Grand Tour: stop, revive, survive

This Northern summer offers an once-in-a-decade opportunity for collectors to sample the latest trends in international contemporary market. Michael Hutak previews a blockbuster European season.

It swings round every ten years, the "harmonic convergence of super exhibitions", according to Artnet, that has signposted the phenomenal growth of the international market since the 1970s. 2007 will see the big four of contemporary events -- the Venice Biennale, Art Basel, documenta XII and the Münster Sculpture Project -- all open within a couple of weeks in June. This fortunate freak of scheduling delivers Basel, the Biennale, documenta, held once every five years, and Münster, held every ten years since 1977, to all strata of the international art milieu: artists, curators, gallerists, critics, consultants, bureaucrats, Museums, foundations, dealers, publishers. Oh, and collectors.

La Biennale di Venezia

With former Museum of Modern Art curator, Robert Storr, taking the reins, hopes for renewal for Venice are high this year. Curators of the world’s longest-running biennale have negotiated a rocky critical road over the last few stanzas. After the sprawling over-determined glut presided over by Italian contemporary art godfather, Francesco Bonami in 2003 (11 co-curators and 375 artists), came a vastly pared-down but no more engaging over-reaction from Spanish co-directors, Rosa Martínez and María de Corral, in 2005 (some 80 artists). Storr, who has had an unprecedented lead-in of 36 months since his appointment to prepare, is expected to deliver a more coherent vision, one that he has claimed will openly celebrate “the plural” as “the very essence” of art. For the Italian Pavilion, which is always given over to the director to make his own special statement on the contemporary scene, Storr has selected artists that include photographer, Rosemary Laing. New York represented Laing is the first Australian to be picked for the Italian Pavilion, eclipsing the past efforts of venerated Australian Venice veterans such as Nolan, Boyd, Kngwarreye or Tillers.

In the national lineup at this, the 52nd International Art Exhibition, Venice’s Olympian pretensions finally widen to include previously “unexplored” territories, with the addition of Turkey, India and Africa for the first time. This pitch has been mired in controversy over the choice of works from the Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art for the African exhibition, following reporting of Sindika Dokolo’s alleged links with Angola’s repressive diamond trade. Despite this development, the opening up of the Biennale to African art is a good thing, and means to reflect an international art scene which operates in an age of globalised trade and technological convergence, increasingly estranged from any notion of (an occidental) centre. Of course, Venice during the three day Vernissage literally embodies that centre, as the artworld’s rich and powerful, from billionaire collectors to celebrity artists, converge to see and be seen with 30,000 of their closest friends and admirers.

The Australia Council attributed 2005’s record attendance of 187,000 visitors to see Ricky Swallow at then Australian Pavilion to the efforts of entrepreneurial commissioner John Kaldor. Kaldor led a donor group of some 75 collectors around Venice who had paid a minimum $5000 to earn champion partner status as a supportor Australia’s Venice presence. All very corporate. Chosen to play for Australia this year are three artists – Susan Norrie, Daniel von Sturmer, and Callum Morton – whose work, in a break from tradition, will be presented in three different locales across Venice, a move away from the exclusive use of the unfortunate beach shack that doubles as the Australian Pavilion on the hallowed Giardini di Castello. This year von Sturmer’s video will inhabit the difficult Giardini space, while Norrie will show at the Fondazione Levi and Morton at an uncertain venue. Tracey Emin (Britain) and Sophie Calle (France) will add class to the contest. If you haven’t booked your room yet, you won’t be going.

www.labiennale.org/en/art/

Vernissage: June 7, 8, 9 for invited guests. Runs till November.

Art 38 Basel

After some well-earned R&R on the Veneto, most art life aficionados will car-pool private jets to deposit them in Basel, Switzerland, for the world’s premier commercial art fair. If Venice is for the artworld’s collective brainstrust, Basel is set up for its collective trust funds. At Art 38 Basel -- it’s their 38^th year – organizers invite about 300 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries which will display the often engaging wares of 2000 of the world’s leading artists; a show so exclusive, some of the world’s most prominent dealers can’t buy themselves an invite. For collectors, all this worlds’ best practice might make Basel appear as though its put on for those to whom six-figures for an artwork is small change. And it is. Still organisers claim the fifty thousand visitors it gets over 5 days “come to see the most rigorously juried selection of what the international art market has to offer, and to meet the insiders and stars of the art scene.” In a pluralist artworld this may seem hype, but it’s also true.

Art Basel divides itself up into Art Premiere (for multiples and editions and emerging galleries), Art Statements (a series of solo shows by selected artists) and Art Unlimited (for large-scale installations and projects). After you’ve snapped up a Miro, a Rusha, two Hirsts, and a Warhol, mingle with the great and good at the cafés on the Messeplatz. From “Down Under”, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery will travel to Basel for the twelfth consecutive year. And outside the main exhibition, the Liste 07 survey of young artists is always interesting and the extraordinary Beyeler Foundation, just outside Basel, will still have its landmark, Edvard Munch: Signs of Modern Art running (till 15 July.

www.art.ch/go/id/ss/

Tuesday, 12 June, 2007 Vernissage for invited guests, runs till 17 June.

documenta XII

If Venice anoints the artists who will be sold at Basel, Kassel is where they typically made their name. Known for breaking the careers of younger artists, documenta’s key venue is the Fridericianum, opened in 1779 as Europe's first public museum. Bombed by the Allies in 1945, it’s damaged frame would be the venue of documenta I, in 1955 by Arnold Bode, whose exhibition of works by modernist icons such as Arp, Beckmann, Klee, Matisse, Mondrian, Kandinsky, de Chirico, Chagall and Picasso, among others, at once renewed post-war German art connection with its past and renounced the repression encapsulated by the Nazi’s infamous exhibition of “Entartete Kunst or Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937. Over the decades documenta, always influential, became archetypically monumental. Okwui Enwezor’s documenta XI in 2002 drew 650,000 visitors but was criticised for being so broad it verged on indigestible. documenta XII director Roger Buergel was tight-lipped on any concrete details at a press conference in February, and confirmed just two artists: Ferran Adria, who is actually a leading Barcelona chef; and Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, who will present a Bach cantata performed by a deaf choir. Buergal, an art historian, has revealed that he wants to ask his audience three questions: Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? and the ever-popular, Education: What is to be done? The cognoscenti’s concern is if we can’t come up with the answers who will have failed? Buergel or us? Kassell, the town, is a mixed bag. When visiting Australia earlier this year, curator Ruth Noack, coincidentally, also director Buergal’s partner, told the Sydney Morning Herald the “food is terrible, the hotel’s suck,” and “people only go to Kassel… for the art”. It gets crowded.

www.documenta12.de/informationen.html?&L=1

Vernissage: 14 & 15 June 2007.

sculpture projects muenster 07

It cannot be merely coinicidence that MoMA, New York, will open a 40-year retrospective of US sculptor Richard Serra’s monumental minimalism just two weeks before the fourth international Münster Sculpture Project, or the sculpture projects muenster. Mounted every ten years since 1977 in this lively German university town, Münster is the pinnacle for contemporary sculptors, and has been a bellwether to the careers of the likes of Serra, Jeff Koons, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and Martin Kippenerger. This year 35 artists have been invited to create new, site-specific work in the city. Expect works from Thomas Schütte, Rosemarie Trockel, and Mark Wallinger to attract attention. The reliably brilliant and esteemed curator, Kasper König, will again oversee Munster, which he has nurtured since the beginning with Klaus Bussmann of the Landesmuseum in Munster.

http://www.skulptur-projekte.de/aktuell/?lang=en

Grand opening, 16 June

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First published in Australian Art Collector

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Art Market Notebook: Summer 2005

Chalk up another astounding performance for the Australian art market in 2004, begging the question, just how long can these good times roll?

The most transparent barometer of artworld economic activity remains the auction scene and 2004 continued the stellar growth that has marked the longest upward trend in the domestic market's history. In terms of total sales at auction, the market has been growing at around 10 per cent per annum, according to records kept by the Australian Art Sales Digest. At the time of writing, 2004 was on target to break the magic $100 million barrier in total sales at auction, meaning the secondary market has increased in volume five-fold since 1993 when turnover was just $19.4 million.

Where’s the money coming from? It’s not coming from traditional collecting institutions, whose acquisition budgets are shrinking. And corporations and companies have been actually divesting themselves of non-core activities like art for several seasons now. New collectors, more than likely, are readers just like you: some, no doubt, have heard of the booty to be had in John Kelly’s Cow’s or Tim Maguire’s petunias and are seeking a “piece of the action”; others have simply done the math and are choosing art over other investment options; others still have caught the collecting bug and now officially count themselves art lovers.

While the auction sector has been stimulated at the top in recent years by furious competition between the so-called "big three" - international firms Sotheby's and Christie's, and locally-owned powerhouse Deutscher~Menzies - a raft of second tier (in terms of turnover) players - like Shapiro's, the new joint-venturers, Bonhams & Goodman, Lawson~Menzies, and Leonard Joel - now account for roughly a quarter of all auction activity.

