28th Oct, 2018 8:30
Historic, Modern and Contemporary Art
31
Ruth Everard Haden (South Africa 1904-1992)
Nude
oil on canvas
Signature details: authenticated by Lenora Everard Haden, the artist's daughter, on the reverse
oil on canvas
Signature details: authenticated by Lenora Everard Haden, the artist's daughter, on the reverse
(1)
92 x 92 cm
Notes:
Ruth Everard Haden’s Nude clearly demonstrates the influences of her formative exposure to some of the greatest modernist painters and teachers working in England and France in the early twentieth century. From 1922, in life drawing and painting classes at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, as well as under the private tuition of renowned figurative artist, Henry Tonks, she gained valuable experience in painting the human form.In 1923 Everard Haden enrolled at the Colarossi Art School in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, and from her letters to her mother, artist Bertha Everard, it is clear that she began the present work not long afterwards.
Writing of a visit to the Louvre, she enthuses about looking at the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens whose ‘flesh colour is simply marvellous, and his drawing superb’1 but it is undoubtedly the modernist, Paul Cézanne, who made the most impact on her, when she expressed her intentions as being ‘to get it strong and delicate and to keep the planes and not get it too hard all at the same time, and besides to get the colour beautiful’.2 She certainly drew on Cézanne’s simplified forms and modulated colour to create subtle gradations as can be seen in the brushwork of the flesh and even more evidently in her handling of the voluminous folds of drapery in the background. By eschewing modelling and strong tonal contrasts in favour of broader areas of colour, her painting emphasised a strong pictorial cohesion. Art historian Frieda Harmsen found the painting sufficiently impressive to illustrate and comment on it in her highly regarded biography of the Everard Group. Interestingly, her first comment that ‘the head has the austerity of a primitive mask’ links this South African artist to the ground-breaking traditions of Gauguin, Picasso and the German Expressionists before she concludes that a ‘fierce vitality is expressed through rugged, angular, positively unpretty shapes, determined line … and racy brushwork which is exuberant and restless as if dashed down by an Expressionist’.3 Such unstinting praise clearly marks Everard Haden as a courageous artist far ahead of her time.
Emma Bedford
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Auction: Historic, Modern and Contemporary Art, 28th Oct, 2018
Aspire Art Auctions brought a significant double-header of top lot leads to this sale.
Stellar results were achieved for internationally prominent William Kentridge and Alexis Preller, one of South Africa’s most respected and collectable modern artists. Collectors were attracted to Kentridge’s remarkable, Drawing from Stereoscope (Double page, Soho in two rooms) (1999), which sold for R6 600 400, while Preller’s Adam (1972), sold for a world record at R9 104 000. Modern offerings also included works by Peter Clarke, Kenneth Bakker, and Douglas Portway, while the contemporary segment included Moshekwa Langa, Penny Siopis, Simon Stone, Clive van den Berg, and Georgina Gratrix, amongst others.
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