The Aboriginal art in the Essl Museum near Vienna probably does not constitute more than a three figure number in the total holding about 7000 works, but the Aboriginal content has special significance because of its high profile acquisition and its presence in a museum of fine arts.
Overseas museums which have put down their own money to buy Aboriginal art have tended to be ethnographic rather than fine art.
Australian Aboriginal art has struggled internationally to find homes in fine art museums.
The Essl museum is admittedly still a privately administered affair but Mr. Karlheinz Essl and Mrs. Agnes Essl who put it together have shown Aboriginal art for many years alongside the museum's American and European contemporary work.
The future of the museum has been reported as threatened.
London's Daily Mail has reported that , a new firm owned 60 percent by the Haselsteiner family foundation and 40 percent by Essl family vehicles would pay more than €100 million for the collection.
The money would be used to shore up Essl's struggling bauMax home improvement chain, through which their fortunes came, and which appear to have encountered some financial turbulence.
On October 13 Christie's offered 43 of the international works and grossed £46,861,500 including the premium.
This was just comfortably within the estimate of £40 million to £50 million although the estimates do not include the premium.
A major work protected by a guarantee was reported sold after being passed in during the auction.
The sale was held at Christie's major rooms in King Street, St James to mark the opening of the Frieze magazine's annual fair, around which many exhibitions and events are held, included by five major works by Sigmar Polke which grossed £16,252,500.
This was the strongest part of the offering and although some of the Polkes did not to appear in the mainstream of the artist's work as evidenced by the big retrospective, they would have benefitted from the improvement in the artist's reputation as a result.
Polke visited Australia many years ago when he is reputed to have encountered visa irregularities - which only goes to show how futile they prove to be in the course of time.
That an esteemed collecting couple should collect both Aboriginal art and masters of western art is obviously a big tick for the art of our indigenous masters.
The Christie's offering covered a wide range of other German and Austrian art although the offering (if not the collection) was short of any work by Anselm Kiefer whose career has been handsomely advanced by the current show at the Royal Academy.
Viewers of the Kiefer show have been gob smacked by the size, power and quality of the works in the RA exhibition. The Art Gallery of NSW must now be very well pleased with the work (consisting mainly of a broken concrete staircase) acquired by curator Tony Bond with donor support for its permanent collection.
Christie's pointed out that the sale saw strong bidding from international buyers resulting in half of the lots selling above estimate, many for double or even five times of their pre-sale estimate.
Michael Eather, director of the Fireworks Gallery in Brisbane, and the Essls' major agent for the acquisitions for the Aboriginal works told the Australian Art Sales Digest that he had flown to Vienna earlier this year to value the Aboriginal art in the collection which comprised well over 100 pieces.
The purchase of 38 of these from a Sotheby's sale in 2000 and their subsequent inclusion in an exhibition at the Essl Museum, in Klosterneuberg about 20 kilometres from Vienna, was a great confidence builder for Aboriginal Art.
The catalogue, in English and German sold out. The exhibition, Dreamtime helped position Aboriginal art in the European art market .
It had been a fitting and long awaited follow up to the break-through Aratjara exhibition in Dusseldorf in 1993/94, Eather added.
The strength of the Aboriginal art in the Essl collection was in the seven Emilys and five Rovers which were among the 38 works bought in the first tranche acquired by Essl in 2000.
Essl was passionate about his art and travelled to the outback in pursuit of it.
The sale included four Baseitz's including an upside down painting of the kind said to have influenced the Australian artist Gunther Christmann.
But a rare Baselitz sculpture, the above life sized (1.2 metres tall) My New Hat stole the artist's thunder by making £1,426,500 against estimates of £1.5 million to £2 million.)
Christie's points out that half of the lots (49 percent) sold above estimate, many for double or even five times of their pre-sale estimate.
The sale also gives a boost for Austrian art which occasionally has puzzled Australian and other visitors to the Venice Biennale with the strange by-ways it has taken at the national pavilion in the far reaches of the Venice Biennale gardens.
The works of two Austrian artists, Maria Lassnig and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, which Karlheinz Essl expressly included in the sale selection as typifying his core collection, sold for prices above estimate.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Der 7. Bezirk / The 7th District (1966) sold for £266,500 against a pre-sale estimate of £150,000-£200,000.
Hunderwasser became familiar to Australian audiences mostly through works promoted by Julian Faigan who had a gallery in Watson's Bay in the early 1980s and had been a director of the Hamilton Art Gallery and Sydney's Museum of Fire.
Many Australians would also have been familiar with the artist's peculiar kaleidoscope approach by visits to the artist's musem house in Vienna.
Gerhard Richter 's Wolken (Fenster) (Clouds (Window), painted in 1970 (estimate £5 million – £7 million) sold for £6,242,500, momentarily bought-in.
Martin Kippenberger, (1953-1997), Ohne Titel, painted in 1992 (estimate £2,500,000 – to £3,500,000) sold for £2,882,500.
A work by Juan Munoz, also represented by a familiar example in the AGNSW sold for £386,500. Made of bronze, steel and resin it consisted of two men in chairs hanging on a wall titled One Laughing at the Other,
Not necessarily meant to be funny, Mechanical Pig, a pneumatic silicone life-like sculpture with an electrical engine to make it seem to breathe was left unsold. By Paul McCarthy, it had been expected to fetch £1 million to £1.5 million.
That Australian auction houses may not be jumping to knock on the doors to sell the Aboriginal content of the collection may be no laughing matter.