At the blue-chip end, the lightning rod for much of this frenetic competition has been cleaning magnate Rod Menzies and his successful partnership with Melbourne dealer, Chris Deutscher. Since D~M's first Auction in April 1998, annual turnover has increased from $8.5 million in 1998 to $21.2 million** in 2003. As we write D~M was the only house to sell individual works for more than $1 million in 2004: Frederick McCubbin's Childhood Fancies (1905) for $1.23m in March and Brett Whiteley's Lavender Bay at Dusk (1984) for $1.17m in June. Tellingly, both benchmarks were sold at Sydney sales, which anecdotally at least is now the nation’s art collecting epicentre. Menzies’s foray into Sydney with his 2001 purchase of Lawsons has been tumultuous to say the least, with the proprietor's hands-on management approach spawning upheaval in terms of staff turnover. Latest casualty at the top is Paul Sumner, the former MD of Sotheby's Australia, who was engaged by Menzies upon his return from Sotheby's in London to reright the good ship L~M in 2003. Sumner and Deutscher, as naturally competitive heads of rival firms ignored the fact they were owned in the same interest, and set about competing for the same market. Menzies finally called a halt to the dog-eat-dog set-up early in 2004 when Sumner announced all the fine art business would henceforth be referred to Deutscher and L~M would concentrate on mounting a challenge to Sotheby's in the bull-market for Aboriginal art. Now Sumner himself has departed L~M and is running his own business "auction-broking", and marketing personalities.

The move into Aboriginal art for Lawsons was a case of join the bandwagon, with several firms in 2004 jumping into a sector which Sotheby's has had to itself for several years. Credit where credit's due, Sotheby's had done the hard yards developing the Aboriginal market both locally and internationally for a decade. It must irk them to now see its market share now being poached by "upstarts" like Christie's, Bonhams & Goodman, and Lawson~Menzies.

L~M offered 400 lots in their second Aboriginal art sale for the year in late November with sales hitting 80% by both volume and value. Highlights included the sale of Rover Thomas's major 1990's commission Wily Wily for $240,000, Dorothy Napangardi Robinson's Salt on Mina Mina for $85.400, and Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula's The Straightening of the Spears for $58,560. Shaun Dennison, Christie's new Aboriginal art specialist, adopted a more rigorous approach for his first sale with a small but select draft of 160 works. While the spin is rosy Dennison will want to improve rapidly on clearance rates of just over 50 per cent.

Earlier in the year Sotheby's Tim Klingender mounted his usual two-session blockbuster of indigenous art, clearing $6.6 million worth of works for the New York Stock Exchange-listed firm. The sale’s success was overshadowed by the failure of the sale’s “hero” lot, Rover Thomas’s Uluru (Ayers Rock) 1987, to meet it’s ambitious estimate of $700k-$1m. When it should have been bathing in adulation over a sale that could set 17 individual artist sale records, Sotheby’s copped media flak for inflating market expectations at the prospect of the indigenous art sector’s first “million dollar painting”. Some people are never satisfied. Ironically, sources say two private treaty sales of works by Emily Kame Kgwarreye and Thomas have both eclipsed the magic million mark, albeit away from prying eyes.

Kngwarreye and Thomas continue to dominate the market in terms of volume. Forty-nine Emilys changed hands at auction in 2004, out of 83 offerred, with works with a Delmore Gallery provenance featuring heavily among those lots passed-in. Female artists continue to be prominent with works by Queenie McKenzie, Dorothy Napangardi Robinson, Minnie Pwerle all keenly sought. The sudden interest in Central Desert painter Maggie Watson Napangardi is notable. Not often seen in the saleroom, her sale-topping Digging Stick Dreaming fetched $185,225 at Christie’s in October, more than double her previous auction record.

2004 was also the year the phrase “self managed super fund” became more popular among collectors than “your commission is how much?”. Suddenly self-styled art “consultants” are popping from behind plinths to spruik the attractiveness of buying fine art for your personal super fund. Such was the flurry of activity, the Australian Tax Office issued statements and directives that while art can be considered a bona-fide asset class, “storing” your investment above the mantelpiece to enjoy while you wait to retire could mean a “breach of the sole purpose test”. Until a test case is brought before the courts, we can assume that breaches are being made right across the country, such has been the market activity driven by this new source of funds.

Mid-year was dominated by John Shaeffer’s financial travails which necessitated dumping a lifetime’s collecting onto the market. Christie’s handled the so-called “garage sale of the century" - Shaeffer’s Bellevue Hill mansion - with $5.3 million worth of aplomb. Shaeffer’s main game would be played offshore, in London, where the cream of his collection of 19th century British art went under the hammer. The big loser was the Art Gallery of New South Wales and it’s art-loving public, which has seen scores of works “on loan” from Shaeffer retrieved and sold.

Outside the auction scene, commercial galleries continue to thrive, if this year’s Melbourne Art Fair in October is any indicator. Now run exclusively by the fair’s not-for-profit foundation after a bumpy history partnering with the Australian Commercial Galleries Association, this year’s fair showcased the wares of some 800 artists, represented by 81 galleries. Sales of $8 million represented an expected jump from 2002, when $6.3 million worth of primary works by living artists found homes. With 70 per cent of works selling for under $5000, the MAF offered testimony that bedrock of this bull market is the army of small collectors who have entered the market in the past five years.

** All prices quoted include the buyer's premium, and where applicable, GST.

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First published in Australian Art Collector

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Deal Me In: Shaun Dennison

Christie’s entered the burgeoning fray of the indigenous art market in October with a 168-lot auction in Sydney. The man plotting the strategy for the venerable French firm is tyro auction specialist, Shaun Dennison. Melbourne-based Dennison, a management consultant by trade and an art collector by passion, has only been collecting himself since 1996 – the year Emily Kame Kngwarreye died. Christie’s new Modern Aboriginal art specialist, spoke to Michael Hutak at the Paris preview of the sale in September, then by email after the sale in October.

Michael Hutak: Can you remember the first artwork you bought?

Sean Dennison: No but I remember the first show I attended, in 1996, it was a show of paintings by Emily (Kame Kngwarreye) at Lauraine Diggins, the first works in Ochre. The show was a complete sellout but the works weren’t particularly good for Emily and I immediately decided to find out more, and it just became my mission to understand this work and this market.

MH: How did you arrive at this venture?

SD: First I began collecting, then advising other people on what to collect. Then last year I met (Christie’s Australia managing director) Roger McIlroy. Roger had been keeping a watching brief on the Aboriginal market, waiting for the right conditions to enter the market. The turning point was last year’s Sotheby’s Aboriginal art auction which was incredibly successful - over $7 million in works sold. The market looked easily strong enough to handle more competition. And here we are – not forgetting three or four other auction houses have jumped in as well.

MH: How are you able to run a consulting business (Farrier Swier) and Christie’s “Modern Aboriginal Art” department at the same time?

SD: Well, you’re looking at the department – it’s all me, what you see in this catalogue is my selection and reflects my taste, these are my estimates, the lot. So it gets down to a time management issue and being self-employed there are a lot of synergies.

MH: You’ve never hung out a shingle as a dealer or advisor, what qualifies you for the job?

SD: Because I have a passionate and I would say deep knowledge gained in many different ways from being a collector. As a collector I have followed the auctions very closely and I have been advising people on buying works from the start. Dabbling in my passion got to a point where I’d had enough and wanted to do something.

MH: Have you suspended your own collecting?

SD: I only acquire works for myself through the primary market. Christie’s have a strict conflict of interest policy. I cannot buy any works in this catalogue.

MH: Having never put together a sale before, are you concerned about getting the pricing levels right first time?

SD: Auctions are pretty process-oriented things. It’s very structured. Do I have the eye for a good work? I’ve got that. Do I have an idea of what sells, I think I do. Are the estimates pegged at the right level, that’s yet to be seen. But also, there’s an abundance of material out there that people want to sell and it’s a relatively easy market to research. We’ve deliberately kept the sale modest at 168 lots to maximise the quality. I’ve looked at at least a thousand works and I have echanged an incredible amount of email.

MH: What do you mean when you define your sale as “Modern Aboriginal Art”

SD: I think it’s about time Aboriginal art was more defined in its various sectors. We’re trying to narrow the focus so ‘Modern Aboriginal art’ is works on board, paper and canvas from 1971, from Geoffrey Bardon to the modern day. It’s notable for what’s missing: bark artefacts, water colours pre-1970, so no (Albert) Namatjira or Hermannsberg artists. Also it’s a segment where some artists may not have appeared at auction before, such as Max Mansell.

MH: What is your attitude to provenance in choosing works for auction?

SD: Our policy is to only offer works whose provenance can be traced back an acknowledged Aboriginal art community, and/or by artists known to be represented by a gallery. In other words, I don’t mind if they don’t work for an art community as long as they’ve signed on with a representative or a gallery. I’m looking for relationships between artist and dealer such as Maggie Watson Napangardi and Gondwana, or Ginger Riley and Alcaston. I’m looking for an artist’s commitment to an agency because I think that’s where the top quality emerges. Our commitment is to quality and it worries me when an artist is painting for ten or 20 different sources.

MH: In the 1000 or so works you’ve sifted through for this sale have you seen any being passed off as the work others?

SD: Put it this way, I have seem some works which are either extraordinarily bad works [by name artists], or they are fakes.

