Streeton, MCubbin, Nolan head up huge NAB corporate art auction
Helen Trinca, The Australian, 28 January 2022
It reads like a list of the Greatest Hits of Australian art — from Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin to Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams, John Brack, Jeffrey Smart, Fred Williams, John Olsen, William Delafield Cook plus so many more in a collection of more than 2500 pieces up for grabs in arguably the biggest ever sale of Australian corporate art.
When the bidding starts next month on the National Australia Bank collection, the bank expects to clear about $10 million to be poured into its philanthropic foundation, marking the end of decades of determined acquisition of leading Australian work.
For the auction houses sharing in the staggeringly large sell-off – Deutscher and Hackett and Leonard Joel – it’s the culmination of more than a year gathering and cataloguing pieces spread out across bank sites in Australia and overseas in what Leonard Joel’s chairman John Albrecht calls a “monumental” exercise.
For private collectors – and some galleries – the auctions on February 22 and 23 followed by a year-long series of smaller “capsule” auctions, are an opportunity to acquire significant name works at relatively modest prices.
Such a large sale of corporate art – most of it cutting edge 1970s and 80s work - is rare, and D+H’s executive director Damian Hackett says: “I have the feeling this might bring some new blood into the market. So much of contemporary pop culture is experienced on a screen, so the physicality of a major abstract painting of the 1970s is a really short, powerful experience.”
He’s particularly interested in buyer reaction to a swag of abstract art saying: “The nonfigurative section of the market in Australia has really lagged behind as far as market value goes. We certainly hope and aim to get ridiculously high prices, but the fact is, they’re available (in the sale) at very reasonable prices.”
Mr Hackett says one of the last big corporate art sales was the Foster’s sell off more than 15 years ago and Qantas also sold part of its collection around that time. D+H will auction 73 NAB lots while Leonard Joel has 131 lots and also the task of selling off the remaining 2000-plus “lesser works” over a period of a year or so.
The core of the NAB collection, says Mr Hackett, is the 1970s contemporary work put together for the bank by its art consultant, the late Melbourne gallery owner Georges Mora. It’s a microcosm of contemporary art, a “time capsule of the cultural flavour of the time,” so exciting that in 1982 it was shown in a special exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and has also been drawn on often by curators putting together retrospectives.
The NAB had made a conscious decision in the 1970s to champion contemporary art to add to a number of older works — Streetons, Hans Heysens, and McCubbins — from earlier acquisitions.
Mora looked to emerging artists and also commissioned a series of tapestries by people such as John Coburn, Mirka Mora, Lesley Dumbrell and Jan Senbergs.
According to the D +H catalogue the 1970s was a period of “cultural buoyancy underpinned by a period of strong economic prosperity” and the decision by big corporates to build serious collections was important in developing the local art market.
Mora drew on his impressive network of people such as Heide’s legendary owner John Reed and artists Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd to fill the bank’s walls with extraordinary Australian art.
Later, the bank decided it wanted painting of rivers and Mora sourced and commissioned works on that theme: Howard Arkley’s Waterfall, painted in 1988,is among those on sale with an estimated value of $100,000 -$150,000.
Mr Hackett notes important work by John Brack, Jeffrey Smart and sculptor George Baldessin and says the auctions will also be a great opportunity to see the nonfigurative works in the context of others.