Sotheby's London to Hold its First Dedicated Aboriginal Art Auction with Star Centrepiece Collection

By Jane Raffan, on 08-May-2015

Having dispensed with a department dedicated to Aboriginal art, Sotheby’s Australia has exposed itself to a raid by the company’s London branch. The independently owned and operated firm’s practice of including major works of Aboriginal art in their Australian Fine Art sales was clearly not considered an effective trigger for the “no competition” agreement between the two entities.

Industry sources say Sotheby’s Australia was blindsided. In what appears to be a snub, the London sale has been put together by Tim Klingender, Sotheby’s former Director of Aboriginal Art, who resigned from the Australian entity in 2009 and consulted for international newcomer Bonham’s from late 2010 until the end of 2013.

The London sale is centred on select works from the Thomas Vroom Collection, described by Sotheby’s as “one of Europe's largest, most valuable and significant collections.” Vroom himself made this claim in 2002[1]. At that time he was Director of the Amsterdam arm of Songlines Gallery, which was closing up shop and commented that “educating clients is difficult. They have no references. They don’t know what’s good and why it’s good … The quality is not really improving ... It’s getting too commercial.”

 

Vroom was indeed a major player in the market twenty years ago, flying to remote art centres and buying up big at auction. In 2004 he was named alongside Karl-Heinz Essl as one of around twelve European collectors who accounted for approximately a third of all auction sales of Aboriginal art at the top of the market[2].

In 2011 it was reported that Vroom had consigned about 150 paintings (including 60 barks) to Coo-ee Aboriginal Art Gallery for sale, as part of the process of whittling the collection down to 400/500 key works[3].

Many of the Vroom Collection works in the Sotheby’s sale have been on long-term loan to the AAMU, the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, in Utrecht. In April 2010, works from Vroom’s collection featured in the AAMU exhibition Aboriginal Art Today!, which showcased works from 1971 through to examples from contemporaneous developments, all drawn from Dutch collections.

Sotheby’s has indicated that the June sale will feature several works from amongst Vroom’s AAMU loans, and will also include material with provenance from the collections of the late Lance Bennett (son of famed collector Dorothy), and anthropologists Drs Kim Akerman and Joseph Birdsell. Collectors can expect “early artefacts, figurative carvings, many rare erotic bark paintings and major contemporary canvases by Rover Thomas and Emily Kngwarreye” amongst the offerings.

Aboriginal Art - Including Selected Works from the Thomas Vroom Collection

10 June 2015, London, with previews in New York 9-14 May

 

[1] Sebastian Smee, ‘The fortunes of Aboriginal art outside Australia: ethnographica or art?’, The Art Newspaper, June 2002

[2] Michael Hutak, ‘Aboriginal art in Paris: in your Dreaming’, The Bulletin, 2004

[3] Arts - About Town, The Australian Financial Review, 21st July 2011

About The Author

Jane Raffan runs ArtiFacts, an art services consultancy based in Sydney. Jane is an accredited valuer for the Australian government’s highly vetted Cultural Gifts Program, and Vice President of the Auctioneers & Valuers Association of Australia. Jane’s experience spans more 20 years working in public and commercial art sectors, initially with the AGNSW, and then over twelve years in the fine art auction industry. Her consultancy focuses on collection management, advisory services and valuations. She is the author of Power + Colour: New Painting from the Corrigan Collection of Aboriginal Art. www.artifacts.net.au.

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