MH: Why have you decided to preview in Paris and New York?

SD: It gives vendors the confidence to consign for a start. A key criteria for getting involved in this was that I take the work to the world. New York was an easier choice, there always been a market for Aboriginal art there. Paris, rather than London, I chose because of it’s access to the European market. My expectation from what I’ve seen here is that around half our sales will be overseas collectors. Although it may be hard to tell as most of the big collectors have local advisors and agents who may bid for them. Here in Paris there’s been several commitments to sales and if half of them end in sales it will have been worthwhile making the trip. We’ve had two collectors fly in from London, another is flying to New York for the preview.

MH: What collector demographic are you targeting with the sale?

SD: In Australia I’m looking to widen the market, to attract sales from non-indigenous Australian paintings to Aboriginal art. We have valued about 40 per cent of the catalogue under AUD$10k, about 7 works in the AUD$80-150k range, and only two works above estimated $150k.

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With a pre-sale total estimate between $2.5-3.5 million, Christie’s Modern Aboriginal Art sale grossed $1,615,593 (includes premium & GST). Of 168 lots offered, 89 were sold, representing 53% by lot and 56 per cent by value. A respectable if modest opening. After the sale, AAC continued our interview with Dennison via email.

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MH: Pleased with the result?

SD: Yes I was happy with the overall result of $1.75m (including buyer premium). Some individual results were very strong (such as $188,248 for Maggie Watson Napangardi’s Digging Stick, and Emily Kngwarreye Yam, lot 59 by Tommy Sheen).

MH: Was "Modern Aboriginal Art" the right way to go?

SD: I still think that defining Aboriginal art into various genres is important and I am likely to continue to do so. However, the next sale I may expand the genres offered.

MH: Were the Paris and New York previews worth the effort? How many sales were generated out of the previews? How active were international collectors at the sale?

SD: Given it was Christie's first stand-alone Aboriginal sale and obviously the first time viewed by Christie's overseas I am very happy with the participation from overseas bidders. Not only did overseas bidders underbid a number of paintings, but in terms of total sales about one third by number and 40% by value went overseas.

MH: How do you think you fared on setting estimates?

SD: I am generally happy. I believe the key is to build on Christie's client base rather than refine estimates.

MH: Any general comments on strategy, the frequency of sales, or the size of catalogue?

SD: I am still to finalise my view on the strategy for 2005, but I think that I had about the right number of lots (I wouldn't go above 200). One sale a year is to be offered, but as I said above, maybe we will expand the genre of Aboriginal art offered to, for instance, ‘Modern and Traditional’.

MH: Were any museums, local or international, buying or bidding?

SD: No, there was no institutional interest.

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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

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Deal Me In: Rex Irwin

Rex Irwin has been dealing in works by “important Australian and international artists” from his first floor rooms in Queen Street, Woollahra, since 1976. Irwin’s business is built around a stable of respected, mostly mid-career local artists, and a trade in works by some of the world’s most famous modernists, from Picasso, Hockney, Freud and Auerbach, to Australian icons like Fred Williams and John Brack.

Never lost for an opinion, Irwin is well placed to comment on the changes and trends that pervade Australia’s dynamic market for fine art. He spoke to Michael Hutak.
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MICHAEL HUTAK: Can you tell us a bit about how you started in the game?

REX IRWIN: I learnt my trade back in the 1970s from Frank McDonald, who was a partner with Terry Clune in the old Clune Galleries at the Yellow House [in Kings Cross, Sydney] - Olsen, Whiteley and the rest of them showed there, but Frank would also put on shows of work by (highly regarded 19th century landscape painter) von Guerard before anyone had really noticed him. Frank eventually started his own gallery and was an old-style art dealer who would do things like travel to Paris to find long lost (Rupert) Bunnys from the paint shop where Bunny used to buy his paints. He was essentially repatriating Australian art.

MH: What’s the biggest change you’ve noticed since you started you own business?

RI: When I first came here (to Queen Street) the focus for art was almost exclusively in Paddington. Then after the ’91 recession Queen Street picked up, then suddenly a few years ago Sotheby’s moved in, Shapiro’s, Deutscher~Menzies, Michael Carr and it’s now very much at the centre of things. Now it’s become much like Bond Street in London. We’ve been here since 1976 and we’ve never had street frontage, then earlier this year we managed to get a lease on the shop in our own building and it’s been very good for making us simply more visible, and we find we’re getting new clients in off the street.

MH: Have you had a high turnover of clients over the years?

RI: Clients have a rhythm; you might have a QC, who’s been earning millions, who finally becomes a judge, drops back to earning $150k and stops collecting. There’s lots of new flashy money and like everyone else we need to get some of that, but we’re not as good at getting it as others, such as Denis Savill. I’m walking slowly after them, Denis is in a tank running them down. But Denis is a dealer who likes to own all his pictures... People consign things with us.

MH: Is this new money driving a booming art market, or is it just attracted it?

RI: New money is always attracted into art when the economy is performing well. But the difference between today and the last boom in the late 1980’s was that back then people were borrowing to buy assets. Today people are spending their own money, which means the market is built on genuine wealth and can’t really collapse today, like it did then.

But the truth of the matter is the market isn’t booming anyway. Just because you see seven pictures by Smart, Boyd or Whitely get high prices at auction, doesn’t mean there’s a boom, it just means that seven pictures achieved high prices. The market is meanwhile happily plodding along with that great bulk of collectors who buy something here, then buy something there. It’s those happy plodders who’ve kept us going through the dark years, and they were dark.

The high rollers can come in here and say all they want is a Jeffrey Smart - who used to show with us before he went over to Australian Galleries - because they’ve read about the sales for $300k plus, and there are always opportunists who come into the market when times are good to handle those sort of clients.

But for mine I’m happy to offer them a work by Fred Williams or Nicholas Harding or Lucien Freud and say “this will hold its value”. But what I’m not prepared to say is “you will make 20 per cent on this in 12 months”. The problem for us with these new clients is when they toddle off and buy from the opportunists and find their 20 per cent doesn’t materialise they say “fuck it”, and swear off buying art forever. That’s the great pity, but that’s also the price of greed.

MH: How has the rise in the auction trade affected your business?

RI: I have nothing to do with auctions. I neither buy nor sell at them. I would make two bids at auction per year, but only on behalf of a client. However I don’t believe the dealers shouldn’t feel threatened by the auction houses. For every painting where the hammer falls $500k, there is an underbidder walking the streets the next day with $480k to spend.

MH: Is there too much talk about the market today? Have we lost sight of the art?

RI: You can’t have too much talk about the market, I think it’s legitimate and necessary and inevitable, but there is too much talk today about money. Money is not the be-all-and-end-all. In the end we’re about bringing people into contact with that intangible quality that comes with the great work of art. Otherwise we might as well be selling pork-belly futures. And when all is said and done, what we are selling is our expertise and judgement of what a picture is worth. That’s why our regular collectors don’t bargain, whereas new clients try to bargain all the time.

AAC: What’s your view of the growth in art purchased through DIY super funds?

RI: I think the trend is very good because where a private person once might spend $10k per annum on art, they can now spend $30k to $40k, as long as one gets proper advice in setting it up. I’m told around 10 per cent of your fund should go towards art, anything above 20 per cent and you’re asking for the attention of the taxman.

I don’t believe these proposed pooled art funds are a particlarly good idea. I’m reminded of the British Railways Pension Fund which in the 60s and 70s bought a huge array of objects – furniture, jewellery, porcelain as well as old masters and fine art. After twenty years it had still made only one per cent more or less than blue chip stocks.

I don’t think (the so-called "managed art funds") will wash, there are too many fees off the top and your little picture needs to make 50 to 60 per cent on resale for you to see an overall return. Speaking to someone who was putting one of these funds together, I understand they’re not actually for people who want to collect art or build a collection but are aimed strictly at investors.

MH: Do you deal with many such “investors”?

RI: We are not “investment advisors”, we are art dealers, but I do have people, usually young people, who come into the gallery with a wad of money wanting to invest. I say to them: “I will be happy to invest this for you as long as you do exactly as I say. If you want chop and change and buy and sell you’re on your own.” We sometimes have so called art consultants who present themselves as “investment advisors” coming through looking to buy works for their clients.

MH: Do you offer a commission, discount or “finder’s fee” to these consultants?

RI: No, of course not, fuck ‘em. We deal in art, not in clients. The art world is magic, it’s great fun, and all the cowboys and cowgirls are not going to affect the bedrock of the business which, for me, is very much built on dealing with private clients one-on-one. We don’t deal much with corporations, which mostly are selling at the moment. But the point of running an art gallery is to put artworks on walls so that people might see and appreciate them. We showed a first edition of Goya’s Disasters of War and we had literally thousands come through. More than 70 per cent of the people that come through the gallery are there just to look and that’s a major part of what we do.

MH: What about managing your artists? How do you approach that?

RI: Some artists need managing, some don’t. ALL artists need ‘nannying’; they need their paints bought and their bottoms wiped occasionally. We are very active in promoting our artists. We’ve just assisted Gwyn Hanssen Pigott mount a show at the Tate St Ives (in Cornwall, U.K., runs till September 26).

