A year of hidden gems and high drama
Gabriella Coslovich, Australian Financial Review, 10 December 2020
A pandemic, a punch-up, a chute of new records, and a toppling at the top. It’s been a year like no other for Australia’s art auction industry, a year of operatic proportions that drifted at times into soap opera, a year of rapid change and adaptation. The single greatest shift was one experienced across many industries. The internet morphed into a lifeline for auction houses and a virtual mall for captive and cashed-up buyers hungry for a retail hit.
“Remote auctions” became the norm, and collectors grew comfortable bidding big online.
A year ago a $2 million internet bid would have been unimaginable, this year it was a reality – that amount was bid via internet for Russell Drysdale’s 1941 painting Going to the Pictures at Deutscher and Hackett’s live auction in Melbourne in November. The Drysdale ultimately sold for $2.4 million (hammer) to a phone bidder, but the era of seven-figure internet bids had arrived.
In a year that defied expectations, 34 new artists’ records were set, and the total sales at public auction reached $105.9 million, not a substantial drop from last year’s $111.31 million. The last time sales figures dropped below that figure was in 2013 when the total turnover was $103.73 million.
Deutscher and Hackett topped the public auctions register with a turnover of $26.3 million, up from last year’s $21.3 million, ousting the rebranded Smith & Singer from the lead. In its first year of trading under the names of its owners, Geoffrey Smith and Gary Singer, the company formerly known as Sotheby’s Australia fell to third place, with a turnover of $21.6 million, behind Menzies’ $22.6 million. Bonhams pulled in $7.67 million, Leonard Joel $7.13 million, with another $20.6 million made by the remaining smaller auction houses.
Without the international cachet of the Sotheby’s brand, Smith & Singer’s takings at public auction almost halved, down from 2019’s $39.6 million. However, company chairman Mr Smith presented Saleroom with another set of figures this week, insisting the company was still “market leader”. Smith & Singer now sees itself primarily as an art dealership, the conduit of private sales, commercial exhibitions, private auctions, in which results are kept just that, and consignments to international companies Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
The only way that Smith & Singer can be transparently compared to its rivals is through results at public auction, but Mr Smith tells us that when the final results are in for 2020 the company will have turned over “in the region of $50 million, which we understand will be the highest turnover of any auction house in Australia and will confirm our market leadership for the fifth consecutive year (since 2016).”
He’s clearly keen to keep that mantle. What’s beyond dispute is that Smith & Singer provided some of the year’s most amusing moments. Such as its marketing campaign for Brett Whiteley’s 1987 painting White Corella, which claimed that the work had once belonged to golfing great Greg Norman who had hung it in his Florida home. Saleroom pointed out that neither was correct.
Not so amusing was the skirmish that occurred at Smith & Singer’s Sydney office in March between office manager David Mackay and outgoing jewellery specialist Hamish Sharma. The scrap spilt onto Queen Street, ever so lowering the tone of genteel Woollahra. Sharma ended up in hospital for three nights, Mackay was charged with assault, and the charges were later dropped by New South Wales police, and that should have been that, except that the so-called Friends of David wouldn’t let it go and began circulating CCTV footage of the tussle edited in such a way to wrongly show Mr Sharma on the offensive. We hope for a more decorous 2021.
Mr Sharma defected to Leonard Joel where he has been organising jewellery auctions of uncommonly high value for the local market – his latest, on Tuesday night, pulled in $1.8 million (hammer) against a low estimate of $6.86 million, with just 93 of 209 lots selling, a clearance rate of 44 per cent. Nonetheless, Mr Sharma was strangely pleased, saying he hadn’t hammered that amount in 10 years. Smith & Singer’s jewellery sale on Monday night had a clearance rate of 76 per cent and hammered around $820,000.
Meanwhile, Saleroom hears that further senior staff have opted to walk from Mr Sharma’s old firm Smith & Singer. What this says about staff morale is open to conjecture.
As ever it was the year of Brett Whiteley who, 28 years after his death, continues to be the most traded artist at auction – 58 of his works worth a total of $13.1 million were sold, most significantly Henri’s Armchair, 1974-75, which dislodged Sidney Nolan’s First-class Marksman from its perch as Australia’s most expensive painting sold at auction.
At a gala solo auction held by Menzies in Sydney last month, Henri’s Armchair, made $6.136 million (including buyer’s premium), superseding the $5.4 million (including buyer’s premium) that the Art Gallery of New South Wales paid for First-class Marksman.
It didn’t take long for whispers to start, suggesting that Rod Menzies, owner and chairman of the auction house, had probably bought the painting himself, as he has been known to have done with works in the past. But Menzies’ Head of Art Justin Turner confirmed this week that Henri’s Armchair had indeed been bought by a collector from Sydney’s lower north shore, and that’s where Mr Turner was installing the painting on Monday morning when Saleroom got in touch. There’s speculation too on how long Mr Menzies will continue as chairman of the company given his ill health – he was not in Sydney for the auction of the prize Whiteley. Menzies’ chief executive officer Coralie Stow told Saleroom that no announcement was imminent.
Of the top ten most traded artists at auction this year, nine were white males, and a woman was the notable exception: the late Emily Kame Kngwarreye, with 37 works sold to a total of $2.56 million. Kngwarreye was the star in a rising market for Indigenous art with local sales climbing to $12.35 million this year, roughly double 2019’s $6.19 million, but still well behind the $26.45 million of the 2007 boom. Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled - Yam Dreaming, 1996, sold for $US340,000 ($517,099) at D'Lan Davidson's ongoing Emily exhibition in New York.
Internationally, the profile of Australian Indigenous art was boosted by the imprimatur of global giants Sotheby’s and Gagosian. Sotheby’s held its second dedicated auction of Aboriginal Art and Gagosian, with the help of Melbourne dealer D’Lan Davidson, brought contemporary Indigenous art to the Asian market with its first exhibition in Hong Kong, following critically acclaimed exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. As ever, it is water-tight provenance that brings the best results, in both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous sphere.
And the winner of the best comeback attempt was Paul Sumner, former director of the collapsed auction house Mossgreen and undischarged bankrupt, who issued an open letter declaring that he had been cleared of wrongdoing by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The truth was not quite so simple.
Amid it all, Saleroom swatted away a flutter of legal threats, which perhaps suggests we were doing our job. Here’s to an equally riveting 2021 with fewer disruptions from the viral sphere, and just as many hidden gems.