Anyone want a cheap Brett Whiteley?

CALL it the Bargain Brett Sale: seven Brett Whiteley oils and sketches with a reserve of about $1.7 million will be offered for auction.

Brett Whiteley Exhibition

CALL it the Bargain Brett Sale: seven Brett Whiteley oils and sketches with a reserve value of about $1.7 million will be offered for auction by Bonhams at its debut Australian and International Fine Art sale in Sydney this month.

In a risky move intended to entice buyers, market newcomer Bonhams has convinced sellers of the four big paintings to agree to low reserves. A vast orange work called Vincent, on which Whiteley had stuck a razor blade, is offered for $750,000, considerably less than the $1.02m (including 20 per cent buyer's premium) its owner paid at auction during the 2007 art market peak.

Dealer Richard Martin is selling Nude in Bath, which he owns, for a $170,000 lower estimate. The figure is $160,000 less than his price on the painting at an exhibition in April at his Sydney gallery.

Another painting owned by Mr Martin in that exhibition, The Lebanese Grin, will go under the hammer with a lower estimate of $200,000 -- $150,000 less than he sought in April.

Mr Martin said he bought The Lebanese Grin from the artist's former wife, Wendy Whiteley.

"I'd seen it in Brett Whiteley's studio and I really coveted it," he said.

Only three of the 14 works he exhibited in April sold and he had decided to consign the two paintings he owned to the Bonhams auction because he no longer has room for them.

The other big Whiteley offered by Bonhams is a classic blue-sea scene depicting Nobby's Head, rather than the artist's classic Sydney Harbour scenes.

The painting, called Nobby's Head and the Entrance to Newcastle, is offered for $450,000 and was last traded at auction in 2002 for $324,000. If the painting sells for $450,000, it would amount to a weaker investment than money in the bank over the same period.

Bonhams chairman Mark Fraser said the low reserves were a strategy to ignite interest in the generally flat art market.

"We want to provide buyers with an incentive to attend the auction, but where the hammer will fall we don't know," he said.

The 94 artworks set to be auctioned on August 22 at Byron Kennedy Hall, in Sydney's east, are on show in Melbourne until Sunday and can be viewed in Sydney next week.