MH: Do you follow the international art fair circuit?

RI: We’re not really interested in art fairs. We went to the Hong Kong art fair twice in the early 1990s when Mr Keating was in power and believed the region should be interested in us. I notice Gene Sherman is always showing in Asia but I really don’t know that Asia is any more interested in us than it ever was. Art markets are parochial; there are very few artists who fly internationally. Of course, we do deal in the work of such artists – Picasso, Hockney, Auerbach, Freud -

MH: Tell us about dealing in the market for Freud prints.

RI: We are one of only two galleries in the world (the other being Marlborough Gallery, London) licensed by Freud’s sole agents, Acquavella Galleries in New York, to sell his prints and we’ve had great success doing just for over two decades now. Twenty years ago I knew Freud’s London agent, James Kirkman, well, and we sold our first prints to clients here for just $1000. Today they go for $75k. It’s been a considerable part of our business over the years. We’ve survived the peaks and troughs over the decades but in the last three years especially we’ve been getting more and more successful.

MH: To what do you attribute your success?

RI: I love to bring people into contact with beautiful things and I have a truly wonderful life. But really it all boils down to forging strong connections, and being good and middle class and paying your bills. Earlier this year I had dinner with David Hockney one night, dinner with Hockney and Lucien Freud the next night, and then lunch the next day with Frank Auerbach – all those sorts of personal friendships are wonderful and invigorating but it also helps the business. When they go back and see their dealers I have little doubt they might say: “I had dinner with Rex the other night. Make sure we save something for him.”


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Abridged version published in Australian Art Collector

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Art Market Notebook, Spring 2004

Fierce competition heats up Aboriginal sector

Sotheby’s is moving to meet the challenge of competitors snapping at its heels in the lucrative and ever-growing market for fine Aboriginal art

It had to happen. After nearly a decade of stellar growth, Sotheby’s failed for the first time to set a new Australian turnover record for an Aboriginal art auction, at its 2004 sale in Melbourne on July 26. But it is a mark of NYSE-listed firm’s success in this collecting category that a sale that aggregates AUD$6.6 million* and sets 18 new individual artist auction records can be considered something less than successful.

At least there is a culprit to blame: the “million dollar painting” of Uluru by Rover Thomas, which, in passing in for just $675k, knocked a hole in the catalogue and cruelled the post-sale headlines for Sotheby’s aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender.

“If the blockbuster sells it gets us across the line,” Klingender told Australian Art Collector, referring to last year’s benchmark of $7.5m. “We had no $400k or $500k paintings and only four above $200k, so it was still an incredible sale considering we had about 100 less lots than last year. This is a healthy, sophisticated and maturing market.”

Klingender still has no regrets about setting the $1m upper estimate for the Rover, which was more than $200k above the artist’s current auction record, also that for any Aboriginal artist. “It probably scared off a few bidders. With hindsight if we’d set a very conservative estimate of say $300-500k we would have had ten bidders and probably would have ended up with a better result.” However, as a marketing gambit, the “million dollar painting” press releases attracted plenty of pre-sale “million dollar” newspaper headlines.

Back in 2001, when the National Gallery of Australia went to $786,625 to secure Thomas's All That Big Rain Coming From Top Side, saleroom watchers gasped that the top end of the market could run so far ahead of the pack. Were market forces really speaking, or where they being amplified through the megaphone of Sotheby’s slick marketing?

Klingender remains supremely confident that “ten years from now Thomas will be selling for $10m”, but he’s not the only auctioneer who sees dot paintings in his dreams – red dots that is. Sotheby’s position as market leader is under assault as rival houses, Lawson~Menzies, Christie’s, Bonham & Goodmans and Shapiro’s have all begun moves to enter the Aboriginal art sector.

At its first Aboriginal art sale on May 4, Lawson~Menzies sold $1,637,620 worth of art with a respectable clearance rate of 69% It set five artist records, including $94,750 for Limestone Hills, Texas, 1994 by Queenie McKenzie Nakamarra. Klingender was adamant that Lawson’s sale, run by his former Sotheby’s boss, Paul Sumner, was inferior to his blue chip offerings: “There’s not one work in that sale that we would have consigned.”

Under newly-appointed specialist Shaun Dennison, Christie’s is aping Sotheby’s international preview strategy, planning Paris and New York previews of selected works in its “Modern Aboriginal Art” planned for the spring.

With competition for works ruthless, Sotheby’s has been forced to change tack. “From next year,” said Klingender, “we’ll be putting together a shorter, sharper sale of around 200 lots sold over one night where everything is of the highest quality.” Which means say goodbye to 600-lot sales over two days.

In non-indigenous art, “Christoby’s” went head-to-head again in late August in Sydney but both houses saw only indifferent clearance rates, Christie's recording 48 per cent sold by lot, and 61 per cent by value in a sale worth $3.345 million with John Olsen's Landscape and Night Heron (c. 1982) topping the tree at $239,000. Sotheby's sold $4.93 million, 62 per cent by lot with Lloyd Rees’s Surge of the Sea fetching $447,000, a new artist record.

Deutscher~Menzies two-day Sydney June Fine Art Auction showed again the company’s wisdom in going it alone, avoiding the traditional May double header in Melbourne put on by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. A sale aggregate of $7.3m (inc. buyers premium and all GST) outperformed both international houses and setting new benchmarks for David Larwill ($83k), Howard Taylor ($71,250) and Julie Dowling ($24k). After it’s record breaking auction in March Rod Menzies’s Melbourne-based flagship has shifted more than $15.5m worth of art through its Sydney sale this year – a phenomenal performance.

Taylor’s is a breakthrough sale which should herald the emergence of many more works at auction for this revered abstract painter and sculptor who died in 2001. His previous saleroom record was $51k set in 2002 but beyond that only a handful of works have been offered, mainly in Taylor’s home state of Western Australia, selling for sums well under $5k.

Meanwhile, down in the trenches and away from multi-million dollar sales, James Badgery’s new venture, Badgery's Auctions & Appraisers, held its first auction in late June in the old RAN Drill Hall in Rushcutters Bay. The sale went ahead with mixed results, and despite a flurry of legal correspondence with competitor Bonhams & Goodman, which has its offices in nearby Double Bay. If the presence of Badgery’s fledgling operation, which sold just 97 of 276 lots for an aggregate of $306,000, poses problems for B&G, its displeasure must be considerable at Christie’s luxurious new Sydney headquarters, just up New South Head Road in the refurbished former Edgecliff Post Office.

Badgery was unconcerned by the poor clearance rate and was happy to score a few significant sales, most notably $73,395 for the Norman Lindsay water colour, Jewels For A Lady, and several significant aboriginal works in what Badgery’s hopes will initially be his bread-and-butter range: under $20k. Badgery, formerly the long-time managing director of Lawsons, has had a bumpy ride the last few years, surviving Rod Menzies’s acquisition of Lawsons in 2002 before leaving to join Jim Byrnes’s new entrepreneurial venture, Cromwell’s Auctioneers. He left Byrnes late last year and launched Badgery’s in March this year. “After having worked for Rod and Jim these last couple of years, I’m very much enjoying being my own boss again,” he said.

As we go to press the Australian art market is gearing up to once again coagulate, disseminate and sell, sell, sell at the 2004 edition of the Melbourne Art Fair, from 29 September to October 4. The international roll call will expand this year to include contemporary galleries from Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Auckland, Wellington, Amsterdam, Rome and New York and with sales last year totalling $6.3m, MAF can lay claim to be leading contemporary art fair in the Asia Pacific.

And in the context of the October 9 Federal Election, collectors who vote might want to appraise themselves of the issues on a proposed Resale Royalty Scheme for the Australian art market by reading the discussion paper released by the Howard Government.

Without taking a position, the paper outlines four options for proceeding:

1. a fully legislated scheme,
2. industry self-regulation,
3. contract-based resale royalties, or
4. no resale royalty scheme.

Apart from canvassing the issues, the paper also includes much interesting data comparing a “droit de suite” schemes throughout the world. Other nuggets of dispersed data include the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimate that total expenditure by households on paintings, carvings and sculptures in 1998–99 was $274 million. You can download the paper for free here.

* All quotes are in AUD. All prices quoted include the buyer's premium, and where applicable, GST.








First published in Australian Art Collector

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Collectables: Carbine upstages auction heavyweights

Sales of racehorse art often ride on the animal rather than the artist, as the auction of a portrait of the great Carbine attests.

Carbine, the 1890 Melbourne Cup winner and the greatest racehorse to grace the ­Australian turf before Phar Lap, made a brief return to the spotlight last week – as Lot 62 at Sotheby’s Sydney sale of fine Australian art.
The handsome, if flattering, portrait of “Old Jack” was painted by Frederick ­William Woodhouse snr in 1891, the year Carbine retired from racing and began an influential stud career. The work stood out like a beacon in a catalogue clogged with the usual quality saleroom fare of Olsens, Boyds, Blackmans, Smarts and Co.

