There were plenty of auction houses operating in Australia, right up to the 1980s, but the arrival of the two international powerhouses, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, gradually changed the rules of the game. They had created a duopoly that dominated the international art market, in the same way that Coke and Pepsi, or McDonalds and Hungry Jacks, vie for control of the fast food market. Together they owned about 80 per cent of world auction sales in high value art, and had close enough to a monopoly on artworks sold for more than $1 million. No dealer or museum could get anything like the media coverage they generated. Even today, such is the power of their brands that their activities are monitored and discussed in terms usually reserved for institutions rather than commercial enterprises.
Here in Australia, Sotheby’s didn’t get started until Robert Bleakley decided to strike out in Sydney in 1983. Christie’s had arrived 20 years earlier. Within ten years Bleakley had moved on to real estate and then the medicinal honey market in Byron Bay. Tim Klingender, who’d worked his way up from the packing room, took over from Bleakley as the head of Sotheby’s Aboriginal and Tribal Art department in the early 1990s. Before long, the two auction houses were running the same duopoly they enjoyed overseas, and there was nothing to stop them pushing their weight around with impunity.
In 1997, however, a new player arrived on the block. The Australian cleaning magnate, Rodney Menzies, restless despite his immense wealth, decided to become a major player in the art world by establishing his own auction house. Menzies was a punter who always bet on the nose, and he already had a reputation for being tough, ruthless and capricious – but he was also an extremely astute businessman. He bailed out the Melbourne art dealer, Christopher Deutscher, whose gallery was overburdened by debt despite Deutscher’s impeccable art world connections, and in doing so acquired a stable of cutting-edge artists (Peter Booth, Bill Henson, Tim Maguire, John Olsen, John Brack). Together, they founded Deutscher Menzies, and determined to end the duopoly’s domination of the high-end art auction market. By the dawn of the new millennium, this goal was firmly within their grasp. Menzies had no love of Aboriginal art, but he was compelled by his own competitive nature to assail Sotheby’s, the market leader on all fronts. He hired the Aboriginal specialist Vivien Anderson to stake out ground in what had previously been Sotheby’s exclusive domain. Such was the momentum of the Aboriginal art movement, however, that instead of taking Sotheby’s business from them, Anderson simply doubled the size of the secondary market. It grew to $6.9 million by 2000, and even after Deutscher Menzies retreated the following year, the market continued to grow.
In September 2001, Rod Menzies purchased the venerable Sydney auction house Lawsons, and renamed it Lawson~Menzies. Unlike Deutscher Menzies, which specialised in Australian and European fine art, Lawson~Menzies auctioned everything from matchbox toys to fine wine, jewellery and decorative art. Over the following five years, he systematically discarded one specialist department after another until there appeared to be little distinction between his two auction companies. Both now vied for the same high value paintings.
As the Aboriginal art market heated up post-2000, paintings by the most sought-after artists were monopolised by the galleries that had exclusive access to art centre stock. Papunya Tula, and the art centres in Yirrkala, Maningrida and Balgo Hills, for example, were by now established as powerful brand names that gave paintings by their best artists exclusively to elite branded galleries or agents. This placed everyone else at a distinct market disadvantage. It also meant that these art centres were able to introduce the work of young and emerging artists at prices that were more than six times higher than had been possible ten years earlier.
In the event of a dearth of paintings by a top artist, galleries and art centres chose those collectors whom they considered ‘good enough’ to own them. One only need think of avant-garde British art collector Charles Saatchi, or the American Peggy Guggenheim, to immediately recognise the power of the branded collector. They can be even more important in conferring status on an artist than a collecting institution.
Today, many collectors actively strive to become elite brand names. In the early days, before the ‘market’ existed, major private collectors of Indigenous art were few and far between. Early bark paintings, collected by Jerome Gould, Ed Ruhe and Louis Allen, for instance, are now worth far more than others of the same period. American collectors Richard Kelton, Donald Kahn and John Kluge were considered the most prestigious during the 1980s and 1990s. Today dozens of collectors seek to emulate the success and status of Margaret Levi and Bob Kaplan, Thomas Vroom and Australian mega-collectors Colin and Elizabeth Laverty.
A branded collection, like a major institution, can increase the value of an artist’s work by loaning, touring and allowing its publication in art books. Just as a finalist in an art award may not win the grand prize, yet still gains kudos from having been a finalist, so too a work short-listed by a name collector, but later overlooked, will find its value increased. After all, if it was good enough for Margaret Levi to consider, it must be good enough for any serious collection. Art coordinators and galleries scrupulously gather the names of branded collections, adding them like fertiliser to an artist’s resume.
