Deutscher and Hackett

Dating from his time in Swan Hill (see lot 88), Woman and Boy (Mrs J Bayard) is a poignant interpretation of the 'mother and child' theme which Vassilieff had commenced in Mildura the previous year and pursued subsequently - presumably during one of his intermittent visits to Melbourne - in the large portraits of Sunday and Sweeney Reed. Thematically and stylistically, the painting is also closely related to the monumental, almost Byzantine composition Woman and Girl which Vassilieff executed in 1955 specifically for the Women's Weekly Portrait Prize in the hope of reviving his artistic reputation.

If Woman and Boy similarly echoes the 'Madonna and Child' legacy of Byzantine and early Renaissance art in its rich, jewel-like palette and formality of gesture - the infant (with an adult physiognomy typical of the iconic tradition) embraced by a mother who stares out vacantly at the viewer, her gaze tinged with sadness - it also betrays important affinities with the psychological portraits of the local community which Vassilieff undertook in Swan Hill and Mildura. Indeed, in the same vein as these sometimes disturbing depictions, the present bears an underlying element of disquiet in the starkness of approach, the combination of naturalistic and expressive pictorial means, and particularly, the mother's distraught square left eye. Appearing elsewhere in Mildura Wedding, 1954, - a kind of 'requiem' work exploring the artist's preoccupation with psychological and sexual breakdown in the wake of his own separation from his second wife " and again, in Mildura Mother and Child, the motif seems to allude to the latent uncertainty, conflict and sorrow that pervades the most intimate of relationships.

VERONICA ANGELATOS