Peter Booth

(born 1940)

Painting (Strange Landscape with Sea), 1985

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Pinacotheca Gallery, Melbourne, 1985
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher and Hackett, Melbourne, 29 August 2007, lot 55
Private collection, Perth


Peter Booth is one of Australia's most significant and highly influential artists of his generation. It was his early large-scale abstractions that initially attracted widespread acclaim having been included in the landmark exhibition, The Field, the inaugural exhibition for the National Gallery of Victoria St Kilda Road building in 1968. However today, it is his immensely vivid and emotionally charged apocalyptic landscapes that captivate his audience. Early memories of his childhood growing up during and post the war years in the bleak industrial town of Sheffield, England, infuse his work shaping their dramatic backdrops. His paintings became a culmination of his observations from the real world and the inner realm of his imagination.

'Booth's art unifies a deeply personal, inner reality with a singular vision of the external world, alerting us to the pleasures and pitfalls of life. His visions of urban chaos, landscapes cast in alternately bleak and Arcadian light, and hybrid beings, grotesquery and the carnivalesque, rise from observations of the surrounding world... His pictures can be terrifying and apocalyptic, bizarre, but often heart-warming and amusing.'1

The present work painted in 1985 is quintessential Booth, the strangely positioned bone and egg-like forms, sitting side-by-side on a beach from another planet, where the skies broil with cosmic turbulence. Peter Booth is a master at this, the ability to throw the viewer off balance, depicting a world not quite our own but one which seems weirdly familiar.

The following year in 1986, Booth was rewarded with a solo show in New York, further cementing his position on the contemporary art scene, a rarity for an Australian artist at the time. What was even more rare was the fact that The New York Times gave Booth its lead review. Critic Michael Brenson, noting that booths shapes 'bring to mind the biomorphic forms of Booth's compatriot Henry Moore. But Booth's forms are almost like dog bones. They are more prehistoric, more appropriate as props...' That said, the well-respected Brenson was clearly smitten by Booth's 'combination of bleakness and lushness.'1

During this period Booth's works were acquired by the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, making him arguably the most successful Australian artist in the US over that decade. It is hard to imagine the quietly spoken and introspective Booth amidst the hustle and bustle of New York, whereas he was happy to retreat to his quiet studio in St Kilda by the bay where his visions continued to flow.

1. Gerard Vaughan, Peter Booth: Human Nature, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2004, p. 5
2. Michael Brenson, 'Vision of Australia in Peter Booth's works', The New York Times, United States of America, 10 January 1986