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Lot #10 - Sali Herman

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen
  • Sale Name:
    The Alan & Margaret Hickinbotham Collection
  • Sale Date:
    25 Jun 2017 ~ 2pm (Australian Central Standard Time)
  • Lot #:
    10
  • Lot Description:
    Sali Herman
    (1898-1993)
    Woolloomooloo Street Scene with Boys, 1976
    oil on canvas
    80.5 x 136.5 cm
    signed and dated lower right: S.Herman 76; inscribed verso: Woolloomooloo Street Scene with Boys
  • Provenance:
    Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby’s, Melbourne, 26 November 1990, lot 207 (as Woolloomooloo - Boys Playing Ball); Private collection, Adelaide
  • Notes:
    Related Work: The Street Corner, 1976, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower left S.Herman ’76 45 x 60 cm, Australian Paintings, Leonard Joel, Melbourne, 8 November 1978, lot 92 (Features boys playing football and old woman feeding a cat) Sali (Yakubowitsch) Herman, a painter of portraits, landscapes and urban views, trained first in Zurich, Switzerland where he was born, and later in Paris before working as an art dealer in that city. His ambition to become a painter however, was rekindled after he immigrated to Melbourne in 1937, and enrolled at the George Bell School. One year later he moved to Sydney, settling in Potts Point, one of the then run-down inner suburbs that along with Paddington, Balmain, Redfern, Pyrmont and Surry Hills, became the subject matter for his paintings of the urban landscape. In this he was reflecting a European appreciation for the city, drawing on his Parisian experience of French modernism; and his vision to find interest and beauty in the nondescript or commonplace was rewarded in 1944 when his painting The McElhone Stairs (Coll: Art Gallery of New South Wales) was awarded the prestigious Wynne Prize, a prize that he subsequently won a further three times. The charm of Sali Herman’s works resides in his skill at combining textured paint with both vivid and muted colours to depict the variegated building textures of bricks, peeling paint, rusted iron and wood that constituted the run-down terrace houses of Sydney’s inner suburbs for most of the 20th century up to the late 1970s. Herman’s Woolloomooloo Street Scene with Boys 1976 conveys the various changes that can occur to buildings during a lifetime, shifting from new to dilapidated to renovated. In fact, when this painting was produced the once working-class suburb of Woolloomooloo had become the focus for an intense residents’ group action to resist plans to re-develop the ‘Loo by knocking down old terrace houses and replacing them with high-rise apartment blocks. The vacant block in Herman’s work with its backdrop of buildings featuring the ghostly outlines of the previous adjoining property thus subtly bears witness to this urban change. Critical in Herman’s compositions too, as seen in the present work, is his concern with the day-to-day lives of people evident in the ‘human interest’ elements that he includes, such as the two boys playing football and the elderly woman feeding the cats in the distance. However, while this human interaction adds interest, it may not have occurred in real life; rather, it is a compositional device that he uses to great effect. In fact, Herman never painted outdoors, preferring to work from drawings in the studio. This enabled him to build up the textured surfaces of his paintings with scumbling - a technique where layers of broken colour are applied on top of each other and scraped back with a palette knife, often followed by the application of transparent glazes to enhance the luminosity of the colours. Sali Herman’s works thus successfully combine human interest, colour and composition. As he commented to fellow artist and critic, James Gleeson in 1978, ‘My philosophy in a painting is colour, texture, design, spiritual content, emotional content. I’m not happy with just one of (these) particular things. I like them all together’1. Frances Lindsay AM 1 Sali Herman interviewed by James Gleeson 23 November 1978, The James Gleeson Oral History Collection, National Gallery of Australia.
  • Estimate:
    A$30,000 - 40,000
  • 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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