signed in Georgian and dated 1942 Oil on canvas, 100 by 67.5 cm. Authenticity certificate from the House Museum of Lado Gudiashvili, Batumi, Georgia, expert Zaur Tsuladze. Fantasies featuring naked female figures first appeared in Gudiashvili’s work during his years in Paris, where between 1919 and 1925 he honed his skills. This was a time of vigorous growth of modernist trends, and Gudiashvili had a natural inclination towards the decorative and expressive qualities of art of the new age. Following his return to Georgia, the artist strove for some time to become part of the development of Soviet art, giving his decorative talents entirely over to portraying the “New Life” he could see around him. However, from as early as the second half of the 1930s, fantasy and romanticism were taking precedence over “real”, social themes. Inspired by the success of archaeologists who had discovered major sites in the Armazi district in Mtskheta, the ancient capital of Georgia, Gudiashvili immersed himself in the world of his country’s legendary past, and in 1940 painted The Walk of Seraphita, one of his largest works. The name of Seraphita, the daughter of Zevakh, the junior Pitiakhsh (governor) of Tsar Farsman, became famous from an inscription that had been discovered on one of the tombs. And although there was no hint of any specific historical details in the artist’s work, this theme provided great scope for fantasy, and the successes of Soviet science, which was still in its infancy, served as the necessary source of inspiration. Henceforth, Gudiashvili would turn repeatedly to images inspired by the historical past and Georgian folklore, and in fact began to create, year after year, his own mythology based on Georgian themes. During the course of each decade the artist painted an entire series of canvases which represented variations on the theme which was close to his heart from the 1920s onwards, that of “maidens and beasts”. Most notably there is an entire gallery of “devis” – perennial characters of national Georgian folk-tales, good or evil spirits, presented in various guises in the works Devi Abducting a Beauty, Before the Stroll, and The Battle of the Amazonians and the Devi (all painted in 1942), Face to Face (1951), Woman with a Lion (1953) etc. Gudiashvili’s bestiary became more defined and, one might say, more aggressive in its symbolism. In place of the former peaceful idyllic scenes, we are now presented with tempestuous movement: here we have women lost in a dance, rearing horses, masks from national theatrical shows, and magnificent folk-tale garments. In place of the former languorous long figures and faces of whirling maidens, we see the substantial forms of full-blooded lovelies glowing with health. The spiritual aspect recedes into the background, giving precedence to physical beauty, sensuality and the overflowing joy of being alive. Gudiashvili’s style itself and the colours employed by him have also undergone significant changes, one of them being the emergence of thickly applied paint, iridescent colours and a “vibrating” surface, which replaced his former “flat” style. The artist himself acknowledged that these fantastic images brought him closer to the history and traditions of his homeland: “I have thought about this so much that I have at times mentally reconciled the forces of good and evil. This is how, for example, I thought of my large canvas The Wedding of the Devis (The Wedding Procession of the Devis, 1954). In this work the gigantic, bizarre Devis have been presented by me as good creatures. Our national creativity embodies an inexhaustible source of fantasy, and this world never ceases to inspire me. Through my portrayal of Devis, I have first and foremost wished to express the desire for our motherland to be without enemies and for these inimical elements to develop a respectful and caring attitude towards the motherland. They ought to love and value its beauty … they ought to examine their consciences and become forces for good, and they ought to strive not to slight our country even through mere clumsiness. The portrayal of the Devis shows them to be full of good and love for people, and they even befriend people. This, of course, is possibly mere fantasy and is not entirely justified – is even unacceptable and unfeasible – but this is a world of fairy tales and I love it ... women are in fact protagonists in almost all my works, for after all woman is the source of life and goodness, and therefore women have also occupied the loftiest position in painting as a whole. For me women are the crowning glory of nature and the personification of its inexhaustible abundance”.
