Danila Vassilieff

(1897-1958)

The wedding 1954

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
The collection of the artist
A G Morant, bequest of the artist, 1958
Museum of Modern Art and Design, Melbourne, 1959-1980
A G Morant, returned, 1980
Sue Gouch, 1984
Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 19 April 1994, lot 183 (illus.)
The Reg Grundy AC OBE and Joy Chambers-Grundy Collection, acquired in 1994

EXHIBITED
Memorial exhibition of the Paintings and sculpture of Danila Vassilieff, Museum of Modern Art and Design, Melbourne, 9 June 1959
Vassilieff: A Retrospective exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Watercolours, touring exhibition, Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 11 August – 22 September, 1985; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, cat. no. 40

LITERATURE
Felicity St John Moore, Vassilieff and His Art, Oxford, University Press, Melbourne, 1982, pp.110-1, 113 (illus.), 158
Felicity St John Moore, Vassilieff: a retrospective exhibition of Paintings, Sculptures and Watercolours, exh. cat., Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1985, p. 27
Zoja Bojić, Imaginary homelands: the art of Danila Vassilieff, Andrejević Endowment, 2007, pp. 44, 131, pl. 23 (illus.)
Felicity St John Moore, Vassilieff and his art, Macmillan Art Publishing, 2012, p.133, (illus.)


This symbolic autobiographical painting marks the bitter end of the artist's marriage to Elizabeth Vassilieff-Wolf. It would have been painted in Mildura in the period that followed his enforced departure from the house and studio that he had built himself, extracting stone and felling trees on his property at Warrandyte. Vassilieff was to refer to this Murray River period as his 'exile'. And he confided to friends there that his wife was living with a younger man, a communist. The younger man was the tall squarish-headed Bill Wolf, a linesman who was bringing electricity out to Warrandyte while conducting an affair with Vassilieff's estranged wife. William Wolf was to be the father of her future child, and her 'husband' until his untimely death in the early sixties.

This painting came after Vassilieff's remarkable achievements during the sculpture years that had been facilitated by Elizabeth's private money (but then interrupted by Vassilieff's second heart attack in 1953). The influence of his carving is evident in the style, such as the densely painted surface and solid treatment of forms, of this seemingly allegorical work.

But there is a pre-sculpture precedent for The wedding that was painted during the Second World War, some years before Vassilieff turned to sculpture. Theatre party 1944 (private collection, Sydney) is a black-humoured allegory that had emerged out of an earlier emotional crisis. [This work was later chosen by the Australian National Gallery to represent Vassilieff in Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s, the travelling bicentennial exhibition in 1988.]

Theatre party was a revenge, for her supposed infidelity, on his pianist 'wife' Helen and her smooth German 'boyfriend' (with whom she attended musical concerts and was later to marry). The figures were recognisable and the manner deliberately crude, impassioned and distorted, with squirts of paint direct from the tube.

The wedding is perhaps more calculated and (one suspects) a deliberate reference to the art of Edvard Munch who was one of Elizabeth's painting heroes and the father of German Expressionism. Elizabeth's enthusiasm for the expressionism of Munch had been the subject of an adult education lecture and of an article she had written in the left-wing literary journal Meanjin.

But the present painting was also anticipated in Vassilieff's dark marble carving, Three forms c.1953 (private collection), in which the figures of man and woman are separated by the rift between them and the man's primitive origin is implied by the Red Indian head-dress. The fact that the figures are bound by yoke and claw is less visible. It follows that the opposition between the sexes was already a theme of his sculpture.

In the present picture, The wedding 1954, the looming blockhead figure on the left is a mocking representation of the artist's virile German rival. His rival's sexual desire and looping advance (in the form of a greenish snake) appear to be answered by the bride's electric bouquet (like a row of red lights); inside her head are signs of further red connections. With some mindless kinfolk behind, the Hitler-like marriage celebrant (in the right foreground) suggests their shared ideology and dogmatic attitudes.

Vassilieff had every reason to resent the invasion of German and communist intruders into his personal life. He was a Don Cossack officer who had fought against the Reds in the Russian Civil War of 1917, been captured in 1921, and imprisoned at Baku. Before that, and straight out of Military Academy, he had fought against the Germans in the First World War and even enlisted in the Australian Army for a brief period in 1943-44.

The wedding is the sardonic and heartfelt precursor to Vassilieff's major theme during his Mildura years. Among the best of these later paintings are Marriage breakdown (Figure group and bridal car) 1954 (private collection, Perth) and Mildura wedding 1954 (Museum of Modern Art at Heide), a work that keys off his sculptural masterpiece, Stenka Razin 1953 (National Gallery of Australia).

Felicity St John Moore