Art Auction Sale Reviews

Capping off a bumper year, Menzies’ 30 November Sydney auction of Australian and International Fine Art and Sculpture felt flat in comparison to recent record-breaking events. The 185-lot sale sold 65% by number, totalling $4.234 million (hammer) against the pre-sale estimates of $6.3 to $8.5 million. With several half million-dollar Australian works failing to find bids, the top lot went to Jacques Lipchitz’s Homme Assis à la Clarinette II, 1971 (conceived 1919-1920), which made its low-end estimate of $800,000.

At Deutscher and Hackett’s final sale for the year in Melbourne on 29 November, little-known Australian expatriate Iso (Isobel) Rae rocketed into the record books with Les Acheteuses (the Buyers) c1913 (lot 16), a heavily-drawn oil loaded with character. It sold for more than $111 000 including buyer’s premium, eclipsing its previous market entry of $30,000 in 2005 by almost a multiple of four. Rae spent much of her life in Brittany and her composition shows seven women at a local fabric market stall—all outlined with strength and deft brushwork giving density to form.

Good old Charles Fredrick Goldie has done it again, this time smashing his records for drawing and photography in Auckland on 27 November 2017, with those in the room last night applauding at the end of a brace of good old-fashioned auction room bidding contests.

Sotheby’s sale of Important Australian Art on 21 November in Sydney has cemented 2017 as the second highest recorded sales since the boom year of 2007, when $175.6 million dollars worth of art were sold. The auction house reported a total of $10.666 million in sales on the night, with 65% sold of the 82 lots offered, and 113.5% sold by value.

After a substantial decrease in sales and major shake-ups of the auction houses post-GFC, it is mostly been steady as she goes with recorded art sales at auction since 2013, just eclipsing the $100 million dollar mark.

Swing into the 1960s collectors!  It is well past time to collect 1960s works from our senior artists who came to prominence in the 1960s.  An early Dick Watkins Landscape, Bonnard’s Hat, circa 1961-63, (lot 39) surged past its $7,000-$10,000 range to reach more than $34,000 (including buyer’s premium) at Mossgreen’s new-format November sale ‘Important Art’—a second-highest price for the artist.

“It’s what an estate sale could and should be”, declared former Bonhams Chairman Mark Fraser from the podium, ready to steer the sale of Important Works of Art from the Estate of Lady Nolan in Sydney last night. Selected to showcase the diversity of Nolan’s oeuvre from the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the top ten featured examples from many iconic series, including rarities and a plethora of Ned Kelly works, one of which, an ominously dark oil (Lot 167), took the top spot at $150,000.

Some auctioneers promise to move heaven and earth to guarantee consignments and secure sales. CooeeArt directors Adrian Newstead and Mirri Leven actually travelled through time and space to ensure the sale of Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Earth’s Creation I at their inaugural MarketPlace auction, held last night in their Paddington pop-up gallery.

Collectors will have a rare chance to obtain a piece of Australian art history when 22 of iconic modern artist Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings – the most ever to come to market – are auctioned on  November 19 by Bonhams in Sydney.

The paintings are part of the 118-strong collection assigned from the estate of Nolan’s widow, Lady Mary Nolan, who died last year in the United Kingdom.

Historic Falls House at Wentworth Falls in New South Wales Blue Mountains began life in 1850 when Joseph Poll established the venue as a hotel.

Eighty years later, the building was almost destroyed by fire before being completely rebuilt and during the 1990s. Iconic Australian artist John Olsen and his girlfriend lived there where they set aside a room for his studio.

Well-known landscaper Paul Sorensen designed the garden and the property is once more in the news with Mossgreen auctioning the home’s contents on November 13 in Sydney.

Modernist female printmakers such as Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor have enjoyed appreciation for many years from their Australian audience.

It is however the Australian artists with international exposure who have shone brightly in recent years, namely Eveline Syme, Dorrit Black and Ethel Spowers whose work is collected on a worldwide scale. Hence the very substantial prices achieved in the last five years.

Modern technology seems to be making major finds very rare. In a packed auction room in Sydney on October 26, Bonhams sold a Chinese hanging scroll illustrated with a delightful and impressive landscape with waterfalls for $2.6 million hammer ($3.172 million IBP) or 400 times its mid-estimate of $6500. Even at this price, however, the buyer may have secured a bargain.

The work, simply titled Landscape, was only “attributed” to Fu Baoshi” a modern master of Chinese painting who worked in the traditional Chinese medium of ink and watercolour and was sourced from a renowned if still anonymous collection of modern Chinese paintings belonging to a Singaporean family who moved to Sydney.

