Picture buyers are not going to contract a disease from bidding on art but the big question now fixating everyone is where have the things they want to acquire, including art, come from.
The main sale is the 42 lot collection from the estate of the late Macquarie Banker David Clarke and it forms a solid start on provenance disclosure. Provenance would have been easily traced, as the purchases have been so recent, that is nearly all over the past 15 years to put in a very special house. now sold. A named estate sale is also always hot to trot.
But a common factor in three of four especially interesting paintings in the coming art sales is exceptional provenance - with no blanks – on some of the most interesting lots since the works were acquired in one case 114 years ago.
They are paintings of real life issuing from a school known as social realism addressing issues of concern mostly to “working folk.”
Their appearance on the market is very topical because if a recent issue of New Yorker magazine is to be believed the big issue being talked about among the chattering classes on its beat, is economic inequality. A deluge of books has hit the market in the past year,
Few paintings have ever come as close to highlighting this in Australian art as Weary by Florence Fuller, a large 92 by 78 cm painting of what a review of the painting in 1891 at an exhibition in her house in Melbourne's Malvern called a “Street Arab' (a young vagabond).
He is sitting up asleep in on the ground propped up by a billboard advertising what appears to be city produce.
The portrait was reported in the magazine Table Talk of that time as having been bought by Mr Hamilton Ker. It has come down from Mr Ker, who was a stockbroker, through the family and been seen at a string of loan exhibitions and recorded in numerous books and accompanying publications since its sale.
Fuller's chef d'oeuvre, painted when she was aged 25, it is considered to have played a big role in the development of Australian art.
A narrative figure painting of the type very popular in late Victorian times, the oil on canvas is of a type that might have been consigned to the culture bin of taste at some periods over this time.
The work is regarded as having played a big part in the development with a string of exhibitions known. Its original purchaser might seem odd now. Stockbrokers are usually seen as men with money but no heart. Letting the poor into our drawing room on canvas at least when they cannot make a fuss, might prove they had a conscience as the picture casts a light on the underbelly of inequality.
Acquisition of such works might have made them look good in a Dickensian world even while some were cheating the public through fraudulent land boomer floats. With the remnants of a welfare state still in place our iron ore barons and baroness(es) might not feel the same role is due to them to help out or now be feeling a bit sorry for themselves following the collapse in prices of their commodities.
But there was a big demand for them in Melbourne in the 1880s when this work was created. At least two were doing the rounds handled by a prominent dealer Alexander Fletcher. They were W H Whitehead's News of the Old Regiment which was a carefully finished watercolour of a gnarled Chelsea pensioner whose great grand daughter was reading an old newspaper, and Claude Cailthorpe 's The Little Breadwinner a painting of a little girl dressed as a fairy who obviously appeared nightly on stage to support her destitute family.
The estimate of $150,000 to $200,000 may be less than the money initially paid for it but the reason it has been placed towards the end of the mixed vendor sale number 103 of 111 lots is that is with the rest of the traditional paintings.
By then, people will be weary like the title, a juxtaposition of time and content that may have been deliberate.
The second of, let's call them Terry's trio as opposed to say Dave's Faves, is another work with a grand provenance. This is at Deutscher and Hackett's sale on May 6 in Melbourne. Herbert Badham's Snack Bar,1944 squeezes four fully recognisable individuals into the small 42 by 50 cm space provided for the oil on pulp board. This shows the working class taking a break.
The sitters proposition each other, gossip, chatter, smoke and stuff sausages into their mouths. Rationing is in force but no body goes hungry at the Hasty Tasty which was where it is set. Badham, who had once disappeared into the culture bin and was known only for his book on Australian art, has made a solid recovery from it and the work is estimated to make $90,000 to $120,000.
It is one of the few wartime paintings of a type done by the likes of Mitty Lee Brown (Night Train in Ballarat) and Noel Counihan's Three Negroes. Counihan destroyed most of his work of that period and this one has been promised to an institution.
The Badham was initially owned by Georgina Farquhar and has also come down by descent, much wanted for exhibitions related to its topographical nature as a record of a Kings Cross institution of a different kind. D + H appeared pleasantly surprised when I suggested they ask the vending family if Farquhur was one of the celebrated ANZAC nurses of that name. When they did so it was confirmed.
Not that this would have been pointed out in the catalogue anyway – given the recent blooper by Woolworths involving ANZAC promotion.
The third work is a cross between social realism and surrealism. When Britain's angry young men appeared on the scene in the 1950s they were said to produce plays where the characters had one foot in the kitchen sink and the other in a double bed.
Jeffrey Smart's Approaching Storm by Railway, an oil on board 60 by 73 cm dated 1955 is of that period but a bit more sinister in feeling than any work that could be described as more than 50 per cent social realist. This is a top specimen of Smart's work when he was a serious surrealist painter rather than a painter of expensive highly crafted beautified oils on canvas of Italian highways. The painting is reproduced on the cover of the101 lot offering two nights after Sotheby's in Sydney at a pub near its rooms in Woollahra.
Shapiro is selling at the Woollahra Hotel in its function room, while Sotheby's sale is also at a pub, the Sydney Intercontinental.
Approaching Storm has always belonged to D’Arcy Ryan, a Perth biology professor who was a much earlier collector of surrealism than the much more celebrated Agapitos – Wilsons whose acquisition and sale of their collection to the National Gallery of Australia has been much reported upon. A number of other surrealist works in the catalogue come from the same source.
The painting shows a pram with or without a baby sitting abandoned or forgotten in a field as a dark storm approaches.
The work is hard to pass by although an electric train might do any minute as it is next to a main line. A dark shadow bisects the picture and a pink and purple house is in the background. It is all very much like a still from one of those terrible Disney horror films known as cartoons full of violence yet made for little children.
Shapiro's estimates for its sale of Australian and International Art are $800,000 to $1.2 million.
Why would anyone want to buy a painting of an abandoned pram for this type of money. Well they have paid as much for dead horses and dead landlords.
If there is a baby in the pram, of course it could be dead too, or a big bad wolf (or a dingo) which has eaten it.
D + H have a slightly later period work by Smart showing washing on a clothes line and a solitary lady in back doing something with it.
Some odd changes have been made in these latest sales. D +H's catalogue is one inch thicker other auction houses. This does not require comment.
Lord Mark Poltimore of Sotheby's UK and the Antiques Road show is to take Sotheby's Australia's two sales although there is “no official connection” between the two as has been insisted at all times by both.
He is out here looking for paintings to sell of Denmark's Golden Age (the early 19th century) if possible and other golden ages if not.
David Hansen, Sotheby's past star cataloguer, is still writing essays for Sotheby's but the entry could predate his appointment to the ANU or he could still be freelancing.
Sotheby's chairman, Geoffrey Smith has written the long entry for the Florence Fuller showing some empathy for the subject. All the three pictures I have mentioned come from deceased estates.
The David Clarke collection on April 28 is estimated to make $4.035 million to $5.605 million and the mixed Sotheby's mixed vendor sale which follows it $5.043 million to $6.711 million. Deutscher and Hackett's sale of Important Australian and International Art on May 6 has estimates of $4.32 million to $5.96 million.
D + H separated its sale from Sotheby's sale (it was to be a day later in Melbourne) upsetting a few of us who had pre-booked their flights on Qantas at Red Hot special prices, so the tickets are a virtual write-off. But it gave them extra time to make their catalogue content bigger as well.
But given there were so many sausages is the pictures, the sales are best compared to them. That is lots of sawdust and a bit of meat in a condom. Wearying......,
