Lot 16
  • 16

Duncan Grant

Estimate
80,000 - 120,000 GBP
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Description

  • Duncan Grant
  • Blue Nude with Flute
  • oil and pencil on panel, in the Artist's painted frame
  • 61 by 183cm.; 24 by 72in.
  • Executed circa 1914-1915.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the Artist by Simon Watney
Anthony d'Offay, London, 1984, where acquired by a Private Collector, 18th June 1986, and thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited

London, Anthony d'Offay, The Omega Workshops: Alliance and Enmity in English Art 1913-1920, 18th January - 6th March 1984, cat. no.58, illustrated. 

Literature

Simon Watney, The Art of Duncan Grant, John Murray, London, 1990, illustrated pl.21.

Condition

The panel appears sound. There are some very minor surface cracks to the board, in line with the grain. There is a small spot of lifting to the lower left forearm of the figure. There is some light surface dirt across the work. The work is presented in the artist's own painted wooden frame, with flaking and some scattered losses. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in good overall condition, with strong and vivid colours throughout. Ultraviolet light reveals areas of retouching to the artist's painted frame. There are scattered flecks and spots of retouching to the piece in isolated areas in all four quadrants, mainly to the painted ground. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Catalogue Note

We are grateful to Richard Shone for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

In 1914 Duncan Grant acquired at least four narrow wooden panels with raised framed edges and devised for them a series of painted nude figures on an almost life-size scale. Three of these were completed: a Standing Nude with Bird (Fig.1, 1914, Private Collection, UK), a Nude with Flute (1914, Private Collection) and the present painting, almost certainly the last of the group, a re-working of Nude with Flute but in which the reclining figure is carried out entirely in tones of blue. The Standing Nude with Bird was based on a photograph of the writer Molly MacCarthy; the reclining nude was modelled by Marjorie Strachey (1882-1964), Grant’s cousin and sister of Lytton Strachey. In a very different style and setting, she is also portrayed in Grant’s 1910 painting Crime and Punishment (Tate, London). On the verso of Nude with Flute is an unfinished nude of the mountaineer George Mallory. All three female figures have an exotic presence, partly achieved through their setting, partly through their high-keyed, emblematic colour; that the ‘models’ are identifiable with two women in Grant’s social circle adds a note, in hindsight, of the degree of personal liberation which was then a hallmark of early Bloomsbury.

No evidence exists as to Grant’s intentions in painting these works which remained in his possession for fifty years. They were not the result of any commission through the Omega Workshops for which Grant frequently worked in 1913-14; nor do they appear to have formed a series with a particular decorative purpose in mind. But we do know that the present work was hanging on the wall of Vanessa Bell’s studio in 46 Gordon Square (where Grant often painted) in spring 1915, for the lower right section, including the dog, appears in the background of Bell’s Flowers in the Studio (Private Collection), (Richard Shone, The Art of Bloomsbury, Tate, London, 1999, p.128). The first of the group to be exhibited was Nude with Flute at Grant’s 1964 retrospective at Wildenstein, London (cat. no.29) where it was bought by Vivien Leigh. The Blue Nude was memorably included in The Omega Workshops at Anthony d’Offay, London, 1984.

There is no doubt that these three related works are startling images in British art of that period. Nothing could be further removed from the decorous female nudes of the New English Art Club and the Royal Academy, with their only apparel a veil of mythological or classicising symbolism. Nor yet do they share the frank realities of nudes in shabby settings as seen in works by Walter Sickert (see lot 13), Spencer Gore and Harold Gilman.

The figure’s awkward leg-splay and the dog’s look of alarm are characteristic of Grant’s ludic treatment of a classic theme. He may well be echoing Titian’s Danaë (in various versions) and Piero di Cosimo’s Death of Procris (as it was then called) in the National Gallery (which Grant later copied). There is also the possibility that the flute-playing nude carries a recent memory of Nijinsky in the ballet L’Après-Midi d’un Faune which Grant had seen in London in 1913; the colouristic and gestural freedoms of the Russian Ballet coursed through Grant’s work in the period 1913-14.

As found in several paintings by Grant from these years, Blue Nude with Flute allies music to a strong figurative presence – the nude is seen close to the picture plane – and provides an archetypal expression of his distinctive imagination. As Richard Morphet has written, this is characterised by Grant’s ‘preoccupation with combining references to different worlds and different times with a quiet but rich new celebration’ (see Richard Morphet, 'Image and Theme in Bloomsbury Art', The Art of Blomsbury, ed., Richard Shone, Tate, London, 1999, p.37).

Richard Shone