Vistas: Alice Goldin and Selected Landscapes

Session 1

This session brings together the work of Alice Goldin (b. Vienna, 1922) across the disciplines that defined her practice: woodcut, screenprint and tempera painting. Included in this session are works from the Alice Goldin Estate, the second curated offering at Strauss & Co for this artist.

The woodcuts on offer trace directly to her training at Pretoria Technical College under Robert Hodgins and Zakkie Eloff, where she took to the Japanese printmaking technique with striking assurance. Her mastery shows in the slender, silhouetted trees, mountainscapes and valleys that recur across these lots - dramatic yet restrained forms, built from a vocabulary of contrast and colour. 

Goldin's colour woodcuts, developed after her time in Rome studying Etruscan and Roman architecture, brought a warmer, more saturated palette on South African subjects.

The screenprints represent a distinct chapter taken up at Camden School of Art in 1978 and developed further during her 1986 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Parisian Summer (lot 526) is an example inspired by this period. 

Goldin’s enchantment with the Cape landscape itself can be seen across several lots in this sale (lots 501, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513 and 525): the dramatic silhouettes of Table Mountain and her sensitivity to the sharp light.

Another rare example of Goldin's versatility in media can be seen in her tempera painting of camellias (lot 522).  Executed in 2010, this late work captures the zenith of her artistic range. A lush bush of pink camellias clustered against deep green foliage and a bright blue sky, with the layers of tempera lending a remarkable depth of colour.

Goldin remains underrepresented on the South African secondary market relative to her contemporaries, which makes this grouping a rare opportunity to acquire a fuller picture of her output in a single session.