The sale finished on a good note, however. The total grossed IBP was $8.53 million with the weakness at the lower level. The sale was 69.61 per cent sold by lot with 31 of the 102 works on offer being unsold.
Martin Gallon succeed in dealing with self-aggrandising bidders who threw in over the top, attempted knock out, bids punctuated by cheapskate bids that were under those an auctioneer might normally be expected to take without discord.
The sale just took a lot longer to get there, with lots taking up to five minutes to be sold. The devil-may-care bidding occurred among the most expensive lots. It was as if those on the lower rungs of wealth accumulation simply accepted their fate which was more often not to bid at all. It was the more affordable works that could not be afforded.
Still, the sight of the big brass splashing money around and then trying to hold on to it gave some enjoyment to those in attendance. Albeit small in this instance, the sale was just a little more exciting than usual, especially with a balance of phone, room and internet bidding.
The sale became more routine among the lesser lots as the performance became a little Lizt-less and more like a grinding Ravel Bolero.
The sale’s connotations however were more economic than musical. It contained a subtle hint that the market was entering a new inequality regime with the “affordable art” becoming less expensive and the very pricey even more so. This is in line with the current economic orthodoxy that wealth is trickling upwards.
On international markets, trophy paintings are attracting massive premiums whereas the prices of the remainder are lacklustre. Not that this is helping some auction profits. There is too much competition by the auction houses for the high yield lots. The shareholder-unrelated auction house, Sotheby’s International incurred a loss of $US54.5 million in the latest quarter compared with $US17.9 million in the same period last year, with directors seeing “encouraging signs of a rallying point.”
This is as mad as anything in Lewis Carroll, whose wonderland-inspired Charles Blackman’s The Game of Chess (Lot 47 ) was one of the lots which attracted some of the more scatty bidding. Bidding on the large oil on board began at $850,000 and worked its way up to $1,475,000 ($1.79 million with premium (after some confusion about the odd $1000 or so at its final resting point.)
This compared with estimates of $1 million to $1.2 million and appeared to go to a bidder in the room to which the oddball-bid play was confined.
The price compared with $720,000 paid at Bonhams and Goodman where it was bought by the vendor in this sale, in November 2009, and was a classic case of the trend in classic pieces of Australian art. In this instance the lot was an example of Australian modernism which has largely replaced late impressionism as the mandate for big spending.
The work was a showpiece in Melbourne dealer Lauraine Diggins modernism exhibition in 1992 as well as several other major exhibitions
Another instance of wild independent room bidding was for a classic painting of a different period. A sum of $565,000 ($689,300 with premium) was paid for Arthur Streeton’s And the Sun Clasps the Earth of 1895. (Lot 18 ) This had been in the celebrated first auction of the collection of sharebroker Leonard Dodds in January 1922 and continues the streak of classic works by the artist that have been found by Sotheby’s Australia’s chairman Geoffrey Smith, for recent auctions while also working towards a new catalogue raisonné of the artist.
The estimate on this offering was $250,000 to $350,000.
The small work was an Art Nouveau painting from a school very removed, as its Oscar Wilde-ean title suggested, from the “manly” big Streeton paintings that public gallery directors and landed gentry preferred for their collections through the 1920s to the 1950s.
Towards the beginning of the sale, busy art consultant David Hulme had a good run of purchases for clients headed by an oil by the inspired illustrator-like artist, Herbert Badham, once admired almost exclusively for his book on Australian art. Badham’s recent rise to stardom was reflected earlier this year by the export embargo placed on one of his paintings.
This was a very rare intervention in the protection of the national heritage, mostly reserved for indigenous art works. On Wednesday Hulme paid $140,000 plus premium for the first lot in the sale, Badham’s Botanical Gardens, Sydney (Lot 1 ) against an estimate of $80,000 to $100,000.
Interest was moderated by the subdued subject matter, albeit with a lively interplay of figures making a more diverting approach to the subject than other park scenes.
As early as lot 3 the natives were growing restless and Hulme had to battle his way through some frenetic bidding to secure William Dobell’s Storm Approaching Wangi (Lot 3 ) for $335,000 hammer ($408,700 with premium), more than double the top estimate of $150,000.
It has been rare of late for Dobell to impress the market with the strength he once did and the Turneresque scene suggests the market for classics overrides difficult subject matter. With the world as it is, pretty pictures should be selling better.
The auction included some seductive landscapes by the likes of Purves Smith and Rah Fizzell but they were too lowly in price to attract the big spenders and did not make much of a splash. A flower piece, Lilies and Bells (Lot 66 ) sold for $105,000 ($128,100 with premium) against an estimate of $35,000 to $45,000 but the work by Streeton whom “everybody knows” was a more formidable picture than most other works of the same genre.
Dangerously close to falling into the Culture Bin were Sali Herman and John Coburn, indicative perhaps of a falling off in the spending power of the eastern suburbs Hungarian community as the fair smattering of works by the former in particular, attracted limited enthusiasm.
Most of the generation who enthused over them initially are now becoming grandparents – and Eva Breuer, the dealer who revived their market, passed away in 2010.
Jeffrey Smart made no more than expected, his death now nearly four years behind us. A painting by him of a spiral staircase leading nowhere may be a metaphor for an artist’s reputation, once the excitement of post death activity has been forgotten.
The two Fred William's performed at the lower end of their expectations. The first and rear-cover catalogue illustrated work not influenced by its illustration of diggers of the common turnip, or so the title indicated.
Brett Whiteley held his own, despite one of the works, Still Life with Cornflowers (Lot 8 ) being illustrated in the Sotheby’s catalogue alongside its inspiration, the great Italian still life artist Morandi and not coming out the better for it.
In a run of paintings of bogs by lately fashionable Emma Minne Boyd, Walter Withers and Arthur Streeton only the Withers secured its estimate. Brown paintings are clearly still on the nose.
Gallon’s masterly auctioning - or should it be conducting - with the inevitable number of unsolds offered in what is possible both a picky and Thomas Pikety* market announced pianissimo, the weakness of the more affordable paintings was not so obvious. The “not sold” announcements required by global convention on lots which had not found a home, being so barely audible that they came out as an “n” and an “s,”. Gallon probably would not object to becoming known as the Sir Thomas Beecham of Australian auctioning.
* Thomas Pikety is the author of the 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) which argues that wealth concentrations will cause increases in inequality.
