Sir Warwick’s and Lady Mary’s love of Rodin was kindled in Sydney when Charles Lloyd Jones established an effective and elegant gallery run by Robert Haines in Sydney’s David Jones store. Now we might not think that a department store could establish taste in art, but images from the 1969 exhibition of fifty Rodins curated by Haines, show a sophisticated array of bronzes on pedestals and plinths set among floodlit trees and branches that cast shadows across the installation. This was classy. The atmosphere clearly played on history, recalling Rodin’s dance with the final chapters of Romanticism at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Australian works from the Fairfax Collection had previously been dispersed by Bonhams Sydney in September and with that sale successfully completed, local Art Specialist Merryn Schriver chaperoned a mere ten European works from the heart of the collection to Bonhams London, charged with doing ‘the best possible job’ for their dispersal in the European market. The logistics of shipping life-size Rodins certainly paid off, with Schriver appearing relaxed after the sale: the 10 lots realised more than $2,550,000.
Bonhams elegant headquarters at New Bond Street in London boasts a vaulted ceiling and a 21-screen digital array behind the auctioneer for live projection of the lots and currency equivalents at the fall of the hammer. For this auction, twenty-two imposing phone stations lined the sides of the room, all staffed by Bonhams specialists from London, Brussels, Milan, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and yes, even Australia. This is the how and why London is the power base for modern, post-war and contemporary art. Even after the previous week of London’s Frieze Artfair, where untold millions of pounds changed hands (for individual items) in both the primary and secondary post-war, modern and contemporary art markets, Bonhams fearlessly scheduled their Impressionist and Modern sale for the immediate week post-Frieze. Their sale contained the ten Fairfax works as a centrepiece, surrounded by European gems from the Futurists and Surrealists. Little was passed in.
The Fairfax collection slipped with ease into this environment as a sequential group, beginning with Edgar Degas’ Cheval au bord de la mare, c 1892 (lot 25), a pastel mounted on board. Light and breezy, it proved popular, selling for £225,000 or more than $410,000 AUD including premium—well above the £100,000-£150,000 estimated range. Auctioneer Ralph Taylor prefaced the sale of the Fairfax group with the announcement of the exotic and the serious: It was a ‘fabulous, well-respected and renowned collection from Sydney’.
Next followed a range of bronze studies for Rodin’s celebrated commission The Burghers of Calais, 1889, which comprised a group of six figures led by one Pierre de Wissant. According to classical tradition, Rodin made nude studies using live models, before making the final clothed figures. This ensured that the armatures and musculature would realistically carry the fall of the drapery and robing. So, the figure of de Wissant (lot 26) is hesitantly poised with its weight balanced through one leg; it is nude, sinewy, muscular and inward looking, with a purposely enlarged hand shielding the face. There is a sense that some of the heroic power is lost by the figure being presented separately from the rest of the Burgher group; it seems to need the missing figures as a pillar of strength to bounce off as it turns away.
Certainly, absolute strength is supplied in this figure’s head study: L’un des Bourgeois de Calais: Tête colossale de Pierre de Wissant (lot 27). Standing high on a plinth, the head almost seems to have the slip of a noose around its neck. French law prohibits the production of more than 12 editions of Rodin’s sculptures, and this example is from an edition of 5 cast in 1973. The realised price of more than £180,000 ($333,000 AUD) dwarfed its pre-sale estimates of £40,000 - £60,000. This popular lot sold after a battle between six telephones and at least one room bidder—finally the telephone’s insistence won out.
Three further Rodin bronzes followed, including studies for specific figures from the Burghers of Calais group, beginning with a 46 cm high réduction of the clothed figure of Jean de Feinnes (lot 28). This sold comfortably with a hammer price matching the top of its estimated range, reaching £62,500 (more than $114,000 AUD). Next, the petit modèle, Main No 3 (lot 29), the study of a hand with fingers curling upward, poised between tension and release, also performed well beyond expectation, falling to one of two duelling room bidders. It realised a price of more than £75,000 ($137,000 AUD) against pre-sale estimates of £15,000 - £20,000. The mainstay of such a severed hand is Rodin’s belief that a sculptural fragment must carry the capacity to be a complete artwork in itself. This ‘fragment’ notion applies to the small but intensely focused head (lot 30) L’un des Bourgeois de Calais: Tête de Jean d’Aire, the modelled head of a third member of the Burgher grouping. This sold to an online bidder for £50,000 (more than $91,000 AUD) and four times the high estimate.
The final painting lots in the collection reflected Fairfax’s interest in the French School (possibly influenced by the tastes of his second European wife Hanne). These were competent and attractive pictures that he purchased at Leicester Galleries in London in the late 1940s. Interestingly, he wasn’t chasing the British avant garde of the time—Auerbach, Freud, or even Bacon—for these are now serious money through their defining of post-war culture. Instead he acquired Marie Laurencin’s La femme au chien (portrait), 1924 (lot 31) with a truffled surface in pink and grey. It realised mid-range at £47,500 (more than $87,000 AUD). From the same period the quietly silent Maurice Utrillo Caserne à Soissons (lot 32) failed to have the powerful haunting silence that has become so familiar in the canvasses of de Chirico. It sold at the base of its range at £43,750 (more than $80,000 AUD) to the book.
Quoted realisations include buyer’s premium but exclude the gst on that premium or duties associated with import/export.
