Premium pages left without account:

Auction archive: Lot number 113

Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Blue Nude

IMPORTANT IRISH ART
31 May 2017
Estimate
€15,000 - €20,000
ca. US$16,586 - US$22,115
Price realised:
€17,000
ca. US$18,797
Auction archive: Lot number 113

Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Blue Nude

IMPORTANT IRISH ART
31 May 2017
Estimate
€15,000 - €20,000
ca. US$16,586 - US$22,115
Price realised:
€17,000
ca. US$18,797
Beschreibung:

Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Blue Nude Oil on canvas, 105 x 120cm (41¼ x 47¼'') Inscribed by the artist verso 'Blue Nude, Barrie Cooke 85' Provenance: With Hendricks Gallery, label verso, September 1992, No. 3; Gillian Bowler. Exhibited: The Hendriks Gallery, 1985, where purchased; 'Barrie Cooke Exhibition', Haags Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Holland, Tentoonastelling 1992, Catalogue No. 3. Literature: 'Barrie Cooke' by Aidan Dunne, 1986, Douglas Hyde Gallery, detail front cover illustration, illustrated again p.119 under title 'Blue Figure'. Barrie Cooke was one of the dominant figures in Irish painting throughout the 1960-90s. Born in Cheshire, in England, he spent his teenage years in the United States and studied art history and science at Harvard before coming to live in Ireland in 1954. Apart from time spent studying under Oskar Kokoschka in 1955, and his extended trips to Borneo, New Zealand, Malaya, Lapland and other places, he has lived in counties Clare, Kilkenny and Sligo for most of his adult life. Blue Nude is one of many nudes painted by Cooke although the artist is generally seen as a landscapist with a passionate concern for saving nature from the devastating consequences of human intervention. His paintings of the female body, like his portraits of friends, can be seen as a continuation of his landscapes. When he painted a portrait of his friend, the American writer, Tess Gallagher, she wrote an account of the process, which has him saying for me you will simply be a landscape. That this is clearly true too, of his female nudes, is evident in his earliest ventures into the genre, begun when he was living in Clare in the 1950s and early 60s. There he painted the figures of women emerging from the bare landscape of the Burren, making the linkage between the earth and the people who occupy it appear seamless. His famous Sheila-na-Gig paintings, in which the nude is built up, in three dimension from clay and fused with the painted ground were landmark works in this genre. Blue Nude shows the consistency of this motif in his art and, although painted in 1985, bears a remarkable resemblance to earlier nudes from the early 1960s in the Gordon Lambert Trust at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and in other collections. What they have in common is what Seamus Heaney referred to as Cookes aqueous vision, which makes the female body appear to bend and flow with the contours of the landscape or the barely defined physical surroundings of the interiors in which they are sometimes placed. The palette of strong blues and oranges also remains consistent. Cooke loved to work directly onto raw canvas, allowing the paint to seep into it and stain it like a river caressing its banks, creating a strong sense of fluidity rather than precise finish. For that reason, Blue Nude should not be understood in the usual sense of a study for a more complete painting but rather as an end in itself, in which the body is surrounded by a very sketchy background, which has references both to the landscape and to an interior setting. The fact that it was intended as a completed painting rather than simply a study, like so many of his nudes, is borne out by the fact that the painting was included in his retrospective exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum at the Hague in 1992. Barrie Cooke was a significant influence, not just on younger artists in Ireland, but also on the context for making and showing art to the wider public. He was a founding member of the Independent Artists group in 1961 and, successively, an active member of the boards of the Butler Gallery, where he had a considerable role in the shaping of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and of the Douglas Hyde and Model and Niland Galleries in Dublin and Sligo respectively. He was also a founder member of Aosdána and through his wide international connections, an important transmitter of external influence on Irish art. Catherine Marshall, April 2017

Auction archive: Lot number 113
Auction:
Datum:
31 May 2017
Auction house:
Adams's
St Stephens Green 26
D02 X665 Dublin 2
Ireland
info@adams.ie
+353-1-6760261)
Beschreibung:

Barrie Cooke HRHA (1931-2014) Blue Nude Oil on canvas, 105 x 120cm (41¼ x 47¼'') Inscribed by the artist verso 'Blue Nude, Barrie Cooke 85' Provenance: With Hendricks Gallery, label verso, September 1992, No. 3; Gillian Bowler. Exhibited: The Hendriks Gallery, 1985, where purchased; 'Barrie Cooke Exhibition', Haags Gemeente Museum, The Hague, Holland, Tentoonastelling 1992, Catalogue No. 3. Literature: 'Barrie Cooke' by Aidan Dunne, 1986, Douglas Hyde Gallery, detail front cover illustration, illustrated again p.119 under title 'Blue Figure'. Barrie Cooke was one of the dominant figures in Irish painting throughout the 1960-90s. Born in Cheshire, in England, he spent his teenage years in the United States and studied art history and science at Harvard before coming to live in Ireland in 1954. Apart from time spent studying under Oskar Kokoschka in 1955, and his extended trips to Borneo, New Zealand, Malaya, Lapland and other places, he has lived in counties Clare, Kilkenny and Sligo for most of his adult life. Blue Nude is one of many nudes painted by Cooke although the artist is generally seen as a landscapist with a passionate concern for saving nature from the devastating consequences of human intervention. His paintings of the female body, like his portraits of friends, can be seen as a continuation of his landscapes. When he painted a portrait of his friend, the American writer, Tess Gallagher, she wrote an account of the process, which has him saying for me you will simply be a landscape. That this is clearly true too, of his female nudes, is evident in his earliest ventures into the genre, begun when he was living in Clare in the 1950s and early 60s. There he painted the figures of women emerging from the bare landscape of the Burren, making the linkage between the earth and the people who occupy it appear seamless. His famous Sheila-na-Gig paintings, in which the nude is built up, in three dimension from clay and fused with the painted ground were landmark works in this genre. Blue Nude shows the consistency of this motif in his art and, although painted in 1985, bears a remarkable resemblance to earlier nudes from the early 1960s in the Gordon Lambert Trust at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and in other collections. What they have in common is what Seamus Heaney referred to as Cookes aqueous vision, which makes the female body appear to bend and flow with the contours of the landscape or the barely defined physical surroundings of the interiors in which they are sometimes placed. The palette of strong blues and oranges also remains consistent. Cooke loved to work directly onto raw canvas, allowing the paint to seep into it and stain it like a river caressing its banks, creating a strong sense of fluidity rather than precise finish. For that reason, Blue Nude should not be understood in the usual sense of a study for a more complete painting but rather as an end in itself, in which the body is surrounded by a very sketchy background, which has references both to the landscape and to an interior setting. The fact that it was intended as a completed painting rather than simply a study, like so many of his nudes, is borne out by the fact that the painting was included in his retrospective exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum at the Hague in 1992. Barrie Cooke was a significant influence, not just on younger artists in Ireland, but also on the context for making and showing art to the wider public. He was a founding member of the Independent Artists group in 1961 and, successively, an active member of the boards of the Butler Gallery, where he had a considerable role in the shaping of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and of the Douglas Hyde and Model and Niland Galleries in Dublin and Sligo respectively. He was also a founder member of Aosdána and through his wide international connections, an important transmitter of external influence on Irish art. Catherine Marshall, April 2017

Auction archive: Lot number 113
Auction:
Datum:
31 May 2017
Auction house:
Adams's
St Stephens Green 26
D02 X665 Dublin 2
Ireland
info@adams.ie
+353-1-6760261)
Try LotSearch

Try LotSearch and its premium features for 7 days - without any costs!

  • Search lots and bid
  • Price database and artist analysis
  • Alerts for your searches
Create an alert now!

Be notified automatically about new items in upcoming auctions.

Create an alert