After a brief bidding war, the painting was knocked down for $34,000 against an upper saleroom estimate of $20,000 to horse breeder Grahame Mapp, owner of Hobartville Stud near Richmond, NSW, reputedly Australia’s oldest thoroughbred stud. With buyer’s premium and GST, the price tag was $41,095, the second-highest price for a Woodhouse, according to Australian Art Sales Digest, which also notes the Englishman arrived in Australia in 1857 and painted every winner of the Melbourne Cup from 1861 to 1890.

Strangely, Sotheby’s catalogue notes talk exclusively of Carbine’s superlative track and stud record, making no mention of Woodhouse, even though he is among Australia’s most highly regarded “equine portraitists”.

“That is typical with this category,” says Clare Smith, specialist in sporting art at Christie’s, New York. “With themed sales like these, interest lies partly in the artist and partly in the subject matter. Many works in this category are bought by clients who have a personal interest in racehorses, whether owning or breeding or even gambling.”

Mapp is a case in point: he bought the painting for the horse, not the artist. “The money didn’t matter; I just wanted it. Bravo, which narrowly beat ­Carbine in the 1891 Melbourne Cup, was bred at Hobartville. I ­normally never go to auctions but a friend brought this work to my attention and I had to make a quick decision. I actually arrived halfway through the ­bidding and decided to take a punt.”

Mapp plans to find a permanent home for the work in Hobartville’s convict-built, ­Francis Greenway-designed homestead. “It will stay here forever,” he told The Bulletin.

If he ever changes his mind and decides to sell, Mapp would be well advised to offer the work in London, where sporting art aficionados would appreciate the work for both Carbine, as the sire of three English Derby winners, and for Woodhouse, who studied under John Frederick Herring, one of sporting art’s most sought-after artists.

“Themed sales are a successful way of marketing certain works outside the traditional classification by period or style,” says Smith, who has put together a 138-lot sale of works depicting noble steeds, heroic scenes of hunting, and often bizarre canine subjects for Christie’s December 5 sale of sporting art in New York.

Mapp also happens to be the breeder of Toulouse Lautrec, winner of the Carbine Club Stakes at Randwick at Easter.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Rover Thomas

Doubting Thomas: After the high-profile failure of a 'million-dollar' Rover Thomas painting, Sotheby's are questioning the state galleries' commitment to Aboriginal art.

It looked a cinch on paper. An exceptional painting by Australia’s most famous indigenous artist, Rover Thomas, depicting the country’s most mythical physical feature, Uluru. The perfect work on which to hang publicity for the annual blockbuster sale of Important Aboriginal Art at Sotheby’s in Melbourne late last month.

The NYSE-listed company went for broke, pegging the upper estimate at an astonishing AUD$1,000,000. Out went the press releases: “Million Dollar Painting on Display”. Dutifully, out went the newspaper previews, noting Aboriginal art’s “first million dollar painting” in headlines, body copy and captions.

Noone thought to mention that the figure was just an educated, but essentially hopeful, guess on the part of Sotheby’s Aboriginal art specialist, Tim Klingender. Nobody asked why this painting was worth more than $200k above Thomas’s current auction record, [which is also that for any Aboriginal artist]. Notwithstanding the Aboriginal sector’s astounding growth in recent years, nobody bothered to ask who had a million dollars for an indigenous work, given the current benchmark had been set not by a private collector but by a state art gallery, and that the galleries haven’t splurged on a major indigenous work at auction since.

Back in 2001, when the National Gallery of Australia went to $786,625 to secure Thomas's "All That Big Rain Coming From Top Side", saleroom watchers gasped that the top end of the market could run so far ahead of the pack. Were market forces really speaking, or where they being amplified through the megaphone of Sotheby’s slick marketing?

These observers weren’t surprised to see "Uluru" passed in for $675k, failing even to meet it’s lower estimate of $700k. “It was a good painting, but not outstanding,” said one rival auction house expert. “The price it passed in at was a fair one.” While admitting his estimate had scared off potential buyers, Klingender bemoaned the fact that Australia’s collecting institutions weren’t coming to his party.

“It’s amazing the state galleries aren’t here picking the eyes out of our catalogue," Klingender told The Bulletin. "The National Museum of Australia bought three works…, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales bought one, but none of them are buying at the top end – everything above $100k all went to private collectors.”

Sotheby’s sustained foray into the Aboriginal art market since the mid 1990s has been met with disdain and suspicion by the country’s major collecting institutions. Klingender can’t fathom the snub. “The curators of these galleries don’t even come to the previews – it’s ridiculous and small-minded.”

Ironically, the Rover flop cruelled the headlines for what was otherwise another sensational sale from Sotheby’s: $6.5 million in total sales with bullish clearance rates of around 70 per cent both by lot and by value. Among the more than 60 new artist auction records set were such eminently collectable artists as Charlie Tararu Tjungurrayi (new benchmark $215,200); Dorothy Napangardi ($131,725) and Eubena Nampitjin ($52,200).

Collectors need not fear, the indigenous art market’s perpetual boom remains intact, though Sotheby’s position as market leader is under assault as rival houses, Lawson~Menzies, Christie’s, Bonham & Goodmans and Shapiro’s have all commenced moves to grab a slice of this dynamic art market sector.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: End result: lots

With the share price of troubled Tempo Services hitting a five-year low of $1.02 on May 4, its chairman, John Schaeffer, could at least survey the recent dispersal of his art collection warmed by the knowledge he was getting top dollar. However, as the dust settles from the "garage sale of the century" at Rona, Schaeffer's $28m Bellevue Hill mansion in Sydney's eastern suburbs, collectors are entitled to ask: was it worth the hype?

It was to Christie's, which spent a small fortune promoting the sale. If there are any other cash-strapped multimillionaire art lovers out there, Rona was a great ad for Christie's, which shifted 570 lots - $5.19m in paintings, sculpture, furniture and decorative ephemera - at top-gun clearance rates by lot (85.3%) and by value (88.7%).

"For the vendor, these house sales work," one industry insider said. "Most of the big-ticket items [at Rona] wouldn't have done so well if they'd been put through a normal multi-vendor 'dec arts' or fine arts sale." This was echoed by Roger McIlroy, Christie's Australian MD, who praised "the market appeal of single-owner collections of quality with impeccable provenance".

He then added, tellingly: "It augurs well for the ongoing private sales from The John H. Schaeffer Collection." Rona was really just an elaborate prelude for the main game: the sale of 15 of Schaeffer's most valuable pre-Raphaelite pictures in London on June 9 at Christie's (as well as several more being offered privately through St James's dealer, Angela Neville).

Included is Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pandora, for which Schaeffer paid a record œ2.6m ($6.6m) at Christie's in 2000. The upper estimate next month is just œ1.2m ($3.1m).

But Schaeffer's losses aren't just his own. Of the 94 paintings and sculptures he has lent the Art Gallery of NSW since 1999, just one remains in the gallery's care: Gerrit van Honthorst's Merry musician with violin under his left arm (1624).

Meanwhile, Christie's has denied that it snatched the Rona contract from under Sotheby's nose by offering to conduct the sale for, as one press report claimed, "zero seller's commission, against a backdrop of allegations that Schaeffer owed Christie's London money".

"John Schaeffer has always honoured his financial obligations to Christie's," says McIlroy. "We did not conduct the sale for zero commission but negotiated a much reduced fee, which reflected both Christie's desire to handle the sale and the need to spend money to make money."

Spend it they did, on 7500 catalogues, 10,000 brochures, an international print advertising campaign and no less than five private parties targeting "high-wealth individuals". More than 3000 people traipsed through Rona to gawk and dream.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Fairweather trading

The modernists have been trumping the contemporaries in the salerooms, while a Picasso scooped the pot, writes Michael Hutak.

There's an inverse – some would say perverse – law of the Australian art market that says the more conventional the wisdom, the less sway it holds. An example: in the past few years, we've been told the moderns favoured by old fogeys are on their way out as the market moves to accommodate cashed-up young fogeys, who allegedly prefer contemporary art and art photography.

Last week's round of fine-art auctions threw that theory on the scrapheap as record sales of modernists such as Ian Fairweather and Margaret Preston cast the passed-in works of hitherto hot contemporaries Tracey Moffatt, Tim Maguire and John Kelly into a new, uncertain light.

Since 2001, eight prints of Moffatt's 1989 photograph, Something More #1, have found buyers for sums up to $117,500. However, punters finally brought something less to Christie's last week, marking the first time the artist's calling card has failed to sell at auction. Maguire's flower power also wilted badly, with just one of 10 works offered selling – a 2000 oil that still brought a tidy $135,625. Two of Kelly's cow canvases – only recently a must-have item, according to the pundits – passed through the saleroom friendless. Christie's sold just 60% of its catalogue for $4.9m; Sotheby's just 52% for $4.4m.

While the art trade prays that the gloomy grosses and dismal clearance rates were more an aberration than full-blown market correction, at the Art Gallery of NSW, it's all blue sky for Edmund Capon. The director was ebullient over his gallery's new acquisition, Fairweather's 1936 oil on compressed card, Tea Garden Peking. "It's a very big work and probably the most significant from his Chinese period," Capon says. “When we think of Fairweather we think of this strange, nomadic creature and this work sees him, I would say, at his most exotic.”

The Art Gallery Society coughed up $552,600, three times Christie's high estimate, and more than double the artist's previous auction record, set in 2000. Any suggestion that that was too much brings Capon out swinging: "We made a decision to get this painting so we went out and got it."