Lot 237
SEREBRIAKOVA, ZINAIDA 1884-1967 Bathing Nude signed and dated 1927 Pastel and pencil on paper, 47 by 62 cm. Provenance: Private collection, UK. Authenticity has been confirmed by Catherine Boncenne, niece of the artist. Related literature: For similar works, see V. Kruglov, Zinaida Serebriakova, Zolotoi Vek, St Petersburg, 2004. Serebriakova’s lovely pastel Bathing Nude, which she executed in 1927, is one of the earliest in a series of portraits of a young, dreamy model who became the artist’s favourite “life model” between the end of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s. In Serebriakova’s best works of this period, we time and again encounter this same, invariably pensive girl from a Parisian Russian family. She poses lying serenely on sheets with a red scarf (Nude with a Scarf, 1932); blowing out a candle before going to sleep (Nude with a Candle, 1934); sleeping (Nude, 1927); washing herself in a bath-house, long tresses of hair over her shoulder (The Bathhouse, 1926); and rubbing herself dry and relaxing (Reclining Nude in a Light Cherry Cloak, 1934).The nuances of the way the model is portrayed vary in each case, and some of the works are less finished than others. These variations are determined by the goals Serebriakova set herself in each occasion. For example, the work presented for the auction, similar to Torso for which the same model sat and which is now in the State Russian museum, is one of the more lively and gentle studies. It is executed in pastel, which brilliantly conveys the nuances of air and colour and is so well-suited to the purpose that even the seemingly misplaced strokes of chalk all but enhance the impression of the vibrancy of life. As an artist specialising in life drawing and painting, Serebriakova occupies a special place in the history of the art of her native land. She had no systematic training, but she did possess a natural taste in relation to how to portray a human body. The young artist had her first lessons in the laws of human anatomy during a brief period of study in the school of M.K. Tenisheva and in the studio of O. Braz in St Petersburg. Her education was continued in Paris (1905 to 1906), where she made a detailed study of the Louvre collection and made sketches from works by Brueghel, Watteau, and Fragonard that had made an impression upon her. Serebriakova produced her first “female bathers” in early 1920s, thus laying a foundation to a whole series of works that would bring her international recognition. Following a move to Paris in 1924, Serebriakova revisited her avourite topic and spent quite some time doing life drawing and painting. Thus, she created another version of her renowned work The Bathhouse, featuring the same model that sat for the pastel presented for the auction. However, the artist’s principal achievements between the late 1920s and the 1930s were her studies and her life sketches in pastel and oil, in which Serebriakova refrained from attempting, similar to Kabanel, to transform her life models into abstract “bathers” or heroines of ancient mythology. She filled her albums with entire series of “nudes” lying, sitting, and standing in various poses, drawn with astonishing ease and with a fine understanding of the female body. Serebriakova herself explained her passion for drawing and painting the naked body in a letter which she wrote from Paris to A. Savinov: “I have always had a passion for the theme of the nude, and the subject of The Bathhouse was merely a pretext for this purpose, and you are right that this is ‘simply because a young and clean human body is a nice thing’. At the beginning of my time here, that is from 1922 to 1934, I had a number of acquaintances – nice young Russian girls – who would agree to sit for me. Then they would go off and get married, and after that they would no longer have any time to act as models. I did not have the money to draw and paint professional life models, and I began to content myself with drawing and painting still life instead, and also managed to find some joy of painting in this ‘quiet life’ also …”
Lot 532
* § TSELKOV, OLEG B. 1934 Smoker signed, titled in Cyrillic and dated 1969 on the reverse Oil on canvas, laid on panel, 100 by 152.5 cm. Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner. Private collection, USA. Authenticity has been confirmed by the artist. Literature: Oleg Tselkov, Le Grandi Monographie, Turin, Fabbri Editori, 1988, p. 67, illustrated. Roger Pierre Turine, Oleg Tselkov, Bonfi, Moscow, 2002, p. 33, illustrated. Related literature: For similar works, see Roger Pierre Turine, Oleg Tselkov, Bonfi, Moscow, 2002. The image of the “pipe smoker” became one of the most important in Tselkov’s creative oeuvre during the second half of the 1960s. Evolving from the still life of 1964, in which a grey, large-toothed face, two long smoking pipes and a burning candle form the traditional vanitas composition, evocative of the “nature morte” of African totems and of ancient Latin American art, to the self portrait of 1969, and the suite which is made up of several impressive compositions of the same name, the image of “the smoker” grows, not only in relation