JOHN COBURN

Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney (label on the reverse)
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 24 July 1988, lot 407
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Lou Klepac, John Coburn: The Spirit of Colour, The Beagle Press, Roseville, 2003, p. 64, pl. 38 (illus.)

This work is presented in its original black painted timber box frame. There is very minor paint loss to upper right hand corner. This work is in overall good original condition.
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John Coburn's familiar pictorial mode of floating geometric-organic-symbolic forms was well-established by the middle of the 1950s. It therefore comes as something of a surprise to encounter his paintings of 1962 - 63, with their strongly Abstract Expressionist flavour. There is a distinct New York School influence in these works, something of 'the calligraphic impetuosities of Kline or De Kooning',¹ but there are also traces of contemporary European non-objective painting, from the Frenchman Alfred Manessier (one of Coburn's admitted early influences) to the British Situation artists such as John Hoyland and Gillian Ayres. Developments closer to home also had an impact, most obviously the 1961 and 1962 exhibitions of the Sydney 9 abstractionists – John Olsen, Stanislaus Rapotec, Eric Smith, Leonard Hessing et al – with their splashy, wristy, spiky, aggressive riposte to Antipodean figuration.

Coburn's version of this style was expressed in a major Passion series, as well as in a number of non-religious subjects, amongst them the present work.² Within its dramatic, painterly tangle of thorns and mandalas, hands and suns, lies the old Australian theme of the old Australian landscape. As the artist himself said around this time: 'I think that my work is always concerned with the Australian landscape, things that I saw and experienced as a child in Western Queensland, the red dry earth that's cracked in the drought times, the burnt scrub after the bushfires; I think these are the things that my work is mainly concerned with, but that is almost by the way. What I worry about are the shapes and the colours.'³

What he didn't have to worry about was making a mess of the carpet. A final and not entirely trivial generator of these new works was a major change in the artist's domestic and productive circumstances. Coburn and his wife moved from their tiny Rose Bay flat to a new house in Warriewood 'where, for the first time, I had a studio which was the garage. For the first time I could throw a bit of paint around and it didn't matter. Before that time I had to be very careful because I painted in the lounge room!'⁴

Coburn eventually gave up this new-found gestural freedom, returning to his accustomed calm, hard-edge mode within a very few years. Nevertheless, works such as Edge of the Desert remain as important documents of a turbulent period in Sydney painting, and testaments to the wilder, more dynamic side of Coburn's artistic personality.

1. Elwyn Lynn, introduction to John Coburn: Religious and Abstract Paintings (exh. cat.), Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne, 1964, p. 2
2. Both Passion paintings and secular subjects were included in Coburn's exhibitions of this period, at the Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney (June 1963) at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane (March-April 1964) and at Melbourne's Museum of Modern Art and Design (June 1964)
3. John Coburn, interviewed by Hazel De Berg, June 1962 (Tape II, cut 2, second side), Oral History Section, National Library of Australia
4. John Coburn, quoted in Nadine Amadio, John Coburn, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 46