Art Auction Sale Reviews

The Manly Art Gallery is finding it owns one of the globally best known paintings, which was memorably overlooked by forgetful curators some years ago.

The painting is Christmas Flowers and Christmas Belles, a 52 by 36 cm oil on canvas borrowed by the National Gallery of Australia for its Tom Roberts exhibition in Canberra.

No curator of Australian art should now be unaware of this delightful painting of the poor unemployed selling flowers to ladies in long dresses and parasols in Sydney.

The surprise star of the last big auction of 2015 was Thomas Tyrwhitt Balcombe (1810 – 1861), a little-known colonial artist whose work from the 1850s is extremely rare to market. Menzies offered not one or two, but seven of these rarities, two small oil paintings of Aborigines, and 5 mixed media works on paper passed down through the artist’s family.

Heavily contested by several bidders in the room and on the phone, the two oil paintings set new auction records for Balcombe, selling for hammer prices of $70,000 (lot 60) and $80,000 (lot 61) on estimates of $16,000-$24,000 to the Mitchell Library.

The 5 works on paper equally smashed their pre-sale estimates of between $2,000 and $5,000, selling for $13,000 (lot 62), $18,000 (lot 63), $24,000 (lot 64), $36,000 (lot 65) and again $24,000 (lot 66) – not as assumed to another public institution, but to a private collector from Victoria with a passion for mid-19th century Australian art.

Several predominantly South Australian rare and collectable modernists comprise the majority of a boutique selection of early 20th century art that goes under the hammer from 2pm Thursday December 10 at Leonard Joel 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra.

Bonhams successful recipe for their end-of-season sale involved: Step 1—catalogue fresh works that delight the seasoned auction hound; Step 2—take a spoonful of modest estimates; and Step 3—create the repartee of a genuine bidding war.

Their modest Sydney sale of Fine Australian and Aboriginal Art was simulcast across the internet with the current fashionable intention of attracting digital bids to add to the tradition of the auctioneer’s book. They did indeed attract some internet traffic but most of the excitement was generated by bidding duels between the room and the telephones.

Sotheby's Australia retained its reputation for creating the appearance of very real live auctions in Sydney at its sale of Important Australian Art on 24 November.

The sale, which grossed $8.55 million, with 67 per cent sold by volume and 112 per cent sold by value, was greatly helped by collectors or their agents who came out and bid freely.

Last evening, November 23, 2015, an upbeat Paul Sumner welcomed a modest crowd of bidders to his Armadale rooms, offering 39 lots in Mossgreen Auctions’ final Australian and International Art sale for the year.  Including the $1.3 million realised at last night’s auction, Mossgreen has achieved art sales of around $13 million in 2015.  Their great success of the year was The Peter Elliot Collection in August, which alone accounted for $7 million in sales. This caps off a record year for the Melbourne based auction house.

A new respect for provenance was very much in the air as the hammer began to fall on the end of November offerings in Hobart, Sydney and Melbourne last week. The auction of The Collection of Geoffrey Stilwell, a man whom auctioneer Paul Sumner of Mossgreen described as “Tasmania's Mr Provenance” realised $422,364 against a pre-auction estimate of $177,760 with some stellar individual results.

Provenance was also in the air albeit not quite as comfortably at or in preparation for different sales with two lots withdrawn as cataloguers went in search of more of it. In one sale, coincidentally also at Mossgreen,  a contemporary Chinese painting of high profile (it was illustrated as the catalogue cover picture) was pulled out of the offering.

A painting by Girolamo Nerli which held the record for a work by the artist was pulled by Bonhams Australia from its online catalogue of its coming Sydney sale for the same reason.

Bids came from far asunder – even from Double Bay – for the bric a brac and tat (mostly used carpets) that made up the bulk of the 398 lot auction of the Estate of Colin Lanceley offered by Leonard Joel at the artist's studio and home in Sydney's Surrey Hills on November 16.

But what was arguably his best painting, A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the provenance of author Peter Carey and Alison Summers, went unsold as did another admirable work, Montserrat 2009-2010 estimated at $40,000 to $50,000.

In the New York saleroom the cat appears to have achieved its ultimate artistic apotheosis. Ironic that Australia, its wild life bedevilled by the most feral of creatures, has a big equity in the animal's transformation.

