Art Auction Sale Reviews

The Australian art market showed remarkable resilience in the current year in the face of the loss of two of its biggest spenders. Given the previous year’s total included substantial big ticket sales of non-Australian art it would appear that the story of the Australian art market in the latest year is “steady as she goes” rather like the larger than life yachts in the painting of Sydney Harbour by Arthur Streeton which produced one of the year’s best prices.

The cover lot of the Important Fine Art and Aboriginal Art sale held in Sydney by Deutscher and Hackett on 30 November 2016, was a delicate golden view of Lavender Bay by Brett Whiteley titled Dawn, 1974 (Lot 39). It snared the sale’s top lot position with the hammer falling at $450,000, improving marginally on its last market outing in 2011. The sale’s most exciting result, however, was for another more modest work that focused on the effects of light: a fresh-to-the-market impressionistic depiction of a French village riverside scene in summer, which sparkled with a myriad of hues from sunshine on moving water and dappled shade.

Conviction that it played a part in the visualisation of modern Australia is believed to underlie the extraordinary price for a 19th century photo album at Lawson's in Sydney on November 24.

The album sold for $15,000 excluding premium against estimates of $1000 to $1500 to one telephone bidder against another, after rising quickly from around the estimated price. The buyer's premium and GST adds an extra 25 per cent to this hammer price.

The Bonhams double-catalogue sale held in Sydney on 22 November 2016 and double-billed as “Important Australian Art” totalled $1.692 million, with 81 percent sold by lot and 77 percent by value.

Highlights of an art collection by the late John Cunningham – who left the largest ever bequest to the Art Gallery of New South Wales – will be auctioned by Bonhams as part of its Important Australian and Aboriginal Art sale from 6.30pm Tuesday November 22 at NCJWA Hall 111 Queen Street, Woollahra in Sydney.

Jeffrey Smart’s Dividing Line, Study 1 from 1978-9 leads the auction charge at Mossgreen’s final multi-vendor Australian and International Art sale for 2016 from 6.30pm Monday November 21 at 36-40 Queen Street, Woollahra in Sydney.

Collectors of constructivist sculptor, Robert Klippel, are in for a treat when a private collection of extremely rare and desirable works by the artist comes onto the market at the end of November.

The collection was assembled over many decades with the immense passion and distinctive eye of founding chair of the National Gallery of Australia, Richard Crebbin. 

A large and what first appeared to be enthusiastic crowd gathered at Deutscher and Hackett’s Melbourne saleroom on Wednesday night to see the dispersal of a decade worth of collecting, through the primary and secondary markets, of the finest examples of Australian Indigenous art by an American family. 

At Swann Galleries, an Australian art collector swooped in to purchase five prints by one of the US most revered printmakers, Australian Martin Lewis, born in Castlemaine in 1881. Not well known in his native Australia, Lewis is famed also for having taught American great Edward Hopper to etch. Today, Martin Lewis’ scenes of the 1920s and 30s New York are iconic and highly sought after.

While outside, the weather was extremely blustery - even for Hobart on a winter’s day - Mossgreen’s auctioneers enjoyed relatively smooth sailing inside the Henry Jones IXL Art Hotel when the David and Leslie Frost collection was offered for sale there on October 9.

Only 50 of the 374 lots in the auction went unsold and the sale grossed a comfortably-over-estimate $491,000 including buyers premium.

One of the most valuable international collections of Australian Indigenous art to be repatriated and auctioned in Australia has opened for viewing in Sydney this week.

The Luczo Family Collection was put together over the last decade by Stephen & Agatha Luczo, based in California, USA, and includes some of the finest examples of contemporary Aboriginal art from the desert regions of Australia alongside important carvings from Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands.

Australian sleepers are still being smoked out in foreign fields – internet or not. But it takes lot of hard work, experience and serendipity to find them and place them in an appreciative home that proves they were just that.

Two offerings at various levels of sleepfulness have come to the attention of web based saleroom habitues attention lately. One was a group of attractive pieces of gold-fields jewellery on the well worn paths of traditional sleeper territory, a UK regional auction and in the heart of the Cotswolds, which has one of the strongest concentrations of antique traders in the world.

