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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings and Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  07 Aug 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZST)
• Lot #:
  21
• Lot Description:
  Michael Smither
  Walnuts in Blue Bowl
  oil on hardboard, 1975
  770mm x 730mm
  initialled MDS and dated '75 in brushpoint lower right
• Provenance:
  From The Collection of Kevin and Levanah Croon, Australia, previously Lower Hutt. Purchased by Kevin and Levanah Croon from Peter McLeavey Gallery, 1975.
• Notes:
  I wonder whether anybody, anywhere, at any time, has looked as long and as hard at a bowl of walnuts as Michael Smither must have done in order to paint this picture. At least that is the illusion created. According to the artist, the painting was developed from a drawing of a bowl of walnuts seen at his mother's place and is closely associated by him with her. It's an impressive feat of observation and concentration: painstaking, also, in the physical laying on of the paint. Anything looked at so closely for so long is bound to start looking weird and this is certainly the case with Smither's walnuts. Realism morphs into surrealism, if you like. The unconscious of the artist has come into play. There are other things going on in this painting. Consider, for instance, the role of the bowl; it holds the nuts and is a perfect circle while they are organic and wiggly. It is blue while they are brown. It is one' but they are many'. It is made but they are grown. It is culture' while they are nature'. It is still while the nuts are full of (apparent) movement; they squirm, they writhe and they have rhythm but their energy is perfectly contained. The Russian futurists, a lively group of literary theorists writing before the Revolution, had a term, ostranenie, usually translated as 'making strange' or defamiliarisation', which they regarded as the central principle of all art. The purpose of art, said Viktor Shklovsky, their leader, is 'to make the stone stony'. Art renews the sense of life by breaking through habitual modes of seeing/saying by 'making strange' perception so that we see things as if for the first time. Smither does this with his walnuts; he makes the nuts nutty. By magnification and replication of detail, he makes us see them as new and strange. He refreshes our perception: so Binney with birds, so Smither with nuts and oranges. PETER SIMPSON
• Estimate:
  NZ$65,000 - 85,000
• 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.