All eyes on Emily as art auction year kicks off
Gabriella Coslovich, Australian Financial Review, 17 February 2021
Australia’s art auctioneers learned to live with uncertainty last year and proved adept at it, boosting their online activity and ending the year on a surprising high with a total turnover of $108.2 million, a tolerable $3 million down on 2019’s takings. As if to emphasise the lessons of 2020, Melbourne went into its third lockdown last week, scuttling the auction calendar on cue.
Last year’s market leader Deutscher and Hackett had to postpone their charity auction for the Australian Prostate Centre, now scheduled in Melbourne this Sunday, with works by Australian artists including Sam Leach, Lisa Roet, Sally Ross, and Michael Zavros going under the hammer for a good cause.
At least the industry enters 2021 ready for the unexpected, having honed a repertoire of business-saving strategies such as remote auctions and timed online auctions, and confident that collectors have adapted, have discretionary money to splurge, and are unafraid to bid up to $2 million online.
“Our last live auction with a live audience was in March 2020,” said Deutscher and Hackett’s Melbourne executive director Chris Deutscher.
That auction, of Australian Aboriginal Art, went ahead on 18 March, the very day that Prime Minister Scott Morrison banned non-essential gatherings of more than 100 people. Seems a lifetime ago. Despite the need for some last-minute changes, the auction was an unforeseen success and revealed a renewed interest in Australian Aboriginal art that would continue through the year. The resurgence was helped along by two local dealers who pushed Aboriginal art on the international stage: Melbourne-based D’Lan Davidson held exhibitions in New York and forged ties with contemporary art giant Gagosian, and Sydney specialist Tim Klingender, senior consultant of Australian art to Sotheby’s New York, racked up a second dedicated Aboriginal Art sale for the international auction house.
The Aboriginal art market is expected to continue its charge this year. Sotheby’s is planning another dedicated Australian Aboriginal art auction in New York in November. Closer to home, Deutscher and Hackett’s first major auction for the year, on March 17, is again of Australian Aboriginal art, a sign of the company’s continued confidence in the market, amid increasing competition.
“Last year there were a few drivers of this industry,” Mr Deutscher said. “You had D’Lan who is fairly loud with his pronouncements pushing it quite heavily locally and abroad and Tim Klingender saying this is an international thing, and a few of our vendors consigned to New York and not here. So that started to open up the market and I am assuming that those two will continue promoting. But certainly with artists like Emily [Kame Kngwarreye] there is a lot more activity now.
“A few years ago you would have an expensive Emily and you’d hope to attract a bidder, whereas now you have two to three collectors competing with two to three traders. It might not be the case for every painting but it does apply to the major ones.”
Deutscher and Hackett’s auction catalogue has yet to be finalised but Saleroom can reveal that Kngwarreye’s Anooralya (Wild Yam), 1989, has been consigned with an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000. The painting comes with respected Delmore Gallery provenance. In all, the auction will feature about 55 lots with a total estimate of $1.7 million to $2.4 million.
The revived interest in Aboriginal Art has prompted Leonard Joel to launch dedicated Indigenous art auctions, albeit at a lower price range, and, somewhat boldly, without an Aboriginal art specialist on the team. The company will hold its inaugural stand-alone sale of indigenous art next Wednesday in Melbourne, again contingent on Victoria’s lockdown. The auction features 118 lots ranging from $300 to upwards of $30,000, with a total estimate of $387,000 to $587,000.
Aware of the minefield of provenance in the area of Aboriginal art, with artists prone to the exploitation of unethical dealers, Leonard Joel’s Head of Art Olivia Fuller told Saleroom that the auction house would primarily target Indigenous works with art centre provenance.
“That’s not to say that other provenance is not reliable,” Fuller said.
Indeed. Not all indigenous communities have an art centre, and not all artists want to work through one. Some prefer to work independently or through a gallery, directly with dealers, or in a mix of ways. Regardless of the chosen model, provenance remains an important consideration when buying Indigenous art. Sotheby’s policy, for example, and that of Australia’s public institutions for that matter, is to only handle work that has come through an art centre if an artist is represented by an art centre, and if an artist is independent, to handle works sold through their principal agent or gallery, with clear provenance. That’s the ideal, but that’s not to say that legitimate works can’t be sourced in other ways.
Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri ’s Untitled 2002, with an estimate of $6000 to $8000, is a choice example of works in the Leonard Joel sale and comes with Papunya Tula art centre provenance. But concerns have been raised about Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s Linear Yam Dreaming from 1993, which has an estimate of $30,000 to $40,000. Industry sources have pointed out that the date of the painting doesn’t concur with the style which is more common in Kngwarreye’s later works. Fuller stands by the painting.
“The fact that we have put it into this sale, that’s our assurance,” Fuller said. “We would not have included it if we weren’t confident about the work,” she said.
When Saleroom asked for further information about the painting’s provenance, Fuller said that it was originally sold in 1994 by the Aboriginal Desert Art gallery in Alice Springs, which was owned by Michael Hollow and has since closed.
Kngwarreye worked outside the art centre model and it’s well-known that she was often pressured to produce paintings by dealers descending on her community in Utopia, resulting in a large but inconsistent body of work.
Saleroom’s continuing advice to buyers is, do your research, ask questions, and demand clear answers about provenance, whomever the artist and whomever the dealer or auction house.