In my opinion, the most talented of all the Mount Liebig artists was Bill Whiskey, a traditional healer and former cook. Whiskey was well into his 80s when he began painting in 2004. By the time he passed away in 2008 his works had been shown in a number of important galleries, most especially Scott Livesey in Melbourne and John Gordon Gallery in Coffs Harbour. Major works depicting the rockholes near Pirupa, Uluru and the story of his journeys to Areyonga and Haasts Bluff rose from $15,000 to $30,000 in one year. In 2007, a year before he died, I included his painting Rockholes near Olgas in my Lawson~Menzies auction, with an ambitious presale estimate of $30,000–40,000. It had been painted just three months earlier. It sold for a mind-boggling $72,000 and sent shockwaves through the market. The buyer was the owner of a prominent Melbourne gallery with a stock room full of works by Whiskey. Why did he pay twice the going price? He was clearly ramping the artist’s values.
The strategy worked in spades. The market value of the artist’s paintings changed overnight. A month or two after Whiskey died – by which time I no longer worked for an auction house – a Swiss client sought my services to bid for another of his major works offered by Deutscher Menzies. I stood at the back of the room, paddle in hand, ready to bid. I estimated the painting’s worth at $80,000–$100,000, and had persuaded my client to allow me to bid up to $110,000. I didn’t stand a chance. After spirited bidding in an otherwise flat sale, the painting sold for a record price of $146,400.
Without any funding or outside assistance, Glenis Wilkins did about as much as anyone could to assist artists to make a living while working within an Aboriginal community context. During the boom years post-2000, her daughter Peta Appleyard opened a beautifully appointed gallery next door to Gallery Gondwana, in the centre of Alice Springs’ Todd Mall. She did well while she had access to the best of the works created for the Mount Liebig art centre. But following the death of Bill Whiskey in 2008, Watiyawanu Artists – Mt Leibig fell apart. The only artist who remained, and continued to be able to create works of lasting brilliance, was Wentja Napaltjarri.
Bill Whiskey Tjapaltjarri, Rockholes near Olgas, 2007. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 180 x 180 cm. Sold at auction in the same year it was painted for $72, 000 including buyer’s premium.
TWINKLE TWINKLE, TINKLE TINKLE
T he statuesque, sophisticated Roslyn Premont arrived in Alice Springs in 1987. Having recently returned from Paris, where she worked at the Australian Embassy, she was in town to take over the Centre for Aboriginal Artists owned by the government marketing company – The Company. A heartfelt listener, with an open and generous personality, she quickly developed close relationships with artists who lived in town and those passing through. When The Company closed down at the beginning of the 1990s, Premont opened her own Gallery Gondwana. She had an excellent eye, great style, and her eclectic taste ensured that it quickly became the most successful and interesting gallery in the mall. Her gallery manager, Bryce Ponsford, was the perfect foil. His cool efficiency was a match for her authority and charm. Ponsford was a former Papunya Tula staff member, whose pre-existing friendship with Walala Tjapaltjarri, his brother Warlimpirrnga and Dr George Tjapaltjarri ensured they all visited when in Alice Springs. The amiable Daphne Williams at Papunya Tula enabled Premont to nurture these artists’ careers through the 1990s even though they lived in Kiwirrkurra, which was part of Papunya Tula’s territory.
With her knack for friendship, Premont readily established cordial relations with a number of art coordinators, including Christine Lennard, who worked with the Warlpiri artists at Yuendumu. This helped Premont to develop close personal ties with Warlpiri artists living in town. By maintaining a studio attached to the gallery rather than a ‘shed ‘ in the industrial area, artists could be nurtured and encouraged through the feedback and support they received from gallery staff and the important collectors they met on a daily basis. Artists were encouraged to experiment and explore while Premont, with the agreement and support of art centre staff, arranged ‘back to country’ trips to visit significant Dreaming sites, which stimulated and inspired them.
The Gallery Gondwana crew 1998: Peter Overs, Christine Lennard, Bryce Ponsford, Tess Matthews, Georgina Bracken, Roslyn Goodchild, Dorothy Napangardi Robinson, Roslyn Premont, Polly Napangardi Watson.
