Richard Larter

The artist
Watters Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2006

Exhibition of Paintings: Richard Larter, Watters Gallery, Sydney, September 1965, cat. 4
Richard Larter: Recent paintings and mining the archive 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, Watters Gallery, Sydney, 26 July - 19 August 2006, cat. 16 (as Untitled (large abstract))

Richard Larter: Recent paintings and mining the archive 1965, 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, Sydney: Watters Gallery 2006, cat. 16 (as Untitled (large abstract)) p. 8 (illus.)

This work is framed in a black flattened frame with a gilt slip. The work is braced at the reverse. Surface is in very good condition, consistent with age.
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The climax of Richard Larter's hypodermic needle pictures were the two series of 1964-1965 he called the 'Anacreontic' and 'Dithyrambic' paintings. As the names suggest,¹ these works present distinct sexual content within strong visual rhythms of line and colour: stylised, strongly outlined female nudes in startlingly erotic, even pornographic poses recline against a Paul Klee-Friedensreich Hundertwasser doodle-pattern knitting-patchwork of rippling concentric and parallel lines.

However, from 1965 Larter 'gave up hypodermic syringe paintings ... after terrible hassles about obtaining syringes and needles – the imbecilic chemists would not believe you coukld paint with them – my hair was long – Q.E.D I must be a drug addict. After rather pointless confrontations with officious chemists (dispensers) and fat ignorant and equally officious fuzz (sergeants), I decided to conform and use the brush.''²  Nevertheless, his collage-pattern aesthetic still required the strong but transparent layer formerly provided by the dribble and squiggle of the hypodermic lines. He found a substitute in the graphic net, a device he had previously used alongside the needle lines in some of the Dithyrambic paintings. In the present work he stretches the net across the entire width of a large canvas, and even includes it in the title – 'retiform' (from the Latin rete) simply means net-shaped, net-like. The black outlined spaces ripple elastically, dynamically, spinning and twisting and puddling and clumping like stockings on a stripper or scales on a snake.

Beneath the retiform screen, the picture explodes in a joyous riot of orange, purple, red, green and yellow, in raw bars, patches and glyphs. This is in fact one of the very earliest examples of Larter's non-objective work,³ which would be a constant descant to poppish figuration throughout the rest of his career. A few years later, Donald Brook described such paintings in terms which well describe the present work: 'overlaid bands and lattices of hectic and reflective colour, like a plateful of unfolded garish toffee wrappers.'⁴

A highlight of Larter's first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery (with Anacreontic painting no. 2 it was one of the most expensive works in the show, priced at 125 guineas), Retiform is a bold, ambitious and grandly decorative painting, and a key work in the development of the artist's oeuvre.

1.  An ancreontic (from the name of the Greek poet Anacreon) is a lyric poem with amatory, erotic content, while a dithyrambic is a Bacchanalian chant, somewhat wilder, mre rauncy, more boisterous
2.  Richard Larter, letter to Ian North, quoted in Deborah Hart, Richard Larter, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2008, p. 40
3.  Another, from the previous year, is Surform (1964, Laverty Collection)
4.  Donald Brook, 'The astonishingly obvious', Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 1970, p. 16