Sydney Ball

The Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art, Christie's, Melbourne, 28 June 2000, lot 58
Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne; purchased from the above
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2005

Sydney Ball, Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne, 13 - 29 July 1965, cat. 5 (as Diagonal no. 1)
The Mertz Collection of Contemporary Australian Paintings, National Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, March 1966, cat. 1
Contemporary Australian Painting from the Mertz Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1966, cat. 91

Work is framed in a metal frame and the reverse is sealed with a foam core back. Some direct in the yellow area of the painting, there are pencil marks apparent in the work by the artist which are not visually disturbing.
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This work is number XXV of the Canto series.

With Dick Watkins and Janet Dawson, Sydney Ball was one of only a small number of Australian artists who engaged with post-painterly abstraction in the early 1960s, before the establishment of the Central Street Gallery in Sydney and the triumphant emergence of a local hard-edge style.

As with Watkins and Dawson, Ball began experimenting with the abstract mode as a result of first-hand, overseas experience. From 1963 to 1965 he studied at the Art Students' League in New York under Theodoros Stamos, 'one of the most intuitively lyrical of the abstract expressionists.'¹  He visited major museum exhibitions by Morris Louis, Hans Hoffmann and Kenneth Noland, and gallery shows by younger artists such as Robert Morris, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly. Perhaps not surprisingly, this environment produced in Ball the intention to 'bring the painting down to very simple terms and not worry about a vehicle to carry the colour, but instead to let the colour itself be the painting.'²  In other words, by reducing his formal means to fundamental geometry he would allow colour – its saturations and tonalities, adjacencies and complementarities – to become the organising principle of the works.

Ball's celebrated Canto series was developed from an earlier sequence of vertical stripe paintings, through the epiphany of an accidental encounter. As Patrick McCaughey tells it, 'One day in a cheap New York print shop he saw an old print in an elliptical mount within a rectangular frame. The tension between ellipse and edge immediately suggested the  ... format ... that Ball was to work with over the next two years.'³  The artist first essayed this structure – the striped circle within a square – while still in New York, but its final, fully-resolved format, with the circle touching the edges of the rectilinear frame, was not settled until his return to Australia in May 1965, in paintings such as the present work, the very first in which he rotated the square to make a lozenge or diamond.

The Cantos are not entirely non-referential. Ball once stated that 'the circle containing the vertical bands of colours represents for me the Chinese symbol of infinity. The general epigraph to the Cantos, "In Great Praise", represents my affirmation to people, places and things experienced.'⁴  However, whatever the artist's mystical or humanist leanings, it is the immediate, sensory-somatic qualities of this work which most immediately strike the viewer, today as much as 40 years ago. The radiant, sonorous disc of Canto (Diagonal no. 1), with its harmonious chords of pure, flat red, gold and blue eclipses or makes redundant any distracting questions - of meaning, of subject and surface, figure and ground.

As James Gleeson noted in his review of the Canto paintings' first Sydney exhibition, Ball 'is using colour in a new disturbing way – not to enchant the eye but to stimulate it in much the same way as matter can be stimulated by an electric charge. These stripes and circles work upon the nerve endings in the eye like a vigorous massage under the nerves below the skin. We are almost physically enhanced by the experience.'⁵

1.  Elwyn Lynn, (Introduction), Sydney Ball, Melbourne: South Yarra Gallery, 1966
2.  Sydney Ball, quoted in Janine Burke, 'The paintings of Sydney Ball', in Sydney Ball survey 1965-1975, Newcastle: Newcastle City Art Gallery, 1975, n.p.)
3.  Patrick McCaughey, 'Sydney Ball and the sixties', Art and Australia, vol. 7 no. 4, March 1970, p. 333
4.  Mervyn Horton (ed.), Present day art in Australia, Sydney: Ure Smith, 1969, p. 19. 'In Great Praise' is also a reference and a homage to the poetry of Ezra Pound.
5.  James Gleeson, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 August 1966