The final dispersal of the stock-in-trade of Savill Galleries is complete with 160 lots put up for auction at Menzies in Melbourne on Thursday night, 22 September. 

The collection was mostly classic dealer stock – attractive pictures by established artists that appeal to the private buyer. 

With Savill making it clear he did not want any of the pictures back, reserves were clearly lenient and the number of dealers, commercial galleries, institutions and private collectors bidding made for a healthy clearance rate of 92%.

In a sale that grossed £1,613,375 GBP including the buyer's premium and established seven new records, the exchange-rate board accompanying each lot was telling: Great British pounds, American dollars, euros, Swiss francs, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, rubles, but no AUDs.

The top lot, Five Stories, 1984 (Lot 60), a seminal work by Michael Nelson Jagamarra with extensive exhibition and publication history topped out at a mind-boggling £330,000 (£401,000 including BP). The buyer, an American, was by far the largest buyer in the sale, purchasing fourteen lots in total.

Brett Whiteley continues to dominate the saleroom with nine works by the artist attracting a flurry of competitive bidding at the Menzies auction of Australian & International Fine Art & Sculpture in the evening of Wednesday 21 September in Melbourne.

Fitting snug at the top of the stairs at the South Yarra saleroom was the imposing The Sunrise, Japanese: Good Morning! 1988 (lot 36). The immensely appealing, lush blue work had phone bidders competing with Denis Savill in the room (reportedly on behalf of a client) in slow $10,000 increments. An emerging Sydney collector eventually bought the painting for $1,370,000 hammer ($1,681,364 IBP) - an astute purchase considering the popularity of, and recent results for, his much loved bird studies.

The decision by Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) to commission a (temporary) installation/ conceptual work by Wiradjur/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones for the creation of its signature Biennial Project of 2016 in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney shows a new dynamic at work in the market in Indigenous Australian art.

The auction market in Aboriginal paintings may be challenging – except for the occasional trophy work of course- but spending on the installation and conceptional art is being well sustained.

Ben Quilty’s mean and very clean depiction of a Toyota Landcruiser, lot 1,  led the Deutscher + Hackett sale of Important Fine Art with 117 lots held in their now regular venue in Sydney, the Cell Block Theatre at the National Art School.

And lead the way to an excellent sale lot 1 did. Setting the tone for the evening, this rare and large 2005 thick impasto painting quickly eclipsed its respectable $40,000-60,000 estimate, to sell at $80,000 hammer price, with many interested parties missing out on their prey. It also set a new record price for the artist, beating the $66,000 price set at Menzies in December 2011 for one of Quilty’s famous Toranas from 2003.

Menzies Art Brands will auction 289 lots of art over two evenings on 21 and 22 September including the final stock-in-trade auction of legendary art dealer, Denis Savill.

Monumental works by Brett Whiteley have a habit of turning up at the Menzies saleroom and two particularly epic but disparate examples are expecting to draw the highest prices on Night One: one a haunting and emotionally charged allegory of Paul Gauguin, the other a tranquil scene depicting a bird before a rising sun and seascape.  Both command serious attention and an equally serious amount of wall space.

Sir Arthur Streeton's super-sized oil on canvas Sydney Harbour (lot 31) sold for $2.07 million at Sotheby’s Australia’s auction in Sydney on August 31 confirming the artist’s status as Australia's ultimate blue chip artist.

Underling the strength of interest in trophy paintings at a time of high cash liquidity, the painting made the price without the buyer’s house even being in it. That at least was the raison d’etre for its last high.

The successful bidder, art consultant David Hulme, at least was able to concede this information but obviously could not add any more except to say that following the sale the painting was now still out there in private ownership. This, of course is excellent news for the art trade. It will come round again and could then conceivably be bought by a public art museum as curators like to make big splashes too.

