Placed at the beginning of the offering they could have set the sale off on a bleak note but the works that followed captured keener interest.
These were a swag of works by another important abstractionist, Stanislav Rapotec (1913 - 1997) and with the Holdsworth Galleries labels still on the back, his works are now back in Australia with the Australian trade.
Both artists are truly underrated even allowing for the discount at which abstraction sells to the figurative in both local and overseas markets. Conservative collectors like to know what is going on in a picture and Rose's are very much the pictorial equivalent of Robert Klippel's sculptures.
All ink and watercolour on paper and measuring 18 by 27 cm, the Roses were far from ambitiously estimated at £300 to £500. An artist to obtain a rare showing in a New York state public gallery, Rose, who died in the same year as Rapotec, did not help his cause late in life by his heightened irascibility. He died in 1997. The Roses dragged down the sales rate with only 19 of the 35 on offer finding buyers.
One could imagine his response to seeing his works offered in a sale described by an auction houses as "affordable, stylish, unique."
Rapotec was a different variety with only one of six works on offer going unsold. His Brown Still Life an oil on board at 135 by 105 cm made £4500 hammer plus 25 per cent buyers premium.
This was an achievement, as his works, this being no exception, tend to be big and heavy, inflating transport costs, although at least one of his dealers said he had not picked up word of the auction until it was over. (Others were more alert.) Both were very important figures in the breakthrough in Sydney abstraction in the 1960s.
The collection also included sculptures by Gunther Christman and screenprints by Sidney Nolan which sold readily.
The collection had been put together by Professor Doeker-Mach, a scholar and academic who has worked in several countries including Australia, India, the United States, Canada and throughout Europe, and joint-collector Alice Tay. He is the author and editor and co-editor (with Alice Tay) of 20 books and the author of more than one hundred articles on comparative constitutional and international law (especially treaty law), legal systems and human rights. Alice Tay was the University of Sydney’s Challis Professor of Jurisprudence for twenty-six years.