"We paid a record price but in the fullness of time, it's what matters for the collection that counts," says Capon. "The estimate was $120,000 to $180,000 but I knew that was ridiculously low. Our Fairweather collection is not terribly extensive, we have about twenty-odd works, but I’d say we’ve pretty much got him covered now.

“Certainly the price we paid bears much more relation to reality than the US$104m (AUD$143m) paid for that Picasso [Garçon à la Pipe at Sotheby's last Wednesday]. I mean, no painting is worth that much… That is just a trophy and I think it’s ultimately offensive when one considers recent events on the world stage.”

He has a point. For the cost of one painting, you could have bought every work sold at auction in Australialast year, and most of the year before that.

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Abridged version first published in The Bulletin

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Ruckus over resale royalty

With pressure mounting for the introduction of a resale royalty on works of art every time they change hands, auction houses are becoming anxious, writes Michael Hutak.

Fine art worth more than $91m changed hands in Australia's booming auction market last year, yet the artists responsible for those works (or their heirs) saw not a red cent of it. One auction house, Sotheby's, shifted $7.9m of Aboriginal art at one sale last June. Yet living conditions on many of the remote desert communities where the finest indigenous artworks originate remain a national disgrace.

Media attention on anomalies such as the late Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula – one of the originators of the dot-painting phenomenon who spent his final years in abject penury while works he had sold for $30 went for hundreds of thousands in the saleroom – has accelerated calls for a resale royalty to be introduced in Australia.

Such a royalty, also known as a droite de suite after the French scheme that has been in place since the 1920s, is a fee – typically fixed at about 5% of the hammer price – that goes to the artist every time an artwork changes hands in the secondary market. Support for such a scheme gained momentum in 2002 when Rupert Myer made a resale royalty a key recommendation in his federal government inquiry into visual arts and crafts funding.

However, the prospect of a new tax on collectors has the secondary art market in a lather as it collectively points towards a fast-falling chunk of sky.

"It's been highly unsuccessful in France," says Paul Sumner, chief executive of Sydney auction house Lawson-Menzies. "And it hasn't actually reduced the gap between rich and poor artists – it just rewards artists who are already successful."

Sumner, who has just an-nounced that his firm will take on market leader Sotheby's for a slice of the lucrative Aboriginal market, says Lawson-Menzies will pay 2% of its normal commission on sales of indigenous works into a new foundation that will donate funds to improve health and living conditions in Aboriginal communities.

The foundation hopes to raise $200,000 in the first year. However, Sumner acknowledges the impetus for setting it up is to derail the resale royalty juggernaut. "We're trying to head it off," he said. "We think it will be a nightmare to administer and ultimately will only hurt the artists."

But citing a 2003 Australia Council study, which found that 50% of Australia's artists earn less that $7500 a year from their art, Labor arts spokeswoman Senator Kate Lundy argues that artists couldn't be hurting much more than they are now.

The creation of a decent ongoing income stream for artists "is way overdue and it's Labor Party policy to introduce a resale royalty", she says. Lundy, who introduced a private member's bill on the issue in the Senate on March 11, concedes it has no chance of passing without government support. However, she says she's "calling the government's bluff on this. There's simply no excuse for them to delay their response to Myer any longer."

Last September, a year after Myer reported, then-Arts Minister Richard Alston promised a response on resale royalties before the end of the year. Six months later, his replacement, Daryl Williams, who also retires at the next election, is backing away from the idea.

"The government will only commit taxpayers' money to developing an implementation strategy if it is satisfied that we should implement a resale royalty scheme," a spokesman says. In other words, it's not satisfied.

Labor's draft bill is modelled on European Union legislation, where a droite de suite will extend to member countries from 2006. Lundy was advised by the National Association for the Visual Arts, the Australian Copyright Council and Arts Law, which have urged the government to act on Myer's recommendation and implement the scheme.

"We need a decision," NAVA executive director Tamara Winikoff says. "This issue has been kicking around for 20 years and it should be a bipartisan issue. We're very pleased that Labor has committed itself to a bill, and we urge the government to support it."

Not everyone in the trade is contrary. Sotheby's Tim Klingender has gone on record several times in favour of a droite de suite. "I think it would be great if it could be made workable," he says. And leading Melbourne Aboriginal art dealer Gabrielle Pizzi believes a resale royalty is "an inevitability".

But she warns: "Some people will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to it."

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First published in The Bulletin

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Collectables: Dake Frank

Auction prices fetched by some Australian contemporary artists are rocketing. And those about to take off display obvious signs.

The hullabaloo over painter Tim Maguire hit the heights last November when Untitled 1997, a massive split-screen canvas, brought $329,000 at Christie’s Melbourne – the third time in 2003 that a new peak was set for Maguire's florid photo-realist visions. Just one year earlier Deutscher~Mennzies had offered a comparable work with an estimate of just $10k-$15,000 (it sold for $35,250).

The latest benchmark sent market watchers into overdrive: Maguire was the new John Kelly, who was the new Garry Shead, who was the new Bill Robinson, etc. Such headline-grabbing sales are more salacious evidence of art’s potential for a quick return-on-investment, and the cue for another tranche of cashed-up, dumbed-down, saleroom ingenues to turn up, grab a paddle and start splurging.

But those hoping to get a piece of “the next Tim Maguire” should also note that the savvy buy and sell on the way up, not at the top of the market. The time to pick saleroom sensations is before they become headline fodder. Maguire, however, did fit a model that made him ripe for reaping so here’s a quick checklist for pinpointing who’s next.

First, go for beauty over brains. Ugly doesn’t wash in the saleroom, no matter how much the critics might wax lyrical. Second, stick to contemporary artists, the market’s current growth area. Third, seek out artists in their late 30s and 40s with a good body of work behind them; those who have shown they can conduct a sustained professional practice. Fourth, opt for artists who have been on the critics’ radar for more than a decade but are still new or unknown to the saleroom, ie. those with less than 50 works offered at auction. And lastly, if you plan to hang the work awhile before moving it on, it helps to like it.

Still sound like too much work? Forced to tip, 45 year old Queensland-based painter, Dale Frank, fits the Maguire model to a tee. Ever-present on the contemporary scene for over 20 years, the prolific Frank shows with the country’s leading galleries and has impeccable critical credentials, with reams of favourable reviews, several monographs published, and a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2001 to boot.

Represented in every major state gallery collection, Franks’ luscious abstract works already bring vast slabs of colour to white-walled foyers and living-rooms from Kirribilli to Kew. Yet Australian Art Sales Digest records reveals just 47 works have ever been offered at auction.

However, again last November, Christie’s set a new artist record of $21,150 for a handsome 2 metre square painting. That was the jump on previous sales that canny collectors look for and it is a very attractive floor price for works that could easily climb to $100,000-plus without raising an eyebrow.

[For the record, I don’t own any of them.]


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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Art Market Notebook: Autumn 2004

The Rise of the Others

The new year began with the fine art auction market flush with cash but fraught with competition, reports Michael Hutak

In 2003 the great Australian art boom continued to gather pace with another $91 million worth of fine art changing hands in the saleroom - a 15.91 per cent increase on 2002 ($79.2) and an aggregate neatly split four ways between Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Deutscher Menzies and “others”, according to statistics compiled by the Australian Art Sales Digest. Tellingly, the biggest increase came not from the big three but in the crowded “other” category, centred mainly around players in Sydney. Swelled by a resurgent Lawson~Menzies (which actually recorded a better sale aggregate than Christies in the last round for 2003 in late spring), last year’s new comers, Cromwells, and the new old-money/new money partnership, Bonhams & Goodman, sales for the “other” category almost doubled in 2003 to $22.3 million, an aggregate representing more business than the entire auction market in 1993. That year it stood at a paltry $19.3m, in the days when “Christoby’s” pretty much split the blue chips among themselves leaving the potato chips for Leonard Joel’s (which celebrated 85 years in the business in March).

The year before, Sydney was big story. 2002 was the year Deutscher Menzies established their March sale in Sydney as a season-opening fixture on the calendar. It was when Sotheby’s cleared an incredible $7.9 million worth of Aboriginal art in June at their first foray into Sydney with indigenous art. And Cromwells, L~M, and Bonhams & Goodman embarked on a harbour city turf war which has made competition for quality stock fiercer than ever. In 2003 contemporary names like Tim Maguire and John Kelly were on everyone’s wish list, but it would prove to be the year of Russell Drysdale, who had four of the top ten highest prices achieved at auction, including the only picture to break the million barrier last year, The Outstation, sold by Sotheby’s in Melbourne in May.

Sotheby's, which topped the sales aggregates for the third year running with $27.3m, has made corporate dispersals the bedrock of its success, having managed sale of the Fairfax, BP, AXA and Kerry Stokes collections in the past two years alone. 2004 continues the trend with the planned March dispersal of the Western Mining Corporation Contemporary Art Collection, with an aggregate estimate of $806k to $1.2m. As to why so many corporations have shed themselves of art in recent years, Sotheby’s MD Mark Fraser told AAC the reasons are myriad: “Such things as share holder accountability; focusing on core activities when art is peripheral area; big increases in the value of artworks; secondary reasons can be a change of premises or a merger or de-merger of companies.” Naming Wesfarmers, Macquarie Bank, Westpac and ANZ as having the finest corporate collections still extant in Australia today, Fraser did say he knew of no major corporations that have started collections in the last two years. In fact several more firms have also sold off their collections confidentially with Sotheby’s through the saleroom.