Premont fostered a core group of artists which included Linda Syddick, Polly Napangardi Watson and Dorothy Napangardi Robinson. No other Aboriginal artist’s career could better illustrate the advantages of the independent representative model than that of Dorothy Napangardi.
Reared as a nomad, whose family was forcibly removed from its traditional land, Dorothy was in her late teens when she was married to an elderly man to whom she had been promised. By the age of 37 she was on to her second marriage, the mother of five daughters, and living in Alice Springs, where she picked up a brush for the first time. But it was not until 1997 that she developed a signature style, tracing the grid-like patterns of salt encrustations on the Mina Mina claypans of her homeland. Over the following three years these paintings became less contrived, with all detail pared back to the barest essentials. In 2001, a painting she created for Premont was awarded the 18th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award. Toward the end of the following year she was afforded a solo retrospective exhibition, Dancing Up Country, at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney. A beautiful catalogue with scholarly essays by Dr Christine Nicholls and Djon Mundine was published. In what was considered a rather cheeky move at the time, Premont cleverly hired the Depot Gallery in the Danks Street art precinct, and held a solo exhibition to coincide with the MCA retrospective. Immediately following Dorothy’s Telstra win, the prices of her major works jumped from $12,000 to $18,000.
The art market was about to go into overdrive. While only three months earlier the first Napangardi ever offered at auction had failed to sell, now a media and buyer frenzy saw the demand for her work explode. Within two years her record price at auction had soared to $84,625. The following year, 19 of her paintings sold at auction for a total of $641,896. Included were three works for more than $75,000 each. Her current record of $129,750 was set at Sotheby’s in July 2004. Within just five years, based on her secondary market statistics, Dorothy Napangardi Robinson had shot from relative obscurity to become one of the 20 most successful Aboriginal artists of all time.
Dorothy’s career blossomed over two decades through a close association with Gallery Gondwana. She occasionally painted for other dealers, but by the time Gallery Gondwana closed in 2012 she had been painting for too many people, and her prices tumbled. Today there are Dorothy Napangardis and Gallery Gondwana Dorothy Napangardis, and only the works she painted for Premont retain their cachet.
Seemingly overnight, Premont did it again with Dorothy’s aunt, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson, who in 2006, became one of the hottest artists in the primary market. Premont had carefully sequestered Mitjili’s works for more than 12 months and launched her career at the Melbourne Art Fair, taking the Alice Springs art trade completely by surprise. The ethereal quality of Mitjili’s multi-dimensional paintings moved one critic to compare them to flights of imagination. By the end of the fair’s opening day every work had sold, and within six months critics were predicting she too would join the pantheon of great female Indigenous artists. Her performance as the grandmother in the award-winning feature film Samson and Delilah, written and directed by Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, gave her added exposure when it was awarded the Caméra d’Or for best first feature film at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. Mitjili came out of nowhere very fast but five years later she was admitted to hospital, where she passed away. And two years after that, in 2013 following a week spent shopping with Premont in Sydney, Dorothy too passed away in a car accident while out hunting.
By then Premont had closed her gallery. For almost two decades Gallery Gondwana was the finest Aboriginal art gallery in Alice Springs. Premont had clearly been a masterful strategist. Her no
n-confrontational manner and reputation amongst serious Aboriginal art collectors meant that she was able to avoid acrimonious demarcation disputes with art centres. The way she conducted her business was an object lesson in propriety and transparency.
