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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Lowenstein Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  07 Mar 2017 ~ 6pm
• Lot #:
  42
• Lot Description:
  Garry Shead
  (born 1942)
  The Measuring Artist, 2003-04
  oil on board
  37 x 44.5 cm
  signed lower right: Garry Shead; titled and dated verso: The measuring artist 2003-04
• References:
  Sasha Grishin, Accounting for Taste: the Lowensteins Arts Management Collection, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2013, p. 24 & 57 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  It would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that the late Judith Englert Shead was the single most important subject in the work of Garry Shead. It did not matter whether he was painting the ‘D.H. Lawrence’ series, the ‘Royal’ suite, the ‘Ern Malley’ pictures or the more recent ‘Artist and Muse’ sequence; in all of them, there is one unifying leitmotif – the unmistakable presence of Judith, the artist’s wife, model and muse. Her formal inclusion, however, was not always premeditated. ‘Often, I start out painting a woman with a completely different face and bigger-bosomed body’, Shead notes shyly, ‘but it always ends up looking like Judith.’1 Garry first met Judith in 1981, when both were attending an artists’ residency in Vance, France. With the French sojourn completed, the pair soon rendezvoused in Budapest, signalling the beginning of a twenty-five-year relationship. Her presence not only made Shead a happier man, but also a happier artist. In technique, he was a good painter even before they met. In terms of style, however, Judith was to provide the stimulus and encouragement that would charge and inspire Shead’s best creative work. ‘I openly admit’, he once confessed, ‘that Judith turned my career around. I learned more from her about how to put a picture together and the finer points of composition than I ever did at art school.’2 Her inclusion in so many of Shead’s pictures was perhaps the artist’s way of showing his gratitude for those lessons. Nowhere is Judith’s presence more explicit than in the ‘Artist and Muse’ series to which the present work belongs. In these paintings, Shead paints Judith, in the guise of a nude model in the artist’s studio. To match, he includes himself, tacitly, in the cloak of an artist at work. Like Picasso’s ‘Vollard Suite’ (where the Spaniard subtly points to himself and Marie-Thérèse in the form of sculptor and sculpted), so too Shead’s and Judith’s presence is only implicit through their roles as artist and model. In these works, Shead also shows his admiration for those old European masters to whom he owes his technical brilliance. At times, this is done formally and openly to the point that we clearly recognise Rembrandt or Velasquez in the male figure. In The Measuring Artist, the allegiance is stressed more in style and execution than by direct quotation. The model and artist are here depicted at work in the studio. The male figure, in front of his bare canvas and standing on a woven rug, is dressed in a sharp black suit, white shirt and polished leather shoes. With his palette wedged between his left thumb and forearm, he stretches out his right fist, brush in hand, in the direction of his nude: he is measuring his model (a technique, developed in the Renaissance, used to transfer correct proportions of an object onto canvas). The model, a supple nude, reclines in the striped fauteuil. Eyes closed, she leans towards the artist, brushing her left ankle with her fingertips in a gentle, classical pose. With her exaggerated sinuous limbs, she recalls the warm, languid nudes of Modigliani (who, inclinedly passed a winter in Vance in 1918, painting his own wife muse, Hebuterne, resting in an armchair)3. The background is enclosed by a chain of long curtains (the red, white and blue design perhaps another symbolical reference to the place they first met). The whole scene is bathed in deep sombre tones of Titian-red, warm blacks, ochrey whites and golden flesh tones; the whole recalling the iridescent palette of a Rembrandtesque interior. In The Measuring Artist Shead pays homage to his two prevailing passions: art and Judith. In them, he found a muse, a love, companionship and purpose – one would not have flourished without the other. It is in their name that he paints this ode. Petrit Abazi 1 Gary Shead, cited in Janet Hawley, ‘Just one look’, Good Weekend, 18 August 2001, p. 50 2 Ibid., p. 51 3 Portrait de Jeanne Hebuterne assise dans un fauteuil, 1918, (private collection)
• Estimate:
  A$35,000 - 38,000
• 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.