LIIBUS, VAIKE (1917-2008)

“Worship Of The Baals” (c.1965)
Oil on board
92 x 122m
Signed lower right
*Blake Prize Entry
*illustrated in "Vaike Liibus; Her Life And Art" (2001) by Sergio Sergi, p.159
*private collection, Sydney
 
Liibus was an award-winning, mid century Estonian-born Australian painter & portraitist. Vaike's family moved to Australia in 1927 following the Russian Revolution and subsequent Independence of Estonia. She studied freehand drawing, fashion drawing, millinery, and window dressing at the National Art School, then following World War II, the Meldrum School of Painting & Julian Ashton Art School where she won prizes for still life and landscape. She established herself as one of Australia's premier portrait painters, counting a generation of Australia's best mid century artists as her sitters, including John Coburn, Robert Dickerson, Florence Broadhurst Joshua Smith and Guy Warren (which won the Portia Geach Prize in 1969). She was a consistent Archibald Prize and Blake Prize finalist from the 1960s to 1980s, and exhibited at the Paris Salon, and regularly at the Contemporary Art Society. Her works are represented in numourous esteemed institutions. This impressive, yet dark religious piece was completed during a period where Vaike dabbled in abstract and thematic painting in the 1950s and 1960s, inspired by some of her mid century sitters. The 'Baal' are ancient gods worshipped in Middle Eastern communities, believed to bring fertility. This work is believed to have been a Blake Prize painting and is illustrated in Vaike's biography.