Even before this year’s ram raid on a pair of oil portraits of Maori chiefs painted by the Czech-New Zealand artist Charles Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926) at an Auckland auction house, New Zealand was a well-established source of skullduggery in the world’s global fake stakes and in other crimes involving art.

As double acts go, it is getting harder to beat the team of Chris Deutscher and Damian Hackett. Celebrating 10 years with their own auction house, it’s a heady moment for this dynamic duo. Their sale of Important Australian & International Fine Art in Sydney on 20 September saw them eclipse perhaps even their own expectations for 2017, as they have now sold $30.7 million worth of fine art, with still one sale to go at the end of November. But more on this later.

Australian Curators and Art Market Audiences need to get out more. Mossgreen’s ‘A Contemporary Vision’ sale brought the international artworld to their door—but the curators, institutions, buyers and art marketeers didn’t open that door. Few attended the sale. Few saw the spectacular pre-sale installation of international works from the 80-piece catalogue across Mossgreen’s Melbourne locations that would have made any art museum proud. At least, few were there when this writer attended the viewing.

The Australian art collected by fifth-generation newspaper man James Fairfax sold superbly, as expected, when offered by Deutscher and Hackett under a sprinkling of fairy lights and chandeliers at the National Art School's Cell Block Theatre in Sydney on Wednesday August 30.

The auction grossed $10.3 million, including the 22 percent buyers’ premium, off its $4.7m to $6.7m pre-auction estimate. That total is a high watermark for a relatively small collection of pictures chosen by a wealthy connoisseur without input from an advisor.

Both Mossgreen and Leonard Joel have specialist art auctions scheduled for the first week in September.

At Mossgreen, the photographic collection of distinguished Australian arts administrator Peter Burch is part of auction of Fine Australian & International Art on 4 Monday September in Melbourne.

The first professional administrator of Victorian Opera and state manager for more than three decades of Musica Viva Australia, his interest in the visual arts is most clearly demonstrated through the accumulation of important photographic images.

The Australian arts community this week lost one of its most indefatigable supporters. A towering figure, both physically and administratively, Claude Ullin AM held a panoply of positions through which he tirelessly promoted the arts in its various forms.

When James Fairfax was asked, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald in 1999, 'did he ever feel a pang about giving away so much' he characteristically replied 'there's far more pleasure than pang.'

And he gave away an incredible amount.  A "steady stream of carefully targeted gifts to Australian public galleries"[i] meant that the country's most important state galleries as well as the NGA in Canberra have greatly benefitted from his generosity over the years.

But there were also a (relatively) small number of works that Fairfax chose to hold on to, hanging in his various homes in Australia and the UK, that included some of the best examples of Australian Colonial, Impressionist, Modern and Abstract artists money and connections can buy.

This private collection, Important Australian Works of Art from the Estate of the Late James O. Fairfax AC will be sold by Deutscher and Hackett in Sydney on 30 August 2017.

[i] Sebastian Smee, The Spectator, London, 2 August 2003.

Sotheby’s fine art sale in Sydney on Wednesday night set four artists’ auction records, including three paintings selling above the million dollar mark, resulting in a total turnover of $11.3 million incl. buyer’s premium, with 103% sold by value and 70% sold by volume.  

July Flowers and Wood Warblers exploded like fireworks in the evening sky at Menzies winter auction in Melbourne on 10 August, as the 1929 flower and bird painting (lot 12) by British artist Cedric Morris netted more than $280,000 (including buyer’s premium) on a high estimate of only $12,000. That is more than 20 times the estimate! 

Morris dwelt on the artworld periphery in rural Suffolk in the 1920s, where he gardened, entertained the likes of Lucien Freud and New Zealand’s Frances Hodgkins and painted richly decorative flower studies. His works exude the fabric of the 1920s, with a naiveté and a sensual playfulness that Menzies buyers clearly found refreshing.

Ten telephone lines from all over the world battled over this modest little painting to register a new world record for Morris, establishing his credentials as ‘substance’ over ‘fashion’.

Celebrity charity auctions can be quite a heady experience. Imagine one where the founder is Leonardo DiCaprio and the entertainment includes Madonna and Lenny Kravitz. Put that together with the world’s leading celebrity auctioneer Simon de Pury, and you can be sure that you are going to raise a very considerable sum of money in one evening. Not perhaps as much as a contemporary art sale from one of the international fine art auction houses, but the Leonardo DiCaprio foundation was able to raise in excess of US$30 million just a few days ago in the South of France, by selling a large number of contemporary artworks from leading artists, plus a number of what were termed “unique items and experiences”.

