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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Estate of Suzanne Cecil
• Sale Date:
  15 May 2016 ~ 2.30pm
• Lot #:
  1
• Lot Description:
  Clarice Beckett
  (1887-1935)
  Low Tide
  oil on board
  29 x 38.5 cm
• Provenance:
  Acquired from the Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Armadale, Victoria, 1971
• Exhibited:
  Homage to Clarice Beckett (1887-1935): Idylls of Melbourne and Beaumaris, Rosalind Humphries Galleries, Melbourne, 30th October - 20th November, 1971, cat. no. 66
• Notes:
  Clarice Beckett’s paintings with their poetic nuances of colour and subtle tones are today highly prized key works of Australian 20th century Modernism. Beckett is noted especially for her ability to portray the transitory atmospheric effects that occur in the liminal realms of dawn and dusk, when nature is enveloped in a chiaroscuro half-light with soft-focus haziness. Her mastery of the fleeting effects of the diurnal shifts on Port Philip Bay is seen to great effect in Low Tide (c.1930) where the boats, water and sky fuse in a delicate symphony of subtle pink, grey and taupe hues. Beckett sought beauty in the commonplace. This she found in the immediate environs and streets of Beaumaris where she lived, and further on around the Yarra River and the streets of Melbourne with its trams, telegraph poles and cars as signifiers of the modern age. She had a keen eye for composition and understood the importance of incorporating active elements, such as stormy skies, twisted trees, moving cars, boats, people, and reflected lights, to heighten the realism and convey an element of mystery and tension. Beckett aimed for an ‘exact illusion of reality’ and despite the overall serenity of her works, the inclusion of these subtle elements with their implied movement, suggests that what we are seeing is but one aspect of a larger environment or landscape. Such is the case in Low Tide where one of the boats is truncated at the edge of the work, thereby suggesting the wider reality of the world beyond. Australian author Drusilla Modjeska has perceptively noted “…. Clarice Beckett is often at her best when she teases us with a gesture towards the outside of the frame.” 1 In general Clarice Beckett painted outdoors regardless of the weather, favouring early morning and evening. In fact, her early death after contracting pneumonia was partly attributed to her developing a chill while working in the landscape. She had no studio in the family home on Beach Road, Beaumaris where she lived from 1919 with her ageing parents, and instead used a hand-made cart for her easel, brushes and the small to medium sized boards and canvases. This portable studio was perfect for an artist on the move. She painted directly on the spot and never reworked a painting - a method of working that differed greatly from that of the tonalist painter, Max Meldrum, with whom she studied for one year and who painted indoors. Beckett exhibited with the Meldrum group of tonalist painters in the early 1920s, and in the polarizing art scene of that era, was criticized as a ‘Meldrumite’; but she also held regular independent exhibitions. However, few of her paintings were sold in her lifetime, and for decades her contribution was forgotten until the 1970s when her work was rediscovered by a generation of scholars and artists who appreciated the minimalism inherent in her works with their muted tones and poetic sensibility. Appropriately, she was then proclaimed ‘a most remarkable Modernist’.2 Frances Lindsay AM 1. Drusilla Modjeska, Framing Clarice Beckett, Australian Review of Books, March 1999; Drusilla Modjeska, Timepieces, Sydney, Picador, 2002 2. Patrick McCaughey quoted in Rosalind Hollinrake, Clarice Beckett, The artist and her circle, Macmillan, 1979, p.33
• Estimate:
  A$15,000 - 25,000
• 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.