The big surprise of the auction of Important Australian Art being held by Sotheby's Australia in Sydney on August 31 is not what it is in it, but where it is being held.
The venue is the Anderson Street, Double Bay rooms, long occupied by various auction operations of Bonhams and Goodman, which last November was transformed as a franchise into Sotheby's Australia.
The rooms are also the venue where the fine art and book auctions of the associated company Leonard Joel are now held..
Vendors and buyers might consider this a bit of a come-down from the Paddington Town Hall where Sotheby's, before being taken over by Tim Goodman and associates, held its auctions.
It possibly further distances the new Sotheby's Australia from the old, identifying it more closely with Mr Goodman's when clients may be looking for the re-assurance of a powerful brand.
However, it must represent a significant cost saving, and the old rooms have been markedly refurbished.
As tighter venue, it is also easier to attract a "full" room.
Rival auctioneer, Deutscher and Hackett has the Paddington Town Hall booked for their sale on September 1st.
Creating some possible confusion, the Sotheby’s Australia Sydney viewing takes place at the Queen Street Galleries where Sotheby's offices have been long established.
Overriding all this, the 80 lots in the sale surprise by their freshness in a market where re-offered stock had begun to draw giant yawns. .
The offering also deserves a tick for its inclusion of works from respected and named collections such as Readers Digest and Mrs Morris West.
The estimates of $6,150,000 to $8,237,000, if met, will be a triumph for the auctioneer.
It would be the auction industry's golden grail of raising the individual lot value and ipso facto, lowering of costs.
It is a very important sale for Tim Goodman, who bought the Sotheby's Australia franchise at an opportune but difficult time for the economy and the art market.
It compares with a realisation of $5.3 million in April and $6.59 million in August last year.
The estimates occasionally suggest Sotheby's have had to fight hard to secure the works, and fight equally as hard to achieve its targets.
The offerings also add only a modest diversity to their freshness.
The mandatory Fred Williams , Charles Blackman, Ray Crooke and Garry Shead - and Arthur Streeton from the old school - are admittedly all there..
Fine works by Albert Tucker, James Gleeson and Sidney Nolan, artists with whom Sotheby's Australia's head of art, Geoffrey Smith has had a personal or curatorial rapport, also appear.
There are also outstanding omissions.
Barring a 19th century sketchbook, colonial Australian art is also missing.
This is disappointing in a year the 200th anniversary of Governor Macquarie's appointment is being celebrated, and colonial art should be a cause celebre.
This is very conspicuous, as the chronological cataloguing to which Smith, with a curator's penchant and an eye to avoiding accusations of favouritism towards clients by placing stock forwards in a sale has been abandoned.
The earliest scene depicted is Landing at Botany Bay (wisely at lot 70 estimate $20,000 to $30,000) which was priced at a hefty 300 guineas when the 150th celebrations of settlement were being held in 1938.
But out-of-period, and by the now very much out of favour B. E. Minns, its placing in the catalogues is fairly indicative of the likely interest.
The earliest work being offered, a family scrapbook of Thomas John Dournville Taylor with Darling Downs sketches done in the 1840s (lot 43) occurs half way through the sale, just in the unlikely event an appropriate public library cannot be found for it, and it fails to sell..
The scrapbook, so well put in the catalogue as a genre that is " a common but commonly undervalued artefact of 19th century middle class culture", contains revealing images of a corroboree and a raid on an Aboriginal camp.
The $40,000 to $60,000 estimates, plus GST as it was found in the UK, are not sensational in view of past successes by Sotheby's with sketches and scrapbooks.
Former Senior Curator of Art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, now employed by Sotheby's Australia as Senior Researcher and Specialist Dr David Hansen, has gone to town on it in the catalogue with a three page essay.
With many of the other, skilfully edited for the market, catalogue entries, the essay suggests the new Sotheby's is not about to let this aspect of the old Sotheby's tradition slip.
Inevitably there is still a bit of unnecessary (for the professional) contextual verbiage not directly related to the work under review.
Sometimes accused of being too curatorial biased, Smith presided over a bright cataloguing initiative that has been transferred to the new Sotheby's from the old B and G.
The entries flatters some vendors by describing them as being "distinguished".
While the headings to the catalogue entries usually remove any ambiguity of who or what kind of vendor was the source of the offering they sometimes also cheekily continue a B and G conceit of highlighting the best collection a lot had once been in, rather than the latest.
For example. while offered from a private collection, Melbourne, Grace Cossington's Bottle Brush (1935) (Lot 37 ) estimated at $40,000 to $60,000) is headed "formerly in the collection of Mr John Dowell Davies AO, Melbourne".
While Hansen, who did the half column entry on this work refers. to its "haphazard unarrangement" and "spiral logic," anyone looking for a flower piece as a resplendent bunch might be disappointed and wait for the more conventional Streeton flower piece Roses - Lady Hillington which follows, (Lot 44 ).
The Streeton is one of six works by the artist representing a wide spread of his career.
Art collectors seeking that now most desirable subject matter, Ned Kelly, should be satisfied with four modestly priced specimens by the king of Kelly painters Sidney Nolan (lots 7, 18, 48, and 61).
Nolan also contributes to the sale's potential with the modest textile dye picture Gallipoli Riders estimated at $8000 to $10,000 (Lot 52 ).
