Nudist buys himself a shield
Anna
http://www.smh.com.au/news/business/nudist-buys-himself-a-shield/2007/06/15/1181414547028.html
Nudist buys himself a shield
June 16, 2007
WITH the opening up of France's formerly closed-shop auction system at
the behest of the European Union's bearocrats, both Sotheby's and
Christie's have opened Paris salerooms that are busy hammering all
sorts of art. And tribal material is high on the agenda.
Much of the tribal ware brought back by the British colonial types has
already come out of the closet but French and other European explorers
and exploiters also brought back shiploads of ethnographic material
from the new frontiers of Africa and Oceania.
Former NSW politician and nudist Richard Jones, now out to pasture in
the lush surrounds of the Byron Bay hinterland, is among the keen
fanciers of Aboriginal art who need to keep abreast of sales in Paris
so as not to miss any juicy items.
While the rest of us were enjoying a fireside snooze on Monday night,
on the Queen's Birthday holiday, Jones was busy on the phone to Paris,
bidding on a number of items at a Christie's sale.
He secured a Queensland rainforest shield 1.2m long decorated with
circles and bands in fawn, brown, yellow and black pigments.
The shield cost a cool €28,800 ($45,200), four times the lower
estimate.
He was outbid on the previous lot, another rainforest shield decorated
in ochres with figurative motifs, which brought €33,600.
This figurative shield, at the equivalent of $52,750, probably broke
the $42,800 auction record set by Sotheby's in Melbourne in July 2005.
Apparently the buyer might have been Richard Attenborough, who is a
fan of tribal art incorporating human imagery.
The shields, as well as their Australian origin, have another
antipodean association. Both hung on the walls of the acclaimed Arts &
Crafts mansion Culgruff House, in Castle Douglas, Dumfries, Scotland,
which is where Christie's went to value them. Culgruff was built by
one Robert Stewart - a little known figure who apparently made a
fortune in Australia before retiring to contemplate his Aboriginal art
treasures in the mansion he built for his wife in 1889.
Both the Culgruff shields supposedly are cut from hard native timbers,
presumably eucalypts, rather than the soft buttress of a fig tree like
most rainforest shields. Jones says his research has led him to
speculate that the examples in harder timber come from the Atherton
Tableland. It won't be long before shields of this quality, age and
provenance will sell for $100,000, he says. He's probably right, given
they have got to $40,000 and $50,000 from around $1000 in the 1970s.
And the mysterious Mr Stewart - of whom no record seems to exist in
Australia - was certainly a canny old Scot, buying them up for next to
nothing in the 1880s.
Cruising in Kensington
It was the eve of of Deutscher-Menzies's big art auction on Wednesday
night. At the firm's spacious Kensington salerooms the drinks were
flowing, the red carpet was out and the front seats, reserved for the
VIPs, bore the names of the select few - Cruise and Moss prominent
among them. When the sale got under way, actor Tom Cruise and $33
million a year Macquarie Banker Allan Moss were nowhere to be seen.
But DM wouldn't have missed them too much.
An hour into the sale, DM's boss Rod Menzies, who was watching from
the sidelines, had seen all his big-ticket pictures get away for big
prices.
Among them were Brett Whiteley's The Olgas for Ernest Giles at $3.48
million, John Brack's Backs and Fronts for $2.04 million, Jeffrey
Smart's The City Bus Station for $900,000 and Albert Tucker's John
Batman Meets Eliza Callaghan for $840,000. The Whiteley set a new art
auction record as well as a record for the artist, while the Smart was
one of several other artist records set on the night.
Add in a $720,000 Russell Drysdale, Diver, Broome, a $480,000 Fred
Williams, Lysterfield Hillside II, and a $456,000 Whiteley Dawn - plus
lots of lesser lights - and this was clearly a sale that would make
way above $10 million. In fact, it tallied a total of $14 million.
Which might just put Deutscher-Menzies ahead of its major art market
rival, Sotheby's, for the latest financial year. And DM had also
captured the Australian art auction record from Sotheby's, with the
Whiteley slipping past Brack's The Old Time and its $3.36 million
record price just a month ago.
In fact, once the top pictures had been hammered and the TV cameras
had moved on, there were a substantial number of lots passed in,
though the sale still achieved a respectable 80 per cent of lots sold.
But that, like the non-arrival of Tom Cruise and Allan Moss - if
indeed such notables were ever expected - wouldn't have worried the DM
people too much.
Caspian unfazed
Was the Caspian Gallery collection on the carpet? Did it fall flat on
the mat? ArtSmart couldn't get to the sale of the rug bedecked
gallery, held in Queen Street, Woollahra, on May 22. But anecdotal
information trickling in suggested parts of it had been a bit, well,
subdued. And auctioneeers Mossgreen, which handled the sale, for some
weeks failed to post the prices realised on its website, citing minor
problems with the site. But no, it seems all is well. Caspian
proprietor Bill Evans - whose first love is carpets and textiles -
declares himself quite happy with the auction, which saw close to 70
per cent of the lots sold. The sale clears the way for Evans to
operate as a tribal art consultant from rooms at the rear of the
mansion that formerly housed his Caspian Gallery and was for a time
used for Christie's art sale viewings. The front section has now been
leased as offices for men's fashion label Paul Smith - said to be
England's answer to Armani.
Evans says Aboriginal art sold very well, with some prices actually
above what he'd been asking in the gallery over a couple of years.
Among these were two Emily Kngwrreye dot paintings which fetched over
$7000 apiece compared with the $4000 for which the buyer could have
got them from him direct a couple of months back. Among bark paintings
sold for buoyant prices was a western Arnhem Land image of a turtle
that brought $7287. A Kitty Kantilla work on paper sold for $6000-plus
subsequent to the auction.
Oceanic art went quite well. Textiles were OK, Evans says, while he
admits the carpets - including some upmarket 19th century Caucasians -
flopped, though a large Ersari found a buyer at $7894.