Buyers consider the bigger picture in a tough market

John Keats from Sothebys with Sidney Nolan's 'The Emu Hunt' at their offices in Melbourne.

As the ferries came and went from Circular Quay on the evening of August 30 this year, bids shot around the nearby function room at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

The art trade’s biggest players were inside, among them Sotheby’s bosses Geoffrey Smith and Gary Singer, and Brisbane dealer Philip Bacon. About 100 people had gathered to witness the year’s biggest art sale.

They were not disappointed, as veteran dealer Denis Savill emerged from semi-retirement to hoover up many of the best paintings, spending $2 million. By auction’s end Savill had bought 27 lots, including Fred Williams’s Lysterfield Landscape for $295,000 after it had been passed in and the auction cover painting, an angry blue botanical gardens landscape by Brett Whiteley, bought after sustained competition for $200,000 above its high estimate.

Only the first 193 lots of Peter Elliott’s vast art and antique collection went under the hammer on that opening night, with canvases by Whiteley, Bill Robinson, Jeffrey Smart, Williams and others priced low to watch ’em go.

By the time the auction finished at 10pm, four hours after it started, it had grossed $4.4m and every artwork had been sold.

The remaining 820 pieces of silverware, antique furniture, Asian antiquities, tribal art and other collectables, accumulated during 70 years of collecting and catalogued by Mossgreen, were dispersed across the next two days at Fox Studios in Sydney’s east.

The final total was $7m with 98 per cent sold, the highest since the spectacular Grundy art collection was dispersed in 2013 for $19m.

Savill tells The Australian he had not bought at sales earlier in the year once he knew the Elliott collection was coming up. His enthusiasm was rooted in the latest buzzword: provenance.

“You pay a premium but the value is the authenticity,” he says. “I bought them because I have documented ownership evidence in a book; the provenance is very important.”

Savill says he has sold several of the pictures already for a premium that has made the exercise more than worthwhile.

Single-owner dispersals tend to be the highlights of bear art markets, as seen in the past few years as the exuberance of the previous decade evaporated.

Pieces are priced low and often sold higher to buyers attracted by the narrative of where they come from. The carnivalesque Margaret Olley auction at the National Art School in Sydney in 2013 epitomised the phenomenon, as even bric-a-brac owned by the benefactor and artist attracted generous premiums.

Elliott was a well-known gynaecologist and obstetrician who became an avid collector. The catalogue cover painting he bought directly from Whiteley in 1984. On frequent work trips to Asia Elliott developed a network of dealers, often returning with suitcases bulging with foam and wrapping. His final purchase was made just four months before his death at 86.

The other highlight of the art auction year was also held at the MCA, when Liz Laverty, through Deutscher and Hackett, dispersed 166 lots of Aboriginal artworks she had collected with her husband, Laverty Pathology founder Colin Laverty.

The second tranche of art from the collection was expertly catalogued with thorough scholarship and a handsome book that acted as a value-add for collectors.

Auction house co-owner Chris Deutscher said the tactic helped to convince collectors who had been circling the genre to finally make their first purchase.

The Lavertys’ 166 works from the Kimberley, Arnhem Land and the Central Desert grossed $3.4m, with 99 per cent sold.

The Laverty collection, in addition to the Aboriginal art collections of Dutch department store heir Thomas Vroom, sold via Sothe­by’s in London in June and then by Bonhams in Sydney in September, resulted in an uptick in the overall number of Aboriginal artworks sold this year.

The three auctions, plus the million-dollar estate of Canberra bureaucrat Alan Boxer sold in March, accounted for $8.8m, more than half the total Aboriginal art auction sales for the year, and were responsible for the total trade bouncing from a 14-year low of $5.7m last year to $13m this year.

The main auction houses may have abandoned mixed-vendor stand-alone Aboriginal art sales this year, but Deutscher says he is preparing one in March. “There are quite a few super funds going into panic before the new rules next June,” he says.