This prejudice is most potent in the auction house arena where paintings can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here, the notions of safe and preferred provenance can be the difference between being accepted for auction or not. Once accepted, a painting’s provenance can be the difference between a successful sale and a pass, between a bid of $20,000 or a record $200,000. From Sotheby’s first specialist Aboriginal art sale in 1995 until the end of 2004, it dictated the rules of the game, and used them to establish record prices for all but a tiny handful of Aboriginal artists. But this was also it’s Achilles heel. It made a small number of people a lot of money, but it created a great deal of ill will amongst those whose works it considered unacceptable. Auction houses constantly need new sellers with fresh works to tempt new buyers. The narrower the selection criteria, the harder it is to find exciting fresh works, especially ones with a history.
The story of how I personally became involved in all this is a little complicated. At the end of 2003, when Lawson~Menzies needed some advice on 150 Aboriginal paintings sitting in its Sydney storeroom, my friend, the London dealer Rebecca Hossack, recommended me for the job. At my suggestion they returned all but 50 paintings to their owners. The sale of the remainder was extremely successful. So much so that before I knew it Paul Sumner, then Managing Director of Lawson~Menzies, had taken me out to lunch and offered me a job. I had never worked for anyone else in my entire career, but I agreed to do so as an external consultant, hoping to guarantee my independence. I also insisted that 2% of the hammer price on all Aboriginal artworks sold through my efforts would go to establish a new trust, the Aboriginal Benefits Foundation,11 which would support development, health and education projects in Aboriginal communities. My first three auctions generated more than $150,000 for the Trust. Thus I entered the secondary market.
Rod Menzies with the new head of his Aboriginal art department – me!
I did not meet Rod Menzies until after my first auction had achieved a turnover of $1.8 million against its $1 million target. By then Paul Sumner had moved on. I felt like a lone wolf in a lion’s den without the protection he’d promised me. Negotiations over my contract with Menzies stretched through Christmas and New Year. I was 55 years of age and I told Menzies that, no matter what, I would only work with him for five more years. When I’d asked my father, on his death bed, if he had any regrets, he’d replied, ‘I wish I had retired at 60!’
Menzies wanted me to build a department that would be capable of matching and exceeding Sotheby’s sales of Aboriginal art. My own specialist staff was to collect and document artworks, build a client base and be responsible for 20% of the overheads, while Rod Menzies accepted responsibility for administration and 80% of the costs. With over 60 years of combined specialist experie
nce between us, my colleague Kerry Williams and I devised the strategy and tactics that would be required to take on the market leader. We believed that buyers were being heavily influenced by a small number of self-serving informants on issues such as the provenance of artworks, the bone fides of certain sources for art, and industry ethics. Prevailing opinions had become distorted by sympathetic but largely misinformed journalists. We were convinced that we could achieve the results Menzies was looking for by applying our superior knowledge and by being more even-handed than others.
At the end of our first year, 2004, the secondary market for Aboriginal art had become a logjam. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Lawson~Menzies,12 Bonhams & Goodman and Shapiro auctioneers all vied for their share of a market that had grown to $15.9 million. Lawson~Menzies had generated $3.7 million of this. Though Sotheby’s supremacy may not have been breached, its market share had fallen to 54%.
Over the years there have been tens of thousands of wonderful pieces of art that Sotheby’s and Christie’s would not or could not take on. Being the most prestigious players on the block, they were obviously offered far more product than they were able to handle. We could see that this gave us a wonderful opportunity to pull the rug from under them. Many disaffected collectors would become buyers at our own sales after we accepted their paintings into our auctions. To reach my targets I knew I had to expand the range of provenance that my specialists at Lawson~Menzies would accept, including several important sources that Sotheby’s had consistently rejected. Galleries had become used to concealing the source of their paintings because they feared being blacklisted by the art centres. But my own experience of more than 25 years running a gallery taught me that the vast majority of art buyers are not interested in how ‘important’ a painting is, or how it found its way into the gallery. They are interested in it because they like it and they can afford it.
I refused to be intimidated by the blacklist, and Rod Menzies backed me all the way. My strategy worked. The more I supported disaffected owners and dealers, the more they supported me. Between 2004 and 2006 we set new record prices for dozens of artists. It was a classic wedge. Lawson~Menzies established all ten of the highest records for the late Minnie Pwerle, while Sotheby’s refused to take anything that hadn’t come through Urapuntja Artists (the art centre that existed briefly in the late 1990s on the Utopia lands). Of the seven Minnie Pwerles that Sotheby’s offered, only four sold, with the highest price achieved being $7,200. Meanwhile, by accepting works that had originally been produced for Dacou Gallery, run by Minnie’s grandson Fred Torres, Lawson~Menzies set the artist’s record at $78,000. A further 15 of her paintings sold for more than $20,000. Sections of the press responded by describing works sold by Lawson~Menizes as ‘unprovenanced’, despite source codes and documentation of an equal standard to that of any art centre. The majority had originally been purchased by their vendors through prestigious galleries.
Minnie Pwerle, Awelye, 2002. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 164 x 345 cm.
