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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Barry & Anne Pang Collection
• Sale Date:
  18 Oct 2015 ~ 2.30pm
• Lot #:
  31
• Lot Description:
  Norman Alfred Williams Lindsay
  (1879-1969)
  Into the Woods
  oil on canvas
  61 x 47 cm
  signed lower right: NORMAN LINDSAY
• Provenance:
  Shapiro Auctioneers, Sydney, 10 June 2003, Lot 21
• Notes:
  From the moment Norman Lindsay's artwork entered the public consciousness in the early years of the 20th century, his ribald and voluptuous imagery became an enduring part of the nation's cultural life. Lindsay's many siblings also achieved high recognition as authors, arts administrators and artists in their own right. It was a heady brew and photographs of early family life are full of theatrical gestures with a defiant nod to the Dionysian spirit of the bacchanal, a Ôwild and drunken celebration.' In Norman Lindsay's world, the wowser was the lowest form of life, a self-censoring and morally hypocritical creature who sought to chastise any who enjoyed hedonism. In one of his many bombastic essays, Lindsay wrote of Ôthe ban that arrived with the blight of Christianity, with its priestly hatred of the body and its obscene obsession with sin, which spread a dark miasma of joylessness over all experience which makes life worth living.'1 Lindsay felt more kinship with the ancient Greeks and the antics of their happily flawed gods, a subject which provided him with bountiful ammunition to launch a counter-attack on the dreaded wowser, illustrating Ôa land where lustful nymphs and satyrs leer and pout É and innocent maidens make doe-eyes at the viewer while displaying their naked charms. É (Lindsay) used overtly sexual imagery as a way of shocking and challenging his viewers - defying his high-minded detractors to declare themselves immune to the titillations he laid before them. Whatever pleasures he took from these pictures it was as nothing compared with the thrill he must have received from exposing religious hypocrisy.'2 Lindsay is rightly recognised as one of Australia's masters in the technical aspects of watercolour and etching, but from the early 1930s, it was oil painting on which he placed the most emphasis. Due to the overt nature of his imagery, one aspect that tends to be overlooked was his attention to the structure of a composition with its underlying geometrically-based armature. In a letter to his colleague John Hetherington, he outlined many of these measures noting that in paintings like Into the Woods the figures are arranged around curves where Ôthe lesser curves must obey the dominant curve.'3 From the reveler's arm around the wine barrel at the top through to the buttocks of the crawling woman below, such repetitive patterning is evident in this painting. Each character is keenly realised and joyfully alive reflecting Lindsay's belief Ôthat with facial characteristics the eyes were the intelligence, the nose the character and the mouth the emotions.'4 Allied to his free-spirit, Lindsay was never a sentimentalist in his depictions of women, commenting that ÔI have never sentimentalised the feminine image, for I have used the satanic as much as the lyrical in my women. I have utterly repudiated the academic nude image of femininity as an innocuous stuffed dummy designed to decorate the walls of second-class suburban homes. É And it appears pretty clear that I must have successfully infused sexual desirability into my women, else they never would have aroused such infuriated howls from the massed ranks of suburbia.'5 1 Norman Lindsay, ÔThe Delicate Art of Bawdy', Southerly (Norman Lindsay number), Sydney, no.1, 1959, reproduced in: Keith Wingrove (ed), Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1990, p.194; 2 John McDonald, ÔLewd Lindsay: a master of overstatement', Australian Financial Review, Sydney, 19 February 2004, p.20 3 Norman Lindsay, letter to John Hetherington, 1967, cited in: Lin Bloomfield, Norman Lindsay: oil paintings 1889-1969, Odana Editions, Bungedore, NSW, 2006, p.8 4 Lin Bloomfield, op cit., p.8 5 Norman Lindsay, letter to John Hetherington, February 1968, cited in: Lin Bloomfield, op cit., p.10
• Estimate:
  A$50,000 - 70,000
• 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.