As reported in The Australian, (subscription required) auction house veteran Tim Goodman is relaunching Fine Art Bourse (F.A.B.) an online auction house, with the attractions of a 5% buyer's premium and no Artist Resale Royalty or copyright fees, as the auctions will take place in Hong Kong.

The first sale will be Erotic, Fetish & Queer Art and Objects (including two private collections from the Far East and Latin America) to be held on Tuesday 12th of September 2017.

The inaugural Australian sales will be held in Sydney on November 13 - 14th, the latter, an important sale of Aboriginal Art, in conjunction with Cooee Art, owner of Australia’s oldest Aboriginal Art Gallery, through its newly established secondary art market platform, CooeeArt Marketplace.

Russell Drysdale’s masterpiece Grandma’s Sunday Walk is the major drawcard at Mossgreen’s forthcoming auction of the Alan & Margaret Hickinbotham Collection in Adelaide.

According to the catalogue preview, the painting exhibits the essential characteristics of a classic Drysdale – a set of recognisable outback characters in a landscape pared back to a few generic forms that might be found anywhere on the Australian continent. 

The work carries a catalogue estimate of $1.8 million to $2.2 million and, if the painting sells (with expectations of an artist’s auction record), it will be the sixth more than $1 million estimated work Mossgreen has successfully auctioned – giving the company a 100 per cent strike rate in paintings of this value.

The current record price for a work by Drysdale sold at auction, is $1.89 million (IBP) for Rocky McCormack, which was sold by Sotheby's in Melbourne in 2008.

In a small eclectic sale comprising 68 lots of mixed quality, Bonhams Important Australian and Aboriginal Art auction (Sydney, 6 June) was carried by the performance of four works that racked up a hammer total of $1.8 million against their cumulative low-end tally one third that value, and which built a sale total of $3.5 million dollars (incl. BP), well above its $1.2 to $2.2 million dollar expectations.

The top ten tranche was filled with best-performing works by modern and contemporary master painters: Blackman (3), Boyd (1), de Maistre (1), Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1), Nolan (2), Brett Whiteley (1), and lone ex-pat Impressionist John Peter Russell.

A new series of curated contemporary art auctions – the only one of its kind in Australia – has been introduced by Mossgreen.

The first in the series will be held from 6.30pm Sunday May 28 at its Sydney premises 36-40 Queen Street, Woollahra.

Mossgreen has teamed up with contemporary art auction consultant Melissa Loughnan to help with the sale, which includes key works created after 1970 by Australian and New Zealand contemporary artists.

The quality and integrity of the auction is ensured through a set of criteria that includes a five-year cut-off period for consignments – that is, all works are dated on or before 2012.

By all accounts so far this year, the non-Indigenous art market looks to be finally breaking out of its “decade of torpor”[i]. The results of Mossgreen’s Fine Australian Indigenous Art sale last night, however, would suggest that this sector, while not moribund, is still mired in a morass of its own making.

With a single owner core of 96 works, several of which sold at large discounts to their purchase prices, along with a few contemporary highlights from mixed vendors, and a dose of desperate dealer stock, the 193 lot sale was never going to be a Laverty or Vroom affair. And the market responded accordingly, with only 49% clearance by both number and value, and with the top ten lots all settling in the $20-50,000 bracket.

The art trade has little to fear from the increasing torrent of consignments from seniors down-sizing, if the response to the to the auction of Australian and International Fine Art and Sculpture at the Menzies Gallery in Sydney on May 11 is any guide.

Downsizing has added a new D to the lexicon of Ds driving the art market (death, debt and divorce). The sale grossed $7,099,282 IBP which was a respectable 84 per cent sold by value and 87 per cent by volume.

The response to the 136 lot offering of wall-demanding large paintings and space clogging sculpture resulted in a more than satisfactory return, if a wee bit short of what was hoped for.

The recent Laverty sale was a clear highlight for Deutscher & Hackett’s autumnal calendar, but their 10 May mixed vendor Important Australian and International Fine Art Sale added another solid $4.8 million-dollar tranche to the company’s bottom line and included some excellent results in what was a rather underwhelming affair, ambience-wise.

The 132 lot sale cleared well at 80% by volume and 90% by value, and a breakdown of these stats account for the sale’s tenor: works that sold at or below their low-end comprised 34% of the total; those selling within estimate at 26%; and those that performed over-estimate equalling the tally of unsold works around 20% each.