Lawson~Menzies now became the only major auction house that would judge paintings primarily on their aesthetic merit, without ignoring safe provenance, when they were offered them for sale. All other major auction houses stuck with the same entry criteria as Sotheby’s. This was because the protocol travelled with specialists, such as Christie’s Shaun Dennison when he went to Mossgreen, and Sotheby’s Crispin Gutteridge when he moved to Joel Fine Art (and later Deutscher and Hackett). By maintaining such a narrow band of acceptable provenance, they became dependent on a small cache of available stock: early Papunya boards, old bark paintings, quality artefacts, art that carried art centre provenance and major works originally sourced through a small number of ‘sanctioned’ dealers. Compared to our fresh contemporary catalogue at Lawson~Menzies, their sale rooms looked and felt like museums, dominated by old familiar favourites, many of which had been offered for sale several times over.
Controversy raged in particular over works attributed to Rover Thomas. With cumulative sales of $13.9 million, Rover Thomas had beaten Emily Kngwarreye ($13.6 million) as the star performer at auction by 2004. Albert Namatjira was a distant third at $7.8 million, just a fraction ahead of Clifford Possum on $6.7 million. By 2007, these were four of only eight artists whose cumulative sales at auction had exceeded $2 million. A further 14 had generated between $1 and $2 million. It was clear that no auction house could challenge Sotheby’s market domination without a significant body of highly desirable works by these artists, most especially those by the two market giants, Emily and Rover.
Emily had created a large number of works for her nephew Fred Torres, and Rover had worked for years with Neil McLeod. By treating works carrying their provenance with prejudice, Sotheby’s had created a great deal of ill will amongst the collectors who owned them. Having worked with both Torres and McLeod, and known them personally for many years, Kerry Williams and I set about redressing this injustice by openly challenging their detractors to put up or shut up. Works painted for Fred Torres by Emily Kngwarreye, Gloria Petyarre and Minnie Pwerle entered the market without challenge, and a number of these established record prices for the artists. Lawson~Menzies doubled the previous record for Gloria Petyarre and broke the auction record for Emily Kngwarreye, which stands to this day as the highest price ever paid for an artwork by any Australian female.
Rover Thomas, Claypans, Canning Stock Route, 1985. Natural earth pigment on builder’s plywood, 92 x 183 cm. Collected by Neil McLeod in the field c. 1985.
Neil McLeod was a different story. Corrie Perkin, the high-profile feature writer at The Australian, wrote a series of articles throughout 2006 and 2007 that cast doubt on the legitimacy of paintings created for McLeod. Sotheby’s attitude toward McLeod had damaged his reputation more than any other single factor. McLeod’s field trips to the Kimberley from the late 1970s were well-documented. Documentary material that accompanied the majority of the paintings when originally sold had been lost by some of the owners. His extensive photographic negative and slide archive was partially destroyed during a flash flood at Burrinja Gallery at Upwey on 26 January 2001, and in a bushfire on 22 February 2004. Nevertheless an enormous amount of documentation and photographic material has survived.
As I write, Sotheby’s Australian franchise no longer holds Tier 1 specialist Aboriginal art sales, but Deutscher and Hackett and the international auction house Bonhams stage them, with an occasional foray by Paul Sumner’s Mossgreen. All maintain the same protocols for provenance as those originally developed by Sotheby’s. Today, in the absence of any auction house to champion them, as Lawson~Menzies did between 2004 and 2008, countless genuine artworks are rejected and the notion of their collectability is compromised.
THE STAR HAS LEFT THE BUILDING – THE RISE AND RISE OF TOMMY WATSON
Most white Australians picture the Maralinga atomic tests of the 1950s as black-and-white newsreel footage. In fact, a whirlpool of fire radiated from the immense 12,200-metre radioactive cloud. It boiled across the monochromatic desert landscape in pulsing waves of hot pink, magenta, orange and burgundy. The effect on the many nomadic Aboriginal clans of the area was dramatic. They dealt with the psychological, emotional and physical fallout for decades thereafter.
I often think of Maralinga when I look at Tommy Watson’s electrifying paintings, which burst onto the art market with a similarly incendiary effect for the first time in 2002. Never before had an Indigenous artist emerged with such bold and layered colour. Few artists in the history of world art have ever exploited colour chords and simultaneous contrast with such deft sophistication. His paintings of rock holes, mountain ranges and creekbeds met the dual demands of the contemporary Indigenous Australian art market. They tended toward abstract expressionism, as well as conforming to the traditional working techniques of layering and ‘dotting’. His paintings have been described as incandescent, which means literally ‘glowing with heat’. In fact, ‘hot’ is the term that has been repeatedly associated with Watson since h
e first achieved renown.
Following the landmark exhibition Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Papunya Tula had captivated the secondary market through the power of its story and its place in the history of Australian art. It also conformed to the narrow approach to provenance, that Sotheby’s and Christie’s had imposed upon the market. Then along came Tommy Watson, who broke all of the rules.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 46