Indigenous art acid test and that Tom Roberts
Gabriella Coslovich, Australian Financial Review, 10 March 2021
Collectors’ renewed enthusiasm for Indigenous Australian art will be tested next Wednesday in Melbourne as Deutscher and Hackett launches its first auction of the year with a select 54-lot sale.
The five highest value lots are the complete photographic suite of Tracey Moffatt’s Something More and four works fresh to the secondary market – two ground-breaking paintings by Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Lin Onus’s 1990 painting Guyi Rirrkyan (Fish and Rocks), and John Mawurndjul’s 2004 bark painting Ngalyod Rainbow Serpent.
“It will be a bit of a bellwether to how the market is going and how people are responding semi-post-COVID,” said Deutscher and Hackett’s Head of Indigenous Art, Crispin Gutteridge.
This time last year, Deutscher and Hackett held 2020’s highest grossing sale of Indigenous art, pulling in $1.9 million (hammer) just as COVID-19 restrictions began to hit. Executive director Chris Deutscher likened that sale to a miracle. He’ll be hoping for a repeat when the company puts $1.6 million to $2.4 million worth of art under the hammer next week.
The star lot is Kngwarreye’s Early Summer Flowers, 1990, a vast, luminous work in which the artist embraces a new palette of viridian and greens to capture the vibrancy of the desert blooming after rains. Estimated at $250,000 to $350,000, the painting was commissioned by Delmore Gallery in 1990 and has not been on the market since it was sold by Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in 1991.
Also fresh to the market is Kngwarreye’s Anooralya (Wild Yam), 1989, estimated at $150,000 to $250,000. The painting marks a change in direction for the artist with the emergence of her signature dabbed dots of colour which converge with her sweeping and rippling lines that represent the roots of the yam plant.
“It’s a unique, transitional painting that harks back to the batiks she was making in the 1980s,” Gutteridge says.
Kngwarreye’s two totems – the yam and the emu – are depicted. The tracks of a male emu can be seen moving across Kngwarreye’s traditional homeland Alhalkere as it feeds on seeds and guides its chicks to where the yam thrives.
Several early bark paintings from the Estate of Melbourne jeweller Gary Bradley are also on the secondary market for the first time. Particularly intriguing is Mawalan Marika’s Sydney c.1962, an autobiographical work that records the Yolngu artist’s impressions of the city at a time when few Yolngu had travelled interstate.
Mawalan visited Sydney in 1961 to take part in the exhibition Art from Arnhem Land at Qantas house. He made several bark paintings in response, one of which is in the collection of the National Museum of Australia. In his catalogue essay, Indigenous art specialist Wally Caruana compares Mawalan’s portrayal of Sydney’s crowded streets to John Bracks’ iconic 1956 painting Collins St. 5p.m. of grim-faced Melbourne office workers marching home at day’s end.
“Brack’s version is slightly detached, observing the passing parade as if through a window,” Caruana writes. “In contrast, by positioning himself ‘in the street’, Mawalan produces an engaging image that expresses his amazement at facing long lines of people, so much so that he described them as three devil-devils with tall head gear.”
The painting is estimated at $20,000 to $30,000 and you can judge for yourself at the Melbourne viewing which begins Thursday.
Leonard Joel’s inaugural indigenous auction a fortnight ago hammered $335,800 against a low estimate of $336,400, with 78 per cent of lots selling by number. The company will continue to hold stand-alone Indigenous art sales at the lower price range encouraged by the emergence of new buyers. An in-house survey found that just under 20 per cent of buyers at the sale were new to Leonard Joel.
“We did notice that a number of the viewing attendees were looking to start collecting Indigenous art,” said Leonard Joel’s Head of Art, Olivia Fuller.
“It’s visually stunning so it attracts contemporary buyers. I think also that people are aware that Indigenous art is coming back to the art world in a bigger way and the potential newer collectors are listening.”
The Kngwarreye painting Linear Yam Dreaming, 1993, which had raised concerns among some Indigenous art experts who were puzzled by its date and a style more common in the artist’s later works, sold for its low estimate of $30,000.
Leonard Joel has another delicate painting on its hands. Saleroom can reveal that the cover lot of its fine art auction next week, Portrait of A Lady, c. 1880s, by Tom Roberts, with an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000, was declined by another auction house. The portrait is signed and appears in Helen Topliss’s catalogue raisonne of the artist, but after examining the painting last year this auction house was not convinced. The auction house recently advised Leonard Joel that further research was necessary to determine the work’s authenticity. But Leonard Joel is standing firm.
“Our first concern is for the vendor and to ensure that their property is not tarnished by speculation and we are in discussions with them now,” Fuller told Saleroom. “The starting point for us is that this work is documented in the catalogue raisonne for Tom Roberts by the recognised expert Helen Topliss. We are in the process of reviewing the work with other recognised experts, but we have no intention of withdrawing the work until we are sure this is the prudent course of action.”
Saleroom looks forward to the assessment.