Premont’s business acumen may have been formidable, but to this day the largest and most successful of all Alice Springs art businesses has been Mbantua Gallery. Its owner, the genial Tim Jennings, was a former police officer who participated in the investigation into Lindy Chamberlain’s missing baby, Azaria. Jennings purchased the old Mbantua store on Gap Road in the early 1990s, and plowed its profits into real estate on Gregory Terrace and Todd Mall. In time, he upgraded the entire western corner of Alice Spring’s blue ribbon commercial district to house a beautifully appointed art gallery and museum dedicated to the artists of the Eastern Desert. In addition, Jennings opened a large showroom in the industrial area, a facility from which he continues to run one of Australia’s largest art wholesale businesses. He too has managed to avoid demarcation disputes by focusing on the artists of one region, in his case Utopia, that did not have an art centre. He maintained exemplary working relationships and genuine friendships with a very large number of artists throughout the Eastern Desert without treading on the toes of too many other dealers. Jennings’ business acts as an unofficial art centre supporting dozens, if not hundreds, of artists, from the journeymen to the greats, including Gloria Petyarre, Barbara Weir and, before them, Minnie Pwerle and Emily Kngwarreye. His Alice Springs facility prepares canvases from as small as 15-centimetres square upward, in regulation sizes, primed with edges ruled and ready for delivery to outstations throughout the Utopia lands. These are collected every two weeks before being sold on to exhibiting and non-exhibiting galleries, retail shops and direct to collectors around Australia and overseas. Tim Jennings doesn’t discriminate on the basis of talent. He wants to help as many Aboriginal people as wish to paint, and as their work improves they are provided with larger and more valuable canvases. If they demonstrate real talent, he features their works in his exhibiting galleries, as well as promoting them through his company’s many forays overseas.
Attached to the Alice Springs gallery is a ‘museum’ housing part of Jennings’ extensive private collection, which he has dedicated to the artists of the Utopia region. An hour spent there provides a fascinating insight into the history of the Eastern Desert art movement. It includes many of the first paintings ever created by artists who have gone on to become household names. That is precisely why I approached him when I was offered Emily’s monumental canvas, Earth’s Creation I (1995), while running Lawson~Menzies auction house. Here was the masterpiece that would make his museum a ‘must visit’ destination. He’d purchased several hundred paintings from Emily Kngwarreye during her lifetime, but agreed to travel to Sydney for the sale.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Earth’s Creation I, 1995. Synthetic polymer paint on linen, 632 x 275 cm.
I looked down from the platform of auction specialists fielding bids over the phone as Jennings sat in the front row. Every time my Swiss client increased his bid, he followed suit. When Jennings bid $780,000 in the room, my client on the phone prevaricated. The auctioneer implored me one last time, before knocking it down. Jennings had won the day, paying the highest sum ever for an Aboriginal painting. The price, including the 20% buyer’s premium, of just over $1 million dollars is still the highest price on public record for the work of any Australian female. Earth’s Creation I featured in Emily Kngwarreye’s retrospective at the National Art Centre in Tokyo and the National Museum of Australia during the following year.
Don and Janet Holt were also canny operators. Working with dozens of Utopia artists who found their way to Delmore Downs, their adjacent homestead, they managed to purchase no less than 1500 paintings from Emily Kngwarreye. The Holts never owned a real art gallery, apart from a very brief period during the 1990s. Don’s provenance was issued under the name Delmore Gallery. By commissioning works only from Utopia artists at Delmore Downs, which was hundreds of kilometres from Alice Springs, the Holts managed to distance themselves from the sort of controversy that surrounded town-based dealers. They also used their money, prestige and powerful connections to disassociate themselves from other dealers who worked directly with artists outside the art centre system. By supplying elite galleries, and strategically gifting works to institutions, they worked with the most successful Aboriginal artist of all time and reinforced the preferred status of works with the Delmore Gallery provenance whenever they were offered to Sotheby’s and other major auction houses.
Today, the largest and most beautifully appointed art gallery and studio in Alice Springs belongs to Mike and Sharon Mitchell. They began their business in Palmerston at the southern reaches of Darwin, and through the 1990s worked mainly with artists from the north Tanami Desert and Southern Arnhem Land.50 In those days they had no interest in the spotlight. Mike enjoyed working directly with the artists and left the promotional activity to the galleries. In that less fraught period, his clients included William Mora Galleries, Rebecca Hossack, Vivien Anderson, Japingka and Coo-ee Gallery. He moved his company, Muk Muk Aboriginal Art, to a large shed in Elder Street, Alice Springs, in the early 2000s to get closer to even more artists. By 2003, just as Papunya Tula was moving into its new premises, Muk Muk opened its doors and waited for the artists to find their way into its workshop. Muk Muk was inundated. The list of names was both impressive and one suspects depressing for art coordinators and agents who had nurtured their artists and expected exclusive access. Artists looking for money and support for their immediate needs had to look no further than the Mitchells.51
Bidding was fierce at the Lawson~Menzies Indigenous art auction, November 2007.
