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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Peter Elliott Collection
• Sale Date:
  30 Aug 2015 ~ 6pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 193)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 11am - Part 2 (Lots 194 - 340)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 2pm - Part 3 (Lots 341 - 511)
  01 Sep 2015 ~ 10.30am - Part 4 (Lots 512 - 754) and 2pm - Part 5 (Lots 755 - 1013)
• Lot #:
  15
• Lot Description:
  Frederick (Fred) Ronald Williams
  (1927-1982)
  Lysterfield Landscape 1966
  oil on canvas
  73 x 92 cm
  signed lower right: Fred Williams
• Provenance:
  Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
• Exhibited:
  Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011; Masterpieces from the Peter Elliott Collection - curated by Lou Klepac, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 6 December 2013 - 7 February 2014, Orange Regional Art Gallery, 2 May - 15 June 2014
• References:
  Robert Raymond, 52 Views of Rudy Komon, The Beagle Press and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 33 (illus.); Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, pp. 14-15 (details) and p. 94, cat. no. 80
• Notes:
  Fred Williams’s Upwey series of paintings of 1965 to 1966 won him almost immediate acclaim. The famous series of paintings both aesthetically match and historically overlap the present painting: Lysterfield Landscape of 1966. Lysterfield is formed of an extensive area of gently rolling hills that allow a view of a flat horizon. The area is located thirty-two kilometres south-east of Melbourne and a short drive from Upwey, where the artist lived at the time. Its landscape, unlike the tall eucalyptus forests of Upwey and Sherbrooke, is dotted with stands of scribbly gums, low brush and cleared land. This gave Williams a more pronounced opportunity to extend the themes, range and aesthetic attributes of his hallmark paintings of the mid sixties. Stylistically, Williams’s Lysterfield Landscape of 1966 sits magisterially midway between the groundbreaking visual frontality of the Upwey series and the minimalistic abstraction of his Hillside paintings of the late sixties. Painting in the supposed forefront in the mid to late sixties, much influenced by American theories published in 1961, stressed surface flatness and disengagement from the world of appearances and things. The force of these theories was felt even as far afield as Australia. Most artists, including Williams, in the mid sixties became much more fully engaged with the making of a work of art with simple and stripped down visual essentials while paying closer attention to the actual physical surface of the paintings. They adopted a non-recessional, non-illusionistic approach and saw contemporary painting as essentially being a flat picture plane, which did not pretend to present a view, express anything or offer up a mirror image of the world. For these artists the common opinion was that contemporary painting was in essence about pictorial form that was considered as a planar-based arrangement of shapes, patterns and colours and little more. Subsequently, in the Australia of the early to mid sixties there arose a substantial artistic interest in depicting “abstracted landscapes” and Williams was always considered to be the most gifted and admired artist of this new wave of interest.  His paintings were not wedded to nationalistic, rural or pastoral themes, nor were they prompted by questions of national identity. It was a new turn in the depiction of the Australian environment. All these contextual factors and social determinants are present in Williams’s paintings, most characteristically in his Lysterfield Landscape of 1966. The limited series and individuality of the Lysterfield paintings point to a new optically “woven” complexity and scumbled painterly refinement in Williams’s works. Few show these artistic attributes as well as the present painting. Lysterfield Landscape of 1966 is divided into three compositional bands. The lower of these shows a subtle variety of pink, rose madder and umber tones thinly painted that suggests clay bearing earth as might be found on a cutaway river bank or lakeside cliff edge; the area’s upper border shades off into yellow, grey, green and sepia colours that seem to delineate the slope of a hillock. This mid-ground area, while sharing the optical characteristics of the lower adjacent section is complemented by the inclusion of loosely brushed steel-blue splashes that mirror the colours of young eucalypts.  The whole is surmounted by a visually balanced expanse of sky with hints of clouds and smoke. Considered as a whole entity William’s Lysterfield Landscape of 1966 reads as a tapestry of painterly effects. It hangs as a tableau of the essential features of the Lysterfield landscape. Its visual compactness is almost pictographic in its ability to suggest form and capture ambience.
• Estimate:
  A$350,000 - 450,000
• 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.