Ildiko Kovacs stole the limelight quite literally at Mossgreen’s winter sale with a 3 metre painting In the Thick, 2012 (lot 24) of a green folding line curving through the painted space to notch an impressive $45,500 IBP secondary market sale against an upper presale estimate of $35,000, but below the top price of $87,840 for a Kovacs paid for 'Boot' at the sale of The Laverty Collection by Bonhams in 2013.

This interest follows her impressive $80,000 Bulgari Art Award win at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2015. Kovacs’ In the Thick, 2012 (lot 24) is an emotionally charged work that is both sublime and heavy, painted with rollers and human gesture.

We have recently added two new features for subscribers to the Australian Art Sales Digest, accessible from the "Artist" page.

The hunt for fine examples of works by Emmanuel Phillips Fox has intensified with a chase as vigorous as those which used to accompany a bloody fox hunt when they were legal years ago.

At a house sale held by E J Ainger last Sunday, one of the artist’s late works, The Avenue, showing a road with a row of trees and distant figures, sold for $130,000 plus buyers’ premium (around $156,000 all up) compared with an estimate of only $30,000 to $40,000.

A rare painting by E Phillips Fox, not seen on the market for over  100 years, and a large watercolour by ST Gill will be put up for auction on 7 August 2016 as part of the Estate of Lady Sidney Orme McPherson & Marion Orme Page.

The Avenue, by E. Phillips Fox (Lot 240) was originally catalogued in the sale of the artist’s estate on 29th February 1916, conducted at the Upper Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street.  Since its purchase (for 15 guineas) it is believed the painting has remained in one or other of the houses of the well-heeled and well-connected McPherson family - headed up by the eminent and respected pastoralist and leader of primary industry, Sir Clive McPherson.

The great Old Master collection which Melbourne born former model Bambi Tuckewell found herself living among on her marriage to the Seventh Earl of Harewood in 1951 has given up one of its greatest treasures to the international art market.

The preparatory drawing for the Renaissance painter Veronese's The Apotheosis of Venice commissioned for the Doges Palace in Venice after two disastrous fires had broken out and wiped out the existing works there has been sold privately for £15.4 million by an unnamed auction house or dealer to an anonymous buyer and appears headed in that direction failing the intervention of any UK institution to come up with matching funds to acquire it after an export embargo was slapped on the work.

Fifteen Fred Williams etchings dating from 1954-1967 from the Raymond and Diana Kidd collection will be a strong highlight of Sotheby’s Australia’s forthcoming diverse international arts and design auction from 6pm July 19 at The Hughenden, 14 Queen Street, Woollahra in Sydney.

Acquired during the 1970s and 1980s, the etchings show the great craftsmanship and skill of one of Australia’s greatest landscape artists.

The collection includes works by Australian modern masters Charles Blackman, Robert Dickerson, Jon Molvig, Sidney Nolan, William Robinson and Tony Tuckson.

In a marathon event, held over 3 days at Mossgreen in Melbourne this week, held in association with Australian Book Auctions, Denis Joachim's extensive collection of Australian colonial books, fine art and prints has finally gone under the hammer.

It feels like the end of an era. Collectors of Joachim's calibre are now so few and far between and many see this as the last private collection of its kind to be released onto the market.

With the enormous interest this auction inevitably drew, the results were somewhat mixed. Interest was clearly focused at the top end, however, and there were plenty of impressive results reached throughout the 1040 lot sale. Quality, rarity and a focus on early Colonial history were the key trends.

Eugene von Guerard’s View of Hobart Town, with Mount Wellington in the Background is the centrepiece of a strong presentation of early and colonial works at Menzies forthcoming Sydney auction of Australian & International Fine Art & Sculpture from 6.30pm Thursday June 23.

Menzies head of Australian art Tim Abdallah believes the work, painted in 1856, is clearly a museum quality magnum opus, which the auction house expects to sell for more than $1.25 million. 

A newly discovered manuscript accompanied by 27 watercolours and drawings for a book by Ida Rentoul Outhwaite was offered at auction in London on June 15. But just little of the auction magic associated with artist in the past was missing when it went under the hammer.

In the parlance of books of this nature, it might have done much better "once upon a time". The lot sold for £27,500 (including buyer's premium) which was at the upper end of the estimates.

