JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)
JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)
JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)
JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)
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Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)

Homage to Douanier Rousseau

Details
JOHN BELLANY, R.A. (1942-2013)
Homage to Douanier Rousseau
signed and dated 'Bellany 64' (lower left), signed again 'John Bellany' (on the reverse)
oil on board, diptych
72 x 96 in. (183 x 244 cm.) overall
Painted in 1964.
Provenance
Acquired by the present owner in 1967.
Literature
A. Moffat, 'A View From The Railings - Remembering rebellious times in the 1960s', Ages of Wonder: Scotland's Art 1540-Now, 2017, pp. 168-169, illustrated.
Exhibited
Edinburgh, Festival Exhibition, August 1964, exhibition not numbered, catalogue not traced.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. This lot will be removed to our storage facility at Momart. Christie’s will inform you if the lot has been sent offsite. Our removal and storage of the lot is subject to the terms and conditions of storage which can be found at Christies.com/storage and our fees for storage are set out in the table below - these will apply whether the lot remains with Christie’s or is removed elsewhere. Please call Christie’s Client Service 24 hours in advance to book a collection time at Momart. All collections from Momart will be by pre-booked appointment only. Tel: +44 (0)20 7839 9060 Email: cscollectionsuk@christies.com. If the lot remains at Christie’s it will be available for collection on any working day 9.00 am to 5.00 pm. Lots are not available for collection at weekends.

Brought to you by

Alice Murray
Alice Murray Head of Evening Sale

Lot Essay

Painted in 1964, Homage to Douanier Rousseau is one of the most important early works by John Bellany to come to market. Depicting The Beatles, alongside the artist himself (far right) and his friends, the monumental diptych has not been seen since its only notorious public exhibition in 1964, having remained in the same private collection for almost 60 years.

Whilst at Edinburgh College of Art, Bellany was awarded a travel scholarship which enabled him to visit Paris for the first time in April 1963 along with his contemporaries Sandy Moffat and Alan Bold. There, they managed to complete a survey of French painting since the Revolution, firing Bellany’s imagination and making him determined to paint on an epic scale. As the title of the present work suggests, the painting belongs to a body of work which sees Bellany pay homage to these great influences: Titian, Rembrandt, Piero Della Francesca, Bellini, Edvard Munch and Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes along with, in the case of the present work, Douanier Rousseau.

When he returned to Edinburgh, he painted a mural in the backyard of a Greek restaurant near to his flat, in the style of Fernand Léger, with a piano in the middle. John McEwen explains, ‘The piano was a protest against the restrictions of college life and the prim requirements of bourgeois taste. Music spoke to all, so why not art? And it also had a socialist intent by taking art out of the exclusive domain of the galleries’ (J. McEwan, John Bellany, Edinburgh, 1994, p. 46).

In emulation of Courbet’s socialist approach to his practice (being the first artist to propose an alternative to the Academy), Bellany and Moffat decided to hold an exhibition of their work on the railings of Castle Terrace during the Edinburgh Festival in August 1963. The notoriety of this exhibition ‘made them realise they had created a polemical situation, which they determined to exploit … they had the audacity in 1964 and 1965 to win a street trader’s license from the City Council to show their work on the Mound, the site of the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Gallery of Scotland. For a minimal sum they were allowed to use the railings flanking the garden side of the RSA and the National Gallery throughout the three weeks of the Festival. Every visitor was virtually certain to see their work … Considering the difficulties young painters always face when trying to exhibit their work, it was a wonderfully bold stroke and one that has deservedly entered folk legend’ (ibid., p. 48). The present work was exhibited on the railings outside the Royal Scottish Academy in August 1964, firmly placing Scottish art into the gaze of the visitors to the sell-out Delacroix exhibition and acting as a defining moment for both Bellany’s career, and in the examination of Scottish art.

As McEwan suggests, music was another important influence in Bellany’s life, having been a member of a pop group late into his art school career. In the present work we see Rousseau’s artillerymen replaced with members of pop music’s first super group, The Beatles, who by 1964 were emblems of the iconoclasm and revolution sweeping the country during the Swinging Sixties. One of Bellany’s mentors at the Royal College of Art in London was Pop artist Peter Blake, who would go on to design the legendary album artwork for The Beatles’ 1967 album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is not inconceivable that Blake was aware of Bellany’s recent work.

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