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Lot #23 - Charles Tole

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen-Webb's
  • Sale Name:
    Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
  • Sale Date:
    11 Apr 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZ time)
  • Lot #:
    23
  • Lot Description:
    Charles Tole
    Kawerau Motif
    oil on hardboard, 1971
    390mm x340mm
    signed CHARLES TOLE and dated 71 in brushpoint lower left; printed Name: Charles Tole, 12, Seaview Road, Remuera, AKLD 5 / Title: KAWERAU MOTIF; / Dimension: 16" x 14" / Medium: Oil / Support: Hardboard / Date: 1971 / Price: $125.00 / Entry: No. 6. on original typed artist's label affixed verso.
  • Notes:
    Charles Tole (1903-1986) is scarcely a household name, though he has always had enthusiastic supporters. There is little about him in the standard reference books but he is well represented in major metropolitan collections Hocken Collections, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery, the Fletcher Trust, BNZ and university collections. His generally small, intelligent, coherent and well-finished paintings are a currently undervalued treasure of our art history. An Aucklander all his life, Tole studied at Sacred Heart College and The University of Auckland. He later became a public servant. He started painting without formal training in his late 30s, encouraged by his older brother John Tole (1890-1967) and the Auckland, Edinburgh and Paris-trained artist and teacher John Weeks (1888-1965) who had studied with the cubist André Lhote in the 1920s. The Tole brothers, who frequently exhibited together, once said: We have always been intensely interested in modern developments in style and technique, yet we think these elements should not be arbitrarily or consciously striven for but should emerge and flow freely from the subject matter and from the artist's creative intuition towards the expression and communication of his message.Their locally inflected version of modernism was shared with other near contemporaries such as Alfred Wallis, Louise Henderson and Doris Lusk. Charles Tole exhibited with the Auckland Society of Arts and with the mildly experimental Rutland and Thornhill Groups in Auckland. He also showed with the Christchurch Group in 1948 and exhibited with his brother at Wellington's Architectural Centre Gallery in 1957. Peter McLeavey introduced many discerning collectors to his work in Wellington in the 1980s. He was mainly a weekend and occasional painter until retirement in 1965 enabled him to increase his production. Tole is most strongly identified with studies of the built and industrial landscape power stations, factories, warehouses, quarries, fertiliser buildings, railway sheds, wharves, ships, lighthouses, cranes, oil tanks and the like, treated in a modified cubist manner, somewhat reminiscent of the American modernists Sheeler and Demuth, both also named Charles. He worked in other modes too, including still life, collage and landscape. Kawerau Motif with its multiple chimneys (one smoking), pipes, factory buildings and landscape elements sky, hills, clouds is a fine example of highly typical Tole subject matter and treatment. While the departure from realism is not severe, the painting is far from descriptive and all the elements of colour, shape and line are carefully integrated into a two-dimensional construction of some subtlety and complexity. There are carefully balanced repetitions of verticals, horizontals and diagonals, intermixed with curves and arcs and more organic shapes. The smoke at the upper right rhymes with the clouds at the lower left, for example, and the whole painting is alive with such cunning placements and echoes. The complex technology of a major industrial plant the pulp and paper mill at Kawerau is matched by a correspondingly artful and satisfying composition. Peter Simpson
  • Estimate:
    NZ$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.



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