Sold for: $37,250

PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Collection of Petro-Canada, Calgary
Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt, 1990, pages 149 and 150, and a similar collage entitled Homage to Vladimir #2 reproduced page 189

One of the most sought-after subjects in Jack Shadbolt’s oeuvre is butterflies. In the Swiss Alps in 1959, a sighting of butterflies in a meadow affected him, when, as he described, “up from the gentians, in front of our eyeballs, [came] two zig-zagging fritillaries flip-flopping out over the space. Nothing much, but their event seemed momentous - demented, dangerous, memorable.” Shadbolt found their wings an interesting example of abstract design in nature, but more than that, he considered the butterfly “a tremendously erotic image.”

The title of this collage refers to the Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had a passion for butterflies. He began collecting them at the age of seven and also did drawings of them. Butterflies were named after him, and he was known to have said that literature and butterflies were the two sweetest passions known to man. This beautiful and playful collage is from a series Shadbolt produced that was dedicated to Nabokov, consisting of arrangements of “pinned” collections of butterflies made of cutouts from fashion magazines in a wide variety of patterns. According to Scott Watson, these works “identified the butterfly motif with the conquest of the feminine.”

All prices are in Canadian Dollars