Rah Fizelle

Reginald Cecil Grahame Fizelle, known throughout his career as Rah Fizelle, was born on 4 September 1891 at Baw Baw, near Goulburn, New South Wales. He trained as a teacher at Teachers' College, Sydney, and was appointed to the state Department of Public Instruction in 1915. After returning from service in the First World War, he went back to Teachers' College and specialized in art under May Marsden. In 1921 he won a scholarship to Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School, attending evening classes there while teaching at Darlington Public School from 1922 to 1926.

In 1927 Fizelle left Australia for London, where he studied at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art and at the Westminster School of Art under Bernard Meninsky. He returned to Sydney and, in the 1930s, co-ran the Crowley-Fizelle School with Grace Crowley, a studio and teaching partnership that became a center for Sydney's early abstract and modernist painters. In 1939 he was elected the first president of the newly formed Contemporary Art Society in Sydney and showed in its inaugural, semi-abstract "Exhibition I." He continued to travel to Europe in later life, including a trip in 1960 to 1961. Fizelle died on 25 October 1964 at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and was cremated without religious rites.

Fizelle's reputation rests less on a large body of market-tracked sales than on his role in Sydney's second wave of modernism alongside Grace Crowley, Ralph Balson, and Frank Hinder. His participation in the Contemporary Art Society's 1939 "Exhibition I" is treated by later scholarship as an early landmark for semi-abstract painting in Australia, and his teaching partnership with Crowley is credited with shaping a generation of Sydney painters. Posthumous museum attention, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales's 1966 exhibition catalogue grouping him with Balson, Crowley, and Hinder, and the National Gallery of Victoria's 1980 survey of 1930s and 1940s Australian drawing, has kept his work in the institutional record even as his auction presence has stayed limited.

The clearest documented auction result for Fizelle is Seated Woman, 1932-33, which sold for AUD 93,000 including buyer's premium at Deutscher and Hackett in Melbourne on 29 August 2007. Research into subsequent Australian sales, including a later offering of Sleeping Nude, c.1938 to 1939, found published pre-sale estimates but no confirmed higher hammer price, so the 2007 result remains the highest price for the artist documented in available sources. No current commercial gallery or estate is identified as representing Fizelle's market; his work reaches the market through Australian auction houses and moves between public and private collections rather than through an active representing dealer.

Fizelle's auction market has very little public data behind it, with only a single well-documented result located in current research, so any pricing view should be treated as provisional rather than statistical. There is no catalogue raisonne and no identified gallery or estate representative, which puts extra weight on provenance and on the institutional record when assessing a given work. His holdings across the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, the UNSW Art Collection, and other Australian state and regional galleries are the strongest evidence of his historical standing, even where the trading market remains thin.