The record for the Streeton is a great accomplishment considering that the final price was $1,000,000 over the low estimate. The fall of the hammer followed a battle between a telephone bidder, T, and the internet bidder, I, in which more than sixteen bids were lodged while the room looked on. Excuse my use of algebra to describe this, but from an audience point of view all bids were cryptically incognito. Hopefully the auction house knew who they were, and particularly who it was that clicked that final mouse. The internet age has now well and truly arrived in the saleroom, allowing buyer anonymity that was once the province of the telephone bidder alone.
The Streeton was the prime example of his ‘Venice’ paintings. This work had resided in the Baillieu family for more than a century and was recently seen publicly at the spectacular Streeton retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2020. The last major sale of a Venice painting was for the slightly smaller The Guidecca Lagoon at Menzies in 2014 for $500,000, painted in a later reprise of the subject matter c1938.
Beyond the amazing diagonal viridian slash of foreground shadow, the waters of The Grand Canal are glazed in layer upon layer and the technique captures the luminosity of light and water that was made so famous in the eighteenth century by Canaletto. Here Streeton is equal.
It has to be said that the auction began on a quiet note, with a sense of rugged-up Melbourne reserve. Most chairs in the room were taken. Deutscher and Hackett had carefully staged a suite of five important 1970s photographs by pioneering image-maker Carol Jerrems. These capture the zeitgeist of St Kilda street life—as edgy then as it is now—but on an intimate photographic scale of the 1970s that predates the giant glamour images of art photography of the 2000s. Jerrems’ glamour is raw and arresting for its savvy depiction of youthful interaction. The most famous of the images, Vale Street, edition 3/9, 1975 (Lot 3 ) sold solidly with a hammer price of $90,000, just shy of its previous record. We had all hoped for more; sadly, lot 2 (Lot 2 ) and lot 5 (Lot 5 ) remained unsold on the night. These images are vitally important in our art history, taken at a time when the associations between photography and fine art were just beginning.
The room still looked on when several gems from the estate of Ray Hughes were offered. The very desirable international works by Alex Katz, Self Portrait, c1977 (Lot 6 ) and Ada With Headband and Lips, c1968 (Lot 7 ) were perfect examples from early in his career as a 60s American Pop Art icon. These were hotly contested by phone and internet to reach well beyond their top estimates. Self Portrait sold for a hammer price of $125,000, and the smaller Ada for $135,000 on an estimated range of $45,000-$65,000. These intimate canvasses provide a wonderful contrast to the vast canvasses, or rather image environments, of his late career work shown at the Serpentine in London in 2016. Also from the Ray Hughes collection, a Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale Taglio, 1969 (Lot 10 ) from an edition of 7, with a characteristic Fontana slit effortlessly slashed into a curled ceramic surface, was perhaps the buy of the night, selling for only $36,000 at a price point just above its top estimate. A perfect addition to an international collection. Thank you, Ray Hughes, for bringing these to us.
Then, back to the reality of fine Australian works, things got lively. A perfectly balanced Cressida Campbell woodblock print, Japanese Print and Clivias, 2013, (Lot 11 ) nearly doubled its top estimate to sell for a hammer price of $230,000, just shy of a record for this popular artist. Remember, it is a work on paper, uniquely printed in watercolour, from plywood blocks with incised surfaces. No one else could do this.
Far from the contemporary end of things, a bidding war erupted between phone and room bidders when Bertram Mackennal’s colonial bronze masterpiece Circe, c1902-4 (Lot 20 ) was offered. It finally fell to the telephone for a substantial $420,000 over an estimated range of $160,000-$200,000. This piece is straight from the colonial c1900 zeitgeist with the female figure cast as a beguiling sorceress in an interesting comparison to Carol Jerrems’ 1970s female depiction in Vale Street, 1975 (Lot 3 ). Such is life. The music, love and peace of Woodstock has happened in the intervening years to relax the view of how we see ourselves.
Apart from the thrilling high price record of $105,000 for Imants Tillers’ Waterfall Variation II, 2012, (Lot 12 ), there was another contemporary gem that settled in quietly above its top estimate. Ken Whisson’s Face and Flag Face or Deep Dream, 1976 (Lot 50 ) realised $40,000—well above the usual estimated range $25,000-$35,000 for a Whisson canvas. This particular painting brings us the secrets behind Whisson’s usual images of deeply-seated drawn lines that seem to dismiss the importance of form in image-making. But here, in Flag Face, the realist forms of ship, cloud, face and flag are evident against the coloured ground. The forms have carefully-handled edges that he seems to have gathered in and focused on for his later paintings.
On my count there were six high-price records for artists on the night and when the six new records are added in from the Smith and Singer sale in Sydney on the previous night, it shows that the market is very keen to find new benchmarks as we move slowly beyond the covid crisis. The latest artist records from the Deutscher + Hackett sale crossed all the market segments—colonial, modernist and contemporary: Mackennal $420,000 (Lot 20 ); Streeton $2,500,000 (Lot 21 ); Beckett $150,000 (Lot 25 ); Tillers $105,000 (Lot 12 ); Hunter $35,000 (Lot 56 ) and Vernon Ah Kee (Lot 52 ).
All prices are hammer prices in $Au unless otherwise indicated.