Over at Christie’s, new paintings director, Jon Dwyer, would be happy with his first year at the helm, one which restored respectability to the French-owned firm’s local operations to post $21m in sales, a 64 per cent turnaround on 2002 revenue. The company had been haemorrhaging market share, living on the glory days of the $16m Mertz sale in 2000 – until Dwyer opened his account with a record $7.1m aggregate at last year’s May mixed vendor auction. 2004 couldn’t have begun better with Christie’s winning the plum business to disperse the contents of ‘Rona’, John Schaeffer’s landmark Bellevue Hill mansion. Shaeffer has compiled arguably the world’s finest private collection of Victorian and pre-Raphaelite art and is now in the process of selling off great chunks of it in order to shore up his exposure to the declining fortunes of his listed cleaning company, Tempo Services, (mooted in early March as a takeover target). Christie’s had plucked the Shaeffer sale out from under arch rival Sotheby’s, which had “limited success” last September in shifting the remains of Shaeffer’s once prized collection of 19th century and colonial-era Australian paintings for well below the low estimates. As Christie's sex it up to break the record as the biggest single vendor sale in this country, the proof will come, come April.

The appreciating Australian dollar however will have varied effects this year on the international market for Aboriginal art, where it will dampen foreign demand but entice foreign consignment of works held overseas. The latter effect is also expected to be felt in the wider market for Australian modernist and contemporary art. And Sotheby’s will have their first serious competition in indigenous art since 2000 when it met, matched and repelled Deutscher~Menzies’ fast and furious foray into the market. Both Christies and Lawson~Menzies have appointed Aboriginal art specialists, and the latter intends to conduct two sales a year of Aboriginal art. Shaun Dennison, a management consultant turned art expert, has been appointed to oversee Christie’s expansion in Aboriginal Art. While the party line has always been that the firm has “traditionally” not separated streams of modern and contemporary Australian art “ethnographically” and has instead incorporated Aboriginal works within the context of its normal seasonal offerings, Dwyer would “not rule out stand-alone auctions of Aboriginal art in the future”.

And at Lawson~Menzies, Cooee Gallery proprietor Adrian Newstead has come on board as Aboriginal specialist for a planned two-sales-per-year operation. CEO Paul Sumner has identified a new niche for his firm, after his art department was recently submerged into brother house Deutscher~Menzies in a bury-the-hatchet manoevre late last year that put an end to the dog-eat-dog competition between Rod Menzies two auction houses. Sumner hopes to head off finger-pointers with his announcement that L~M will pay two per cent of its normal commission on sales of indigenous works into a new foundation charged with donating funds to improve health and living conditions in Aboriginal communities. This move also offers Sumner the opportunity to denounce noises from Canberra that a resale royalty, as recommended by the 2002 Myer Report will be introduced into the Australian secondary art market. While it’s been generally acknowledged that a droite de suite in Australia will do much to support indigenous artists, the prospect of a what amounts to a new tax on collectors has many secondary market operators like Sumner in a lather. "We're trying to head it off," he said. "We think it will be a nightmare to administer and ultimately will only hurt the artists."

For his part Sotheby’s Aboriginal art guru, Tim Klingender says he supports a resale royalty and remains unfazed by his new competitors. Sumner, however, is in a unique position to know his rival, having been Klingender’s MD during the period when Sotheby’s was fending away Deutsher~Menzies challenge in 2000. And since taking over at L~M last year he has had the advantage of swapping notes with D~M’s Chris Deutscher about what went wrong. “I’ve seen both sides of the fence and I know what the processes are at Sotheby’s and I know what to expect.”

Klingender countered that he never comments on the activities of other firms… “especially that one!”.


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First published in Australian Art Collector

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Australian Auctions roundup, March 2004

After another record year in sales in 2003, the Australian fine art market has entered its second decade of sustained growth, still some people are never satisfied. When Deutscher~Menzies kicked off the 2004 season earlier this month with the highest grossing mixed-vendor sale of fine art ever held in this country – more than $8.4 million - it was greeted with either sublime indifference or churlishness at the failure of several high-value works by high-profile artists to sell, and of others to only meet the low end of the estimate set by the auction house.

One pundit dubbed the sale “a patchy start” to the year, pointing to passed-in works by saleroom favourites like John Brack, Norman Lindsay and John Olsen. Keen market watchers wondered if D~M had overestimated the strength of the top of the market, others saw instead "buyer fatigue" in the face of the runaway price inflation of some “top drawer” artists in recent years.

D~M’s national director, Damien Hackett, told The Bulletin his firm was “very concerned when high value items pass in, during any sale, but this can and does happen for many reasons, not just a weakening of the market… each sale is an individual transaction with its own specific circumstances attached.”

“With regard to John Brack,” said Hackett, “we had estimated Backs and Fronts ($450k to $550k) believing it to be one of the most important works to have come onto the market ever. The result, at $477,825, was in fact the fifth highest price ever achieved for a Brack. One important collector decided not to bid on the Brack, as he intended, because a family tragedy occurred a few days prior to the sale."

Hackett maintained the market for Brack remained strong, despite another work, The Club from 1989, passing in on an estimate of $230,000–260,000. He put the poor showing of other works down to “a number of clients who thought that some of the high value works would ‘fly’ and so did not enter the bidding. As a result, they were dismayed that they had missed out on things, especially the (Ian) Fairweather and the John Olsen”. Rather, the number of dealers buying, or under-bidding, on works in the $100,000 plus market meant “you would expect that (the dealers) are confident that there is more growth in the top end.” After $91 million in sales nationally last year, a 15 per cent increase on 2003, we guess they would be confident.

However one sector keen to get out of art quicksmart may offer the first tangible signs of a market reaching its tipping point. The great Australian corporate art sell-off resumed in 2004 with last week’s dispersal of Western Mining Corporation’s corporate art collection at Sotheby’s rooms in Melbourne. An aggregate of $1.28 million would have pleased WMC patriarch Hugh Morgan, the gross just pipping the high estimate for the entire sale. And with 21 new individual artist records – most notably for the late 20th century modernist, Leonard French, and moody Melbournite, Rick Amor - at least WMC found out they'd bought the right works. The clearance rate was an astonishing 98 per cent by lot.

Corporate sell-offs have become the bedrock of Sotheby’s market leadership in Australia: in the past two years they’ve flogged off the once-prized collections John Fairfax Ltd, BP, AXA and Kerry Stokes. Several other firms have sold off their collections confidentially through the saleroom, and Sotheby’s Managing Director, Mark Fraser says he knows of no major corporations that have started collections in that time. It will be interesting to watch for any moves by Wesfarmers, Macquarie Bank, Westpac or ANZ to liquidate their art assets. Fraser nominated these companies as having the finest corporate collections still extant in Australia today.

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Abridged version published in The Bulletin

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Australia's Most Collectable Artists, 2003

Profiles written for "Australia's Most Collectable Artists, 2003" from Australian Art Collector Magazine.

Since the late 1990’s Garry Shead has shot into that pantheon of Australian modernist figurative painters who can command prices in excess of $100k. Son of a Sydney North Shore estate agent, Shead is privately influenced by the occult, and works in themes which can traverse several series over several years, taking inspiration from sometimes oblique corners of Australian culture: DH Lawrence’s time on the NSW South Coast, the 1954 Royal Visit by Elizabeth Windsor, and, most recently, the “Ern Malley” poetry hoax of the 1940s, which see him tackle ceramics for the first time – urns etched with poems by Ern! Championed as logical inheritor of the mantle of Boyd and Nolan, Shead quickly embraced the comparison in a recent interview: “Definitely… I like the story telling aspect of painting. I like to express in painting something that’s already there but hasn’t (yet) been done in visual terms.” Sasha Grishin, Head of Art History ANU, the author of several books on Shead as well as catalogue essays for the artist’s exhibitions, says Shead is now “painting at the height of his powers.” He believes Shead is “arguably Australia’s finest lyrical expressionist painter”, adding that his prices continue to grow dramatically. In 1993, the year he won the Archibald Prize, Shead sold just two works at auction for an aggregate of $693. A decade later and one of 39 works at auction included The Secret, which Christies offered with an $80k upper estimate. It brought a new artist record of $129,250 – a spectacular indication that supply is failing to meet demand.

