The Artistic Muse (Rembrandt) 2003

GARRY SHEAD born 1942

The Artistic Muse (Rembrandt) 2003

oil on board
121.0 x 121.0 cm; 125.0 x 124.0 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: Garry Shead/ 2003
inscribed verso: 'The Artistic Muse'

Provenance:
Private collection, New South Wales
Menzies, Sydney, 26 March 2015, lot 32
Private collection, Melbourne

Estimate: $60000 - 80000

Garry Shead is widely regarded as Australia’s preeminent contemporary lyrical figurative expressionist painter. In his paintings, he creates a dream-like state where figures may float through the air, where light can dissolve solid objects and transform them into forms resembling apparitions suspended within veils of colour and his paintings frequently evoke an atmosphere of enchantment that permeates the entire work.

Since the late 1980s, Shead has been in the public eye with such memorable series paintings and graphics including the D.H. Lawrence series, The Royal Suite and the Ern Malley series that have become iconic in Australian art. His reputation was further enhanced when he was awarded the Archibald Prize for Portraiture in 1993 and then the Dobell Prize for Drawing in 2004 that was judged by John Olsen (1928-2023). He has been celebrated as one of the most significant artists of the post-war period to emerge in Australia and has held a series of spectacularly successful sell-out exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.

Despite the thematic diversity evident in his oeuvre and the variety of techniques and mediums employed, the unifying thread in Shead’s art is his conscious belief that there is a Muse that guides his work and that he, in a sense, is a willing medium through which her inspiration can act. One could argue that Shead’s work from the early 60s to the present, in all mediums, represents many different paths travelled in pursuit of the same Muse.(1)

D.H. Lawrence, when writing on painting, noted: ‘A picture lives with the life you put into it.  If you put no life into it — no thrill, no concentration of delight or passion of visual discovery — then the picture is dead, like so many canvases, no matter how much thorough and scientific work is put in it.’ With Shead it is precisely the question of the inner life of a painting that is central to his art making, and this inner life is dependent on inspiration and on his Muse. To return to Lawrence, this inner life or visionary awareness ‘needs a purity of spirit, a sloughing of vulgar sensation and vulgar interest, and above all, vulgar contact, that few people know how to perform … [Art] is treated as if it were a science, which it is not. Art is a form of religion, minus the Ten Commandment business, which is sociological. Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object but is the great atonement in delight, for I can never look on art save as a form of delight.’(2)

For Shead, the idea that art is a religion and a total commitment, is an absolute given. One constant thread which recurs throughout his diaries is that he feels that he is married to art, to his Muse, while the rest of life is something which has to fit around this. It was when he was aged in his late fifties and was working at the height of his powers that he embarked on a small series of paintings that dealt specifically with the theme of the Artist and his Muse. The Artistic Muse (Rembrandt) and Artist and the Muse in Studio belong to this series. If the Muse was implicitly implied in much of his earlier work, in the Artist and his Muse series, the Muse takes centre stage. When painting Rembrandt, Goya or Velázquez with their Muse, Shead venerates the role that the Muse played in their inspiration, while simultaneously painting himself into the picture.

Shead is an artist who in most instances has to enter the work by putting himself into the composition — whether it be as D.H. Lawrence, Prince Philip, Ern Malley or, in this case, as an old master artist. However, by entering a composition, this does not imply that he ‘owns’ it, as a painting grows through its own internal logic and momentum; he enters it to give it life and then participates in the delight and agony of its growth and development. On one level, these are strangely autobiographical paintings where, in a not too unkindly manner, we can note that we encounter the artist in period dress voyeuristically exploring the world of the old masters. It is interesting that Shead has not called the series ‘the artist and his model,’ but precisely, ‘the Artist and his Muse’. In each instance we recognise the Muse, as she may have appeared to Rembrandt, Goya or Velázquez.

In The Artistic Muse (Rembrandt) 2003, Shead creates a complex composition where a figure resembling Rembrandt stands holding a painter’s palette, while a scantily clad Muse appears to hover before him and holds the paint brush that will bring life to the blank canvas that rests on the easel in front of them. Above, like a mysterious apparition, is a flying angelic being and a hovering lit candelabra that casts a mysterious celestial glow over the composition below. At the foot of the easel are a couple of vases with a red rose as the artist’s passionate tribute to Rembrandt. The painting can be read on many levels. The Rembrandt/Shead figure acknowledges that they are merely servants through whom the Muse can create great art. It is also a celebration of a vision of light, where Shead, who had for many decades studied the techniques of the old masters, has responded to the style of Rembrandt and captures the feeling of a celestial vision where something quite wondrous is being celebrated. The painting may also be read on an autobiographical level where the identity of the model for the Muse may be deciphered as a person who was at that time central in the artist’s life.

The smaller, undated painting, Artist and the Muse in Studio, returns to a compositional arrangement encountered in one of the earliest paintings in this series, Artist and the Muse, dated 1999.(3) The figure of the artist, again resembling Rembrandt, stands behind the completely naked nude and the scene is enveloped by flowing expanses of baroque drapery. It is characteristic of Shead’s working method that whenever he created a tight stage-like foreground space in which the human drama unfolds, he also creates a path of escape – in this instance a shining staircase in the upper left-hand-corner of the painting. There is no other artist in Australia of Shead’s generation, who can so effectively and dramatically create such a powerfully evocative composition through an inner luminosity.

Shead is one of the major figures in contemporary Australian art and the paintings of the Artist and his Muse series are some of the most significant paintings in his oeuvre.

Footnotes:

1. See Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2001
2. Lawrence, D., ‘Making Pictures,’ in Levy, M. (ed.), Paintings of D.H. Lawrence, Cory, Adams and Mackay, London, 1964, pp.iii-iv
3. See Garry Shead, Artist and the Muse 1999, oil on canvas, 102.0 x 76.0 cm, private collection; illus. in Grishin, S., Garry Shead and the Erotic Muse, op. cit., pl.96

Sasha Grishin

Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA is an Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra and Guest Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.  He is the author of over thirty books on art, including Australian Art: A History (The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2013). 

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