Katrina Strickland
Sotheby’s appeared to have had more luck selling art in Melbourne than Bonhams did in Sydney this week.
Sotheby’s 69-lot sale on Tuesday night grossed $4.3 million including buyer’s premium, on reported clearance rates of 71 per cent by lot and 97 per cent by value.
The tightly curated sale looked to go well, although it took some coaxing from the auctioneer for anyone to bid for its cover lot, Sidney Nolan’s 1955 Ned Kelly: Crossing the River. A phone bidder eventually saved the day, securing the painting at its low estimate of $800,000 ($960,000 including buyer’s premium). The work had been consigned for sale by the artist’s adopted daughter, Jinx Nolan.
Michael Zavros’s 2007 painting of a horse with a bird on its back, Hunter, got the sale off to a roaring start. Bidding rose quickly to $48,000, nearly double its $25,000 high estimate, and at $57,600 with premium, an artist auction record.
John Brack’s 1958 still life, Flowering Gum, made its high estimate of a $160,000 hammer, and Jeffrey Smart’s 1974 Reflected Arrows was hammered at $270,000, $20,000 above its high estimate.
The mood at Bonhams important Australian art and Aboriginal art sales held on Monday night in Sydney was much less upbeat.
The Australian art sale cleared only 59 per cent by lot and 36 per cent by value, grossing $2.2 million, with the Aboriginal art auction taking only $495,649 on clearance rates of 49 per cent by lot and 28 per cent by value.
Artists records were set for paintings by Emmanuel Phillips Fox and Walter Withers, and Georges Ricard-Cordingley’s 1910 vista of Sydney harbour nearly doubled its low estimate. But the cover lot, Frederick McCubbin’s Midsummers Eve, consigned with a swag of other paintings by Sydney porn shop king Con Ange, was passed in at $1.1 million.
The Australian Financial Review
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