Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Antony Donaldson: Take Five, 12 May-3 November 2012

Painted in 1965, Anthony Donaldsons' Take her T-Bird Away was created at the height of the Swinging Sixties, before Donaldson moved to Los Angeles to live and work from 1966-68. Donaldson studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1959-62, going on to teach at Chelsea School of Art in 1962 where his colleagues included Patrick Caulfield and Allen Jones. It was in that year, too that he developed his signature stylized and simplified treatment of the female form that came to dominate his work.

Idealized, youthful and sexually confident, these women pose flirtatiously in front of the viewer. They represent a fantasy, generalised and often without individual features, reflecting the hedonistic promise that the decade held for a new generation of men and women. His work from this decade celebrates all that it was to be young and alive in the 1960s – alongside the starlets and models, another favoured subject was racing cars - with titles such as Where the Boys Are (1962), Taking the Plunge (1962-3), It Won't Be Long (1964), Sun, Sea, Sky and Sand (1964) and Six O'Clock Cadillac (1966).

In the present lot, the motif of the seated woman is based on a magazine photo of a Swedish dancer from the Crazy Horse cabaret club in Paris. Silhouetted and outlined in bold red, blue and yellow, she symbolises the modern woman of the sixties, in control of her own sexuality and able to take advantage of the new freedoms that swept across Britain and America at the time. The title is taken from the Beach Boy's hit from 1964, Fun, Fun, Fun, which features the chorus line: 'And she'll have fun, fun, fun till her Daddy takes the T-bird away', the lyrics telling of a young woman who races all over town in her father's car, with the new-found freedom and confidence that comes with having your own set of wheels. The envy of all, the Beach Boys sing that she 'walks, looks and drives like an ace now', leaving men in her wake. With crossed legs, high-heel shoes and her head resting on her hand she stares out assuredly at the viewer, her pose both coquettish and in control.

The bright palette of primary colours both evokes the sun-soaked state of California that Donaldson was shortly to move to – inspired no doubt in part by the moving and shaking of the Beach Boys and their preppy, all-American, aesthetic – as well as the increasing commerciality and boom in advertising that was ushered in following the austerity of the post-war era. Painted on three separate canvases but framed as one, the stylised figure becomes an emblem, almost an advertisement of the good life that the Sixties offered; a technicolour array of free love and mini skirts, the Beatles and the fashionable boutiques of Carnaby Street.

Offered at auction for the first time, Take her T-Bird Away is an important work from the most sought-after period of Donaldson's career, encapsulating the sexual and social liberation the decade offered. Painted in large format and with the zing of bright red, yellow and sky-blue, it exudes the optimism of a young artist embracing not just the Swinging Sixties but creating a Pop art which reflected this, a new mode of expression for an entirely new era.

We are grateful to the Artist for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.