In a frenzied furore of fur, My Wife's Lovers, a studio plus sized oil on canvas painting of 42 of the creatures, sold for $US826,000 at a Sotheby's sale of 19th century European art in New York on November 3.

The financial esteem of the artist who first taught Australians to appreciate the pictorial values of our bush rangers and bush fires - as well as the local practice of little girls losing their way in the bush or at rocky outcrops - has blown out enormously.

This however is thanks to our friends across the ditch in New Zealand rather than the country where he made his biggest mark .

A New Zealand institution has paid approximately NZ1.5 million for a painting by William Strutt (1825-1915) in a deal that makes his past prices paid by Australians look extremely timid.

With the arrival of the Internet, the auction business was revolutionised.

Suddenly anyone with access to a computer was able seek out works of interest around the globe. For those who made a living buying hidden gems for a song and reselling, the game became a lot harder. So in this world, when your auction business has major international pictures for sale and you don’t have a big web presence, how can you make sure that your paintings realise their fair and true value?

A collection of the work by one of the most intrepid travel artists of the 19th century has arrived in Australia and is to become the subject of a major research and publishing project.

Perth media magnate Mr Kerry Stokes has concluded the purchase of the Australian component of the Thomas Baines Collection consisting of oils, watercolours, and documents and relating to the North West Australia Australian expedition which it commissioned in 1856.

A single owner collection of John Gould’s Birds of Australia lithographs will be auctioned from 11am Sunday October 25 by Leonard Joel at 333 Malvern Road, South Yarra.

In a packed room at Mossgreen Auctions in Armadale, on a beautiful spring day that would have been perfection for a race meeting, there was an air of optimism and a gentle buzz of excitement before proceedings got underway. 

Paul Sumner welcomed many new faces to the auction room and the Pang family connections looked excited as Mossgreen offered 225 lots for sale on behalf of Barry and Anne Pang on 18 October 2015. 

An exhibition which has opened in Melbourne suggests that Australia has produced at least one tycoon sufficiently focused to add to the national stock of material culture while the Australian dollar was high and the mining boom was rolling on.

With the assistance of Margaret Manion, who has written extensively on illuminated manuscripts, Mr Kerry Stokes has put together a collection of Medieval art drawn from both major and obscure auctions around the world.

The primacy of landscape in the canons of Antipodean taste took a knock at Christie's sale of Australian art in London on September 24 when two portraits, one from each side of the Tasman, contributed $1.42 million towards the equivalent of $2.67 million gross yielded by the 73 lot sale.

The decline in the Australian dollar weighed heavily on expectations for the sale but the sterling amount of £1.234 million was still a little shy of the lower estimate of £1.305 and considerably short of the £1.830 million upper.

An Australian larrikin, John Perceval had a different approach to landscape painting than other Australian artists of his era.

Perceval’s heart and soul belonged in Europe and he drew on his passion for the old masters Heironymus Bosch (c1450-1516), Pieter Bruegel (c1525-1569) and Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) to create views of Williamstown – regarded as genius.

Unlike the sporting kind, this marathon (Aboriginal Art: The Thomas Vroom Collection, Sydney, 6 September) took 5 hours for the field of 246 to finish. Conservative estimates drew a standing-room-only crowd for the first half, including many first-time bidders. The crowd steadily dissipated as it became clear that the promise of a bargain was becoming more unlikely with every hammer fall. In the end, the sale hauled in $1.6 million, including buyer’s premium, representing 136% by value.

In 1927, Sydney was a little like San Francisco in the 1950s if a painting in the Christie's Australian art sale in London on September 24 is anything to go by. The painting, by Aletta Lewis, shows a lot of naked bodies on a Sydney roof top.

Instead of marking the emergence of a progressive society devoted to free love, however, or even the first appearance of backpackers to Kings Cross, the painting called Hot Night, showed that Australia was 20 years behind the times.

This happened when the painting and other works of its kind by the same artist and her accolytes were bitterly condemned by the art establishment of the day.

The first session of Mossgreen's sale of the (medical doctor) Peter Elliott's Collection in Sydney on August 31 was 100 per cent sold and grossed $4.36 million including the buyers premium which was comfortably in excess of the estimates and the clearance was100 per cent. This was made possible through strong buying from two enthusiasts more closely identified with the second session on September 1 and 2, The second session is Aboriginal and tribal art.

