Leski Auctions
The Joseph Greenberg Collection - 702 lots
The Joseph Greenberg Collection
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Auction House:
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Reference:#LA466
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Description:Joseph Greenberg (1923 - 2007)
Although Greenberg’s artistic talent was honed in the graphic arts, in particular those of the skilled advertising artist (he trained at Swinburne Technical School in the early 1940s as a Graphic Designer), he nevertheless possessed a very strong feeling for painting and - judging from the volume of paintings produced over his lifetime - an unwavering desire to paint.
This desire and his evident tenacity in pursuing it, seem to have been encouraged by a lifelong friendship with the painter, Ray Crooke (1922-2015) and arguably by his exposure to the vibrant art of 1960s London where he had become well established as a successful “commercial” artist (and additionally something of a clever cartoonist).
The inspiration and influence of the British Pop arts such as J.B. Kitaj and Michael Andrews, is evident in a suite of large and accomplished paintings dating from those years. One of these, titled “The Social Page” (Lot 456) is evidently related to a large pen and ink sheet of lightly caricatured heads (Lot 457), and the transformation into an assured painterly canvas is a measure of his innate abilities as a painter. There continue to be glimpses of English artists - Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash David Bomberg, and even the earlier Camden School and London Group – and, later, of Australian Artists such as Leonard French’s abstract Byzantine compositions.
However, while he pursued this talent with paint, producing distinctive and highly competent bodies of work on both canvas and paper, and exhibiting occasional works (presumably those he signed), he did not develop an authentic voice of his own. On reflection, we are left to ponder whether he was actually looking for his own vision or was instead painting to understand what others were doing.
His paintings fall into clusters which are clearly derivative of the sources which he encountered, yet succeed for the most part as highly competent and pleasing works. (See the oil/acrylic sketches on card from 1978, eg. Lot 462 et al which echo English post war artists like Paul Nash and the trio of elegantly Picasso-esque gouaches from 1963 which reflect Greenberg’s fascination with masks, Lot 441.
This very considerable body of paintings include both directly observed and semi-abstract landscape paintings some deriving from holidays spent in Northern Queensland with Ray Crooke (Lot 467), others which perhaps take their cue from Leonard French and Ian Fairweather (Lot 442) and yet others, with their charming fairground and Sunday-outing crowd scenes, rather more in the mode of School of Paris or London Group (Lots 432 and 433). The majority exhibit, as earlier noted, various modes of Modernist figurative abstraction (eg Lots 492 and 499).
Perhaps the series of eccentric highly coloured and charged collages, variations after the celebrated Byzantine Ravenna Mosaics of the Empress Theodora, which are so evidently tied to his collecting of icons and religious sculptures, are among the most convincingly his own (Lots 453 - 455)
At some point his painterly predilections and his highly evolved skills in commercial art coalesced into a series of paintings about sport and its players (in a later auction). Horse racing too became a focus and there are a number of very successful paintings that perhaps owe their inspiration to Degas (Lot 463) and in sharp contrast to Wyndham Lewis (Lot 486)
The body of paintings Joseph Greenberg produced over his lifetime and for his own pleasure are usefully understood as painterly explorations, as well as the expressions of a curious mind and exuberant sensibility, which are likewise reflected in his copious and considered collections of art and artifacts and in his successful career as a writer, commercial artist and teacher.
Elizabeth Cross,
Art Historian, Writer. -
Sale(s):09 May 2021 ~ 11am (AEST)
727-729 High Street
Armadale, VIC 3143 Australia -
Viewing:19 Apr 2021 ~ onwards - Leski Auctions welcomes you to make an appointment to view outside of the hours below
727-729 High Street
Armadale, VIC 3143
Australia
06 May 2021 ~ 10am - 7.30pm
727-729 High Street
Armadale, VIC 3143
Australia
07 May 2021 ~ 10am - 5pm
727-729 High Street
Armadale, VIC 3143
Australia
08 May 2021 ~ 10am - 5pm
727-729 High Street
Armadale, VIC 3143
Australia
Prices realised in this sale include buyers premium of 21.450%.