to scale, but also in terms of meaning. This represents one of the allusions, which can occasionally be found in Tselkov’s works, to classical museum art - “the smokers”, a popular subject for painters, beginning with the Dutch and Flemish school of the 17th century, and continuing up to the time of Cezanne and Gris that became the darlings of the 20th century. Yet, Tselkov’s smoking monsters are merely a fragment of a classical painting, the spatial and compositional structure of which, containing references to well known iconographic motifs and traditional subjects, is merely a trick, a theatrical effect, designed to emphasise the alien nature of Tselkov’s world. Before us we do not see real people, whether in the form of a self-portrait of the artist or a canvas presented at the auction, but a world of simulacrums, in which genuine existence is wholly impossible. There is, therefore, no visible distinction between the genuine and the surrogate, nor is there any real difference between the mask and the face. The large toothed and toothless “Tselkov mugs”, which have been painted in the traditional palette of various shades of red, apathetically and, for no apparent reason, inhale and exhale clouds of grey and violet smoke. This smoke has poisoned everything that surrounds them: the yellow featureless towns and the spatial dimensions of life, squeezed into a frame and suspended by a nail. At the same time, Tselkov’s works contain no hint of the pathos of a Soviet poster calling for the battle for a better world; rather, what is at issue here is the metaphysical death of modern man and his urban world, in which, to use the words of the artist himself, no trace of “the face of god” remains. A student of the legendary theatre designer Nikolai Akimov, from his early days Tselkov was fascinated by experimenting with the “Jack of Diamonds” style of painting. However, the artist’s present-day fame has come about thanks to his so called “ugly mugs”: his bright, almost surrealistic canvases depicting round-headed creatures, which resemble humans with flabby bodies, blank eyes and large, glossy mask-like faces. Painted in bright, sparkling colours, usually against a black background, these “poster-like” garish images became a popular symbol in the West, as early as the 1970s, of the Soviet artistic underground: a caricature, in a sense, of Homo Soveticus. Tselkov himself stated that “I painted a portrait, so to speak; not a portrait of any individual subject, but, rather, a universal portrait of every human being, synthesised into one face, and one which is horribly familiar… This face is the face of modern humanity as a whole. I did not set myself the task of ‘ripping off the mask’: rather, I saw neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but something which was more real, more than skin-deep. And it is what we all are under the skin that brings all of us closer together. I cannot make any specific accusations against any particular person, but I am making more than a specific accusation against the large numbers of people who degrade one another, torment one another, and do away with one another. I am entitled to make such charges in relation to the past, the present and the future …” Tselkov was forced to leave for the West in 1977, where his work was compared to that of Fernand Leger, Francis Bacon and Fernando Botero, and occasionally to the later work of Kazimir Malevitch. As a result of Dovlatov’s famous story, the artist himself became a semi-mythical hero of underground art. Since that time, Tselkov’s works have found their way into museum collections on both sides of the Atlantic; as well as into public and private collections in Russia, the United States, France and Japan. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held in the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery, and the value of the artist’s works has risen in proportion to the increasing size of the paintings, which between the 1980s and 1990s, reached truly gigantic, mural-like dimensions.
Lot 131
SIR WILLIAM GEORGE GILLIES C.B.E., L.L.D., R.S.A., R.S.W., R.A (SCOTTISH 1898-1973), STILL LIFE, BLUE AND RED, Signed, oil on canvas, 91.5cm x 99cm (36in x 39in), Exhibited:Six Scottish Painters, Nottingham University, 1959. John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, no.449. Commonwealth Institute, London, Scottish Painters, 1963/64, no.14. Scottish Arts Council, Edinburgh, W G Gillies Retrospective 1970, no.14. Royal Scottish Academy, Gillies Centennary Exhibition 1998, no.205. Literature:Illustrated Studio January 1960
Lot 85
A large Coalport vase and cover by F. Howard, circa 1900-1925, the vase of shape number L/S 130 and decorated in pattern V.7540, the tapering body painted with a vignette enclosing a still life of grapes and plums, within two rams head handles and raised on pedestal foot, green printed marks and gilt painted numbers, (finial restored), 41.5cm high With accompanying catalogue `Shropshire Pottery and Porcelain, a brief guide to the collection displayed in the Clive House Museum, Shrewsbury` front cover illustration and pg. 10, case 8
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