The sale was 74.74 per cent sold by lot and 113.47 per cent by value. It was not a perfect, but a very satisfactory result with vendors of 24 of the 95 lots offered still lacking buyers.
The activity was not always where it might be expected. At a time of renewed nostalgia for the old self-funded superannuation rules there is just no accounting for taste and art, and even this sale showed that art rarely satisfies those three basic requirements: security, investment and negotiability.
The selective sale also offered some the very best pick of what people might want to sell at the moment and at a time of accumulated bad and dissonant news from the art world.
Jeffrey Smart seems to be the artist sought by smart buyers, judging by the reception to the four works in the sale which oddly (the other paradox) flowed to the auction house after Deutscher + Hackett had pushed the price limits to a record in 2011.
That auction house had predictably expected any improved flow of the work of the artist who died last year, to come to them.
A late if revisited work of the once Tuscan-based artist The Red Warehouse (Lot 35 ) made a hammer price of $720,000 (with buyers premium) against estimates of $400,000 to $600,000 to a telephone bidder.
Another Smart Radial Road (Lot 31 ) from a period he was still finding his way, and a landmark image but therefore arguably a little more interesting, made the lower estimate of $500,000 ($610,000 IBP) to the same bidder (buyer 848).
A bid on Fred Williams' Forked Tree Kew Billabong, (Lot 33 ) however, was referred at $280,000, estimate $300,000 to $400,000) despite catalogue text (by David Hansen) saying there was an obvious comparison to be made to Monet's late Nympheas (Water-lilies).
The obvious response to this (as Hansen points out) was that Monet had a pretty garden in the suburbs of Paris while Williams found poetry in the more scruffy unprepossessing elements of the Australian landscape at the Kew billabong.
The work was the last of three major Williams in the sale and the market reputedly has been clamouring for them. Justin Miller, chairman of the previous fully US owned Sotheby's Australia set the ball rolling by paying $430,000 ($524,600 IBP) (estimate $280,000 to $320,000) for Yu Yangs Landscape (Lot 8 ) 1978 which was offered earlier in the sale.
This was from a more established artist's series the You Yangs, and again related to a great European master.
It was Cezannesque. Cezanne of course was much greater than Monet. Miller is about to open his own rooms in Sydney's Trumper Park.
Once asked what was his first consideration in buying art, Kenneth Clark confessed it was subject matter. Well this was not entirely true on this occasion. The subject matter might not change in fashion but the interpretation might. Supply and demand also had a bearing on the Sotheby's Smart/Brack paradox.
There once were Scheltema cows and there were John Kelly cows but on Monday night buyers wanted Dorrit Black cows, with Melbourne consultant Ian Rogers paying $45,000 for Dorrit Black's A Dorset Farmyard (1944) (Lot 26 ) ($54,900 IBP) against estimates of $30,000 to $40,000.
“Unabashed in its pictorial language” as Hansen put it, the cows came home without the help of any European master but that was probably because that card had been played when the previous lot, the Pink House (1928) (Lot 25 ) also by Black, was linked to the French artist Andre Lhote, There was much more activity in the bovine work, but by its title the preceding lot was prettier. It made $60,000 hammer to a telephone bidder, $73,200 IBP.
Could it be that Dorset (where leading collector James Fairfax had a weekender) and Paris are more in the minds of art lovers these days than muddy ponds close to home? Four Belle Ille watercolours by the one time resident John Peter Russell sold but the results were up and down. Later, a Tom Roberts landscape of Cornwall also failed to sell.
Black and Peter Russell were at various time (Black very recently) “dug-ups,” that is artists that had disappeared from sight but who came back to attention through dealer or curator enterprise.
Like Black also from South Australia, Beatrix Colquhoun (1862-1959) is something of a newcomer to this brigade. She seems to have been seriously constrained by the conventions of Victorian motherhood from which many women artists are said to have been affected.
Given an imputed title (that is, bracketed in the catalogue) of Aboriginal Mother and Child in Landscape (Lot 43 ) dated 1880s, the 35 by 25 cm work sold for $36,000 ($43,920 IBP), which was three times its top estimate. Here the subject matter, late Victorian Aboriginal, was very important.
The Sotheby's research team, which had overlooked a major gold field image in cataloguing of its last design sale, this time struck gold by turning up a like image to an offering and probably source in a photograph of a similar woman and child and pose in a photograph by Samuel Sweet in the National Library as a possible inspiration.
There was still much more predictability and seamlessness about the auction, held at the Inter Continental, a long standing hotel venue for serious auctions, although on one occasion a rush of paddles went up in a corner as the hammer was descending on a lesser but much sought after lot.
Auctioneer Martin Gallon otherwise kept buyers on their toes and the auction was conducted deftly. A fairly well- filled room bid carefully and the presence of little groups of collectors, some with dog-eared catalogues with page stickers underlining their bidding intentions. One such group left with barely a single purchase.
Some exceptional prices were none the less registered as selectivity heightened. Some sellers took fewer than usual hard knocks.
These probably should not include Russell Drysdale's The Barmaid Broome (Lot 10 ) given it made the lower estimate of $400,000 ( IBP) to Sotheby's Australia Gary Singer and had sold for only $142,000 when last offered at auction at Sotheby's in 1983.
Can bars and barmaids be hard to live with? The Bar by John Brack famously suggested so with its reappearance on the market after setting an Australian art record in 2003. The bidding on the Drysdale did not spark.
Bob Dickerson's 2007 The Tourists (Lot 34 ) which last appeared on the market in that year at $110,000, made only the upper estimate of $30,000 but the same artist's The Bottle of 1954 did far better being well aged in artist's career terms.
With its pre-Pythonesque goose-stepper in the background and its bored couple sunbathing in the foreground, the paintings were relatively cheerful for the painter of angst ridden faces whose works appear so popular with Gold Coast canal-bank dwellers..
Numerous bidders wanted to be on the latter and were clearly not intoxicated for it was an admirably ambitious work, With the distinguished provenance of John and Sunday Reed it made $150,000, or $50,000 more than its top estimate.
Apart from the colonial works, which appeared to be on the move again, the modestly represented traditionals were left mostly left behind, apart from an Elioth Gruner, The Evening Bathe, (Lot 48 ) which sold for $40,000 ($48,800 IBP) to dealer Bob Lavigne.
These beach scenes in the 1970s were much sought after by collectors, such as lawyer the late Bill Burge, who went on to become a big collector of contemporary sculpture. Of 12 bronze sculptures by Clement Meadmore consigned by the widow of a client of Sydney dealer Robin Gibson, three went unsold. The last one and last lot in the sale, Hob Nob 1992 (Lot 95 ) made $35,000 ($42,700 IBP).
Arthur Streeton's Mountain Mists (1925) (Lot 46 ) sold for a mid estimate $60,000 ($73,200 IBP) on the back of a run of misty landscapes inspired by the Clarice Beckett revival.
Many vendors must have wished they could have consigned the other lesser traditionals they had bought in the 1980s or conversely glad that they had not put them into their pension basket.
