A review by The Evening News's art critic George Galway was even headed Aletta Lewis, A Complete waste of Talent.
Nick Lambourn, head of Christie's travel department has had to work hard to come up with sufficient paintings to make his sale economic in a climate extremely hostile to Australian buyers. UK vendors are reluctant sellers in the face of a low Australian dollar.
But inclusion of the 71 by 76 cm work on canvas which had been damned by the critics is no mark of desperation.
It emerges as one of the most exciting finds. It was done at a time that produced universal Australian infatuation by Australia collectors with gum trees and sheep. The painting was repeatedly described as sensational - but not usually with flattering intent.
The painting, estimated at £8000 to £10,000 which would make it a record - way past any existing prices for the artist's work.
Still, it is very large compared with the painting holding the previous record. It is also arguably an important document in Australian art. Like some of her other pictures it is not clear what actually is going on in it.
Of the 11 works listed by the Australian Art Sales Digest as having gone through auction, the highest price was $5500 paid for the oil on plywood Factories on the Yarra, 1928 at Sotheby's, Fine Australian Paintings, Sydney, on 29 November 1991.
Hot Night which is signed by the artist, came to light seven years ago when a puzzled London buyer chanced up on it, and decided to do some homework. Prompted by the label on the rear he narrowed it down to the British- Australian artist Lewis who came to Australia in 1927. The label was that of S A Parker 219 George Street (Near Circular Quay).
A search of Trove, the National Library's digital newspaper archive showed extensive if not very supportive press coverage.
Looking at the picture and the titles of works mentioned it was clear that the painting was one of her much maligned works – and possibly a chef d'oeuvre as it appears to be with the Hot Night – which created a sensation when shown at the Society of Artists in Sydney in 1927.
The Sydney Morning Herald was very balanced calling it “distinctly modern in style.”
Table Talk , said it was an example of the determination of a section of the Society of Artists to be modern and contemporary at all costs. It was among some “exceedingly eccentric works – a type notorious in certain European galleries but rejected by the sane society.”
“It looks hot, in fact it might have been painted from the roof of a traditional Hades where ugly misshapen humans and devils sprawl around in colourful and “cubey” profusion or else it is a nightmare induced by a violent attack of 'flu.”
“A new-comer has appeared in the person of Aletta Lewis, who had studied at the Slade School before she settled in Sydney. One of her paintings, "Hot Night," and some of the pictures by Roi de Mestre, are provoking much discussion, Table Talk continued.
"Some complain that the modern movement is bringing Australian art to ruin, while others contend that it is lifting it out of the rut of monotony."
Lewis was described as the High Priestess of this order.
At a one woman exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries a year later Galway asked: “If a clever violinist were to devote his talent to strumming Chinese music on a fiddle, what would people thing of him?” The answer was given in the headline. He loved her beautiful drawings of however.
At a mixed artists show at Sydney's Grosvenor Gallery in November Lewis showed a seated portrait of a little girl in red shoes. The Sydney Morning Herald critic thought the drawing and tone “effective.”
The critic was not so kind about a painting called Judgment. “In her ventures to the more modern field Miss Lewis has not been as successful. Its meaning is not clear. The 12 seated figures ranged the presiding judge are stiff and ungainly and the elderly judge like them is clad in shirt and his feet like theirs, are bare.”
In 1929 the Sydney Morning Herald said of an exhibition at Macquarie Galleries of work she brought back from Samoa she had allies modernity of style with a sincere grasp of character...whatever criticism may be offered of her broadly vigorous results it must be agreed that she perceives her subjects from a fresh point of view and imparts to them undoubted animation.
It praised the courage of a white woman “even sleeping among the natives in villages where she was the only white woman” “Rosemarie” said that 18 months earlier Lewis had brought down the wrath of the critics. The problem was they had not met her. She was attractive, tall in a beautifully cut ensemble and wearing a cubist pattern scarf.
The “cube” as in cubism was the image modem that the battle of modernism was being fought in Australia. Most art pundits could not accept what Picasso and his confreres had done to art in the first decades of the century,
A portrait of Professor Ratcliffe Brown was a "more sober work painted in the modern manner", according to another review.
Lewis was born in 1904 at Orpington, a progressively peopled commuting town outside London and showed with the New English Art Club, a breakaway movement from the Royal Academy rooms where Australian artists had sought to made their mark for more than three decades by conforming. She died in 1956 at the age of 52.
Lewis came to Australia at the age of 23 in 1927 and may not have intended to stay. For she left in 1930 -and who can blame her? She seems not to have been overcome by the reviews for ill health and the birth of a child in 1942 are credited with being responsible for her turning away from art.
The discovery of the work and publication of a book which includes a study of the life of another with -it woman of the 1930s Clarice Zander, highlights the clash that occurred between traditional and contemporary art in the 1930s. The book is Awakening Four Lives in Art by Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller.
The clashes between the contemporary and the old brigade were largely won by the former when Zander brought back from Britain works mostly by modern contemporary British artists which were exhibited for sale in Australia in 1933. Only a quarter were sold.
Christie's 76 lot sale on will hopefully do a little better than this. Apart from its flint stone figures in the painting which are squared rather than cubed, the offering represents a broad spread of Impressionist and more conventional modern art, the main absence being any colonial works.
Buyers can hope for changes in the value of the dollar or adjustments in the estimates in Sterling – either to reach the same effect.