Old timers attending a recent Sydney suburban art auction report feeling momentarily trapped in a time warp. At an auction held by Theodore Bruce in its rooms in Alexandria on April 9 prices of what appeared to be scrappy pieces of early colonial art soared in frenzied bidding to many times their estimates.

A pair of engravings by John Eyre (1771-?) sold for $50,000 (lot 10) hammer against estimates of $800 to $1200. With the BP and GST the total was $61,000.

Several other lots sold for much more than their estimates.

Included amongst the best selection of Australian Impressionist paintings to appear for some time at a Menzies sale is Charles Conder’s The Fortune of War 1888 (lot 45).

Painted in 1888, the year of the historic and career-defining meeting between Conder and fellow Australian artist Tom Roberts, The Fortune of War belongs in the exalted company of some of Australia’s best known works of art – The Departure of the SS Orient from Circular Quay, Herrick’s Blossoms and Holiday at Mentone, all on permanent public display in Australia’s most important public galleries, and all painted by Conder in the same year as the work up for auction.

After the remarkable $14.26 million dollars achieved at Sotheby’s sale of important Australian art in Sydney yesterday, one might well ask whether we have just seen a paradigm shift in the Australian art market.

By any definition, exceeding the high end of the estimates for any fine art sale by close to $2 million is a big ask, especially when 25% of the lots remain unsold on the evening.

Specialists at Deutscher and Hackett are expecting a new auction record for Lin Onus when a monumental work by the artist comes up for sale in Sydney on 10 May.

Riddle of the Koi, 1994 (lot 10) was released from the artist's estate in 2016 for a touring exhibition when it was bought by a private collector in Sydney. Its return to the market also marks its auction debut.

The painting is one of Onus' celebrated and highly-prized 'watery landscapes', though one of the few that seem so obviously inspired by his residency in Yokohama in 1989 - with the inclusion of the wonderfully decorative 'Koi' fish so prevalent in Japanese garden ponds.

At 2 x 4 metres the diptych is a major work, rich in detail and immensely appealing. With an estimate of $450,000-650,000 the work will likely sell for more than the artist's current auction record as recorded by the Australian Art Sales Digest, set in 2015 by Frogs on Waterlilies (which is one quarter the size of the current work) from the David Clarke Collection at Sotheby's Australia for $512,400 IBP.

Clearing a very comfortable 93% by volume and a happy 123% by value, Deutscher and Hackett’s sale of The Laverty Collection Part III: Contemporary Australian Art closed the books on the third and final deaccession from the collection with a solid, if not exciting performance: some strong result for artists, although no new major records, and a few collectors running off with bargains to boot.

With many works featuring in the Laverty’s lavish and highly regarded publications (two editions) on their collection: Beyond Sacred – it was reported that Elizabeth Laverty found it hard to let certain works go: “That sort of history makes a work terribly hard to sell.”[i] Let go they were, and sell they did, amassing a total of $2,614,582 (including BP).

The auction of the third tranche of the Laverty Collection will be conducted by Deutscher and Hackett in Sydney on Wednesday 5 April.  Comprising works by some of the finest indigenous and non-indigenous Australian artists on the market, the final sale follows two successful auctions that have come before it.

The London sale on March 22 of Pre-Raphaelite & British Impressionist Art, Maritime Art, Sporting & Wildlife Art at Christie’s South Kensington is almost certainly the last that will have an Australian lot illustrated on the catalogue cover, and probably the last lot of any special Australian interest to be offered in its rooms.

The lot is also the last that offers the opportunity for Australian institutions to compete for, in a saleroom that has produced many Australian institutional buys as well as private and trade purchases. The saleroom on Old Brompton Road which was established in 1975 as Christie's secondary London premises alongside its flagship King Street rooms is being closed down.

The Australian art market has lost two exemplary works, presumably for good, to the public sector following perceptive intervention in the secondary market by museum collections.

This is never welcome news to dealers as they are unlikely ever to secure a second bite at them. But if private collectors zero in on trophy works, deft funding utilisation is called for if public collections are to grow.

The works are Meditating on Good Friday 1961 a triptych, oil on board by Stanislaus Rapotec, 183 x 412 cm and Ruby Plains Massacre 1, 1985, natural earth pigments and bush gum on canvas, 90 x 180 cm by Rover Thomas.