Today Mike Mitchell says Muk Muk is 42% Aboriginal-owned. Its stunning gallery is situated at the Old Eastside, a short walk from the town centre, and its studio is still open to any established or emerging artist who wants high-quality materials to work with. Immediate and appropriate payment lies at the core of the Mitchells’ good relationship with artists. Their impressive stock room holds works by three Telstra Award winners and many Telstra finalists. A number of community artists from Yuendumu, Haasts Bluff and Papunya spend significant periods in Alice Springs and paint for Muk Muk in preference to others.
It makes sense that most Aboriginal artists require specific conditions to produce their best works. The poor health, appalling living conditions and the sheer desperation of their extended families place many of them under intolerable pressure to make money. Important artists whose careers have been carefully nurtured have many options if they need quick money and can easily end up producing too many works just to appease their entourages. Naive buyers simply can’t understand why different works by a renowned artist can attract such varying prices, but it’s actually quite simple. Some works are far better than others. David Cossey of Gallerie Australis now lives in Bali and was unwilling to support Kathleen Petyarre after she began to paint inferior works for a plethora of Alice Springs dealers. Roslyn Premont was so disappointed when Dorothy Napangardi began to paint on demand that she closed Gallery Gondwana in 2012. After Lily Kelly and Ngoia Pollard went to paint in Alice Springs, the unfunded art centre in Mount Liebig was no longer viable.
At their peak, dealers like Cossey and Premont were endlessly patient, deeply involved and vitally concerned with their artists’ output, careers and reputations. Their ultimate goal was to ensure their artists painted the very finest works of which they were capable. To do so, these dealers had to personally bear enormous financial and social pressure. It takes vision, dedication and guts to operate that way.
AUCTION WARS
My head was spinning. In 2007, three years after I became a consultant to Rod Menzies, he ushered me into the office of the former New South Wales Premier, the Honourable Neville Wran AC CNZM QC. A formidable and popular Labor politician in the 1970s and 1980s, Wran was my first political hero, and here he was smiling
at me beneficently. As I leaned back in my chair, expecting plush leather upholstery, I hit the back of my head sharply on the marble wall. Perhaps it was a warning not to get big-headed. Wran was a member of Menzies’ advisory board, and his legal adviser. I’d already been told that Chris Deutscher, Menzies’ partner for the previous ten years, had jumped ship. Deutscher would be starting his own auction house and was taking Menzies’ chief painting specialist, Damian Hackett, with him. Now to my astonishment, Menzies said he needed a new director for his board, someone he could trust. He had chosen me. In effect, he was offering to make me one of the highest paid people in the Australian art world if I agreed to become the Managing Director of his 100% Australian-owned, $65-million annual turnover auction house.
Within a week I was standing in front of a television camera for the ABC evening news, extolling the virtues of a work by Brett Whiteley, which had a tap poking out of its upper margin. The Olgas for Ernest Giles, an erotic representation of Kata Tjuta, carried an estimate of more than $2 million and sold for $3.48 million, setting an Australian record price. During the next 12 months, while continuing to source $10–$15 million dollars worth of paintings for Aboriginal art sales, I flew all over the country persuading owners to relinquish works by white Australian artists such as John Brack, Robert Dickerson, Roy de Maistre, Roland Wakelin and Bertram Mackennal.
Between 2003 and 2007, the great art ‘bubble’ saw Sotheby’s international sales of contemporary art shoot from $218 million to $1.3 billion. There was a complimentary 800% rise in the average value for contemporary artworks.52 Meanwhile in the antipodes, a world away from the engine rooms of the international art world in London and New York, sales of Australian contemporary art at auction shot from $104 million to $175 million in a single year. Of this, Menzies Art Brands (Lawson~Menzies and Deutscher Menzies) accounted for $97.5 million.
The Dealer is the Devil Page 52