For the past five years the market has pushed down prices of Aboriginal art as collectors have dumped them from their superannuation funds in anticipation of the more onerous and expensive collecting standards.

Deutscher says the March sale will be a bonanza for collectors with 150 lots valued at $2m on offer. “General decorative Papunya Tula works from the late 80s through to the 2000s are hard going because there’s lots of them left in the market,” he says.

Interesting canvases from Western Australia that pushed boundaries, Tiwi Islands works, Maningrida barks and Arnhem Land sculptures are more saleable. “The market is going for special things and the bulk of it you have to ignore,” he says.

Deutscher says while Australia’s art market is still largely parochial, some of the nation’s high-end collectors have started eschewing local artists and been buying abroad, especially in the Asian contemporary art market.

Australia’s market is flat when compared with this activity in Hong Kong, but prices here appear increasingly affordable for international buyers.

French and some US collectors recently have started taking advantage of the disparity and see high value in Australian art.

Aboriginal art historically has fared well in France, where there is an established tradition of collecting tribal pieces, reinforced recently with high-profile acquisitions by the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris.

Auctioneers may be spoiled for choice when consigning Aboriginal art but for a few years now it has been harder to convince mainstream Australian collectors to part with their trophy paintings.

Australian fine art auction catalogues traditionally have carried million-dollar-plus pictures on their covers but prices lately have been falling, with fewer pictures valued above $1m and those hovering at that limit being stockpiled for better times.

Sotheby’s Australia proved the exception when two of its cover lots, Arthur Boyd’s intensely moody Sleeping Bride and Sidney Nolan’s The Emu Hunt, owned by his daughter Jinx, sold for $1.58m and $1.16m respectively.

Second East Auction Holdings, the Australian franchisee of the blue-chip international auction brand, grew to dominate the secondary art market this year. It also sold the year’s highest priced artwork, Williams’s Trees and Hillsides, in November for $1.7m.

Total secondary Australian art trade this year was $109.5m, according to Australian Art Sales Digest, whose figures include art traded by Menzies Art Brands.

Menzies stands apart from other auction houses because of numerous unusual practices, among them guaranteeing artworks, buying trophy pieces on the international market for resale in Australia and syndicates associated with the auction house recycling pieces through the sale room.

None of these things are illegal in Australia but the practices skew price perceptions for some artists and the market overall.

Sotheby’s billed for $27.4m during the year from its three Australian art sales and other works privately sold, up from $18.4m the previous year. The total included the collection of Macquarie Bank co-founder David Clarke, sold in conjunction with Sotheby’s April auction for a combined $11.3m.

The annual figures also reveal slight growth in total art auction sales in the past four years but auctioneers are working harder to achieve them, with more works offered for smaller gains. Competition among art auctioneers is set to intensify next year with acquisitive multi-category auction house Mossgreen pledging to invest in better art scholarship so it can take on Sotheby’s and Deutsch­er and Hackett.

Mossgreen has made its name executing single-owner sales; from eight staff three years ago it now has 46, having acquired numerous businesses, including prestige stamp business Leski’s and most recently New Zealand’s Webbs Auctions.

Managing director Paul Sumner says: “Our vision was always to be a true auction house set up to sell everything that’s collected in depth and quality.”

Mossgreen will also enter the primary fine art market next year with Fehily Contemporary gallery and its artist stable that includes Darren Wardle, Kate Shaw and photographer Ricky Maynard joining the group.

The contemporary art market continues to be challenging, with Sydney veteran Ray Hughes the latest to close his gallery this year.

The biennial Melbourne Art Fair will go ahead next year, independent of English events impresario Tim Etchells.

Etchells’s second Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks this year reported sales of $14m, up from $10m in 2013. The event had 100 exhibitors and 31,000 visitors.

Organiser Barry Keldoulis is upbeat about the market and says performance art sales trialled this year were a success.