Badham's Snack Bar to raise glasses
Peter Fish, Badham's Snack Bar to raise glasses, The Australian Financial Review, Thursday 23 April 2015
A rare wartime genre painting set in the louche surrounds of the legendary Hasty Tasty in Sydney’s Kings Cross features in a major art auction in Melbourne early next month.
The work, Herbert Badham’s, Snack Bar, is a highlight of a sale that also offers a 1960 Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly head and a pristine Conrad Martens colonial landscape, plus a little-known early Jeffrey Smart beach scene, among other Smart pictures.
The Deutscher and Hackett sale on May 6, values at some $5million, comes a week after Sotheby’s Australia hammers the collection of the late Macqauarie banker, David Clarke (AFR Weekend, April 2-6 in Sydney).
Snack Bar, dating from 1944, portrays a cast of period characters – US sailors and black GIs chatting up the ladies, and besuited gents – wearing ties, of course – at communal tables joking with waitresses over sausages and sauce and cups of tea.
Open 24 hours, the Hasty Tasty was a beacon of the red-light district, a home away from home for the seedy suburb’s night dwellers, a venue where uniformed visitors could mix and mingle with ladies of the night. It was still going strong in the 1960s era of rest and recreation from the Vietnam war.
Badham’s Snack Bar and the Conrad Martens’ Storm over North Head a large Turner-esque landscape, hail from a Sydney family, the descendants of Sir Edward Knox, who built the imposing home Rona in Bellevue Hill in 1883. The Martens was purchased in 1951 by a Miss Barbara Knox and was inherited by her nephew, M.E.K Adams and passed on to his descendants. The Badham was also inherited by the nephew.
In later times, Rona was the home of the cleaning magnate and renowned collector of English Victorian art John Schaeffer. It was sold in 2004 along with Schaeffer’s art when he encountered financial problems.
Snack Bar carries a pre-sale estimate of $90,000 to $120,000, while Storm over North Head is $100,000 to $140,000.
Jeffrey Smart’sTamarama (right) led Deutscher and Hackett quite a dance. Its Sydney vendor had owned it since the 1960s, but the only documentation was a flimsy black and white catalogue from a Geoff K. Gray sale in 1968 where he had purchased the work, described only as “G Smart, Beach House” – a title to which no other reference could be found. But via a torturous process, the word Ballarat on the back of the picture frame led to confirmation from Smart’s archivist, Stephen Rogers, that this mystery work was Tamarama, which had been entered in the
Crouch Prize competition at Ballarat Fine Art in 1955. Deutscher and Hackett has three other Smarts to sell, Via Leopardi from 2004 (estimate $280,000 to $350,000), The Apartment House from 1965 ($180,000 to $240,000) and Backstage from 1957 ($40,000 to $50,000).
Like the Badham, Roy de Maistre’s, Studio Interior, is something of a classic, dating from the 1940’s or 50s. The cluttered London studio the Australian artist moved into in 1937 was a lively meeting point for artistic types including the young Francis Bacon. The work last changed hands at auction at Leonard Joel in May 2002 for $88,855 including premium. At D&H it is estimated at $80,000 to $120,000.
The catalogue cover for the sale is Sidney Nolan’s, Ned Kelly from 1960, one of a series where Nolan reinvented the venerable bushranger using a scratched technique in synthetic polymer paint and polyvinyl acetate. This picture, estimated at $450,000 to $650,000 has been in a Melbourne private collection after being offered at Sotheby’s Australia in August 2010 with expectations of $400,000 to $600,000.
Among works by overseas artists from local collections is Patrick Heron’s, Sydney Garden Painting December 1989 1, one of a series completed during the British painter’s artist-in-residency at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1989. Its estimate is $120,000 to $160,000.
New Zealand artist Colin McCahon’s, Paul to Hebrews, three handwritten biblical panels, carries an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. When D&H last offered a McCahon “text” work in November 2010 with an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million it attracted huge interest but failed to sell on the night, only to be snapped up shortly afterwards by the National Gallery of Victoria.