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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The John Buckley Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  13 May 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  2
• Lot Description:
  Danila Ivanovich Vassilieff
  (1897-1958)
  Portrait of Bryan 1939
  oil on board
  40.5 x 35.5 cm
  signed 'Vassilieff' lower right
• Provenance:
  Sotheby's Australia, Fine Australian Paintings and Books, Sydney, 17 November 1988, Lot 369; Ian Rogers Fine Art, Melbourne 1997
• Exhibited:
  Danila Vassilieff: A New Art History, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 21 April - 7 October 2012 (illustrated)
• References:
  Felicity St John Moore, Vassilieff and his Art, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2012 (reprint), cat. no. 183
• Notes:
  Perhaps the pithiest description of Danila Vassilieff is that by Barry Pearce when he reviewed an exhibition of his work at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2012. Said Pearce, "One of the most extraordinary of all the creative souls who found a new life here during the 1930s, Danila Vassilieff added fuel to Melbourne's collective visual genius following his arrival in 193[7], reinforcing a growing resistance to the city's fatal conservatism." 1 Vassilieff was one of the Angry Penguins, a group within the Contemporary Art Society, which also counted Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd and John Perceval among their numbers. Vassilieff held his first exhibition in Melbourne in 1937, opened by art patron and friend John Reed (it is somehow poetic that Vassilieff later died in Reed's arms in 1958 at Heide). He is best known for his expressionistic urban street scenes - such as Soap Box Derby, 1938, Children Playing in Collingwood School, 1939 and Street Scene with Graffiti, 1938 - and later figurative sculptures carved from Lilydale marble. Portrait of Bryan was created during the beginning of World War II. A technically-similar portrait in the Art Gallery of New South Wales is Vassilieff's Portrait Sketch of Herbert Collingwood, 1936. Underrated during his lifetime, this artist has received academic attention in the years since his death. Dr Shireen Huda 1 Barry Pearce, "Vassilief: Cossack at the core", Australian Financial Review, 8 September 2012
• Estimate:
  A$4,000 - 6,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.