Women take top billing but men still dominate art prices
Gabriella Coslovich, Australian Financial Review, 21 October 2021
If by now you can’t name at least five Australian female artists, you haven’t been paying attention. Mind you, many Australians would struggle to name five Australian artists, full stop. Culture plays second fiddle to sport in this country, whose serving prime minister, let’s not forget, erased the word “arts” from his ministries. But that’s enough grumbling.
Women’s contribution to Australian art history has been the subject du jour at public institutions, with exhibitions including Clarice Beckett at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Bessie Davidson and her great niece, Sally Smart, at the Bendigo Art Gallery and, most prominently of all, the National Gallery of Australia’s #KnowMyName campaign, a title that gives the nod to the #MeToo movement.
Auctions houses are keeping pace. It’s good for business, as Leonard Joel has found. Ahead of the game, Leonard Joel launched its first women artists auction in 2017. On Tuesday it held its fifth such sale, the most successful in the series so far, with 10 new records set and Clarice Beckett confirming her resurgence. Beckett’s small work, Winter Sunset, measuring just 30cm by 25 cm, sold for more than three times its high estimate, at a hammer price of $125,000, the second highest for the artist at auction.
That record could be surpassed next month when Deutscher and Hackett presents its inaugural Important Women Artists sale after a three-month delay, caused of course by Melbourne and Sydney’s extended lockdowns. On the positive side, the lag has helped fuel a bumper sale featuring 125 lots with a total estimate of $8.3 million to $11.4 million.
Deutscher and Hackett’s biggest sale of the year – and its first live sale since April – begins viewings in Sydney on Thursday, ahead of the Melbourne auction on November 10.
“At one stage we locked off at 80 lots,” executive director Chris Deutscher told Saleroom this week. “Some good things came along at the last minute, so we could not say no. It’s pretty much the August and November auctions combined. Having said that, we will have a December sale as well.”
Unlike Leonard Joel’s women’s auction, Deutscher and Hackett’s sale is not exclusively of female artists. Many important male artists feature, and their works, predictably, are the most expensive. However, the first 28 lots are dedicated to women, ranging in time from a self-portrait by Josephine Muntz Adams from about 1896 to a watercolour on incised woodblock made in 2013 by contemporary sensation Cressida Campbell.
Muntz Adams’ Self Portrait (oil on canvas with an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000) could stand for a symbol of these times, even though it was created more than 100 years ago.
Wearing her painter’s smock, holding a palette and looking directly at the viewer, Muntz Adams is nobody’s muse but her own. As independent curator Andrew Gaynor eloquently puts it in the auction catalogue, “Self Portrait shows Muntz Adams as she wanted to be seen – active, industrious and, above all, creative.”
Muntz Adams’ mother was a supporter of the women’s suffrage movement and her younger sister was one of the earliest female science graduates of the University of Melbourne – a reminder that family circumstances and attitudes have played a critical role in enabling or hindering the careers of women artists.
These women’s stories run the gamut from the uplifting to the poignant. As writer Jennifer Higgie outlines in the NGA’s Know My Name catalogue, Clarice Beckett’s middle-class parents discouraged her artistic ambitions and insisted that she keep house for them. As an unmarried daughter, this was considered Beckett’s appropriate fate.
Despite this, and being dismissed by critics during her lifetime, Beckett kept painting her misty, melancholy landscapes, three of which are in this sale, including two Melbourne vistas that will resonate with the city’s residents: one is of the popular running and walking track around the Royal Botanic Gardens, The Tan, South Yarra, c. 1925, (estimate $80,000 to $120,000), the other a View Across the Yarra towards Government House, c. 1931 (estimate $60,000 to $80,000).
Beckett may have been lost to art history had it not been for curator Rosalind Hollinrake, who in the late 1960s discovered hundreds of her paintings, many beyond repair, in a shed in rural Victoria following a tip-off from the artist’s sister.
Compare the fortunes of Nora Heysen, whose father, Hans Heysen, encouraged his daughter’s work, enthusiastically proclaiming, “We have another artist in the family!” as Colin Thiele details in his book, Heysen of Hahndorf (first published in 1968).
In 1938, Heysen became the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, for her portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman. In this sale, Heysen’s Still Life Study, 1931, painted when she was about 20 years old, shows her astonishing skills. The oil painting, a palpably lifelike table set with eggs, a buttery head of lettuce, and a plump loaf of bread begging to be sliced, has an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.
The Adelaide-born Bessie Davidson, who studied under Margaret Preston, and moved to Europe, settling in Paris’s Montparnasse district, has also been largely overlooked in her home country.
A new record was set for Davidson’s work in April, at Smith & Singer, when Interieur, c. 1935, sold for $662,727, more than double its high estimate. Deutscher and Hackett are selling Davidson’s Lecture au Jardin, c. 1934, which was the cover image for the Bendigo Art Gallery exhibition last year, with an estimate of $280,000 to $350,000.
The sale is packed with significant works, including an appealing cross-section of Australian impressionist paintings by the likes of Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. The most expensive work in the sale is Streeton’s The Centre of the Empire, c. 1902, an atmospheric London scene, with an estimate of $1.2 million to $1.6 million.
Contemporary art from the collection of celebrity chef Shannon Bennett, and works formerly in the collection of the late newspaper magnate Keith Murdoch and his wife, the much-loved philanthropist Dame Elisabeth Murdoch (parents of Rupert), are also going under the hammer. In all, it will be quite the return to the live auction room floor.