At the top end of the price range, it was disappointing that the major Russell Drysdale Red Landscape, 1958, (Lot 40 ) a raw expression of aboriginal agony in cerise and black, was withdrawn from the sale. Although it has a history of market appearances in the last decade, its restless bloodied surface would have been well received in the current zeitgeist. These works, top, middle and bottom in dollar terms, all had an essential spirit about them.
Gestural paintings that bring the human spirit to life now seem part of the zeitgeist in cutting edge contemporary art. Perhaps there is a restlessness at play. In the art schools, the young artists toy with new outings of abstract expressionism—after all, they did not live through it first time round.
It may be a human cry as an antidote to Gen X mobile phone lives run by technology. However we all want to recognise the human spirt in the art of our own generations. So we look beyond the fashion of the young, to more senior painters that have careers marked by their paint handling ability. It is not surprising then that gestural painting is back in fashion in the saleroom.
Menzies September sale provided buyers with some vivid examples of mark-making at its best by Williams, Rees, Perceval and Fairweather; their works successfully sailed well beyond the hundred thousand dollar mark. Their success was due to the fact that these paintings were notable examples by the given artist.
Although the spectacular Ian Fairweather (Lot 44 ) had recently been in the market in 2012, its re-appearance was welcomed by the audience because, as we have said, the times they are a-changin'. For all its modest scale and its humble medium of polymer paint on cardboard mounted on board, Fascismo, 1963, has some of the most beautiful tactile brushwork that you would ever see. It comfortably met its lower estimate of $400,000.
The John Perceval (Lot 39 ) was in the same boat (so as to speak). Although fresh to the market after life in private hands of more than 50 years, The Moored Shark Boat, 1959, flexed with pent-up physical energy, curving markings and frolicking colours.
Reaching similar levels half million dollar levels was a magnificent Lloyd Rees (Lot 38 ) Song of Creation-Land, 1969; its rough cast surface gleamed with scumbled silver like a quintessential beam of Australian light.
The Fred Williams Werribee Gorge II, 1978, (Lot 41 ), a classical late career work with an aerial aspect and a marked pointillism that would have made Emily Kame Kngwarreye proud, reached a comfortable $775,000. It revelled in an appealing asymmetry, and a fan-like river delta gesturing from the centre. This landscape is an exercise in calligraphic writing, being appreciated at a time of tech advancement when the media asks such questions as: When will handwriting cease to be?
John Olsen’s Harbour Tidal Pool, 1993, another humble paper work of deft gestural means flicked from Olsen’s wrist, splashed effortlessly to $106,000. This is a price at the top end of the artist’s watercolour spectrum. A small jewel in the grand politics of gesture was Brett Whiteley’s The Great Bowerbird, 1971, (Lot 26 ), where Whiteley metaphorically placed himself amid the arabesques of a grass bird’s nest littered with collaged flags of USA, China, Japan and Australia. This small lively work, little bigger than an A4 page, found a new home at $75,000 far above its upper estimate of $60,000.
The range of quality contemporary works met with mixed success, an aspect that continues to baffle industry-watchers as the contemporary market is the strongest secondary market in New York and in London. Perhaps Australians have always been suspicious of their trendsetters. If we are not careful, we will lose them if we don’t back them.
Fortunately the totemic Patricia Piccinini Wollemi (Panelworks-TypeII), 2005, (Lot 18 ) found a home mid-range at $25,000. Even at this level it seems grossly undervalued: Piccinini is an artist who shows at Haunch of Venison in New York and London, and other panel works were shown at Robert Miller Gallery in New York at the time of their production in 2005.
Other women artists did not fare so well. Rosalie Gascoigne’s classical cut-out Banana Yellow, 1998, (Lot 31 ) and Del Kathryn Barton’s pinkly-inflected The Love You Know, 2009-10, (Lot 43 ) failed to attract buyers due to high reserves. Lower down the financial scale, Stephen Bush’s popular beekeeper motif work Gone Dead, 2009, (Lot 69 ) exceeded expectations realising $12,500 surpassing pre-sale estimates of $7,500-$9,000. Here the active painted surface of drips, pours and gesture keeps the public drawn like moths to a flame, even though the meaning remains elusive in keeping with a Bush’s postmodern ethic.
The photography section was not large, but was lined with classical black-and-white Cotton, Moore and Dupain, rather than contemporary large-scale colour panoramas of Zalhalka, Laing or Henson.
Max Dupain’s saleroom favourite Sunbaker, 1937, (Lot 96 ) reached $20,600 on presale estimates of $14,000-$18,000. The well-known and much-loved images of spectacles (Lot 95 ), Olive Cotton’s Glasses, 1937, and nuns (Lot 94 ), David Moore’s Sisters of Charity, Washington DC, USA, 1956, each reached $6,800 after spirited bidding between the phones and the room.
As usual, the Menzies sale garners international works of significance, hunted down in surprising locations around the world. The massive late-cubist marble Homme Assis a la Clarinette II, 1971 (Lot 42 ) by the Franco-American Jacques Lipchitz settled into new garden surroundings at over $1,300,000, perhaps a little disappointing given Sotheby’s recent 2014 realisation of $2,165,000 in New York for an editioned bronze of similar stature.
At the other end of the visual spectrum, but still major internationally, Blue Dominance, 1977, (Lot 231 ) a spectacular and under-estimated screenprint by Op Art queen Bidget Riley reached $6,250 a quantum above the estimated $4,000 upper estimate. This is still excellent buying. It should have been offered as lot number 1.
Sadly, the magnificent charcoal and pastel on paper, Latopolis, c2004, (Lot 34 ) by South African mega-star William Kentridge remained unsold. It is a brilliant example of Kentridge’s theatrically and politically engaging drawing techniques: his rendering of political institutions, to quote the catalogue, ‘stresses the way things are, rather than the way that things should rationally be’.
If I had a choice, my money would have backed Reginald (Rah) Fizelle’s Untitled (Seated Female Figure in Skirt), (Lot 10 ). This watercolour portrait mounted on board, lovingly painted in gestural sweeps of translucent wash, reached $32,000 over pre-sale estimates of $18,000-$24,000. It reminded me of the women in a c1970 Igmar Bergman film Cries and Whispers, and of the struggle and the need to achieve grace.