This could be put away for the centenary celebrations of Gallipoli are almost certain to much greater than Macquarie's "bi."
Even dedicated art museum curators have tended to underrate Nolan's Gallipoli work.
Decorators have long since ceased eschewing beige as dreary. So the cover picture (Lot 20 ) Shao (Rain Slanted by Wind) 1978-79 estimate $600,000 - $800,000) will not be the yawn associated with the colour.
The Whiteley shows a heron - an ever popular subject - with two real eggs in a bird's nest.
The latter items could, it may be unnecessary to add, might offer some conservation challenges although replaceable surely by marble specimens.
Members of polite society might be more concerned by the ambiguities in the picture which the very busy Hansen concedes, also include the white splashes.
Are they snow or bird droppings?.
The offering is one of the most recent to appear on the market. Emphasising the freshness of the stock it was offered by Savill Galleries, Sydney in 1991 for $49,000. Its present ask represents the sensational rise in prices that followed the artist's death.
Fred Williams' Orange and Green Landscape (1975) (Lot 29 ) at $350,000 to $400,000 is far more luscious than an earlier (lot 200) Landscape (1967) Williams' beige painting.
Hansen skilfully has readers licking their lips at the reference the colours of Neapolitan ice cream.
Cattle and sheep are back in six figure offerings respectively in lot 11 and lot 13. These are thankfully facing the viewer and far off rather than with their rears towards the viewer as was the case in many of Withers work.
After the Heat of the Day, a large oil by Withers, 1891 is a brown picture saved by its golden glow which would have been a big draw in the 1980s when collectors were buying alphabetically (the 80s).
This magnificent example would have made it top of the pile of the Ws during the previous art boom..
A continuing travel exhibition has given late Frederick McCubbin's late work a golden curatorial glow. Yet the absence of figures in this large vertical painting Pastoral of 1904 makes one lust more for either the narrative works of intimate scenes such as women shelling peas.
The intimacy of Lot 1, plus its early place in the artist's career, should offset the market bias against religion which would otherwise be a no-no for a sale starter. Flight into Egypt painted by Donald Friend in 1940 (estimate $10,000 to $15,000 plus GST), a UK find, shows Christ held lovingly by Mary on a donkey.
Aficionados of the same artist's naked youths have to wait until lot 65 A State of Trance II wisely placed later in the sale because of its higher $35,000 to $45,000 estimates and later (1971) execution.
If the sale were to have a name like the old Sotheby's it could well have been ‘Table Top’ as there are four. Charles Blackman's The White Table Cloth (Lot 8 ) has an incredible exhibition history and is suitably whacky for a picture from the watershed Alice in Wonderland series of 1956.
Regardless of its originality at $550,000 to $750,000 and devoid of characters, it may be the hardest ask of the sale.
Margaret Olley's Swato Oranges with a Black Jug, painted in 1964 (Lot 2 ) should help the sale on its merry way, the $50,000 to $70,000 being no obstacle in the adoring market for this living treasure's work.
Donald Friend's Girl with a Ginger Cat (Lot 3 ) (estimate $12,000 to $18,000) could only offend those collectors of great sanitary sensitivity like Melbourne collector Keith Murdoch, who famously declined to buy a Bonnard because it was "unhygienic" to have a cat on the table.
Might it not interest the buyer of Whiteley's incontinent heron?
Adrian Feint's Mixed Flowers in the Ram's Head Cornucopia Vase (which appears to be placed on a table near a window) is number 76 in the catalogue. The estimates oft $8000 to $12,000 presuppose no revaluation from a revelatory recent regional gallery travelling exhibition of his work.
Dr Hansen might have been evoked to produce a few words of flattering art-speak for some of the contemporary works. The "phallic verticality" of Lisa Roet's 191 cm tall piece of vulgarly suggestive Chimpanzee's Finger and its Ozymanis fragmentation is acknowledged.
But could it not also be the fickle finger of fate? Viewers can decide for themselves whether they want it around their swimming pool.
A work from a different edition sold for $52,800 (including BP) at Sotheby's Australia in August 2009 and this one is estimated at $50,000 to $70,000.
The contemporary market might be harder going in view of the recent $11 million drawn from the market by the Melbourne Art Fair which being bi-annual was not held last year before the August sales.
Four portraits, two by Nora Heysen, including her celebrated penetrating 1932 self portrait (Lot 23 ); and seven overseas works provide some diversity of genre and geography for the sale. Five of the overseas works are modest sketches by Edouard Bonnard bought to Australia by Georges Mora in 1981.
The third portrait is a vivacious Self Portrait with Satchel and Bicycle by Charles Bush (Lot 71 ) and the fourth is an oxymoron, an important painting by Ernest Buckmaster. (Apologies to all art lovers in Malvern). It is a fine portrait of the tenor and Aboriginal activist Harold Blair. Estimate of this work (Lot 68 ) is $10,000 to $15,000. There should be institutional interest for both of these if not also for the previous two.
Three of the overseas works are by Charles Conder, two of which came to Australia via Melbourne's Blue Boy Gallery director George Grunhut, whose under-appreciated repatriations in the 1980s are fully acknowledged.
So are those of other dealers, some previously often unmentioned for no reasons it seems than casual cataloguing.
This application to provenance is a confidence booster in a market now deeply troubled by several major faking issues.
*The writer is a vintage saleroom habitue.
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