Menzies Art Brands was over the moon when Brett Whiteley’s Gauguin, brought back earlier this year from the Chelsea Hotel in New York and seen for the first time in Australia, sold at its July auction in Melbourne for $1,718,182 including buyers’ premium.
The Chelsea Hotel was a cultural magnet and attracted many of the leading artists and musicians of the 1960s – such as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Jackson Pollock, Dylan Thomas – and, of course,...