Find Lots

• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The John Buckley Collection of Modern & Contemporary Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  13 May 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  8
• Lot Description:
  Peter Booth
  (born 1940)
  Painting 1979
  oil on canvas
  182 x 244 cm
  signed and dated verso
• Provenance:
  Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, circa 1979
• Exhibited:
  Peter Booth, Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, November 1979; Peter Booth: Human Nature, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 November 2003 - 29 February 2004, cat. no. 27
• Notes:
  Peter Booth's work was included in that enduringly-influential survey exhibition, The Field, which launched the new National Gallery of Victoria in St Kilda Road in 1968. The 40 young and emerging contemporary Australian artists represented were all inspired by the large exhibition, Two Decades of American Painting, shown in Sydney and Melbourne the preceding year, and who became preoccupied with colourfield, minimalism and conceptualism. Booth's art in the 1970s was heavily influenced by the work of William Blake (Dante's Divine Comedy, The Book of Job and Virgil's Pastorals) and Francisco Goya (Proverbs and The Disasters of War). He had ready access to these works while working in the framing department at the National Gallery of Victoria. His art at this time was thus grounded in the phenomenological and the apocalyptic, punctuated with grotesque hybrid figures and volcanic infernos. Booth was also reading books by Doris Lessing (Briefing for a Descent into Hell and The Memoirs of a Survivor) in the late 1970s, around the time that Painting 1979 was executed. Lessing's words may resonate in the context of this and similar paintings: "...The plateau city was invaded by warring tribes of strange hybrid monkey-man-like creatures with a rat-dog face, with sharp cocked ears and dog-like muzzles and long rat-like scaly tail..."1 As a Modernist, Booth has never allocated titles to his paintings and for reasons of identification, Painting 1979 has familiarly come to be known as Painting (Large Insect in Landscape) 1979. Paintings from the period 1977-82 were particularly characterised by Booth's response "...to his reality and the present moment - to the world as he sees it..." and his most notable paintings from this era are known as his 'apocalyptic' ones 2. Painting 1979 presents a disquieting 'apocalyptic' image - it may also draw upon Booth's childhood memories of living in industrial Sheffield in Britain. The National Gallery of Victoria hosted a major retrospective of Booth's work, Peter Booth: Human Nature, in 2003. Curator Jason Smith revealed the underlying tenets of Booth's imagination and work as being the triumvirate of humans, nature and human nature and defined him as "...one of the most influential and idiosyncratic artists of his generation."3 Dr Shireen Huda 1 Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971, p.71, quoted in Robert Lindsay, "Hard Rain: The Iconography of Peter Booth", Peter Booth: Human Nature, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 29 November 2003 - 29 February 2004, p.20 2 Jason Smith in Peter Booth: Human Nature, op.cit, p.12 3 ibid, p.9
• Estimate:
  A$80,000 - 120,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

  Can't see the realised price? Upgrade your subscription now!

• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.