A large number of artworks performed well at the Deutscher + Hackett sale of Australian and International works of art held at the Cell Block Theatre at the National Art School which formed part of the Old Darlinghurst Gaol. Theatre there was aplenty. A full room, busy phones and active floor bidding meant that 75% of the lots offered were sold on the night, or 68% sold by value, achieving a total of $3.71 million dollars including buyer’s premium.

Extraordinary scenes greeted art lovers at the auction, Important Australian Art, held by Sotheby's Australia at the Intercontinental Hotel Sydney on August 25. Bidders raised their paddles on several occasions as if they were athletes using exercise machines at a gym or playing high ball pin pong.

The pumping resolve caused old-timers to smile as one of the lots concerned was Flamingos (lot 11) by Sidney Long. The lot doubled its top estimate to make $110,000 which with buyers premium rose to $134,300. The saleroom has not seen the like of this since the The West Wind was sold at Sotheby's in August 2003 for $192,750.

That was before the market and design's moves into minimalism supposedly fully decluttered itself from traditionalism.

Three extraordinary de-cluttering auctions of great interest to Australian culture vultures have so far left the Art Gallery of NSW as the only suspected local institutional participant.

New South Wales has been tracking down its movable cultural heritage after years of being beaten to key pieces by Ron Radford. Two substantial examples of colonial art have headed back to Sydney from Melbourne after being purchased by art institutions in the Premier State.

The Mitchell Library has emerged as the buyer of the important watercolour View from the Verandah at Hobartville, Seat of Mrs. W. Cox by Frederick Garling which sold for $20,000 plus 22 per cent premium at Leonard Joel's painting sale in Melbourne on June 23.

Mossgreen’s Sunday Art Emporium was the perfect place for alert collectors to seek out gems. True collectors have a nose for works that will add a touch of pizzaz to their collection—many will chase the trophy acquisition that they believe others will admire—but some seek out artists on their wishlists that add breadth to their collections with a touch of classicism, beauty, irony and intrigue—and all the better, if the price is right. 

The room at Mossgreen’s Sunday Art Emporium was full of collectors in this latter category with wishlists in hand. They were drawn in by modest low estimates, but many prices soared as soon as two or more chased the same piece, often leading to record prices for artists.

Sotheby’s Sydney June 21 Fine Asian, Australian & European Arts & Design auction reached an expected $1.5 million sale price (including buyers premiums) with strong prices for contemporary works.

A highlight was the collection of leading Australian law firm Minter Ellison that featured an impressive selection of Australian photography and art including works by Adam Cullen, Max Dupain, Bill Henson, Akio Makigawa, Rosemary Laing, Robert MacPherson, Tracey Moffatt and Patricia Piccinini – and established four new artist auction records.

Items from leading Australian law firm Minter Ellison will be a major highlight of Sotheby’s Australia’s Fine Asian, Australian & European Arts & Design auction from 6pm Tuesday July 21 at the InterContinental Hotel, 117 Macquarie Street, Sydney.

The firm is selling its collection because it is moving from its old Aurora Place, Sydney offices to new premises, which are largely open plan with fewer walls.

One of the more significant sculptures is Makigawa’s Wisdom of Water 1995 – the genesis of inspiration being bottled drinking water.

Mossgreen’s 2015 annual sale of Australian Indigenous and Oceanic Art features many early artefacts including an important private collection of rare Australian indigenous shields, many of which date to the early 19th century.

Among the more important is an Albury broad shield (lot 56), collected in the 1870s by Albury-based John Mitchell, and the Dja Dja Wurrung broad shield (lot 57) picked up by George Kidman between 1852 and 1864.

Old timers have said this many a time of late, but little could seal the end of the Sydney auction world as they knew it, than the deaths last week within days of each other, of two auctioneers very much of the old school.

Henry Badgery, who died in hospital at the age of 81 had been in care for a couple of years since his retirement but was felled by a lung issue, while John Segar Williams died as a result of liver cancer at the age of 69.

Tasmanian professional gambler David Walsh hit the jackpot with his celebrated painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, consigned to Christie's sale in London last week but other works de-accessioned from his collection just struggled home.

New meaning has been given by the London art trade to the word "appreciation" when it comes to Australian art.

