Footnotes

PROVENANCE
William Mora Galleries, Melbourne
The Hicks Family Collection, Melbourne
Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 April 2009, lot 39
Private collection, Sydney
Shapiro, Sydney, 19 August 2015, lot 18
Private collection, Sydney

'I've been a ballet fan ever since I could see' declared Dickerson in a 2002 interview.1 He was an avid attendee of the ballet throughout his life, both in Australia as well as international performances during his travels for international exhibitions. He was to revisit this subject time and again throughout his career, producing paintings, charcoals and pastels as well as several etchings and two series of linocuts entitled Aspects of Dance I and II. In 1978 he was commissioned to design a backdrop for the Queensland Ballet Company's performance of Cage of God.

One of his first paintings on the subject, The Dancing Lesson, 1951, is an early work and reveals Dickerson's keen observation of the human figure. He had had many opportunities throughout his early years as a young boxer to develop an understanding of and fascination with the movement of the human body in all of its athletic forms. He admired the discipline and commitment required and keenly understood the psychology of the performer. In this work, despite their physical proximity to one another, each dancer is very much absorbed in their own practice, many with eyes closed, completely captivated by the music and focused entirely on their own response to it. This sense of individual experience and of 'aloneness' (not always of the melancholy kind) was to permeate throughout the rest of his oeuvre.

1. Louisa Powell, Robert Dickerson: The Complete Graphics, Queen Street Fine Art, Sydney, 2002, p. 47