FLETCHER MARTIN 1904-1979 (AFTER CHARLES MEERE)

• Lot Sold $40,000 (Hammer Price)
• $48,000 (Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium)

AUSTRALIAN BEACH PATTERN (AFTER CHARLES MEERE)

oil on canvas 95.3 X 127CM

PROVENANCE
Adolph Loewi, Los Angeles
Private Collection, Rome, circa 1950
By descent
Private Collection, Rome

Charles Meere’s Australian Beach Pattern (1938- 1940, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) is a masterpiece of Australian Art Deco classicism; a sonorous hymn to sun, sand and surf and to the bronzed, athletic, Australian body. First shown in the 1940 Wynne Prize exhibition, seen again in the artist’s 1952 retrospective and purchased by the AGNSW in 1965, the painting nevertheless remained somewhat neglected until featured in the Gallery’s 1982 On the Beach exhibition, and again a few years later in the Bicentennial touring show Creating Australia. Since then it has become one of the Gallery’s most celebrated modern pictures, regularly featured in scholarly and popular publications and exhibitions. (1) In turn, this new-found ‘iconic’ status has led to the discovery in Europe and Australia of a number of previously unknown but closely-related works: a variant by Meere’s studio assistant Freda Robertshaw (sold Sotheby’s Australia , 25 August 1998, lot 31), and four smaller facsimile renderings by the artist and/or from his studio. (2)

The present work emerged recently in the United States, a signed copy by the American painter, teacher and illustrator Fletcher Martin. Largely self-taught, Martin served in the U.S. Navy as a young man before working as a printer, a métier which segued in the mid-1930s into painting. During the Depression he undertook a number of commissions for the Work Projects Administration (WPA), painting murals for government buildings in California, Texas and Idaho, while establishing himself as a book and magazine illustrator. In this latter role he served as an artist-war correspondent for Life magazine in North Africa and Europe during World War II, and after the war his work appeared regularly in Life, Esquire, Fortune and other American periodicals. He exhibited widely – with more than two dozen solo museum shows across America to his credit – and held artist-in-residence or teaching positions at a number of universities. His work is represented in many prestigious public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

While it is not known when, where or how Martin might have encountered Meere’s painting, his decision to make a copy of the work is not surprising. Both artists had trained as mural painters – Meere under William Rothenstein in London, Martin under David Sequeiros in California – and the complex array of figures, the tightly-balanced armature of angled limbs and beach equipment, displays a kind of horror vacui not uncommon in public works of art. Moreover, Australian Beach Pattern’s provincially-inflected classicism is very much in keeping with Martin’s early style, which shows the influence both of the Mexican muralists and of the American Regionalists.

A large-scale, (3) vintage, faithful transcription of an important Australian painting, this version of Australian Beach Pattern is an art-historical discovery as impressive as it is intriguing.

Dr David Hansen

(1) See Linda Slutzkin, ‘Spartans in Speedos’, in Daniel Thomas (ed.), Creating Australia: 200 Years of Art 1788-1988, International Cultural Corporation of Australia, Sydney, 1988, p. 176-177; Jackie Strecker, Charles Meere’s ‘Australian Beach Pattern’: From Origin to Icon, Fine Arts IV thesis, Power Institute, University of Sydney, 1988
(2) Australian Beach Pattern, 1940, oil on canvas, 75 x 98cm, signed lower right ‘Charles Meere’, Modern Australian Painting 1920s-1980s, Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne, 9-20 September 1997, no. 7; Australian Beach Pattern, oil and wax on cardboard, 73 x 102.5cm, Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sotheby’s Australia, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 39; Australian Beach Pattern, oil on canvas, 65 x 88cm, signed lower right ‘CM MELBOURNE’, Australian & International Paintings, Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney , 4 March 2003, lot 29; Australian Beach Pattern, oil on canvas, 65 x 85.5cm, signed lower right ‘CHARLES MEERE’, Fine Art Auction, Deutscher & Hackett, Melbourne, 26 November 2008, lot 18
(3) At 95.3 x 127cm, the work is in fact slightly larger than Meere’s original in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which measures 91.5 x 122cm.

 

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