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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  28 Oct 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  22
• Lot Description:
  John Henry Olsen
  (born 1928)
  Portrait Landscape 1961
  oil on board
  122 x 91 cm
  signed and dated 'John Olsen '61' lower right
• Provenance:
  From The collection of the late Alan Boxer
• Exhibited:
  The Boxer Collection, University Art Gallery, University of Melbourne, 1-30 August 1974, cat. no. 25; (Possibly) The Boxer Collection, Albert Hall, Canberra, October - November 1977 (no catalogue); The Boxer Collection: The Sydney Alternative, The Nolan Gallery, Tharwa, ACT, September 1982, cat. no. 3; Crossing Cultures: Art From the Boxer Collection, Drill Hall, Canberra, May - June 2000, cat. no. 37
• References:
  The Boxer Collection, University Art Gallery, University of Melbourne, 1974, p. 4; p. 16 (illustrated); The Boxer Collection: The Sydney Alternative, The Nolan Gallery, Tharwa, ACT, 1982, p. 2; Crossing Cultures: Art From the Boxer Collection, Drill Hall, Canberra, 2000, p. 22 (illustrated)
• Notes:
  John Olsen was one of the central figures in the modernist movement of 1960s Sydney and is today regarded as one of Australia's most original artists. Portrait Landscape, painted shortly after the artist's return to Australia, is a synthesis of the stylistic influences which Olsen absorbed during his extended sŽjour d'Žtude in France and Spain. There, he came in contact with the visual vocabulary of his European contemporaries. He experimented with the dark, worn, and patchy block-scapes of the Spaniard, Antoni Tˆpies, and concurrently investigated possibilities of linear abstraction mixed with the pure colour palette of the Northern CoBrA artists. Despite a brief flirtation, and later nostalgic revisions, with the former, Madrid School, it was the liberal and dynamic gestures of the latter, international group, which remained with Olsen, and subsequently impressed a group of artists around him. Deborah Heart, in her monograph of the painter, identifies Olsen's return as 'largely responsible for the resurgence of interest in irrational imagery in Sydney painting', one which fused the 'extraordinary and the mundane' with humour and child-like expressionism, in opposition to both the figurative tendencies of Melbourne and the American school of abstract expressionism that was dominating the Sydney manner.1 Indeed, it was the dynamic and lyrical, doodle-like, expression of the CoBrA gang (inter alia) Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky, which found resonance in Olsen's Australian imagery. This visual vocabulary, however, was not one taken from common, shared iconography or archetypal Australian imagery. Rather, Olsen's personal experiences of the bustling Sydney street life and the spectacles of pub culture, which inspired some of his most original work. Robert Hughes identified this 'regionalism' as one of the defining qualities of Olsen's art, 'with passion and intensity', he noted, 'it builds up his images of this particular time and place. It could have been produced I think, nowhere else É he distils more of the essence of landscape than any other Australian painter É At the moment of creation, Mr Olsen stands, as it were, within the landscape'.2 Portrait Landscape, 1961 is a striking example of the manner in which Olsen 'stands' and integrates himself within the landscape; it is a world constructed (or re-constructed) of metamorphic imagery, anatomic fluidity through automatic calligraphy. In rich, yet subdued tones of blue, red, yellow and brown, he develops an image of a quasi-fantastical landscape. Olsen's is not an immobile or idyllic landscape, frozen in time. Through mark making and interchangeable, ambivalent, symbology, an exploratory journey of living and mutating experience is uncovered. In a surrealist manner the human profile, torso, limbs and fingers are organically fused with the meandering coastline, winding streets, rail wheels, birds in flight and flowers in bloom which dotted Olsen's experience the contemporary urban landscape. Created in the year the Sydney 9 group of artists showed at the David Jones Gallery in Melbourne, Portrait Landscape, 1961 is an important work from the original You Beaut period and is a seminal representation of Olsen's idiosyncratic manner which defined his entire oeuvre. 1 Deborah Heart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 55 2 Robert Hughes, The Nation, 1960.
• Estimate:
  A$50,000 - 70,000
• 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.