Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso)
Private collection
Sotheby's, Sydney, 22 November 1992, lot 332
Private collection, Melbourne

RELATED WORK
Untitled (Portrait of Rudy Komon), 1966, charcoal on paper, 75.0 x 54.0cm, in the collection of National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


Robert Dickerson met Rudy Komon when he attended the artist's first solo show at Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, in 1959. Jenny Dickerson describes this encounter: 'Rudy arrived unannounced at the Farmers Blaxland Gallery show and demanded to meet the artist. He had that kind of brusque arrogance. He was then dealing in European art at a shop in Waverley, but his sights were set on a career as a contemporary art dealer... Rudy befriended Bob and showed him the old building he had just bought on the corner of Windsor Street, Paddington and Jersey Road. It had formerly been a wine bar... Rudy would transform the old bar into a smart gallery... Rudy wanted to be Bob's sole agent and set about signing him up.'1

Rudy's presence in Dickerson's life was all encompassing, regularly parading the artist around at long lunches and inviting him to 'Bacchanalian nights of drinking at Rudy's gallery... Bob revelled in the company of Rudy's society set. They were politicians, doctors, business tycoons, legal men... Bob also met writers such as Patrick White and Morris West, and both purchased his work.'2

Rudy represented Dickerson until 1961, arranging for works to be included an important survey exhibition held at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, Recent Australian Paintings Exhibition. However, the pair eventually parted ways. Dickerson tired of Komon's bon vivant ways and felt the dealer had mismanaged his financial affairs. Despite being generally unreliable and a questionable influence, Rudy had played an important role in placing Dickerson's work in distinguished collections, greatly advancing his career at a crucial time in the artist's oeuvre.

Painted in 1959, as the exploration of abstraction was beginning to make advances with critics and audiences throughout Australia, seven artists staged the infamous Antipodean Manifesto exhibition held at the Victoria Artists' Society. Defending the figurative tradition associated with the 1940s modernist literary and artistic movement, The Angry Penguins, artists Charles Blackman, Arthur and David Boyd, John Brack, John Perceval, Clifton Pugh and Robert Dickerson all contributed, Dickerson the only non-Victorian to be included. The Manifesto written by Bernard Smith asserted that the art of 'Tachistes, Action Painters, Geometric Abstractionists, [and] Abstract Expressionists' was 'not an art sufficient for our time... not an art for living men'.

The present portrait of a sharply dressed Komon captures all his charismatic spirit. The dealer is commanding the room with his confident gestures and posture. The red and black palette both serves to give him gravitas, whilst also perhaps hinting at the artist and dealer's tumultuous relationship.

1. Jennifer Dickerson, Robert Dickerson: Against the Tide, Pandanus Press and Queen Street Fine Art, Sydney, 2004, p.72
2. ibid, pp. 79–82