An important collection of around two hundred 20th and 21st century New Zealand artworks and numerous ceramic items are to go under the hammer in Auckland over two days in early September

The very private collection of Tim and Sherrah Francis lovingly assembled over the last six decades is set to break a number of art auction records when it goes up for auction on the 7th and 8th of September through the rooms of Art and Object.

A painting of the Olgas made £1.265 million, more than twice its estimate at a Sotheby's sale in London on 13 June.

Surprisingly it was not painted by any of Australia's artists who are often maligned, especially in Britain, as overpriced artists.

The painting, shows kangaroos hoping realistically in Central Australia, far more vigorously than any 19th century Australian illustrative artist of early last century like J A Turner or Percy Spence might have attempted.

A rare and fresh-to-the-market work by acclaimed 19th century artist and Wurundjeri elder William Barak more than doubled its pre-sale estimate at Bonham’s Sydney 7 June sale of Important Australian and Aboriginal Art, and set a new auction record for the artist at $512,400 (incl. BP). The highly contested work, Ceremony, 1897 (Lot 58), eclipsed its conservative price pitch of $180,000-250,000, and punted away the previous half-million-dollar record, held by Sotheby’s since 2009.

Many high prices and plenty of good buying made for a solid result at Deutscher and Hackett’s Important Aboriginal Works of Art auction on Wednesday.

Like the opossum in Heaviside Clark's book Field Sports of the Native Inhabitants of NSW of 1813, the last of the major old style Australian antiquarian collections of the 1980s has been finally smoked out. The auction of the collection of Denis Joachim, which includes what may well be the original watercolours for the book, has been bagged by Mossgreen Auctions in conjunction with Australian Book Auctions and will be held over three days in June in its Melbourne premises, and viewed at the Anne Schofield building in Queen Street, Sydney.

The most profitable "Australian" sleeper – a work which goes undervalued at auction because no one knows its real value - has slipped into town quietly and gone on view in Sydney.

But because it is surrounded by replicas it is easily seen by visitors as just another facsimile.

The sleeper is one of the handful of contemporary portraits of Captain James Cook and is the one in which he is depicted as looking the most resolute of the all. By William Hodges, the portrait appears almost as an aside in the exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.

The exhibition, Ships, Clocks and Stars, The Quest for Longitude is at the Australian National Maritime Museum until October 26.

Auction goers will have the opportunity to see the late Suzanne Cecil’s personal collection at her magnificent Toorak home for more than two days before Mossgreen transfers all the items to its rooms at 926-930 High Street, Armadale for auction from 2.30pm Sunday May 15.

Descended from Henry Buck – one of Melbourne’s most distinguished and recognised family names – Sue was actively involved in the family retail business, but had a lifelong passion for painting and the arts.

In the first sale of a new era in the saleroom, a “bride” fell over. The “bride”, Arthur Boyd's Bridegroom in a Black Creek (lot 159) had to be referred at $680,000 short of the $700,000 lower reserve and has not yet been listed as sold.

As brides go she was no stunner. But another smaller “bride”, which was more presentable and interesting as a composition was vigorously contested. Bridegroom Waiting for His Bride to Grow Up  (lot 123) sold for $220,000, ($268,400 including buyer's premium) against a low estimate of $150,000.

In a season in which the majority of sales have been in Melbourne, Melbourne artists triumphed nabbing six of the 10 spots in the auction's top 10 price list at the Sotheby's Australia auction, titled Important Australian and International Art, and held at Sydney's Intercontinental Hotel

Anyone who saw the movie Groundhog Day will remember the characters were trapped in a present day when everything kept happening over and over again. That was how art auction habitués must have felt at the Intercontinental in Sydney on Tuesday night when the Denis Savill Collection of Australian Art went under the hammer of Sotheby's Australia.

Only about a dozen of the 120 lots on offer had not been exposed to view in the saleroom in the last 20 years and many of those had come up in the past two years. As a result, the exciting and exhilarating moments were inspired mostly by two lots. One of these lots moreover had been seen before but not in its present context.

