Wagner was born in Australia 83 years ago of Maltese descent, and inherited the mantle of the go-getting Continental school while McClelland stood for the more conservative but no less determined principles of the Joshua McClelland Print Room which opened in 1927.
For much of its life the Print Room, in Melbourne’s Little Collins Street was identified with Joan McClelland who ran it after the death of her husband Joshua McClelland.
In her employment at the Herald and Weekly Times and as the wife of the leading antique dealer in Australia’s second biggest city, Joan McClelland flew a Tiger Moth aircraft.
Despite or thanks to her quiet bravura, it kept her alive to the age of 104. Even then she was still attending auctions and comparing art prices for valuations. I suspect this was out of intense curiosity and husband’s commitment as a journalist to being first in securing the story of the day.
Her obituary was published in Art Sales Digest on 8 September 2017.
Shirley Wagner also took to the skies imaginatively. But while it was probably an early Boeing and she was not flying it, the trip must have been equally adventurous. The flight was to Hong Kong where she became one of the first Australian dealers to open a commercial gallery offshore.
This was at a time when opening a second gallery in Australia was considered madness and almost brought another gallery crashing down.
But she made a go of it through recognizing in the late 1980s that overseas representation was what Australian artists were prepared to die for.
She found a space in the Central District of Hong Kong which has since become the major centre of the city’s art trade. There, Australian expats and Chinese businessmen were keen to discover and buy Western art to secure a place at the tables of their former colonial oppressors.
In the process, Australian artists achieved a substantial exposure to Australian art while a few Australians and Chinese obtained an observation post for contemporary Chinese art which was then in its infancy but is now all ago-go.
So generous even in Australian terms was this exposure that it was said more than once in the household of the Boyd families (David and Arthur) that a luxury liner was about to dock whenever she appeared on the horizon.
The two unsinkable women exercised the greatest discretion and persistence which shows up when information is sought in art books for their backgrounds.
There is hardly a mention of either Wagner or McClelland in the literature.
Shirley married a Czech man she met in the melee of displaced persons resulting from the turmoil created by revolution in Soviet dominated Eastern Europe.
Both schools made enormous contributions to the art business. The crassest the clash of cultures came was the occasional reference to the new citizens deemed “Hungarians” by the old guard. But both groups were passionate about Australian art which, of course, gave them a comfortable living.
After studying at the Swinburne College of Art in Melbourne, Shirley, from an especially modest demographic, founded the Barefoot Art Gallery at Avalon on the tip of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, which she ran for 14 years. Paddington at first was out of her reach, although her husband had established a career in the wool classing industry, 1952 and the Korean wool money was then behind them. Leon was a firm backer of his wife who was the “ideas” member of the union.
However, the chemicals magnate George Vago who was known to the Wagners, had established a strong following for art with the creation of the Villiers Gallery which he had remodelled from an Old Paddington terrace house. He sold it to the Wagners for a reputed $93,000.
The Villiers Gallery had made a name for itself with an exhibition of the work of Frank Auerbach, an artist who was becoming a major name in the rising British School.
The Wagner’s daughter Nadine continued the gallery in that building and this year at a gallery in the art enclave near Trumper Park in Paddington – far from Avalon - into which it was the latest major entrant.
Nadine Wagner continued the emphasis on young contemporary artists and a special commitment to showing artists from Melbourne where her mother was born.
The galleries at both venues have helped to link the two biggest cities together in a way the locals seldom did.
Indeed the stock for which it was best known came from the Boyd family in Melbourne, who were members of the Antipodean Group.
But in the seventies, which were difficult years for art in Australia, she also showed work by many Australian artists including Francis Lymburner at whose art classes she was a frequent student.
She did not have a gallery in each city like Stuart Purves at Australian Galleries, but helped diversify the stock available in Sydney which was heavily abstract.
By 1990 the gallery in Hong Kong offered many artists from both cities not wishing to be known just as Australian artists, overseas exposure at a time when the predominant ambitions were seeking access to the world market so that they would be seen to be international artists.
This access admittedly was accomplished in other overseas cities such as New York through shows at pop up galleries.
Shirley sold art on consignment for leading artists rather than buying the work to sell it on. She was able to communicate her enthusiasm for it. That she persisted for so long suggests she had a winning formula. She picked up well on the connections she made easily.
She had the good fortune to meet the Blackmans at Swinburne and applied her own talents to painting, being one of the few dealers who wanted to see the art world from a practical angle.
She was not so lucky with her health, as for the last 20 or so years she was restricted by the effects of a severe stroke.
Their lives are a further demonstration of the importance played by women as managers in the Australian art market, and who only now are being fully recognized as producers.
The combined Joshua McClelland Print Room and Rathdowne Galleries in Carlton which claims to be the oldest gallery owned and run by one family in Australia, has announced an End of an Era Sale.
After the death of Joshua McClelland in 1956, the business was run by his wife Joan, in later decades assisted by her two daughters Patricia and Philippa.
The gallery will be open by appointment until December 2018, after which it will close permanently.