Gordon Bennett
Queenslander Gordon Bennett went to art school in the late 1980s, where he openly embraced the postmodern positions of the time, a legacy still seen to today in a practice the artists describes as “conceptual painting based on the semiotics of 'style' and paint application, images and text, historical and contemporary juxta-position.” Of mixed Scottish, English and Indigenous Australian heritage, Bennett was brought up as a 'white' Australian and has only investigated his Aboriginal heritage as an adult. While issues of race loom large in his work he denounces the term “urban Aborignal” artist as racist, and prefers to be understood as an artist pursuing strategies of appropriation. Dr Ian McLean, who lectures visual arts at the University of Western Australia, is impressed with the long-term commitment Bennett has shown to his practice. McLean compares Bennett to another Aboriginal artist, Judy Watson, who are both “very different painters, but in less than 15 years each has produced an impressive and substantial body of work and built very successful careers as artists.” Says McLean: “Both found their feet quickly and now are at critical stages in their career. However they have demonstrated stamina, commitment and talent as artists, and so probably are yet to produce their best work.” Bennett is well represented in major state galleries but most works remain in private hands. A rare appearance at auction in 2002 saw Bennett achieve his current saleroom peak of $47,500 for an early 1993 canvas. Always the provocateur, his most recent show at Sherman Galleries, in August 2003, conflated camouflage and Islamic designs with ungainly portraits of Saddam Hussein.

ADS Donaldson
Profiled in issue #24 Of Australian Art Collector, this Sydney abstractionist has had a red letter year culminating in making our list for the first time. Donaldson’s select international following walked away with works from the Armory art fair in New York in March and then at Art Basel in June, the world’s most prestigious art fair. In April Donaldson collaborated with fellow artist Elizabeth Pulie for a show at Sarah Cottier’s now defunct Gallery, where he also exhibited 3 enormous large scale silver and blue paintings. Another show of hard-edge abstract paintings at Pestorius Sweeney House in August prompted Brisbane and AAC critic Rex Butler to write in The Courier Mail that "the issues signaled in this modest little suburban gallery will come to dominate the coming century of Australian culture – the battle between ‘Australian’ and ‘unAustralian’ ways of seeing ourselves." Commissions for Aldi and the City of Sydney and another group show at the Kunsthalle Palazzo, near Basel, followed. Already next year Donaldson has group shows lined up in Wellington, New Zealand in March and at the Ivan Doughety Gallery, as part of the Sydney Biennale.

Ian Fairweather 1891-1974
With a body of work estimated at just 500 major works, this Scottish born ‘citizen of the world’ is often acknowledged as one of the most important artists of the 20th century to work in Australia. Fairweather spend between the wars travelling throughout Asia and Oceania; living first in China, later in Bali, the Philippines and India, taking in creative and cultural influences as he went. He first visited Australia in 1934, and took a studio briefly in Melbourne after the WWII but wouldn’t settle permanently until 1952, when he moved to Bribie Island, north of Brisbane. There he became involved in the local indigenous culture and would become the first and perhaps only non-Indigenous artist to successfully incorporate Aboriginal art into his practice, where it joined with disparate influences such as post-impressionism, Chinese calligraphy and Cubism in the realisation of outstanding abstract paintings. Most highly regarded are the abstracts of the late 1950s, early 1960s but works from throughout his career are keenly sought. Many already grace Australia’s major state collections, as well as overseas at the Tate and Liecester galleries and the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Although saleroom prices have been steadily trending up in recent years [his current auction record of $255,500 came in 2000], there is still value and room for significant growth. “For one of Australia’s most important 20th century painters,” says Sotheby’s Chairman, Justin Miller, “his works still seem reasonably priced to me when compared to the million dollar plus prices paid for iconic works by other truly great Australian painters.” Drawings and watercolours, which are more plentiful, may be easier to come by.

Robert Macpherson B.1937
This Brisbane based conceptual artist is an unlikely “grand old man” of Australian contemporary art but with more than three decades of cutting edge practice behind him, that’s just what he is. Macpherson has become a regular feature on our list, first appearing in 1999. Michael Snelling, Director of Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art, goes as far as saying MacPherson is “probably the most interesting artist working in Australia today, although he may well remain an artist's artist.” Snelling characterises the artist as “conceptually tough, viscerally mesmerizing and continues to make work that is both local and global - parochial and universal…” The broadening of Macpherson’s reputation became complete in 2000 with the major survey show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, curated by Trevor Smith, recently appointed curator at the New Museum in New York. The show took over the whole bottom floor and some of the second at AGWA. “A scaled version toured to the MCA and looked just as impressive second time round,” says Snelling, “The catalogue was the best on an Australian artist seen here for many a year.” Macpherson was Australia's representative at the 2002 Sao Paolo biennale, and then in Face Up, backed by the Australia Council, at the prestigious Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin. Continues to be attractive to admirers of contemporary art, although works rarely surface on the secondary market.


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First published in Australian Art Collector magazine, Issue #27, Jan-Mar, 2004.

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Collectables: Wolfgang Sievers

The art market has finally realised it can no longer ignore 90-year-old photographer Wolfgang Sievers, writes Michael Hutak

Collectors have been hearing for years that photography is "hot", and a stroll through any major international art fair will confirm that it has become the medium of choice, especially for younger contemporary artists.

Australia's art scene is overrun with snap-happy shutterbugs, with some, such as Tracey Moffatt, Rosemary Laing and Patricia Piccinini, making an impact in art world centres of gravitas such as New York, Venice and Cologne.

But do the sums match the hype? Is photography really a serious alternative for collectors looking to diversify away from, for example, the lucrative but monotonous trade in late-20th-century modernist painting?

"It is still possible to buy a good collection of photography for the price of a good painting," says Daniel Palmer, a critic and lecturer in the history of photography at the University of Melbourne. "But the real plus to emerge from the interest in artists such as Moffatt and Piccinini is that it has helped to establish traditional photography as a genuine collectable."

By "traditional", Palmer means "old-school" photographers such as Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Lewis Morley or, as a case in point, the vastly under-appreciated 90-year-old Wolfgang Sievers, AO.

Born in Germany in 1913, Sievers studied at the Bauhaus and is revered as one of the most significant architectural -photographers to work in Australia, with many works in state archives, libraries and galleries. However, he has been ignored by the art market. Australian Art Sales Digest records show that in the decade to 2003, barely 10 works surfaced at auction, all selling for sums less than $1000. Or not selling at all.

Then, at Lawson-Menzies' Sydney auction in July, a 1959 silver gelatine photograph of a sulphuric acid plant in Hobart brought $2350 against an estimate of $900. The word was out by the time Sievers walked on crutches into Melbourne's Centre of Contemporary Photography to donate a 1986 print of a 1967 photograph for last week's charity auction to benefit the centre.

The auction, conducted by Christie's, was a runaway success, with 59 works by the cream of Australian photography garnering $79,360 for the CCP. Admittedly a paltry sum compared with the fine-art market but still vital signs of life for the 100 or so -collectors bidding at the sale.

And it wasn't a Moffatt or Piccinini that topped the sale but the Sievers, which fetched $8800 - an almost four-fold hike on the Lawson-Menzies sale.

-MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in The Bulletin, 2 December 2003, Volume 121; Number 48

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Gallery 19 closes

Another CBD `stepping-stone' Goes Under

By Nick Leys

When Gallery 19 closed its doors last Wednesday night a space where one of Sydney's few remaining artist-run galleries has displayed over 300 artists for the past two and a half years the invitation was more like an end of financial year closing down sale.
Several hundred well-wishers responded to the ``EVERYTHING MUST GO!'' bugle call, cramming into the previously disused coffee shop where artists including Adam Cullen, Max Cullen, Maclean Edwards, Simeon Nelson and indigenous artist Harry Wedge have hung their works.
Gallery 19's final exhibition called on displayed artists for a $20 donation ``to help meet our considerable wind-up costs'', with the gallery taking its usual zero per cent commission fee for sales.
A member of Gallery 19's 10-strong management committee, Michael Hutak, said the reason for the closure was the sale and redevelopment of the premises in the prime location of Campbell Street in Haymarket, opposite the Capitol Theatre.
``We were only able to keep the gallery going for so long because of the cheap rent, $300 a week on a month-by-month lease,'' he said after the doors had been shut for the last time.
``That's the only way you can run an artist-run space -- precariously.''
Gallery 19 is just the latest such display space to come to an end. In the last two years, other artist-run galleries like 151 Regent Street, Pendulum Gallery, Side-On-Studios and South have succumbed to rising rents in and around the Sydney CBD, a situation exacerbated by Olympics-driven redevelopment.
``The reality of the inner-city property market means the rich tradition of artist-run spaces in Sydney is coming to an end,'' Hutak said.
``I'm sad it's over, but glad we were able to get away with it for over two years.''
Archibald Prize winner Adam Cullen credited Gallery 19 and other spaces as crucial to his development as an artist.
``If these sorts of environments end, it sort of rings the death knell of art,'' he said.
``Artist-run spaces showcase art that is very fresh. It is straight from the artists' studios and so is usually of the best quality. I started in them, exhibiting in them for 10 years before being taken on by a commercial gallery those spaces are where dealers and owners get artists from.''
Fellow artist Mark Titmarsh said these spaces were of great importance for artists wishing to experiment with different media.
``They are definitely spaces for experimental artforms they quite often showcase the art of the future from up and coming artists,'' he said.
``They are the stepping stone between art school and commercial galleries.''
Anna Waldmann of the Australian Council of the Arts, which funds some artist-run spaces through the Emerging Artists Scheme, agreed the spaces were an important platform for emerging artists, but said they were always ``coming and going''.
``They are very fluid; that is their nature,'' she said.
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First published in

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