To quote Robert Browning, it was ‘Roses, roses all the way’… as twentieth century Australian women painters paved the way for Deutscher and Hackett’s successful season opener:  in a sale stacked with vibrant international work that seemed to contextualise the Australian offerings their sale effortlessly stared down the winter chill post budget night with a solid clearance rate of 78% on the night.

D+H deserve full marks for a tightly curated auction that Roger McIlroy delivered with wit and poise. Across the sale, quality works fresh to the market were fiercely contested. There were no million dollar price tags among the estimates, but the catalogue was solid in all periods: Colonial, Modern and Contemporary. For D+H there was ‘myrtle mixed in my path like mad’… when Five Botanical Studies, c1805, (lot 23) by John William Lewin sailed to $248,000 over a $10,000-$15,000 estimate to the rapture of an applauding audience. Myrtle indeed.  (All realised prices quoted include the buyer’s premium.)

Mossgreen sold the majority of its leading lots in its auction of Fine Australian and International Art in its swish new rooms in Melbourne on May 2 and 3. These included a painting by the French artist Henri Martin for the low estimate of $100,000 hammer ($124,000 with premium) to an overseas bidder on the phone, of course. But where was its stamp department when a painting by a lesser known South Australian artist, lot 56 was sold? Terry Ingram asks.

An image of a group of heavily inebriated Aborigines became one of the most keenly contested art works when it was offered at a book and print auction held in Adelaide by rare book dealer Michael Treloar on April 10.

The print was withdrawn from the auction the morning of the sale, not because of its racial overtones but after telephone calls suggesting the attribution was wrong.

At least six would-be bidders were keenly interested in acquiring it and clamoured for its fast return to the auction.

The most powerful and fiercely independent figure in Australian art dealing, whose presence or absence has made or broken many an auction, is calling it a day.

But it could be 425 days (14 months) before the dispersal of the unwanted stock and some of the private collection of Sydney dealer Mr Denis Savill is concluded.

Friends and associates believe he will not go hurriedly but like others keep a foot in the door.

However, he recently purchased a new Stephen Gergeley-designed residence in Bellevue Hill, and with his partner Anne Clarke  is taking some of his collection with him. They have also been taking more holiday trips.

Mr Savill has consigned 120 paintings for an auction to be held in Sydney by Sotheby's Australia on May 10.

Menzies’ first sale of the year started with a bang – or was it a CRAK?:  three of the leading US Pop artists, Lichtenstein, Haring and Warhol, set the mood for the pre-Easter auction in Melbourne: 140 of the 170 lots sold, with a total hammer price of $5.588 million or  $6.859 million incl. buyer’s premium, equating to clearance rates of  82% by volume and 85% by value.

Australia has long been a fully acknowledged destination for American entertainers as they enter their dotage; but a coincidence affecting two regional art galleries in Australia would seem to be taking the welcome a little far.

Just over half a century after her untimely death the galleries are holding simultaneously exhibitions devoted to Marilyn Monroe. As Marilyn was not a painter, except of mascara, a stick of which is in one of the exhibitions, it may be time to cash in some of her locally owned memorabilia.

Such are the connections, or variety of portable popular culture that has found its way to Australia over the years, that one of the exhibits, a dress with which she entertained the troops in Korea in 1954, is on show.

The Melbourne man who must have been the biggest supplier of collectables to local and overseas markets over nearly three quarters of a century died in his adopted city on January 9.

Max Stern was still going into his office in the Port Phillip Arcade when he became a nonagenerian and gave up playing football professionally – the oldest registered player in the southern hemisphere -not long before that. He died two weeks short of his 95 birthday for which the Australian Philatelic Traders Association was preparing a big party.

The first major painting sold overseas for an Australian vendor in 2016  is a Picasso which  - described as an illustration of the artist's ongoing exploration of the female form - made £1.32 million or $A2.7 million.

Consigned through Sotheby's Australia to Sotheby's in London the medium sized oil Buste de femme was sold at the Contemporary Day Auction conducted at Sotheby's in New Bond Street on February 11.