Mossgreen are specialists in single-owner sales. On a quiet night for their much-anticipated Lowenstein sale, a shimmering Lin Onus painting Frog, c1995 (lot 76) with all the wistful pull of captured moonlight proved that a canny secondary market audience is after fresh high calibre works that are modestly estimated. This painting is built on the concept of reflected light, glowing like a glass-half-full bridge between aboriginal culture and western pictorial construction. True to form, the painted frog almost vanishes in the textured painted layers.  What a gem. It realised $60,000, just above its upper estimate.  (All realised prices quoted include the buyer’s premium.)  Compared to previous Lin Onus auction records, this was a modest sale. However for Onus, the records are held by works of larger scale and incisive aboriginal character.

Veteran Melbourne art dealer, Rob Gould is selling part of his private collection and part of his gallery stock through Deutscher & Hackett in Sydney on 15 March, 2017.

The gallery was established by Rob Gould and his mother in its current premises in Toorak Road, South Yarra in 1980, and in the early 2000's also had an outlet in Queen Street Woollahra.

Deutscher + Hackett catalogue estimates for The Gould Collection of Important Australian Art compiled by the Australian Art Sales Digest are from $5.9 million to $8.1 million hammer.

Tom and Sylvia Lowenstein are about to auction more than 250 paintings, works on paper and sculptures valued at $2 million as their firm Lowenstein’s Arts Management prepares for a new era. The couple occupy a unique position in the Australian art world as patrons, collectors and close confidantes to many Australian artists and, through these relationships, have created a collection that represents the very best of modern and contemporary art.

Well what a year of change 2016 was with all sorts of records being set at art auction by the major players, mostly in Auckland. Perhaps the most interesting detail to emerge was the record amount spent on art works during the year.

The new year has been quiet, but as February drew to a close the three major Auckland art auctioneers all held sales in the same week giving collectors an opportunity to acquire works of art in a range of media for a reasonable capital outlay.

This suite of second and third tier art offered some excellent buying across a range of schools, styles subjects and media.

A period rich in characters observed with the eye of the seasoned flaneur is described in great detail and considerable perception in Inside the Art Market: Australia’s Galleries A History: 1956-1976.

The book is a tribute to the “real characters” who emerged during the market's creation in its seminal years. That was when and artists still wore berets and corduroy trousers instead of panama hats and Armani suits and rode on buses instead of driving Bentleys.

Over the past 60 years, Europeans and Americans – not Australians - have been in the majority when it comes to significant collections of Aboriginal art.

Chief among them is Dutchman Thomas Vroom, who in the late 1980s first encountered Australian indigenous art in New York.

For the next two decades, he became a passionate collector on an unprecedented level – acquiring important historical works at auction, tracking down and directly acquiring old collections, buying contemporary works on numerous trips to remote regions, from galleries in Australian capital cities and from international dealers.

Mossgreen's first New South Wales auction for 2017 was not held in their saleroom in Queen Street Woollahra, but at the Gibraltar Hotel, Bowral, close to the property of the vendor, the late Michael Ball at Sutton Forrest.

Michael Ball was born and educated in Melbourne, but his career with advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather led him live and work in the US, Canada, England, Italy and Asia before retiring to Sutton Forest.

Over his life time he assembled an eclectic collection of furniture, glassware, sculpture, antiquities, tribal artefacts and taxidermy.

British artist David Hockney’s major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria until March 13 is expected to generate plenty of interest in Leonard Joel’s first specialist print and photography auction for 2017 because two of his works will feature in the sale.

Now 79, Hockney is regarded as one of the most influential living artists and the exhibition features more than 1200 works from the past decade of his career including paintings, digital drawings, photography and video works.

Garnishing the full flavour of secondary market cycles Menzies auctioneer Martin Farrah gathered a confident 82% clearance rate from bidders in Melbourne’s fading summer heat for the first major sale of 2017. The international guns fired again with Fernand Leger’s China Town, 1943, (lot 40) realising $1,875,000 including buyer’s premium. (All realised prices quoted include the buyer’s premium.) This price sits more than $300,000 shy of its previous realisation in 2015, but is still a bargain by heated international standards. Menzies February 2017 sale is a tale of firsts and lasts, of re-runs, of a market treading softly towards the upper end, but striding firmly at the lower.

Art lovers who visit Stonington mansion in Malvern over the next few days to view paintings earmarked for Menzies forthcoming auction on 9 February, will be struck on entry by the strong colour and highly stylised rendering of modern urban life in French 20th century master Fernand Léger’s 1943 work China Town, which takes pride of place in the foyer.

Australian painting is anything but over-priced if a Canadian painting sold in Toronto for a record price on November 23 is what at first it seems.

The painting, Mountain Forms, executed in 1926 by Canadian artist Lawren Harris (1885 – 1970) sold for $C11.2 million at a Heffel’s auction in the former Toronto Stock Exchange Building.