A painting which sold for €269,960 at an auction in France in March is on view at a dealer's stand at the Masterpiece fair in London has a price tag of £750,000 writes Terry Ingram in London.

International art-works – particularly examples by Fernand Léger, Lynn Chadwick and Andy Warhol – took centre stage at the Menzies auction in Melbourne on Thursday night. The emphasis, which was deliberate, also seemed rather fitting.

After all, it’s been a remarkable few months in the international auction market, climaxing with the new record set in May, for Picasso’s The Women of Algiers (1955), knocked down in New York for US $160 million.

Australia appears to have lost a little of its clout at the four art fairs of substance in Basel revolving around Art Basel 46.

It is not just that Australian galleries have decided to concentrate on other versions of the same event nearer to home and administered by the same organizations in Hong Kong in particular, writes Terry Ingram in Basel

Bonham’s major fine art sale held in Sydney, 16 June 2015 – Important Australian and International Art including Private Collections Curated by John Cruthers – elevated the notion of curator-as-point-of-difference to the catalogue cover. With a hammer total of $3,185,900, the sale achieved impressive clearances of 110% by value and 85% by lot. Whether this strategy will become enshrined in the market remains to be seen, but the success of last night’s sale in broad terms is a win for Bonham’s and especially Cruthers, who bore all the risk in the gambit.

Despite “virtually no Australian buyers or interest”, according to specialist in charge Tim Klingender, the Sotheby’s London inaugural sale of Aboriginal art centred on the Thomas Vroom collection cleared 83% by lot, set record prices for several artists and racked up a hammer total of £832,500 (£1,040,625 including premium), around $1.9 million Australian dollars.

The late Alan Bond gave art collecting in Australia a bad name and he did it in the 1980s with other people's money. The one time London East Ender enjoyed the unearned profile as the world’s most important art collector in the roaring 1980s but his interest had more to do with money and being accepted in polite society - perhaps even at the court of St James's - than with connoisseurship.

Bond appeared a handful of times in New York based ARTnews' top 200 art collectors list and was one of only a handful of Australians ever to do so.

The stars were not in the ascendant for Mossgreen’s start to the traditional winter season, their total hammer well below the nadir presale low estimate of $3.8 million, leaving only dreams of a zenith pre-sale high of $5.3 million. Total sales on the night, including buyer’s premium, just nudged past $1.6 million, dispersing only 67% by lot.

This percentage is less than that achieved by Australia’s other major salerooms in their first sales of 2015, most dispersing 80%. The Mossgreen bourse was stacked with fresh-to-the market stars of major impact including some remarkable works by Whiteley (lot 17), Storrier (lot 20) and Delafield Cook (lot 18) from the Ian Gowrie-Smith Collection. But the sale seemed to trigger the onset of the harshest Melbourne winter, a winter of buyer discontent, when major buyers seemed absent and those that attended sat on their hands beneath the stars.

While the debate on wealth inequality rages on, the interest in the Social Realist school, which of course is very much against concentrated wealth, has taken a new turn. A lively painting by an artist who was very much a master of the school sold for three times the estimate and stole the show at Deutscher and Hackett's sale of important Australian and International Works of Art its rooms in Melbourne's Prahran on May 6, writes Terry Ingram.

Snack Bar (lot 13) a medium-sized (41 by 50cm) oil on pulp board became at $380,000 hammer (or $456,000 IBP) the second most highly priced work by the artist, Herbert Badham, sold by auction. It was sold ironically in an auction which grossed $4.10 million (compared with lower estimates of $4.3 million) and which suggested in sustained bidding that there are people and institutions out there that do have more money than others - as so happens in an unequal society.

Colin McCahon’s work Paul to Hebrews 1980 is one of the more fascinating pieces of art to be auctioned from 7pm Wednesday May 6 by Deutscher and Hackett at 105 Commercial Road, South Yarra.

Comprising written passages from the Bible on three sheets of Steinbach paper using synthetic polymer paint, the painting is one of two biblical texts that dominated the final period of McCahon’s oeuvre (the first being a Letter to the Hebrews in the 1970s). 

A mood of exuberance overtook the personnel of Sotheby's Australia as Lord Mark Poltimore lowered the gavel at the 111th and final lot of the sale of the Collection of the late David Clarke and other vendors auction at the Intercontinental Hotel in Sydney on April 28.

