Ralph Balson

Professor Bernard Smith, Melbourne
Peter Walker Fine Art, Adelaide
Fine Australian and European Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Photographs, Sotheby's, Sydney, 16 August 1999, lot 11
Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2004

(possibly) Anthony Hordern's Gallery, Sydney, 1941
Blue Chip III: the collector's exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 27 February - 31 March 2001
R. Balson / 41 Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Galleries, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, 22 August - 27 September 2008

Blue Chip III: the collector's exhibition, Melbourne: Niagara Galleries, 2001, (illus.)
Nicholas Chambers and Michael Whitworth (eds.), R. Balson / 41 Anthony Hordern's Fine Art Galleries, Sydney: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 2008, pp. 18, 19 (illus.)

Overall, work is in good condition. Bardbaord around rebate shows minor scuffing. General and light staining throughout surface. Work requires UV examination.
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Ralph Balson's 1941 exhibition at Anthony Hordern's Gallery is generally heralded as a landmark in Australian art history: the country's very first solo exhibition of entirely non-objective paintings. The artist was to maintain a commitment to abstraction throughout the next two decades, moving from these early hard-edge geometric 'constructive paintings' through a phase of refined pointillist all-overism in the mid to late 1950s to the poured, dashed and splattered physical energies of the final 'Matter Paintings.'

The present work is one of the earliest of Balson's 'pure' abstractions, and indeed was probably one of the 21 exhibited at that seminal exhibition of 1941. Influenced by the 'dynamic symmetry' of Dutch de Stijl – as exemplified by the work of Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg – Balson's 'constructive paintings' consist of flat, grid-based geometric arrangements: variously conjoined, intersected and overlaid circles, squares, rectangles and (more rarely) triangles. The paintings of this period also derive a particular energy from their occasional deviations from the rectilinear grid. Following French cubist Albert Gleizes' notion of rotational movement in composition (as relayed by Gleizes' pupil Ann Dangar to Balson's friend Grace Crowley), the present work hinges on a pair of angled parallel blue and yellow bars, which parallel a similar device in Painting (1941, Whitworth/Bruce collection) and in the slightly later but better-known Construction in green (1942, Art Gallery of New South Wales).

The angled bars are in complimentary or opposite colours, and draw attention to the second crucial aspect of the work, its chromatic balance. Balson's temperamental inclination appears to have been to soft, secondary, pastel tones; the dusty rose shade he particularly favoured (here seen top and bottom left) was even known among his friends as 'Balson pink.' However, as Bruce Adams has noted, 'the works of 1941 were also 'animated ... with geometric focal points of pure colour.'¹  In this case, the heart of the painting is a pulsing red square just left of centre.

Constructive painting is a work of considerable rarity and art-historical significance, but it is also strikingly contemporary: a deft pictorial balancing act, a tour de force of modernist composition. As Grace Crowley would later remark: 'The placing and relation of these forms of colour one with the other must have been weighed with great accuracy for in the net result, even if one small element were removed, the whole structure would seem to fall to pieces.'²

This work has been requested for inclusion in the exhibition Cubism and Australian Art to be held at Heide: Museum of Modern Art from 21 November 2009 - 8 April 2010 and for reproduction in the associated book of the exhibition.

1.   Bruce Adams, Ralph Balson: a retrospective, Bulleen: Heide Park and Art Gallery, 1989, p. 24
2.  Grace Crowley, interview with Hazel de Berg, February 1966, quoted in Ralph Balson (1890-1964), Melbourne: Niagara Galleries, 1989, p. 3