The Noel & Margaret Dick Art Collection Wednesday, 12 June 2019 - 6:00 PM start
Toss Woollaston - Upper Moutere
Lot Details
Mountford Tosswill (Toss) Woollaston (1910-98) Upper Moutere [1947-48] oil on board signed 'Woollaston' (lower left) 60 x 59cm Provenance Ex Cecil Mason Collection, Wellington Sale, Dunbar Sloane Ltd, Wellington 4 December 1991 (lot 25) col illustration Exhibited Nelson, Manson's Studio 1948, no 77. Woollaston-McCahon Retrospective, 1963 no. 26 Manawatu Art Gallery, M. T. Woollaston Works/1933-1973 Touring Exhibition from August 1973-April 1974 no. 47 Literature Arts Year Book 1950 M. T. Woollaston Works/ 1933-1973 exhibition catalogue p. 36. (illus) Gerald Barnett, Toss Woollaston (National Art Gallery 1991) p. 56-7 (illus) 'In works like Upper Moutere 1947-8, a high horizon line attenuates the featureless aspect of the landscape. The underlying rhythms of the landscape - or rather, their notation in paint - become the subject of the picture...the later paintings tend to sacrifice definition of mass and space for gestural, linear rhythm and a loose-woven surface unity. Line reappears - not schematically, as in the charcoal underdrawings of the thirties paintings - but expressively, even violently, in 'great swipes of coarse colour'. This approach is evident in the foreground of The Doubles c1942...and yet more consistently in Upper Moutere 1947-8. However it was not fully realised until the following decade, when Woollaston increased the scale of his canvases. Barnett p.56
