Home Is Where The Art Is, Until Gavel Falls

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 5, 2008

Peter Fish pfish@smh.com.au

Maybe it is the nosy parker in all of us but there is surely nothing more absorbing than a genuine house contents sale, where you can browse through other people's stuff and admire (or disparage) their collections in place, in their home.

We say genuine because there's a couple of auctioneers around town who specialise in "borrowing" a home that has been sold, bring around the pantechnicons and load the place up to the gunwales with bodgy furniture, "signed, authenticated" prints and a modest "collection" of 280 or so oriental carpets.

Among the more memorable home sales in recent years was John Schaeffer's sell-up at his Bellevue Hill mansion Rona - the Tempo cleaning magnate being an early victim of margin calls on his shares. Now there is a slightly more modest home sale coming up tomorrow in the leafy milieu of Darling Point, with viewings today.

Jacquie and Tim Ashton are selling up and moving on, putting under the hammer a home crammed with furniture, art and antiques accumulated over some 25 years. The pair have brought up seven children in the house but you wouldn't know it - hardly anything seems to be broken.

Apparently Jacquie Ashton, who once worked for the Herald but went on to fame and fortune as an author and human rights lawyer, plans to devote her time to charity work in Cambodia. A portion of the proceeds of the sale will go to one of the family's pet projects, Water Cambodia.

Phillip Thomas, of auctioneers Raffan Kelaher & Thomas, which is handling the sale, says the furniture includes a nice 18th century French provincial refectory table in oak and pine some 2.9 metres long, which is expected to command $5000 to $10,000, and a good Welsh oak dresser with three drawers and a shaped apron plus upper shelves, also 18th century, at $10,000 to $15,000. Pembroke tables, chests and dining chairs abound, along with carved horses and elephants.

Jacquie's fondness for Asia is demonstrated by a veritable army of "heads on sticks" - Buddha heads and deity figures in bronze, stone and wood, including a 2000-year-old head of the goddess Kwanyin. There is also an array of Chinese ceramics and paintings, and Indian, Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian and Thai artifacts. Among the fine art is a John Coburn painting at $7000 to $10,000, and a set of paintings by Archibald-winner Cherry Hood which skips the characteristic watery faces in favour of old-masterly still lifes of Chinese blue-and-white vases. The latter are being offered in pairs at $1000-$1500. The catalogue can be seen online at www.rafkelauctions.com.au.

The sale seems to reflect something of a change in momentum at the Leichhardt firm Raffan Kelaher & Thomas, which has sometimes been accused of unfairly favouring Indonesian repro furniture. Joining ex-Lawsons veteran Phillip Thomas as a partner in the old firm is another auction house stalwart, Jonathan Alford, while Sally Hardy - a one-time Lawsons art specialist and daughter of one-time Lawsons owner Henry Badgery - has also joined the team. The first of the firm's new-look paintings sales is on August 16.

WHEN ART AND MONEY COLLIDE

As we know, art and commerce do not always mix - though it is true the two have had the odd mingle in auction salerooms over the past year or 10.

Perhaps it is that philosophical divergence that accounts for the minuscule "Linfox" logo on the Jeffrey Smart painting Joining the Ring Road which went on show in Melbourne last night. It is part of a $3 million-plus Savill Galleries exhibition of Modern and Contemporary Paintings at Bonhams & Goodman's premises at 540 Malvern Road.

The work has in its foreground an expanse of highway, as do so many of Smart's offerings. It is presumably a ring road leading to an expressway. Just around the curve, emerging from behind a grassy bank, is a line of trucks waiting at the intersection, while behind is a hillside and a block of flats - all making playful use of intersecting planes and light and shadow. The work is 62 centimetres by 81 centimetres but you might need a magnifying glass to see the logo on one of the truck doors.

It seems that back in the 1980s, tough trucking tycoon Lindsay Fox noticed Smart's renditions of vehicles and flyovers and decided he wanted one for himself. He decided to commission a big picture, and one featuring - of course - one of his own trucks.

Smart was invited around and plied with champagne and canapes while the tycoon proffered big money plus all the assistance a hard-working painter might need for such a project. A car and chauffeur? No problem, even a private helicopter was available, if needed, to fly the artist to and from suitable locations for his daubs.

Somehow Smart was not seduced by the offer. This painting, with its diminutive Linfox logo, was his cool response - and the tycoon, it seems, was greatly displeased.

Smart, of course, is still painting uncompromising industrial landscapes - often autostradas, now that he is based in Tuscany. No one knows what money Fox offered for his truck commission; but in the 1980s Smart painting were selling for only $20,000 to $30,000 at auction, according to price studies in Roger Dedman's Australian Art Movements Handbook.

Today Joining the Ring Road costs $495,000. The story may be apocryphal, but you can be sure of one thing: Lindsay Fox will not see a lot in this picture.

ABORIGINAL LINE-UP

Menzies Art Brands, as the Deutscher-Menzies/Lawson-Menzies auction group styles itself, was keen to emphasise the sizable Aboriginal art line-up at its two-day art sale in Sydney's Kensington last month.

The group is clearly anxious to paper over the effects of the loss of former managing director Adrian Newstead, an Aboriginal art specialist and gallery owner with many decades of experience in attracting and marketing indigenous art.

Newstead's departure is likely to cement Sotheby's command of the top quality end of the Aboriginal and tribal market; it seems anyone can round up a few dot paintings from the flood of less worthy works coming on to the market from communities all over Australia.

After the big Deutscher-Menzies art sale on June 18, where Picasso's Sylvette took all the limelight with a local saleroom record price of $6.9 million, on the following night it was Lawson-Menzies's turn to wield the gavel, with Aboriginal works very much to the fore.

Maggie Watson Napangardi's Mina Mina Dreaming was the catalogue cover illustration. The densely-dotted two-metre high work by the Tanami Desert artist sold for $348,000 - comfortably above the $260,000 to $320,000 estimate. But on our count it was the sole Aboriginal picture to manage this. Many others were hammered at or below their low estimates or went unsold.

Sold at a below-estimate $45,600 was Regina Wilson's Message Sticks, a large and densely interwoven work recalling the woven bags and fish traps characteristic of the Northern Territory community in which the artist is an elder.

Ronnie Tjampitjinpa's Tingari Cycle at $48,000 and Naata Nungarrayi's giant Marrapinti at the same price both undershot the estimates, while Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri's Mens's Initiation, Spider Dreaming at $96,000 was one of many that just scraped into the estimate range when the buyer's premium was added.

Rover Thomas's Bullock Hide Story brought $108,000 but the same artist's Bedford Station was unsold after questions were raised about its provenance.

Tommy Watson's Iyarka at $96,000 and Emily Kngwarreye's Alhakere My Country at $84,000 both saw the hammer fall at the low estimate. Proprietor Rodney Menzies and his team will doubtless be looking to do better next time.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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