The sale grossed $11,259,136 with just over three quarters of the lots (78.4 per cent) sold and 124 per cent by value. It was proclaimed the highest for the company since May 2007. The collection of investment banker, the late Mr David Clarke, grossed $6.1 million of this sum.

The autumn art auctions have shown a marked and welcome increase in respect for provenance.

Whether deliberate of accidental, details have been forthcoming about the history of a number of lots which might normally have been missing.

The auction houses appear to be addressing themselves to the big question that everyone is asking since the frozen berry crisis early in the year. The berry buyers appear to have been exposed to hepatitis through eating the berries.

The Australian dollar may have slipped together with the price of iron ore and national economic prospects. But the quintessential symbol of Australia - the kangaroo is holding tight.

The kangaroo is a pest no more or not at least as far as the saleroom and art circuit are concerned.

At sales or viewings in as oddly diverse locations such as Sydney (an auction house); Hong Kong (an art fair) and Surrey (a golf club) fine and decorative art featuring kangaroos has enjoyed keen responses – two silver examples leading the fray.

Against frenetic bidding at a Sotheby's Australia auction in Melbourne's Grand Hyatt Hotel on March 31, Museum Victoria outbid private buyers to secure choice lots from a selection of objects that had been collected by the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, which given the strength of the local and global bidding in the room could have gone to overseas buyers.

With the help of the Australian Government Cultural Heritage Account the museum purchased seven lots.

The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has stepped in where the National Maritime Museum in London failed to tread. For more than half a million dollars it has purchased a familiar portrait of a famous seaman man who is now a very different Captain Bligh to that of Mutiny on the Bounty fame.

The portrait has a long market history with uncertainties being raised about both the identities of both the painter and the sitter over the years of its exposure. But thanks to funds supplied by a Canberra philanthropic family it has joined the portrait of Captain Cook in the National Portrait Gallery for a price which coincidentally appears to be around the same price paid for its Captain Cook portrait in the early 2000s.

It is pretty hard for an artist to dominate a fine art sale containing 282 lots. Nonetheless, Sidney Nolan provided almost 10% of it with a total of 23 lots in the Menzies sale on 26 March in Kensington.

The sale grossed $8.4 million including buyer’s premium (unconfirmed), with 84% sold by volume and 67% by value.

Two consignments from Australia appear to have benefitted substantially in the market place from the attention created by the sale of one of the world's finest collections of Asian art in New York this month.

Both Sotheby's and Christie's sold works shipped across the Pacific through the local franchise and the representative offices respectively of the two companies..

Australia's mineral trade with China may be faltering but the boom in choice Chinese art exports from is very much alive and well as is the brand through which they were consigned.

Sotheby's New York has sold sold for a seven figure sum, a set of four enamel panels consigned through the “unrelated” Sotheby's Australia.

The sale for $US1.8 million in New York of a set of four famille rose enamel panels consigned by a member of the property branch of the Paspali - Paroulakis pearl family suggests that for choice finds at least, the market in high class Chinoiserie is still on the boil.

Three recent antique, decorative arts and philatelic auctions showed that interest in the most unlikely categories can produce satisfactory returns if estimates are adjusted to show that the goods are genuinely for sale. An opulent setting can also help. With bidders now accustomed to the delay occasioned by online bidding, auctioneers additonally have the chance to slow the proceedings for this third player, the phalanx of unseen bidders on the Internet.

On what was a glorious late summer Sunday afternoon, the Sydney quay-side museum setting for the Deutscher and Hackett sale of the Laverty Collection’s Beyond Sacred, Australian Aboriginal Art, offered cachet, catering and fresh air. And it attracted collectors and other buyers providing for that ilk in droves, most of whom stayed glued to their spots competing for the 166 lots in a laid-back if not gruelling 4 hour event that saw the sale rack-up a total of $3.4 million (incl. BP) and break many artist records.

The Caressa Crouch and Carl Gonsalves Collection of Australiana sold for $1.07 million or more than three times expectations at Mossgreen's rooms in Melbourne on February 22. The result was helped by strategically low estimates designed to sell, writes Terry Ingram.

A painting offered as from the circle of the 18th century English portrait painter Francis Cotes at a Lawson's house sale in Sydney's Vaucluse on February 15 sold for $42,500 or around three times its estimate. The hammer price was $34,000 against estimates of $10,000 to $15,000.